America And More Importantly, The Obama Administration View The Holocaust Through Different Lenses Than Does Israel. Wonder Why Obama Hates Israel.

Divergent Views of the Holocaust Form Root of Tension With Israel

Did America Abandon European Jews or Act as Their Savior?

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Eye to Eye: Obama and Netanyahu embody two different narratives of the war.

By Samuel G. Freedman

Published April 16, 2015, issue of April 24, 2015.

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Once upon a time, decades before the embittered encounters of Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu, an Israeli prime minister decided to publicly humiliate an American president whom he deemed disloyal. The men in question were Menachem Begin and Ronald Reagan, and the immediate cause of their confrontation in 1981 was Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights.

“What kind of talk is this, ‘punishing Israel’?” Begin declared in a statement delivered to the American ambassador, Samuel Lewis. “Are we a vassal state of yours? Are we a banana republic? Are we 14-year-olds who, if we misbehave, we get our wrists slapped? Let me tell you whom this Cabinet comprises. It is composed of people whose lives are marked by resistance, fighting and suffering.”

Indeed, regardless of the personal enmity between Obama and Netanyahu, stinging words have often been exchanged by their two countries. Dwight Eisenhower threatened economic sanctions against Israel for its Suez invasion of 1956. James Baker, then secretary of state, told Congress in 1990 that Israel should “call us when you are serious about peace.”

During the suicide bombings of the second intifada, in 2001, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon accused President George W. Bush of sacrificing Israel the way Neville Chamberlain did much of Europe to Hitler. The term that Netanyahu has periodically tossed around to oppose territorial compromise — “Auschwitz borders” — was first coined by none other than that quintessential Anglophone Ashkenazi liberal, Abba Eban.

There is something especially revealing in the way that Eban, Begin, Sharon and Netanyahu all reached for rhetoric that evoked the Holocaust in chastising the United States. Beneath whatever temporal causes and individual animosities have troubled the diplomatic waters between Israel and America, there lies a profound disagreement about the Holocaust.

This argument is not the awful, familiar one mounted by Holocaust deniers. Rather, it is about whether, in the face of the Nazi mass murder — and, by extension, any postwar threat to Israel — America acted as the rescuer or the abandoner. No wonder, from an Israeli perspective, Obama’s promise that he will “have Israel’s back” rings so hollow. No wonder, from an American perspective, those election-season warnings that Obama will “throw Israel under the bus” have failed to sway many voters.

Yes, recent opinion polls show that Obama’s approval rating among American Jews has fallen sharply in the past two months. Even at its low ebb of 54%, however, it contrasts starkly with the 59% disapproval rating for the president among Israeli Jews. And the nationwide support in America for a nuclear deal with Iran (59% in an ABC/Washington Post survey) compares with the 72% of Israelis (in a Times of Israel poll) who said they do not trust Obama on the Iran issue.

That kind of discordance makes sad sense when one considers each nation’s Holocaust narrative and what those narratives imply about American intention. In this country, the entire World War II effort fits into the self-congratulatory trope of “The Greatest Generation,” as Tom Brokaw titled the book that has exerted such pop-culture influence.

For American Jewish soldiers, in particular, the experience was of liberating concentration and death camps — sharing C rations with starving inmates, being spontaneously embraced, hearing even a Catholic chaplain say the Kaddish in Hebrew. The concept of “Judeo-Christian tradition,” which was actually created for wartime morale and unity, was consecrated at Dachau and Ohrdruf and Mauthausen.

“Neither rank nor religion mattered in the face of Nazi atrocities,” Deborah Dash Moore writes of a combat radioman named David Cohen in her authoritative history, “GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation.” “Their stunned responses erased the differences between Christians and Jews… Cohen was not alone among his comrades. At this moment, he knew they were [emphasis in original] his comrades.”

The emphasis on Americans as rescuers deeply informs the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the institution sanctioned by the federal government itself. “Several times throughout the permanent exhibition… visitors view images of concentration camps quite literally through the eyes of American GIs,” Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich writes in “Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenge of Representation.” “This technique in particular helps the visitor to identify with the American troops as one of the two categories of protagonists portrayed in the museum — liberators and victims.”

