04.09.2002

Ghostly voices of Auschwitz

First the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, then the president of Israel. In the space of just a few days, both these prominent jews, for their different reasons, found it necessary to raise questions about the killings carried out recently by units of the Israel Defence Force in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. In the month of August 49 Palestinians were killed by the army - the majority of them, as the Hebrew daily newspaper Haaretz concedes, innocent civilians, including women and children, who lost their lives in a series of apparently random attacks. The suspicion is that this onslaught has been authorised by the army's new chief of staff, lieutenant-general Moshe Yaalon, and has the covert support of the Sharon government. That would hardly be surprising. Given the absence of suicide bomb attacks against Israeli targets in the same period and the prospect of an important round of negotiations with the Palestinian authority about beginning the implementation of phased withdrawal, Sharon must have known that murderous provocations of this kind would lead to the suspension of talks. That has duly happened. Although defence minister Benjamin Ben-Elizier has been compelled by events to issue hypocritical statements of regret about the recent slaughter and to sanction an official inquiry, it is simply inconceivable that those responsible will be brought to book. The reaction of Moshe Katsav, who occupies the essentially ceremonial post of president, was hardly reassuring: "The claim as to whether the army was trigger-happy must be examined. If the army reaches the conclusion that this was the case, it will decide what to do but it would be hasty to draw conclusions now." Quite so. The last thing we want is to be hasty. Let the army be judge and jury in its own case, give it time to sort things out, and if that process takes long enough, then these deaths (after all, just a few among so many) will quietly be forgotten. If Katsav's unwilling response was dictated by plain political expediency in the face of mounting unease among Israel's international friends, that of our own chief rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, although delivered in the somewhat coded language of reflections on moral theology, was implicitly (but unmistakably) critical of the Israeli army and the Sharon government. For this service to the cause of humanity he was portrayed on the Israeli airwaves as little short of a renegade and a traitor to judaism. (How long, one wonders, before some outraged comrade from the Alliance for Workers' Liberty denounces Sacks in the pages of Solidarity as an 'anti-semite'? Maybe he is suffering from an acute attack of Jüdische Selbsthaß - just like poor old Karl Marx himself was prone to in his younger days?) Sacks's calculated intervention last week was interesting and significant precisely because he has hitherto been an unquestioning supporter of Israel's military suppression of the Palestinians' right to nationhood and self-determination. Back in April, when Gerald Kaufman MP outraged his co-religionists by (correctly and somewhat courageously) describing Ariel Sharon as a "blustering bully" and a "war criminal" presiding over "barbarism", it was Sacks who immediately came to the Israeli prime minister's defence, using biblical analogies as well as political arguments to justify armed incursions by the Israeli Defence Force: "What is happening now is the direct equivalent of what America is doing in Afghanistan ... They're the same policy" (The Guardian April 18). Killing Palestinians was part of a just 'war on terror'. A month later, he was happy enough to share a platform at a rally with hard-line Zionist Benjamin Netanyahu, who likens Yasser Arafat to Adolf Hitler - a pretty rich comparison in the circumstances. Hardly the actions of a critic of Israel, let alone a closet peacenik. In contrast to his contradictory predecessor, Immanuel Jakobovits, whom Margaret Thatcher admired and ennobled - he was ultra-conservative on matters such as sexual morality, but an outspoken advocate of territorial 'concessions' to the Palestinians and an equally vociferous opponent of jewish settlements in the occupied territories - Sacks has never shown any shadow of doubt "¦ until now. What has changed? To find that out you would need to get beyond his gnomic utterances by talking to the man himself, but his interview with Jonathan Freedland gives us some clues. "I regard the present situation as nothing less than tragic. It is forcing Israel into postures that are incompatible in the long run with our deepest ideals ... There are things that happen on a daily basis which make me feel very uncomfortable as a jew ... There is no question that this kind of prolonged conflict, together with the absence of hope, generates hatreds and insensitivities that in the long run are corrupting to a culture" (The Guardian August 27). Again, hardly a condemnation, but it was enough to make him an object of angry vilification in Israel, whereas the deeply divided community of 280,000 British jews, including the orthodox