Touring the Camps

Tags

education, Holocaust

How we got onto the topic of education about the Holocaust I don’t quite know, but in a recent conversation with some friends I happened to say that I didn’t think it appropriate or beneficial for Israeli high-school students to go on school trips to Poland to visit concentration camps. My friends were quite surprised, as they all seemed to think it was a good idea for young people to tour the camps, so that they could see for themselves what the Nazis had perpetrated.

One of my friends, who used to be a psychological advisor in the Ministry of Education, assured me that these trips were very carefully planned, involving preparatory talks and material as well as follow-up sessions. He added that the youngsters were carefully monitored throughout, and especially upon returning, to ensure that they did not suffer psychological damage. Teachers were told to watch out for indications of depression or untoward behavior, and psychologists were on hand to deal with any problems that might arise.

He himself had been on a multi-ethnic trip to the concentration camps, in a group of over 300 Israelis and Arabs, among them Jews and Druze, Christians and Muslims, and it had been extremely beneficial to all concerned.

My objection to these jaunts is that life in Israel it pretty tough as it is, with various political and economic problems besetting the general population, and two or three years of military service awaiting most of the teenagers at the end of their schooling. In addition, they have to contend with the usual issues confronting young people all over the world – the bewildering world of adulthood, the confusing signals sent by their bodies, the continuous bombardment by the various media surrounding them – and that’s quite enough to be going on with.

Why burden these kids even more by bringing them into close and personal contact with the horrors of the past?

It’s not that I’m against educating the younger generation about the Holocaust. In fact, in Israel it’s very difficult to get away from it. There are still several thousand concentration camp survivors within the population today, not to mention people who were forced to flee their homes in Nazi-occupied Europe. The annual Holocaust Remembrance Day is marked with national ceremonies of various kinds, 24-hour TV and radio programming, and the closure of cinemas, clubs, pubs, and theatres. Furthermore, as part of the national school curriculum, at around age 12 most children research their family’s history to produce a wide-ranging project on their ‘Roots.’ This involves interviewing parents, grandparents, and other relatives, and accessing historical material. In many cases the Holocaust features in these accounts.

In Israel we also have one of the world’s foremost Holocaust museums, Yad Vashem, and all schoolchildren are taken there when they reach an appropriate age. Army units are also taken to tour the museum and to hear lectures about the events of that time, sometimes even first-hand accounts by survivors. Other, smaller museums in Israel also deal with Holocaust-related events, among them Beit Theresienstadt, which is situated in a kibbutz in the northern part of Israel. No one living in Israel today, whether Arab or Jew, can claim to be ignorant of the Holocaust.

When it comes to youngsters living in other countries, the situation is different. Obviously, school systems abroad do not focus on the Holocaust to the same extent as those in Israel, and Jewish youngsters abroad may well be ignorant on the subject. That is something which their parents and communities have to deal with. Plenty of educational material of all levels and for all ages is available, if one knows where to find it, and of course by now there are Holocaust memorials and Jewish museums in many cities. Anyone who wants to learn about that terrible period in Jewish history can easily find it.

Yes, educate kids about the Holocaust, by all means. But don’t we run the risk of defeating our purpose by overdoing things?.

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A Mortal Sin

Tags

assassination of Rabin, Haaretz, incitement

A Facebook message that appeared on my computer screen caused me so much shock and dismay that I committed a mortal Facebook sin: I told the person who had put the message up what I thought of him by using insulting language.

I regret that reaction. I regret my too hasty finger on the return button. And I regret the language I used. But what I don’t regret is the shock and dismay that the message aroused in me.

And what was the message? It showed the bannerhead of one of Israel’s few remaining intelligent newspapers, Ha’aretz, embedded in the red-black-green flag of the PLO, with a message rejoicing at the one-day strike at the paper and expressing the hope that the newspaper would never appear again.

Of course, those hopes were dashed the very next day, when the paper appeared as usual, but the sentiment that was expressed shocked me to the core. The meaning of this was that the paper is the mouthpiece of the PLO, and that its readership is the enemy, that those people are traitors.

