Burg and Kristallnacht

A private e-mail from someone at the Seattle Times, in response to my observation that the anniversary of Kristallnacht was not a good day to publish Avraham Burg's self-flagellatory op-ed:

Nobody had the foggiest notion that it was the anniversary of Kristallnacht, because Kristallnacht is not date we keep track of. Nor was the piece by Burg about Kristallnacht. It was about Israel in 2003. It is beyond me how you, or that woman we printed the next day, to assume that we were "commemorating" or commenting on an event in Germany in 1938.

Another comment: I don't think anything that happened in Germany in 1938 creates a moral claim on Palestinian territory in 2003.

I have no reason to believe that the anniversary of Kristallnacht was deliberately or even consciously chosen as the date to publish the Burg piece. But, "we didn't know" is no excuse for a newspaper to make. It's the newspaper's job to know. In particular, it is the job of the opinion section to place current events in their broader context. When the opinion editors select an op-ed for publication, it's their job to know whether the piece has a sound factual basis, whether the analysis is sensible, what the author's agenda is, and how the piece intersects with the rest of the day's news.

As for the connection between Kristallnacht and the Burg piece -- Chaya Siegelbaum's op-ed which the Times printed (and to which the above e-mail alluded), explained it flawlessly, but here it is in my own words:

Of course, the crimes of Germany in 1938 do not create a "moral claim on Palestinian territory". But there are historical parallels between the plight of the German Jews in 1938 and today's Israeli Jews and there are lessons to be learned from the experience of 1938.

Burg's essay, which was first published in an Israeli daily newspaper, is a perfectly valid contribution to Israel's own internal debate over its security policy. That Israel engages in such a debate and that a diverse spectrum of voices are heard is one of Israel's greatest sources of strength versus its rigidly censored tyrannical adversaries. But in isolation, as a window into current Israeli thinking, it is utterly without balance.

The essence of Burg's argument is that Palestinian violence is caused by Israeli injustice and that if, and only if, Israel behaves differently toward the Palestinians will the two peoples co-exist in peace.

But that argument seems to ignore the long experience of Jews and Arabs living in the Levant and the dynamic of the conflict. Before the 20th century, Palestine was merely a sparsely populated backwater of an Ottoman province that had both Jewish and Arab communities and a lot of vacant land. Jews started immigrating to Palestine in larger numbers in Ottoman days, as did Arabs. The Jewish intention was to form a homeland, while the Arab animus was to prevent the formation of any Jewish entity. (Jews were only ever tolerated in the Arab world as second class citizens under Muslim rule). At every successive stage in the conflict --1930s, 1948, 1967, 2000 -- there is a Jewish/Israeli offer to share the land, an Arab rejection of sharing, followed by Arab violence, an Israeli military victory which leaves the Arabs with even less land than they had earlier, and then an Arab vow to continue the struggle until final victory, condemnation of Israel by the "international community" and offers from the Israeli peace camp to make the Arabs whole for Israel's sins.

Anybody who doubts that the Arab intention is not just to end the "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza but to eliminate Israel as a sovereign Jewish entity should consider at the very least the following: (1) The fundamental documents of the Palestinian national movement, e.g. the Palestinian National Charter and the Hamas Charter, which spell out the intentions in the most explicit detail; (2) the fact that Arabs act on these intentions by attacking not only installations in the disputed territories of the West Bank and Gaza, but by murdering civilians inside Israel. This can only be regarded as an attempt at ethnic cleansing (There is also the fact that Arab terror attacks against Jewish civilians pre-date Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by several decades).

Still, there seems always to be a faction in any Jewish community that responds to external threats with the questions: "What are we doing to make them hate us? And what can we surrender to prevent them from attacking us?" Avraham Burg and the Israeli peace camp are doing that today. There were also many Jewish Germans who were asking the same questions about the Nazis back in the 1930s. (An excellent book on the subject is John Van Houten Dippel's Bound upon a Wheel of Fire). In spite of Hitler's unambiguous anti-Semitic rhetoric, followed by the Nuremberg Laws, the boycott of Jewish businesses and the elimination of Jews from the schools and the professions, the response of many German Jews was to try to placate and accommodate the Nazis and to make concessions. Kristallnacht and the events that followed illustrated the foolishness of such a course of appeasement.

Again, Burg has every right to try to persuade his fellow Israelis of the soundness of his proposals. In fact, he has taken advantage of his many opportunities to do that and his message has largely been rejected. I commend the Seattle Times for taking an interest in Israel and attempting to inform its readers about Israel. But to publish a discredited, minority opinion in isolation and without a broader context does less to inform than to mislead. And especially on a day when many are remembering Kristallnacht, it is particularly klutzy to feature a leader of a Jewish community calling for the appeasement of those who seek to destroy it.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at November 14, 2003 04:12 PM