[Note from Kathie MM: Today we welcome guest contributor John Hess, who has been an anti-war activist for 40 years, and worked for over 30 years in the construction business. He is currently a full-time faculty member in English and American Studies at UMass Boston, where he is a member of the executive committee for the faculty-staff union.]
I found this video the other day and thought it well worth passing on. It is a fascinating comment on the situation in Palestine/Israel from Dr. Hajo Meyer, a Jewish Holocaust survivor.
Meyer observes that Jews were “the pioneers of interhuman ethics” and that he “wants to wake the world” to speak out against the horrible treatment of the Palestinians by Israel.
One of the enduring strengths of Judaism is its strong moral tradition and it is in this tradition that Meyer urges Israelis “not to behave like our perpetrators” (the Nazis) toward the Palestinians and calls on the world to speak out against this behavior.
Watching the video led me to think about both the Holocaust and the situation in Palestine/Israel today. It seems to me they are in some important ways linked, so I took a long look at a book I haven’t glanced in quite awhile, The Cunning of History by Richard L. Rubenstein.
The Holocaust, Rubenstein said, was “a thoroughly modern exercise in total domination that could only have been carried out by an advanced political community with a highly trained, tightly disciplined police and civil service bureaucracy” (p. 4).
Rubenstein provides a warning that it is well worth heeding today: “One of the least helpful ways of understanding the Holocaust is to regard the destruction process as the work of a small group of irresponsible criminals who were atypical of normal statesmen and who somehow gained control of the German people, forcing them by terror and the deliberate stimulation of religious and ethnic hatred to pursue a barbaric and retrograde policy that was thoroughly at odds with the great traditions of Western civilization” (p. 21).
In his view, “The Holocaust was an expression of some of the most significant political, moral, religious and demographic tendencies of Western civilization in the twentieth century. The Holocaust cannot be divorced from the very same culture of modernity that produced the two world wars and Hitler” (p. 6).
What parallels do you see between the Holocaust and the situation in Palestine–or even other parts of the world?
John Hess, Senior Lecturer in English and American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Boston