By Daniel Greenfield
There are two basic human responses to an assault. I will protect myself or I will make the world a better place. The first deals with the risk of an attack. The second with your insecure feelings about the world. The first leaves you better able to cope with an attack. The second makes you feel better about the world that you live in.
The Jewish response to the Holocaust fell into these two categories; Never Again and Teach Tolerance. Never Again became the credo of Israel and Teach Tolerance became the credo of the Western Diaspora.
There were Israelis who believed in teaching tolerance and Western Jews who believed in self-defense, but the responses were structural because the divide between Nationalists and Universalists predated the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was a transformative event, but the responses to it came from old debates. The pogroms had led to the same fork in the road between a collective struggle for a better world and national self-defense, between the Universalists and the Nationalists, between the left and the right. The current debates about Israel by Jews and non-Jews revisit those old arguments.
To the Nationalists, the Holocaust was not an unexpected event and Nationalist leaders like Jabotinsky had warned that it was coming. To the Universalists, it was an inexplicable event that challenged the entire progressive understanding of history as a march toward enlightenment.
Violent bigotry was supposed to be the opposite of modernity. History moved forward, not backward. Unlike Czarist Russia, Soviet Russia and Weimar Germany were too modern for mass murder. And then they weren’t.
The Holocaust was a mugging in broad daylight on the biggest street of the biggest city in the world. Its message was that human beings had not magically become better people because Berlin had a subway and phone calls could be made across the Atlantic. The Nationalists attributed it to human nature, while the Socialists blamed reactionary nationalism. The Universalists insisted that true progress would come with world unity while the Nationalists went off to build their own castle.
The Holocaust deepened the divide between the Universalists and the Nationalists. The Universalists thought the Holocaust made it more urgent for us to work toward a better world while the Nationalists saw history as a cycle of civilizations that had to be survived, rather than a utopian harbor where strife would end and the fighting would stop.
What the Universalists had always hated about Israel was what a Jewish State symbolized; a turning away from the great dream of the Brotherhood of Man for another reactionary state. Zionism had been rejected by much of the left for its abandonment of universalism. Luminaries of the left from Lenin to H.G. Wells denounced Zionism as a reactionary roadblock to world unity. The answer to the Jewish problem was assimilation, not conglomeration. And to many liberals, Israel’s existence is still so pernicious because it lures Jews away from the dream of a better world.
The schism on the left over Zionism is slowly being won by the Anti-Zionists whose visceral hatred is for the Jewish State as a reactionary entity, a retreat from the borderless world. They do not criticize Israel for human rights violations. They find or invent human rights violations because they have labeled Israel as a reactionary entity and in their worldview all reactionary entities oppress and only reactionary entities oppress. The Soviet Union was progressive and therefore not oppressive. Israel is reactionary and therefore oppressive.
The Universalists interpreted the Holocaust as a Nationalist phenomenon and through that warped logic, Israel as a Nationalist response to the Holocaust is just like Nazi Germany. By wanting their own country, their own flag and their own army, the Jews became just like the Nazis. Instead of adopting the Universalist response of national suicide to mass murder, the Jewish people decided to live. And that is a crime that the left can never forgive them for.
Jewish Universalists have always been vaguely ashamed of Israel. They used to understand the need for it in their guts, even as their ideological minds struggled against it, but over time that feeling faded because the things that you feel but do not say are hard to pass down to future generations.
Holocaust museums were built, books were written and tours conducted into Anne Frank’s attic, but the understanding of what these things meant was not passed down. The only lesson was to make the world a better place by teaching everyone to be tolerant so that history would not repeat itself. As if any amount of courses and slides on tolerance could stop history from repeating itself.
There are nice Jewish boys and girls who have read Anne Frank’s diary, visited Auschwitz and come away anti-semities. They don’t call themselves that because their Universalist ignorance is so profound that they don’t even know what they are. Instead they call themselves human rights activists, they boycott Israeli products, smash Jewish store windows, hug terrorists and rationalize suicide bombers.
And what else were they supposed to do when the lessons that they drew from the Holocaust are that the underdog is always right, that people in uniforms are bad and that you always have to stand up for minorities.
