Some years ago Commentary
magazine, the flagship publication for neo-conservative
Jews, published an article by Milton Himmelfarb that made
the simple assertion: “No Hitler, no Holocaust.” What Himmelfarb
meant was that if it hadn’t been for the driving force provided
by Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitism, neither the Germans nor
anyone else would have acted towards the Jewish people of
Europe with the frenzy of persecution and killing, commonly
known as the Holocaust, that resulted in the effacement
of most of the longstanding Jewish communities of Central
and Eastern Europe.
Many revisionists have long been skeptical of the “No Hitler,
no Holocaust” theory, not just because of the fact that
revisionists tend to question some, though not all, of the
details associated with the Jewish catastrophe. Rather,
revisionists tend to question the idea because it is simplistic,
and suggests that but for the accident of Hitler’s birth
all of Europe’s problems in the 20th Century would have
been solved by peaceful means.
We have been reminded of this slogan in recent weeks because
of the escalating violence in Israel’s occupied territories.
Over the past few weeks over 100 Palestinian Arabs have
been killed in clashes with the Israeli Defense Forces,
usually in scenarios that involve stone-throwing Arabs versus
machine gun toting Israelis. It is undeniable that the images
of the conflict have been very much to Israel’s detriment.
Most of the photographic and video images have shown Palestinian
teenagers and even children being shot and killed.
We would expect to hear condemnation of what obviously appears
to be an excessive and even irresponsible use of force,
not only from the media but especially from Israel’s friends.
After all, the practice of hunting polar bears from helicopters
has long been banned. Why should we accept the idea of helicopter
gun ships mowing down Palestinian kids? To be sure, the
polar bears do not throw rocks at the hunters, but still.
. . . !
Instead, the party line that has been emerging in the media
is that the violence is all the fault of Yassir Arafat,
that it was “plotted” after Arafat failed to accept Barak’s
proposals last spring, and that ever since the violence
erupted, it has been “carefully orchestrated” by Arafat.
In other words, the underlying idea is simply this: “No
Arafat, No Violence.”
But this explanation is just as deficient as the one involving
Hitler, and there are plenty of objective reasons to reject
it. For example, just last week the world was stunned to
see two acts carried out by Palestinian mobs in the West
Bank. One involved the gratuitous destruction of a Jewish
study center at the so-called “Site of Joseph’s Tomb” (actually,
the gravesite of an 18th Century caliph). The other involved
the incredibly brutal and inexcusable murder of two Jewish
soldiers who found themselves in the middle of an Arab town.
Clearly, these episodes do nothing to advance the Palestinian
cause, there is no reason and no evidence that Arafat did
or would ever “orchestrate” such counter-productive violence,
and furthermore such things only serve to weaken any residual
pressure on Israel to make concessions. In fact, what these
acts indicate is that Arafat has little if any control over
the actions of the Palestinians in the occupied territories,
who appear in some cases to turn into raging mobs.
So the real question that has to be asked is what is the
source of Palestinian rage? It cannot be attributed to just
one man. Rather, one has to look at what the average Palestinian
has had to live with during the decades long Israeli occupation.
For over 30 years, Palestinians in the occupied territories
have been subject to random searches, settler incursions,
houses bulldozed, property seizures, imprisonment, torture,
and Israeli refusals to allow them to develop their own
infrastructure while more and more settlers are brought
into their midst and are given all the benefits that Palestinians
are denied.
In making these common sense observations we don’t mean
to imply that the local Palestinian leadership has lived
up to its responsibilities. The responsibility for a descent
into mob action has many causes. But it would be hard not
to put the main brunt of the blame on the military occupation
by Israel: after all, they claim to be in control, they
are therefore ultimately responsible for everything that
happens in the areas they occupy.
Just as the simplistic mantra “No Hitler, no Holocaust”
leads the historian into looking at all kinds of irrelevant
details of Hitler’s private life, instead of looking at
the extremely serious social and economic problems evolving
in Eastern Europe at the time, so too the idea of “No Arafat,
no Violence” cuts short the absolutely necessary self-examination
of those Israeli policies that have at least aggravated
the tensions leading to the current explosion. Equally simplistic
explanations on the other side—if it wasn’t for Ariel Sharon,
etc.—are just as unacceptable.
In all of this we see a regretful and even vain refusal
to recognize that Jews, as a factor in any social equation,
have some responsibility when these situations spiral out
of control. To be sure, the idea of Jewish victimization
has a lot of support in terms of the Holocaust, where most
of the time the Jewish victims were not individually culpable
and were defenseless against the terror. But even in that
case the historian is obliged to truthfully record the record
of mounting resentments, just or unjust that underlay the
massacre.
On the other hand, the currently developing idea of a centralized
anti-Jewish conspiracy, led by Arafat, carries no weight
at all. There is simply no reality in the complaint that
Arafat, perhaps with a small clique of supporters, has somehow
engineered a political and cultural situation in which Israelis,
with no culpability of their own, are now being forced to
intentionally kill kids as a matter of State policy.
Political reality and historical honesty requires something
more than slogans. This applies both to Arafat and current
politics as it does to the Hitler of the 1930s and 40s.
The idea that Arafat’s “orchestration” underlies the current
wave of violence prevents Israel, the US Congress and other
friends of Israel from looking long and hard at the policies
they have promoted for the region, policies that more than
anything else have made the current violence possible and
even probable. As a result, it makes a solution of these
problems impossible. One thing however remains fairly certain:
there will be no peace in the Middle East as long as people
subscribe to the self-serving idea of the Arafat conspiracy.
Bradley R. Smith, Publisher 