Forty Years of Suffering

Forty Years of Suffering1 Bruno Chaouat For Jeffrey Mehlman, as a humble tribute to his chiastic imagination. — And the Lord's anger was kindled against Israel, and he made them wander in the wilderness forty years, until all the generation that had done evil in the sight of the Lord was consumed. Numbers 32:13 ALAIN FINKIELKRAUT GREETED the third millennium with a jaded rendition of Holocaust hypermnesia:2 "La Shoah est omnipr ésente. Ses morts ne connaissent jamais le repos. Constamment sur la brèche, sollicités en permanence, sans cesse au travail, ils n'ont pas une minute à eux."3 Busy indeed, the dead, ceaselessly solicited to serve political ends. Handy too, the dead, when it comes to vilifying the enemy of the day. Is there not a Hitler in each unpopular leader? In each victim, is there not a Jew hiding? No footage, not a film documenting genocides or unpopular wars that does not make at least passing reference to the Holocaust. A mass grave? Dachau. A pile of Cambodian skulls? Auschwitz. Guantanamo Bay? Worse than Auschwitz.4 The tsunami? "A natural Holocaust." Israel? The new Third Reich. The Palestinians? Today's Jews.5 The 1948 Naqba? The Palestinian Shoah. Rwanda? The African Holocaust. Saddam Hussein? Hitler redivivus. The Holocaust, it seems, has become the backdrop on which human grief and political violence are framed, broadcast in real time. Barbie Zelizer has documented the obsessive Holocaust reference in images of mass killings and war.6 How can one account for the use of Holocaust imagery to represent current atrocities and injustice? First, if every mass murder resembles the Holocaust , perhaps it is because mass murders hopelessly resemble one another. A corpse is a corpse is a corpse. Cruelty does not innovate. A second hypothesis : the Holocaust reference, because the Holocaust was an extreme atrocity, is expected to mobilize public awareness. Yet, paradoxically, this call for action paralyzes to the extent that seeing "a Holocaust"7 occurring here and now makes one feel at best powerless, at worse blasé. When atrocities are staged on TV and in the news on a daily basis, "Never again!" becomes "Ever again." If each war, each genocide is a Holocaust, then the Holocaust simply keeps re-happening all over again, everywhere, and there is nothing we can do or want to do about it. The devoir de mémoire, from a new, Kantian categorical imperative once formulated by Adorno ("Think and act in such a way Vol. XLV, No. 3 49 L'Esprit Créateur that Auschwitz will not repeat itself'8), has become a moot prescription. Europe and more broadly the West arguably suffer from Holocaust hyperaesthesia . This hyperaesthesia, Finkielkraut contends, borders on collective amnesia—a narcotization of experience.9 Hypersensitivity to the Holocaust not only distracts from current suffering , it also risks turning the Holocaust against its victims. Since the outbreak of the second intifada and attacks against French Jews by French Muslims identifying with the Palestinian struggle, Holocaust commemoration has failed to provide a political, intellectual or moral ground from which to denounce new expressions of anti-Semitism poorly masqueraded as radical anti-Zionism or as critique of Israeli policy.10 If, as Finkielkraut has suggested," World War II split Europe's consciousness among victim, victor, and perpetrator, decolonization aggravated this identity crisis by highlighting Europe's guilt in colonial oppression. Jeffrey Mehlman has noted Europe's reluctance to work through its colonial and antiSemitic past. Such reluctance, expressed by the reduction of ethics to dogma, may explain the French commentariat's paralysis during the backlash of the Middle East conflict on the French Jewish community: Europe having opted to dissolve the shame of its Holocaust in the guilt of its colonialism, appears to have now opted to subject the guilt of its colonialism to the salutary acids of its anti-racist anticolonialism . It is a process that is no less flawed by its questionable assimilation of Zionism to a form of colonialism than by the egalitarian blind spots of its dogmatic anti-colonialism.12 Although the Jewish specificity of the Holocaust remained unacknowledged for nearly twenty years, once it was acknowledged the claim of "uniqueness" rendered it a...