That is the Holocaust in its universalized form. Never Again made the Holocaust a teachable moment for Jews. Teach Tolerance made it a teachable moment for all mankind. The Nationalist and the Universalist drew two opposite lessons from the Holocaust. The Nationalists focused on resistance while the Universalists focused on persecution. The Nationalist aspires to be a ghetto fighter while the Universalist aspires to be a good German.
The Universalist lesson of the Holocaust is that we must all aspire to be good Germans because our governments, at least the non-progressive ones, are embryonic Third Reichs that are only one flag-waving leader away from opening concentration camps. The Universalists believe that the only way to stop another Holocaust is to destroy nationalism, patriotism and the modern state.
This is what they believed before the Holocaust. And it isn’t the Holocaust that motivates them. The Holocaust has been hijacked and distorted as another teaching tool for the left. Its history is one where the Jews happen to stand in for Native Americans, African-Americans or any other victim group, but have no identity, motives or interests of their own. The dead Jews are empty symbols with no tangible claims on the past or on the future. They died to teach us to be better people.
And so the boys and girls, Jewish and non-Jewish, smash Jewish store windows and throw stones at Jewish soldiers out of a desire to be good Germans. Their method of avoiding a repetition of the Holocaust is to perpetuate it by persecuting Jews by being good Germans. If they manage to destroy Israel and all its Jews, then they’ll be the best Germans of them all.
This Universalist doctrine does not mention the English boys, who were being good Germans before the time when those words meant anything, by gathering at anti-war rallies. It does not mention the leftist intellectuals who insisted that the Allies were no better than the Nazis or the Communist Universalists of the Soviet Union who allied with Nazi Germany.
The debate over Israel is only one of many such fights between Universalists and Nationalists of every creed and from every nation. It is a struggle between those who believe that nations, religions and cultures have innate worth, and those who believe that they are obstacles to the great jello bowl of togetherness.
The Nazi Holocaust failed, but the Universalist Holocaust is still ongoing. Every time a leftist gets up to denounce Israel and to look forward to the day when it disappears, the Universalist Holocaust grinds on. And they have no shortage of Jewish assistants who are eager to complete the task, believing that a humanitarian utopia waits on the other side of the gas chamber door.
The Jewish Universalists lost faith in G-d, but they did not lose faith in humanity. They still believe with all their hearts that if they strum the guitar loud enough and sing, “Imagine”, that a better world will appear behind that door. Disbelieving in history, they have forgotten that the last time that door was opened in Russia, there was barbed wire and bitter cold on the other side.
Jewish Nationalists understood what was coming last time. They understand what is coming this time. Yet no matter how many times they are proven right, the beautiful dreamers refuse to listen to the history which proves them wrong. They’re still waiting for the dead hand of history to let go and the better world to be born out of the ashes of the old.
History is the road map that charts where the past lives that made ours possible have gone and shows us where the lives that we make possible may go. The Universalist Holocaust would burn those maps and kill our future for their better world.
watsa46 Said:
There are no secrets on the Pundit!!!!!!!!
@ honeybee:
This was a well kept secret! No more “helas”
@ watsa46:
Thank-you Sugar, and anyone whose uses watsa46,has a good sence of humor too.
@ honeybee:
I appreciate good sense of humor!
the phoenix Said:
Old Yiddish saying,”If everyone pulled in the same direction,the world would tip over”.
watsa46 Said:
You’re not “walking on water” either.
the phoenix Said:
Do you really think a “hatefull mob” will listen????????
@ the phoenix:
This appears to be too deep for both of you. But what is supposed to be an ambassador? Go from there …..
@ the phoenix:
My comment to you yamit kept being spammed and only now I saw that it actually went through…..
Anyway, what I was trying to say is to pose a question :
is an ignoramus Jew that lives in Israel a better ‘ambassador’ just by the sheer fact that he lives in Israel vs. a well versed ‘diaspora Jew’ that can throw meaningful and factual punches at the hateful mob?
@ yamit82:
@ yamit82:
Absolutely correct.
Again, agreed.
But, (and this is my dilemma ) let’s substitute for argument’s sake “Israeli Jew” for the “diaspora Jew”
These VERY SAME points that you have brought in your comment, could be applied to the entire Jewish population of Israel in asfar as the ‘peace process’, Judea and Samaria and foreign policy issues go.