That is a truly shocking message, but sadly it seems to be one that is accepted by a growing segment of Israel’s population, propagated by persons purporting to support Zionism but who in fact purvey a distorted version of the original ideology. Their version advocates continual territorial expansion, opposition to any attempt to get a peace process going and rejection of the idea of a two-state solution.

How these people propose to resolve the problem of the presence of two million or more Palestinians just across Israel’s borders is beyond me. Transfer? Massacre? Mass voluntary exodus? Continued domination of a hostile population? It all seems unrealistic and unethical to me, and not in accordance with any of the traditional values of Judaism. Some people seem never to have heard of ‘love thy neighbor as thyself.’

While I subscribe to Ha’aretz, that doesn’t mean that I subscribe to all the views expressed in it. In fact, its op-ed and opinion pages generally provide a platform for a very wide range of opinions. Besides, I don’t have the time and patience to read all the articles that appear there. But to define thousands of law-abiding Israeli citizens as the enemy, as betrayers of the Zionist cause, is shocking, dangerous and evil. According to recent opinion polls, about half of Israel’s population of seven million hold the view that a two-state solution is desirable, given the appropriate conditions. Are they all to be regarded as traitors?

The tendency to tar large segments of the population with the brush of disloyalty is vile, and ultimately dangerous. In fact, it not only constitutes incitement to hatred, it is hatred, pure and simple. It takes us back to the period before the assassination of Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin, when certain elements within the population fostered hatred and enmity of those whose views differed from theirs.

Let’s hope that as elections approach, Israel will manage to rise above that low level of discourse and debate and aspire to discuss the fundamental issues in a civilized manner, without fostering hatred.

Parties (not political)

Tags

Bumps, Charades, Musical Chairs, Pass the Parcel, pre-1967 Jerusalem, Sardines, The Beatles

The party my family threw to mark my recent birthday (a very round number which seems terribly old to me, even though I keep telling myself I don’t feel it) set me thinking about parties I have had in my life, occasioning nostalgia and a kind of summing up.

Of course (though perhaps not of course), my parents made birthday parties for me when I was a child. These were not mammoth affairs, but a few children from my class would be invited to our house, my mother would prepare sandwiches and cake, we would play games like Pass the Parcel and Musical Chairs, the birthday child would blow out the candles on the cake and be given ‘the bumps’ by the other children, all under the supervision of my father, and then everyone would go home. Each child would bring the birthday child a little gift, but I don’t remember that they were given anything when they left, as we were expected to do when we made birthday parties for our own children many years later). The excitement these parties would arouse were totally out of proportion to the size of the event, and they brightened the otherwise dull routine of my childhood.

In my early teenage years parties became a more formal occasion, with a small group of girls from school being invited to our home to partake of the goodies my mother had prepared and participate in solving the word games and puzzles I had prepared. These could hardly be called parties, but that was the way I chose to celebrate my birthdays. Later on, when I joined a youth movement to which both boys and girls belonged, parties began to be more lively, with dancing and games like Sardines and Charades that involved less sedate pursuits. Those were the years when the Beatles burst onto the scene, and I remember the heady feeling of jiving to ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand.’

For my twenty-first birthday I invited hordes of fellow-students to our modest semi-detached house on the outskirts of London. As usual, my mother prepared all kinds of delicacies, and she and my father remained in the kitchen throughout the evening while every other room in our house, including the bedrooms, was filled with young people encountering other young people. I don’t think there was much room for dancing, though we tried to have music playing all the time. My friends also had twenty-first birthday parties, some quite wild in their way, but that was still at a time of relative innocence in the early 1960s, before the arrival of ‘the pill.’

When I moved to Israel the parties continued. How else do young people get to know one another? My inability to speak Hebrew may have been a handicap, but the fact that various immigrant organisations held parties for English-speakers was very helpful. Of course, the fact that people who were not exactly native ‘Anglos’ often came along to these parties only added to their attraction, and many ‘mixed’ couples emerged from these events. And then there were also a few night clubs in those far-off, pre-1967 days, when Jerusalem was a small, provincial backwater, where life was relatively peaceful and everyone knew everyone else. In fact, on any Saturday night you could hardly take a stroll in what was known as the downtown ‘Triangle’ of streets without meeting one or two people you knew. The saying then was that if you bumped into the same person twice in the same evening you would promise to have an ice cream together on the third encounter.

