RSSRabbi Rollout #2: Amira Hass
By way of further preview to my personal “50 Most Influential Rabbis” (i.e. people who taught me something about being Jewish in the world), following Sunday’s salute to Primo Levi, it is timely to introduce Amira Hass, if only because of the profound op-ed she penned in Haaretz to coincide with Shoah Day in Israel.
First my Amira Hass entry on the Rabbi list:
7. Amira Hass
Like a Biblical prophet determined to confront the Biblical Israelites with their moral failings, Amira Hass has dedicated her life to holding up a mirror to the State of Israel so that it can see itself, and its actions, through the eyes of those it has most impacted: the dispossessed and disenfranchised Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. Her courageous work as an Israeli journalist determined to show her compatriots the effect their policies are having on their immediate neighbors makes her, for me, a living embodiment of Hillell’s insistence that being Jewish means weighing your actions first and foremost on the basis of their effect on others. The daughter of Holocaust survivors who had been communist partisans fighting the Nazis in Europe, Hass has taken up the plight of the Palestinians — she lives in Ramallah, as Haaretz correspondent there — with her parents’ blessing: “My parents came here to Israel naively. They were offered a house in Jerusalem. But they refused it. They said: ‘We cannot take the house of other refugees.’ They meant Palestinians. So you see, it’s not such a big deal that I write what I do – it’s not a big deal that I live among Palestinians.”
This week, in a Haaretz op ed, Hass castigated Israel for its cynical use of the Holocaust as a “political asset.” She draws attention to the shoddy treatment of survivors in Israel, many of whom see hardly a penny of the millions claimed in their name as reparations from Germany. But her primary concern is the political use to which the Holocaust is put:
Turning the Holocaust into a political asset serves Israel primarily in its fight against the Palestinians. When the Holocaust is on one side of the scale, along with the guilty (and rightly so) conscience of the West, the dispossession of the Palestinian people from their homeland in 1948 is minimized and blurred.
The phrase “security for the Jews” has been consecrated as an exclusive synonym for “the lessons of the Holocaust.” It is what allows Israel to systematically discriminate against its Arab citizens. For 40 years, “security” has been justifying control of the West Bank and Gaza and of subjects who have been dispossessed of their rights living alongside Jewish residents, Israeli citizens laden with privileges.
Security serves the creation of a regime of separation and discrimination on an ethnic basis, Israeli style, under the auspices of “peace talks” that go on forever. Turning the Holocaust into an asset allows Israel to present all the methods of the Palestinian struggle (even the unarmed ones) as another link in the anti-Semitic chain whose culmination is Auschwitz. Israel provides itself with the license to come up with more kinds of fences, walls and military guard towers around Palestinian enclaves.
Separating the genocide of the Jewish people from the historical context of Nazism and from its aims of murder and subjugation, and its separation from the series of genocides perpetrated by the white man outside of Europe, has created a hierarchy of victims, at whose head we stand. Holocaust and anti-Semitism researchers fumble for words when in Hebron the state carries out ethnic cleansing via its emissaries, the settlers, and ignore the enclaves and regime of separation it is setting up. Whoever criticizes Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians is denounced as an anti-Semite, if not a Holocaust denier. Absurdly, the delegitimization of any criticism of Israel only makes it harder to refute the futile equations that are being made between the Nazi murder machine and the Israeli regime of discrimination and occupation.
The institutional abandonment of the survivors is rightly denounced across the board. The transformation of the Holocaust into a political asset for use in the struggle against the Palestinians feed on those same stores of official cynicism, but it is part of the consensus.
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6 Responses to “Rabbi Rollout #2: Amira Hass”
Excellent choice Tony.
She is one of those people of whom I always like to remind myself whenever the world looks hopeless. She makes it somehow seem possible that things will get better.
By the way, you probably have her down, but make sure you also mention the great Tanya Reinhart.
Thanks Tony.
The Holocaust was a moral abyss. If we want to do justice to the victims, we need to remember the specific historical and social context in which the events of the Holocaust actually happened. It is not anti-semitic to criticize Israeli policies towards the Palestinians, nor am I a “self-hater” for being a Jew who is critical of Israeli policy towards the occupation, in terms of occupying Palestinian land and making life impossible for those occupied. We are all after all human beings answerable to certain basic ethical standards. I will not comment any more on this though: if we are to honor the victims of the Holocaust and remember the context in which they were victims, we need to separate this sharply from the Palestinian issue.
I have great respect for the 76-year-old Romanian-Israeli Holocaust survivor who a few days ago helped barricade a door in the Virginian university against the Korean student who went on a rampage. I also have deep respect for Ms. Andree Geulen-Herscovici, who helped save over 300 Belgian Jews from Nazi tyranny. The world is filled with good people like this, but we are all too often blind to them.
Who makes light of the suffering of Holocaust victims and does an injustice to those who actually did suffer from totalitarianism? Draw your own conclusions (IPS news):
“The right-wing Washington-based think tank seeks to “undermine the ideological foundations of totalitarianism and Islamist extremism,” according to its website. CSP’s advisory council also includes current and former high-level aides in the George W. Bush administration, such as Eliot Abrams and Douglas Feith. ”
The neocons sought to air a video on PBS that showed individual lives completely detached from the larger historical, social, or cultural context, but who were presumably subject to “Islamic extremism”. This is pure Machiavelli-istic utilization of an ideology for political ends. There is every reason to be concerned with some Islamic groups, such as al-Qaida, who seek to use their ideology as a blunt tool. But there are others, like the leaders (AKP) of Turkey, who are Islamist democrats, who are also Islamic and not a threat to peace. When we talk about “totalitarianism”, we should be very clear exactly what we mean, and remember how it comes in very different forms, and affects many people even today (not just or mainly Jews).
Nice post; it’s particularly relevant after I took a trip to the Holocaust museum this weekend, then came home and happened to watch the episode of “Band of Brothers” where they liberate a concentration camp. (In real life, my uncle tells me my grandpa was involved in liberating one of the camps, but I don’t know many of the details. I can only imagine what that was like.)
Anyway, the Museum here in DC mentions Israel a little bit as one of the places Jewish refugees tried to go both before and after WWII, but doesn’t really play it up all that much otherwise. I started thinking on my own about how the policies of the Nazis still ripple through our world today, and looking at the horror of what happened does make it a lot easier to understand how these refugees who had been through so much viewed Israel as their salvation, and were willing to believe in their new country as something pure and good, as it seems that after enduring the very worst of humanity, there would be a tremendous need to believe a better reality was possible, and that these survivors could take responsibility for building it themselves.
This, however, doesn’t absolve Israel of its modern-day responsibilities, or of the things that happened to the Arabs, because those are historical realities too. I’m with you, T, in that one of the lessons of the Holocaust should be to always examine the consequences of your politics on the lives of others, and to take responsibility for avoiding harm. Using the death of six million for political purposes is sickening, whether it’s done by “Death to Arabs” West Bank settlers and their evangelical American allies, or by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his conference of the historically ignorant.
Anyway, that was a very generalized post, but if anything, the museum trip taught me that suffering sucks, and minimizing others’ suffering is a very dangerous thing.
I was researching the same thing when I saw this.. I can not agree more - but I am still going to look for a better source
This is quite a hot info. I’ll share it on Twitter.
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