But while the United States emerged from World War II with 16 million veterans and only about 140,000 Holocaust survivors, the nascent nation of Israel swelled with what Tom Segev dubbed “the seventh million.” And the prevailing Holocaust narrative in Israel focused on the helplessness and abandonment of European Jewry — those who, as Abba Kovner quoted from Isaiah, “went like lambs to slaughter.”

Yad Vashem, Israel’s museum of the Shoah, venerates the partisans and resisters — Kovner, Hannah Senesh, the Warsaw Ghetto fighters. Israel itself is portrayed as the sole guarantor of Jewish safety in all the years since the war. Not only does Israel commemorate the Holocaust on a different day than does the United States, but Yom HaShoah there has a very revealing full name: Holocaust, Rebellion, and Heroism Memorial Day.

Instead of American Jewish valor in World War II, at least a certain sector of Israeli society sees American Jewish gutlessness, especially among the wartime communal and rabbinical leadership. Benzion Netanyahu, father of the current prime minister, distilled that view in comments he made in a 2009 interview: “Part of the problem was how they saw themselves. In their contacts with President Franklin Roosevelt, Jewish leaders thought of themselves as weak or helpless.”

From that assertion, it is just a short leap of interpretation to posit that FDR could have stopped or at least impeded the extermination by bombing the railroad tracks to the death camps, and that American Jewish cowards were the enablers of that failure. And from that piece of historical analysis, it is yet another short leap to the fear, indeed the expectation that, when it comes to Iran, Barack Obama is going to abandon Israel to its own fate.

At least as far back as 2006, Netanyahu was saying, “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany.” Even if the prime minister, Senator Tom Cotton or Ayatollah Khamenei manages to derail the prospective nuclear agreement, that kind of rhetoric is certain to be heard again during some future dispute between the United States and Israel. History has taught our countries irreconcilable lessons about the Shoah.

Samuel G. Freedman is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and the author of seven books, including “Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry” (Simon & Schuster, 2000).

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/218667/divergent-views-of-the-holocaust-form-root-of-tens/#ixzz3XUWfwMS4

Will Israel Accept 1967 Borders? If So, What Then?

 Deputy foreign minister: 1967 borders are Auschwitz borders

Barak Ravid and Reuters - Jan 02, 2014 
Haaretz

Deputy Foreign Minister Zeev Elkin said Thursday that “the 1967 borders are Auschwitz borders” and therefore Likud has to reject any proposal to withdraw from the West Bank.

Elkin, of the Likud party himself, spoke during a morning tour of settlements in the Jordan Valley attended by parliamentarians and ministers that are members the Land of Israel lobby.

The tour, in which Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar (Likud) participated, took place a few hours before U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry landed in Israel. Kerry is expected to meet Thursday evening with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the “framework agreement” for peace that the United States is interested in presenting to Israel and the Palestinians by the end of January.

“The Jordan Valley must be under Israeli sovereignty forever,” said Elkin at a dedication ceremony for a new neighborhood in the settlement of Gitit in the Jordan Valley. “Now of all times, in a government headed by Likud, in a settlement built by Likud, we can say loud and clear: You will remain here forever and there will be Israeli sovereignty here.”

Elkin added: “To all those who are now making proposals for Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders, there is only one reply, which was already given in 1969 by then- foreign minister Abba Eban: The 1967 borders are Auschwitz borders! The only reply that Likud government should give to such proposals is: No! It’s right to talk to our neighbors, but it’s illogical for them to ask us to give up the security of Israel’s inhabitants and Israel’s vital interests. Anyone who gives up the Jordan Valley will turn Kfar Sava into Sderot.” 

Israel At A Crossroads?

In the following article, Martin Sherman writes in the Jerusalem Post last week about the issues facing Israel.  And they are not pretty.  An out of touch left, incompetent right and a judicial system with minimum support. A very scary article. Let me know what you think?

