Bennett Muraskin: Review of Avraham Burg's The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise From its Ashes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
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First published in Hebrew in 2007, as Defeating Hitler: The Holocaust is Over it caused a storm of controversy. For too long, Burg argues, Israel has been obsessed with the Holocaust. The slaughter of the 6 million Jews in Europe has become internalized to the extent that Israelis view themselves as a nation of victims. Although armed with a powerful military, including nuclear weapons and allied with the sole super power, Israel acts as if it is threatened with annihilation.
Zionism promised to purge Jews of their “ghetto mentality.” Instead Israel has reproduced it on a larger scale, continuing to believe “the entire world is against us.”
I think the "ghetto mentality" that Zionism was supposed to rid them of was one of submissiveness towards the dominant culture, whatever that happened to be.
Now, they have a level of collective self-determination. They have power which they can use to defend themselves and tell other countries and groups where they get off.
The Jews did not have that power for a very long time.
Burg would like to see Israel become “a state of all its Jews and all its citizens with the majority determining its character.” This would entail repealing the Law of Return that grants preferential immigration rights to Jews and all laws that discriminate between Jews and non-Jews. An ethno-religious state would give way to one based on humanistic Jewish values.
In other words, a bland, vanilla, secular humanist state like every other country in the western world that has no loyalty to its culture, religion or traditions, and essentially bases its norms and laws on socialism.
Which is being abused by extremist Muslim elements.
Ask Europe how that's working for them.
The Jewish people would be foolish to adopt that stance.
In order to return to them, mixed groups of Jewish and Arab youth should be taken on a grand tour of Europe from Spain to Germany and Poland to explore both the Jewish and Muslim experience in Europe, past and present. Auschwitz should not be on the itinerary. Another trip should bring Israeli Jewish students to the US to learn “how life with national meaning can be lived without an external enemy, and with full trust between Jews and the non-Jewish environment.”
Auschwitz not on the itinerary?
The Jewish people have an "external" enemy whether they live in Israel or not. Wherever they go, they are targets of fanatical hatred.
I'm not sure this guy gets it.
