After-words: Post-Holocaust Struggles with Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Justice

8 / The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Just Reconciliation in the Shadows of the Holocaust

8 The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Just Reconciliation in the Shadows of the Holocaust leonard grob auschwitz continues to cast its long shadow over all that is human. Like the other contributions to this volume, this chapter strives to further the process of reexamining fundamental ethical concerns in the post-Holocaust world. I will focus here on the notion of genuine reconciliation—reconciliation within a commitment to justice—between conflicting parties in the post-Auschwitz world. My choice of parties to a conflict is not arbitrary. In our time, there are few conflicts that appear to be more intractable, more impervious to notions of reconciliation and justice, than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Indeed, we have before us nothing short of what has been termed a new Hundred Years’ War. Furthermore , the specter of the Holocaust haunts, unrelentingly, the turmoil in the Middle East. The adversaries in this conflict do not hesitate to make references to the Holocaust in the course of creating their rhetoric of war. And even when no explicit references are made, the events of 1933–1945 never cease to cloud that war-torn landscape. If we are to reflect on reconciliation of a conflict fought in no small measure against the backdrop of the Holocaust, it is to this century-old conflict that we must turn. That Israeli Jews perceive themselves to be fighting battles in the shadows of the Holocaust is certainly not surprising. Although the Zionist dream has roots in the millennia-old aspirations of the Jewish people, 197 Israel itself was born, in some substantial sense, out of the ashes of the destruction of two-thirds of European Jewry. Holocaust allusions abound in the Israeli press, the majority bringing to mind the claim that a people newly empowered with statehood must not allow themselves to become, or to be perceived as becoming, weak in their struggle with the Palestinians , their current “Amalek” or inveterate foe. Explicit contrasts are drawn between the powerlessness of Jews in Europe during the Holocaust and the military might of the Israel of today. Those who would wish to retain land on the West Bank for Israel make reference to the pre-1967 boundary lines as “Auschwitz borders.” Indeed, the oft-quoted phrase “Never again” is most often applied, in its literal rendering, to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Threats—perceived or real—to Israel’s continued existence keep the “ghost of the Holocaust” alive and well.1 Palestinians, too, allude with increasing frequency to the Holocaust. The allusions are multifaceted. Israeli treatment of Palestinians is sometimes compared in the Palestinian press to Nazi treatment of Jews at Auschwitz. Israelis have been accused of a racism which rivals or runs deeper than that exhibited by the Nazis. Some Palestinian spokespersons sound a theme that can be roughly characterized as “My Holocaust is as traumatic an event for my people as yours is for your people.” Finally, elements of denial of the Holocaust have also found their way into Palestinian rhetoric. Familiar terms, such as “forged claims” regarding “alleged acts of slaughter,” have appeared in the o‹cially sanctioned Palestinian press, upping the ante in a battleground of words which has so often become a battleground of rocks, bullets, and mortars.2 That the Palestinian-Israeli conflict stands in the shadows of the Holocaust , and that it is a conflict in desperate need of just reconciliation, needs little further comment. I wish, however, to add another note regarding my choice of these parties to a conflict. As a Holocaust scholar, as a Jew, and as a human being vitally concerned with tikkun olam—the healing of the world—I see in a morally sound resolution of these hundred years of enmity in the Middle East an opportunity to cast light on a vital aspect of the human condition as such. It is unquestionably the case that Jews have suªered appallingly from anti-Semitic acts over the course of two millennia. It is also the case that these acts came to a head in the murder of European Jewry during the 198 Part Three: Justice Holocaust—whatever other factors contributed to the creation of the Nazi genocidal mind. As a stateless people, Jews had no access to those instruments of power by means of which they could contend with those who would eliminate them from the earth. A people formerly unable to defend itself with the force of arms has...