Conservative Tom

Into the Fray: A nation betrayed?

Martin Sherman - The Jerusalem Post, November 18th, 2011

This is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender.
– Abba Eban on the Six Day War
The preceding citation, from arguably Israel’s most consummate diplomat, encapsulates the glaring irrationality and the inverted logic that has become the accepted hallmark of the politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict, both at the level of theoretical analysis and of practical policy-making.
The abandonment of any coherent, reasonable criteria has not been confined to the attitude of the Arabs towards Israel, but sadly has become a characteristic of Israeli policy towards the Arabs – and of a host of domestic issues that impinge directly and indirectly on that policy.
The absurd becomes routine
Consider the situation, which defies rational explanation, that is emerging today before our eyes, without evoking any significant expression of public incredulity — much less outrage — that such an astonishing development should warrant.
The ruling party of the day, the Likud, is, in effect, imploring the Palestinians to enter into negotiations over a resolution of the conflict on the basis of a principle — the Oslo two-state concept — that it itself rejected vehemently only a few years ago.
Mind you, this bizarre situation has not come about because this previously rejected principle has proved to be a stunning success. Quite the contrary, it has been shown to be an abject failure. After all, the endeavor to implement it has precipitated all the dangers its opponents warned of, and none of the benefits its proponents promised. Indeed, it has wrought death and destruction on Jew and Arab alike on a horrific scale.
Failures don’t come more abject or clear than that.
Yet almost inconceivably, just when it became undeniable that the opponents of territorial concessions and political appeasement were completely vindicated, they began to embrace the very policy they had previously repudiated.
These circumstances mirror almost exactly the inexplicable absurdity expressed in the Abba Eban citation above. Instead of the anti- Oslo victors in the ideological-political clash with their pro-Oslo advocates routing their vanquished adversaries, they set about surrendering to them.
Unwarranted intellectual surrender
This faint-hearted and feeble-minded conduct on the part of what is inappropriately dubbed — usually pejoratively — Israel’s political “Right,” constitutes unacceptable, unwarranted and irresponsible intellectual capitulation.
After all, the political doctrine of what is inappropriately dubbed — usually approvingly — Israel’s political “Left,” should have been consigned to utter and enduring disrepute. Every notion to which the Left has attempted to tether its political credo has come adrift. Every policy-relevant concept, every politically relevant personality on which it pinned its hopes has produced nothing but disaster and disappointment.
Indeed, the manifest folly of the Israeli Left and its preposterous brain-child, the Oslowian “peace process,” should have made it an object of enduring public ridicule. The manifest mendacity of its endeavor to promote it should have made it the object of ubiquitous public distrust.
Sadly however, the Israeli Right has done little to produce such an outcome. In fact it has done much to prevent it. For despite the fact the Left has little to justify its perennial claim to either the moral or the intellectual high ground, the Right has shown little stomach to challenge it.
A catalogue of blindness and blunder
This right-wing reticence is difficult to comprehend. After all, the list of the Left’s blunders is depressingly lengthy. It has been hopelessly wrong about… well, everything.
• It was wrong in embracing the homicidal Nobel peace laureate Yasser Arafat as a credible peace partner who could “deliver the goods.”
• It was wrong in pinning its hopes on Mahmoud Abbas, whose tailored suits and coiffured hair served as deceptively comforting contrasts to Arafat's belligerent keffiyeh and military fatigues.
• It was wrong in believing it could reach a lasting accord with the Palestinians by decoupling Fatah from Hamas and dealing only with the former while ignoring the latter — as both the expulsion of Fatah from Gaza and the recent unification moves prove.
• It was were wrong in portraying Salam Fayyad as a pivotal centerpiece for a durable peace accord — since recent developments demonstrated how precarious his position is.
• It was wrong in ignoring how imprudent it is to attempt to pursue an agreement based on a person-specific configuration of the Palestinian leadership which could be swiftly removed from power — by ballot or bullet — by a more inimical and radical successor – as in Gaza.