component over which he presides, was not inclined to make much public comment. From Neville Nagler, chief executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, we got the following measured disclaimer: "The views expressed by the chief rabbi do not necessarily reflect the opinions held by every section of this community." Privately, liberal and progressive jewish elements in the UK were more supportive and complimented Sacks on his stand. Exactly what is it that is "happening on a daily basis" that makes our chief rabbi "feel very uncomfortable as a jew"? Just one example. Two days after his interview was published, four members of a Palestinian family were killed as they slept outdoors in an orchard near the Israeli settlement of Netzarim. For two months, since the start of the fruit season, they had been picking figs in full view of the soldiers who comprise the vast bulk of the so-called 'settlers' of Netzarim. The little encampment which the Hajeen family had cobbled together was well known and presented no threat. But that did not stop an Israeli tank crew from firing an air-burst shell containing 3,000 deadly, razor-sharp darts called 'flechettes' that tore them apart. This munition (it would be interesting to find out which Israeli 'ally' supplied them) is not actually banned, but even Nato deems it unsuitable for its own use. Israeli Defence Force spokespeople have defended the deployment of flechettes in the past by saying that they are only ever used against armed troops. Clearly just another routine lie. Why did the Hajeens die in such a horrible and meaningless way? The resulting enquiry is unlikely to provide an answer. The context of the chief rabbi's remarks was the forthcoming publication of his latest book The dignity of difference: how to avoid the clash of civilisations. Going back to the Torah, Sacks cites the command repeated no less than 36 times that jews must not ill-treat "the stranger" (ie, the non-Israelite) or oppress him, "for you were strangers in the land of Egypt". As he puts it, "'You were exiled in order to know what it feels like to be an exile.' I regard that as one of the core projects of a state that is true to the judaic principle." Behind the biblical references, Sacks's meaning is surely clear. That the "ill-treatment" and "oppression" of Palestinians by the Israeli state runs counter to the commands of god himself, that it is, therefore, morally unacceptable and unjustifiable. Quite how this sin is to be absolved in terms of a "core project" that is "true to the judaic principle" is left unsaid, but it must surely encompass the vision of a peaceful and just settlement in which the Palestinian people are given the right to live as a nation in their own state. The logic seems pretty inescapable, but we can understand why the rabbi did not spell it out. The reaction to Sacks's utterance, even more than his words themselves, tells us much. In a bitter leading article, The Daily Telegraph proclaims: "A nation engaged in a struggle for survival is likely to do many things that make outsiders uncomfortable; that does not make them wrong" (August 28). Hinting, disreputably, that the chief rabbi's remarks were intended to give his book some free publicity, it goes on to say that, "Jews and gentiles alike may reasonably debate whether Dr Sacks meant to give comfort to Israel's enemies ... When Israel has never been more embattled, when anti-semitism is again ubiquitous, and when British jews have never felt less secure, however, his own community might have expected a more robust stance" (my emphasis). Evidently it is inappropriate for "outsiders" like us to criticise the deeds of the Israeli army, however vile those deeds may be. By doing so, we implicitly "give comfort" not only to "Israel's enemies", but again, implicitly, foster an anti-semitism that is supposedly "ubiquitous". Even if anti-semitism really were "ubiquitous", which it patently is not, that old alibi simply will not wash. I would take issue with the AWL's Cathy Nugent, who at Communist University 2002 maintained that the holocaust was a unique event in human history. Her approach shows a sad ignorance of history. Of course, the holocaust was in some sense "unique": in the obscene banality of its bureaucratic/technocratic destruction of millions of human beings, in producing photographic and film images of unspeakable horror, in being so well documented. But "unique" in a serious historical sense? If the ghostly voices of Auschwitz and Treblinka could speak to us now, would they not tell us that the sufferings of those who died in Sabra and Shatila - and, on a smaller scale, Netzarim - were their sufferings too? However guarded and tentative his statement may be, Dr Sacks (perhaps almost despite himself) is speaking with the heart and mind of a prophet, whose first and foremost task is to warn. If his words give courage to the many other jews across the world who want a just settlement, then that can only be a good thing. Without justice, there can be no peace. And justice demands that the Palestinians should have the nationhood and the state that is rightly theirs. Maurice Bernal