I submit to you, that reading your comments (and I am in full agreement with what you write), is only a representative slice of a relatively small portion of Israeli Jews as I see it.
I WISH your views were a sample of the majority of the population.
I guess the point I am trying to make is the sad fact that there is just sooooo much division amongst the Jewish nation, whether within or without the homeland.
Yisrael Beitenu MK Says ‘Reform Movement Is not Jewish’
Reform leaders too often make themselves look silly by bending the Bible for their own convenience. By: Tzvi
@ yamit82:
@ yamit82:
Absolutely correct.
Again, agreed.
But, (and this is my dilemma ) let’s substitute for argument’s sake “Israeli Jew” for the “diaspora Jew”
These VERY SAME points that you have brought in your comment, could be applied to the entire Jewish population of Israel in asfar as the ‘peace process’, Judea and Samaria and foreign policy issues go.
I submit to you, that reading your comments (and I am in full agreement with what you write), is only a representative slice of a relatively small portion of Israeli Jews as I see it.
I WISH your views were a sample of the majority of the population.
I guess the point I am trying to make is the sad fact that there is just sooooo much division amongst the Jewish nation, whether within or without the homeland.
@ yamit82:
Absolutely correct.
Again, agreed.
But, (and this is my dilemma ) let’s substitute for argument’s sake “Israeli Jew” for the “diaspora Jew”
These VERY SAME points that you have brought in your comment, could be applied to the entire Jewish population of Israel in asfar as the ‘peace process’, Judea and Samaria and foreign policy issues go.
I submit to you, that reading your comments (and I am in full agreement with what you write), is only a representative slice of a relatively small portion of Israeli Jews as I see it.
I WISH your views were a sample of the majority of the population.
I guess the point I am trying to make is the sad fact that there is just sooooo much division amongst the Jewish nation, whether within or without the homeland.
yamit82 Said:
Abe Foxman’s bastard son?
yamit82 Said:
Hear that more then once. The Great Prayer Of Texas
watsa46 Said:
But what would we play with if we didn’t have it.
yamit82 Said:
If yawl don;t mind the tickles!!!!!!!!Darlin
honeybee Said:
Still sensitive over your mustache and beard?
No problem.
yamit82 Said:
Thanks Zev, but please turn out the lights!!!!!!!!!
watsa46 Said:
Forget about Deshowitz if Ted posts my comment to you I dealt with the idiot in the comment.
By what right would I deny people their rights? I think you mean Diaspora Jews the right of return.
Call it statute of limitations. Translated: I call it blood sweat and a lot of tears. Our blood, our sweat and our tears. Those who refused to join us made their choices for what ever reason but in the past 65 years, Israel was open to any Jew and many came and many didn’t. I think after 65 years any Jew not yet resident among us is not planning by his own choice to join us. So I say don’t join us but that decision is also as far as I am concerned the answer. I don’t want to be your insurance policy where we are your second third or forth option. Don’t do us any favors.
I suspect as soon as our gas and oil starts to flow commercially the per-capita wealth of the average Israeli will leave you in our dust. Why would we want to share that wealth with Johnny Come Latleys after we did all the heavy lifting?
Judaism didn’t bring you here, Zionism didn’t bring you here but if $$$$$ will, then we can refuse you on that basis alone. For years American Jews refused to Invest In Israel creating businesses and Industries here. They preferred to give to UJA and similar projects then threw it in our faces like we were your poor beggared distant relatives. Today we don’t need your money and most of the foreign investment is still not Jewish owned. Jews missed the train but gentiles didn’t.
Facts: about 40% of American billionaires are considered to be nominal Jews but most are so assimilated they have no connection to anything Jewish or Israel.
Of all Jewish contributions to charities only 5-6% go to anything related to Jewishness and Israel the rest goes to non Jewish causes.
Only 10-15% of American Jews have ever been to Israel and those who come usually come repeatedly.
Before the last election polls showed Israel below ten on a scale of 1-10 related to American Jewish concerns. We are hardly on their concerns radar.
Numbers count but not more than the character of those who will come in the future. In 10 year more than 80% of American marriages will be mixed marriages and at least 50-60% won’t be considered Jewish under Jewish law. We will change the rules for Law of return and shut them out as an automatic right and admit some based on different criteria.
my reply to watsa was botted pls retrieve.
watsa46 Said:
How can hypocritical Jews, Jews who know next to zip about Israel, Jewish history and Judaism itself be an ambassador.
