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NEWS & LETTERS, February - March 2009
Revolution needed in Israel
"Everybody is somebody's Jew. And today Palestinians are the Jews of Israelis." These are the words of the renowned Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi when he broke with Zionism after Begin-Sharon's complicity in the massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila in 1982. It was also Levi who wrote in his masterpiece If This is a Man that, "In Auschwitz it was not just Man but the Idea of Man that died."
Levi's account of the death of humanity as an absolute found philosophic expression in Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialectics where he poses a "New Categorical Imperative: 'Never Again.'" With him the Absolute comes crashing down as it is deemed to be but the equivalent of burning human flesh in the crematoria! How could that burning Hell ever disclose a positive in the movement of the dialectics?
Thus, what's drawn from resistance within the Death Camps as well as the Ghetto uprisings is made to comply with an "Ought." Everyone, including Emil Fackenheim, the author of The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought, was convinced that "the Absolute is incomprehensible." The "Kingdom of the Auschwitz," he wrote "is not of this world." What’s left to do, then, is to perpetually resist the "Absolute." The Holocaust, he argued, emerged from a concept of totality. But when people in Bosnia march in the streets with the yellow arm bands, it should serve as a stark reminder that "Never Again" has been but a hollow call to a halfway house.
The tragedy of Israel may be summed up in the self-relinquishment of its history as a struggle for freedom. What's intellectually conserved, and continually recollected, and what permeates its organizational life is the long night of captivity and the experience of a "meaning-less death." No one should ever underestimate the lasting presence of the Holocaust on the mind of a people on the verge of total annihilation. And yet one is not thereby to forget its very opposite, the birth of a whole new consciousness of freedom that arose from within the death camps.
It is this idea that is in need of Recollection. Otherwise, each new generation is condemned to begin all over again as if all that has preceded is completely lost. For Israel to "resurrect" the idea of freedom, all the formative experiences of its struggle for self-determination, it must come to recognize that it has been transformed into opposite--the oppressed has become the oppressor. To save Israel from itself, and to usher in a new era in its relationship with Palestinians and their aspirations for self-determination, Israel must experience a new, a social revolution.
--Raha
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