From grief to jubilation

Editorial

Earlier this week, we marked Yom Hashoah, the Holocaust remembrance and memorial day. In the coming days, on Yom Hazikaron, we will solemnly remember the far-too-many Israelis who died creating and defending the state. Then, we will transition from grief to jubilation, as we celebrate the triumph of redemption on Yom Ha’atzmaut, the 65th anniversary of the creation of the state of Israel.

For Jewish people, there is no conflict or confusion in the succession of commemorations and celebrations; these dates that reflect seismic events in 20th-century history are reflections of the older Jewish calendar, in which events both catastrophic and redemptive are marked and commemorated annually, in a cycle of anguish and elation. Yet it is one of the schisms in the larger discussion of contemporary Jewish history that what is entirely consistent in the eyes of most Jews is contentious in the public discussion of current Middle East affairs.

Critics of Israel routinely contest and obscure the relationship between the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel. At their most insensitive, critics have called Israel a “reparations payment” for the Holocaust. Others view Israel’s creation as Arabs paying the price for European sins against the Jewish people. Dragging this history into current events, it is very common to hear Israel accused of using the memory of the Holocaust to justify or deflect from Israel’s actions toward Palestinians.

There is so much in these interpretations that derails rational discussion around these issues between Jewish and many non-Jewish people. The proximity of the end of the Shoah in 1945 and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 suggests cause and effect. To some extent this is undeniable. Zionism had been a growing movement, but the Holocaust largely unified Jews behind the idea, while convincing more non-Jews that the Jewish people needed a homeland. Beyond this, the narrative is deeply flawed. Zionism, as a European political movement, imagined a haven for the Jews of Europe. By 1945, two out of three of those Jews were dead. Israel, it turns out, was the refuge for Jews from across the Muslim world in the second half of the 20th century that it could have been for the Jews of Europe in the first half.

Those European Jews who remained after the Shoah were no more welcome in Western societies after the war than they and their fated family members were before the war. If anything, support for a Jewish state was motivated in part by the self-interest of states who did not want to take responsibility for Jewish survivors, so the suggestion that Europe or the world “gave” Israel to the Jews is an obscenely generous assessment. All the world gave Zionism was a vote at the new United Nations. From that moment, the Jewish people were on our own, ragged militias left to fight the combined military forces of all the new state’s neighbors.

After the War of Independence, world Jewry united, as perhaps never before or since, to undertake what has become a nearly miraculous achievement in nation-building. From the valley of dry bones that was Europe in 1945, the Jewish people redeemed ourselves in our ancient homeland, pouring the energies of every Jewish community worldwide into the project. At a time when our people might have been expected to collapse into a collective period of inconsolable grief and devastation, we instead threw ourselves into the most hopeful and optimistic project imaginable. Those critics who condemn Israel while contending that they have no animus toward Jews fail to appreciate the emotion, soul, redirected grief, sweat and Jewish blood that built the nation. To condemn and attack Zionism – as the cyberhackers of Anonymous attempted to do on Yom Hashaoh – is to dismiss and deny the spiritual and worldly connection generations of Jews have built with Israel. Anyone is free to criticize or condemn Israel, but it is ignorance and/or arrogance to pretend that individual Jews should not feel defensive or hurt when the collective embodiment of the Jewish people – Israel – is attacked.

The relationship between the history of the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel is contentious because Israel’s critics have made it so. Jewish people tend to understand innately the distinct historical meanings of these events. Israel was not created as atonement for the Holocaust, but the existence of a Jewish state could have prevented the enormity of the Shoah’s catastrophe and it empowers the Jewish people’s self-defence in the present and future.

In much of the world, International Holocaust Remembrance Day takes place in January, on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In Israel, and in Diaspora Jewish communities, Yom Hashoah marks the Hebrew calendar anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The difference in dates is notable. International Holocaust Remembrance Day marks the end of a terrible epoch. Yom Hashoah, while undeniably marking the same event, kindles the flame not only of remembrance, but of redemption.

On Monday, during Israel’s commemoration of Yom Hashoah, President Shimon Peres cited the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as a pivotal moment when contemporary Jewish history turned from one of passivity and victimhood to self-determination and courageous action.

“A clear line exists between the resistance in the ghettos, in the camps and in the forests and the rebirth and bravery of the state of Israel,” said Peres. “It is a line of dignity, of renewed independence, of mutual responsibility, of exalting God’s name ... as a ray of hope which was not extinguished even during terrible anguish. The ghetto fighters sought life even when circumstance screamed despair.”

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