What do you suppose might be their message and approach?
Then which Israel are they representing? Secular socialist Israel, right wing land of Israel Israelis? Religious of any stripe? Those few who love BB and the rest who hate him? What policy might they support and promote in their home countries: 2 state concepts, one state options, no Palis state at all and even transfer of all non Jewish populations?????? Will those diaspora Jews side with their own countries when in conflict with the Jewish State? If yes how can they be ambassadors, their primary loyalty is not to Israel and the Jewish people but to their own countries.
I think it is you who is full of yourself and not me.
I proposed a Jewish Tax to Israel which would allow diaspora Jews to have rights here while remaining in the diaspora if that’s their wish.
My proposal was that like in Israel every high school grad give at least 2 years of military and national service to the state of Israel even before college. Those who refuse, would then the lose the automatic right of return.
Leaving the second half of my comments unanswered tells me that U are full of yourself! And yes, very recently Dershowitz did say that Jews (of the diaspora) must defer to IL!!!!!Get up to date then come back.
Under what right would you deny people their rights?
@ watsa46:
Dershowitz has always been wrong and so are you.
With respect, your comment is Total BS and an excuse for you and other Jews not to fulfill your Jewish obligations.
Why be Jewish at all in the diaspora?
Our relationship is asymmetrical. Israel will continue to exist without diaspora Jews but diaspora Jews will not continue to exist without Israel.
Our open door to you may not always remain open!!
The last thing we need here are more assimilated liberal, pluralistic and christianized Jews in Israel and we no longer need your money.
You have nothing to offer us.
@ honeybee:
http://www.lolriot.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Lemme-give-you-a-big-kiss.jpg
The human brain may be the most dangerous byproduct of this universe. It has the unlimited ability to imagine and create INSANITY. And the rest of humanity is left to cope with the “insaners”!
this should also bring into discussion the constant tension existing btw IL and the diaspora. Both should be complementary to each other and not the source of recrimination or conflict in spite of living different experiences. this is a point that Dershowitz has made time and again. IL is the homeland of the Jews and the diaspora should be the “ambassador” of the state of IL. Not the other way around. As far as I can see, many in the diaspora are totally dismissive of IL. But hypocritically they get the benefits without paying their dues. The diaspora MUST differ to the homeland.
yamit82 Said:
Does Gimbles tell Macy. What no ooooooooooooo&xxxxxxxx, you missed you big chance!!!!!!!
@ the phoenix:
Thank you Maple Sugar, Darlin!!!!!!!!!!!
honeybee Said:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY HB
Were you born in 69′ or is that you age???
@ honeybee:
HAPPY BD honeybee!!!!!
🙂
yamit82 Said:
You noticed.
Today’s my birthday: http://youtu.be/kjxSCAalsBE New age babe!!!!!!!!
Interesting debates between Jewish Universalist Liberal Rabbis and a Jewish Nationalist Rabbi:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ9CeBH9Jqw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXHalbqr15k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jYjtV-DCpM (Skip the 1st 20min)
Seems like we are having the same debate over and over. Nothing really changes not even the positions of the opposing sides.
keelie Said:
2nd Amendment to the Constitution, Canada needs one. unless the Canadian govt doesn’t trust its citizens
ArnoldHarris Said:
they didnt fare very well!!!!!!!!!
ArnoldHarris Said:
look what it took to bring down Waco!!!!!!!
@ ArnoldHarris:
Thank you. Actually I did some serious investigation of the entire matter… Which is why I am so frustrated at the lack of accommodation. I have a Canadian firearms license for both “restricted” and “non-restricted weapons,” and among other firearms (medium calibre rifles) I have a Tokarev semi-auto 9mm and some single action “cowboy” revolvers. I shoot them all with “effective” accuracy, and in some cases, with competition accuracy. I do lack tactical training; this is something one can’t get in Canada, at least to my knowledge.
Your advice about staying off the streets and questionable neighbourhoods, is sound advice… as long as the “streets and questionable neighbourhoods” don’t come to me, if you see what I’m saying.
There may be some legal ways around all of this via some of the gun clubs around where I am currently residing. I’m going to look into these very shortly.