But the most memorable party I attended was the one given by a friend to which the cheeky young man who was later to become my husband gatecrashed and then took over, organising records and getting the party going with a swing. I’m almost tempted to say that our lives have been one long party ever since, but that would be going a little too far. Still, we have adopted it as our motto in life to celebrate whatever we can whenever we can, even if, as on the present occasion, reaching the ripe old age of 70 is not really a cause for celebration. But then again, perhaps it is.

Anti-Israel or Anti-Semitism?

Tags

Balfour Declaration, BDS, Globe Theatre, Habima, Merchant of Venice, Naqba, Partition Resolution, Six-Day War, War of Independence

(First appeared in AJR Journal, October 2012)

When Israel’s leading theatrical company, Habima, was invited to perform Shakespeare’s ‘Merchant of Venice’ in Hebrew at the Globe Theatre in London last summer a flurry of opposing voices erupted. The usual vociferous pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel suspects trotted out their tried and tested arguments denigrating Israel’s government. It seemed perfectly logical for them to call for the cancellation, or at least boycott, of a performance by Israeli actors. They threatened to demonstrate against the performance and disrupt it if it went ahead.

To their credit, the organisers of the festival, who had invited theatrical companies from all over the world to perform in London, did not heed the threats, merely putting precautionary measures in place (extra security and additional ushers). The protestors demonstrated outside the theatre, as was their right, and were confronted by a counter-demonstration by Israel’s supporters. The show went on, and by all accounts was a great success, and those persons who tried to disturb the performance were quickly removed from the auditorium.

But, as has been pointed out before, the campaign against Habima was just one aspect of the ongoing endeavour by various groups in England and elsewhere to delegitimize Israel and deny its right to exist. This campaign has now been extended to the sphere of artistic endeavour, so that any Israeli artist who seeks to appear on a stage in England does so at the risk of having his or her performance interrupted by calls to ‘Free Palestine’ and for Israel to cease practising ‘apartheid.’ The facts on the ground, namely that Israel seeks peace and defensible borders, are of no relevance to these people, led by the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement, who seem to be motivated by little less than blind hatred of Israel and all it stands for.

Perhaps it’s time to remind ourselves that Israel was founded on the basis of the legitimate right of the Jewish people to a homeland, as set out by the British government in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The UN Partition Resolution of 1947 was rejected by the Arabs, who took up arms to prevent its implementation. The outcome of the ensuing war, Israel’s War of Independence, was that Israel was established and Jordan, Egypt and Syria appropriated the areas that had been designated for the Palestinian state. The Palestinians have recently adopted the term Naqba for that event, (something like Tisha b’Av, which commemorates the destruction of the Temple and the Romans’ expulsion of the Jews from their land in 70 C.E.).

Israel has stated that it is prepared to cede land in return for peace and acceptance of its existence as a Jewish state. No such undertaking has been forthcoming from the Palestinians. Moreover, a few years ago Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip and uprooted its settlers hoping for peace with the Palestinians there. The result? Almost daily rocket bombardments of civilian areas from close range. Would anyone in their right mind take that risk again?
It is also worth recalling that in the Six Day War of 1967 Israel fended off three invading Arab armies and conquered the areas that its Arab neighbours had taken over in 1948. Since the Arab countries refused to recognise Israel’s existence or negotiate peace terms, the areas thus acquired became ‘occupied.’ Opinions within Israel and outside it are divided as to the legitimacy and/or advisability of Israel remaining in those areas, and certainly as to its right to build and settle there, but until a viable partner for peace negotiations comes along the situation remains fluid, and certain elements within Israel take advantage of this.

But logic has no meaning when anti-Zionism is simply anti-Semitism in another guise.