• It was wrong in heralding Bashar Assad as young Western-oriented, Internet-adept doctor whose accession to power would usher in an era of peace and progress that would allow Israel to relinquish the Golan.
• It was wrong in urging Israel to avail itself of the “good services” of the Islamist government of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan as an “honest broker” to promote a deal with Damascus.
• It was wrong in insisting that an Israeli withdrawal to the internationally recognized borders would mollify Hezbollah and bring about peace with Lebanon.
• It was wrong in claiming that Israel could not attain economic prosperity without political peace with the Palestinians… as its current prosperity, even in an increasingly unprosperous world, clearly shows.
Yet in spite of this record of massive misjudgment, the leadership of the political Right persists in curiously misplaced deference to its ideological adversaries on the Left.
Perverting democracy
This deference was painfully evident in the Knesset this week, where issues that impinge on the nation’s ability to act assertively with regard to the Palestinians were raised.
The negative reaction of senior Likud ministers and MKs to the legislative initiatives aimed at addressing the problems of ideological bias in the nation’s judiciary and of foreign funding of inherently anti-Israel NGOs operating under the guise of “human rights,” are a disturbing reflection of the Right’s manifest sense of inferiority generated by the aggressive moralistic posturing of the Left.
While it might be possible to argue that the existing legislative proposals lack a measure of polish and refinement, it cannot be disputed that they raise issues of significance and urgency which must be confronted in the spirit — if not perhaps in the precise detail — set out in these bills.
Protection of the rights of minorities is one thing. Promotion of the ability of minorities to subvert the democratic process is quite another. There is nothing vaguely democratic about facilitating the imposition of minority views on the majority via extra-parliamentary action funded by foreign governments.
There is nothing vaguely undemocratic in a sovereign state instituting measures to limit — or at least monitor — attempts by alien sovereignties to empower fringe elements in the country, with negligible domestic support for their ideas, to subvert the policy of the government elected by universal suffrage.
Indeed, to abstain from doing so would be a dereliction of democratic duty. To advocate such abstention is to pervert, not preserve, democracy.
Judicial legitimacy and independence
The same is true with regard to the initiatives regarding the judiciary. While the independence of judiciary is indeed a matter of vital importance, it will be worth little if the public has no faith in the justice it dispenses. Indeed, the confidence the public has in the courts is no less — perhaps even more – important than their independence. For in the absence of such trust, justice will be sought elsewhere and by other means.
The plummeting degree of confidence the public has in the legal system is a clear warning that the status quo is unsustainable. According to one long-term study by the University of Haifa, barely one-third of the general public has faith in the system. According to Prof. Arye Rattner, who conducted the study, this ongoing 10-year decline in public faith in the courts “constitutes a grave blow to one of the most important foundations of the legal system in a democratic society – legitimacy.”
These words of warning echo precisely those of Prof. Ran Hirschl in his book Towards Juristocracy, which I cited in a recent column, “A real reason for revolution.”
In it Hirschl cautions: “Over the past decade, the public image of the SCI [Supreme Court of Israel] as an… impartial arbiter has been increasingly eroded… the court and its judges are increasingly viewed by a considerable portion of the Israeli public as pushing forward their own political agenda.”
It is thus a shame — or perhaps more precisely, shameful — that senior members of the coalition chose to abandon their parliamentary colleagues and endorsed the unfounded censure of them and their initiatives. A far better and more constructive course would be to join them in addressing any defects in their commendable proposals.
Israel has put its trust in leaders who have led it into great peril — and into those who so far have failed to lead it out of it. It has been placed in great danger by the injudicious action of the Left and the impotent inaction of the Right. The Left has imposed a fatally flawed paradigm on the nation; the Right has failed to formulate a persuasive alternative.
This situation cannot be allowed to continue. There is a potential for great tragedy brewing. Unless this pressing challenge is addressed rapidly and resolutely, all that might remain for future generations to do will be to assign blame for the fulfillment of that tragedy.