@ keelie:
My understanding of these situations is that if you ask for and are granted permanent residency, issued with the well-known green card, you will have rights to purchase and keep a firearm for lawful purposes. But if you are serious about any of this, you would be well advised to check this out with the appropriate authorities. But also remember that in most US states, under the now all but universal concealed carry legislation, you must have a lawfully-issued permit to carry a loaded weapon on your person or even in your automobile.
As for your creative substitute for lack of firepower in our mostly armed society, try staying off the streets and avoiding questionable neighborhoods,unless you really know how to evade or take down assailants. But if you are serious about protecting yourself with a firearm, you should get some qualified training in their safe, lawful and accurate use. Guns, parachutes and flotation devices such as life preservers all have in common this one thing, that if you need one but do not have one, you will never need it again because you will be dead.
Firearms such as my genuine Government Issue issue (G.I.) Colt Automatic Pistol, Caliber .45, manufactured by the Remington Rand Typewriter Company in 1943, are indeed fearsome if you know how to shoot them correctly and accurately. Which, after many years of gun-range practice, I think I do. I’m also a trained and experienced gun-range safety officer both for pistols and pistol-caliber automatic weapons.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ ArnoldHarris:
Unfortunately visitors – even longish-term visitors – to the US, can’t purchase or possess firearms no matter how well-qualified they are to do so. (I’ve mentioned this problem to many people both inside and outside of the US, to no avail.)
Because of this lack of firepower I have had to be somewhat “creative” – legally that is. Not as fearsome as your .45 1911, or even a simple shotgun, but potentially lethal nonetheless.
@ honeybee:
My house and my property are my own Alamo, and the only one I need. And if I ever have to defend it, I’ll be my own Travis, Bowie and Crockett, and some would-be Santa Anna won’t just boogie into the place without getting blitzed.
The American people are the world’s largest army. But I think you must know all about that down in TX-OK.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ ArnoldHarris:
Are you defending the Alamo?????????/
@ honeybee:
Armaments have escalated around the USA, and cities are more dangerous. So the thing to do is, keep your mouth shut and carry a Browning Hi-Power 9mm or a good old Colt .45 caliber M1911A1 Government Issue surplus pistol. I own a couple of the former and one of the latter, plus a lot of other stuff that pisses off liberals. Which pleases me no end.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
ArnoldHarris Said:
Speak softly,but carry a claw hammer.
You wouldn’t hardly tag me as one of the nice Jews who has read the diary of Anne Frank, visited Auschwitz, or chases his tail on behalf of human rights. The only rights I really care about are the rights of the eternal Jewish nation to all of Erets-Yisrael; the rights of the American states to protect themselves against autocratic rule of the Federal government; the rights of my fellow American gun-owners; the rights of my family; my rights as a land owner in Western Dane County, Wisconsin, USA; and not a hell of a lot else.
And if any of you were to know me personally, you would rightfully regard me as a hostile and anti-social fanatic who doesn’t really give a damn about being frameworked by anyone else’s conceptualizations.
As for teaching people tolerance, that’s the attitude of a slave. I learned to fight as a kid, and there was a day I needed to use a hammer to scar the face of the leader of a trio of Jew-haters as a 14-year old in a Chicago high school; on reflection, that was one of the prouder days of my life, because I never hesitated, and although he knocked me to the ground after I bloodied his face, I was the one nobody in that school ever bothered again. Which told me that no matter whatever else happened, I had won the victory in combat.
But about this “never again” business. Although I served the great Rav Meir Kahame loyally during the last four years of his life in which I knew him and served him, I never liked that idea. Too damned defensive, and in any case, it always happens again. But next time it involves us Jews, I want our side to be the one that takes the rights away from our enemies, robs them of their lands, their resources, their sense of manhood, and their national future. Not because I hate them, because I don’t. But I am cold-blooded enough to admit that all I have against them is that their presence partially blocks the path of the Jewish national revival and of the national power that I want for the Jewish nation above all else.
So I have neither time nor interest in weeping over the graves or the places of the murders of six million Jews. I just want our chance to visit the same horrors many times greater upon the present and future enemies of our Jewish nation.
But above all else, I work hard to describe events and people — including myself — in the most truthful and accurate manner possible.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI