The original Hebrew version of this book was published in 2007. Elhanan Yakira, a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has revised it for the English translation in order to make it more accessible to the non-Israeli reader. His aim is to provide “a representative, if only partial, picture of the broad phenomenon of Western intellectual anti-Zionism.” (p. viii) Although he points out that “this is not an essay in moral theory” (p. 137), it contains, nevertheless, a moral critique of a number of writers who either deny the Holocaust (first essay), or, who, while not denying it, are Israeli intellectuals whose use of the Holocaust tends to delegitimize Israel (second essay), or who make use of the writings of Hannah Arendt, especially on the Eichmann trial, to foster an anti-Zionist point of view. The English language edition ends with a postscript that succeeds in providing a relatively brief summary of the book as a whole. I suggest that the reader start with the postscript, then read the third essay on Arendt, and only then concentrate on those portions of the remainder that strike his interest. Yakira admits that the book is “somewhat repetitive.” Although he hopes that this does not spoil the reader’s enjoyment, he admits that the book “is not likely to make for enjoyable reading in any case.” (p. xi) I found the book quite informative and interesting, but the method he employs of offering detailed accounts of the views of a large number of writers and texts one after the other accompanied by moral commentary makes it difficult to hold the reader’s undivided attention. It would have been better to organize the material around specific themes and use footnotes to refer to particular writers and texts that illustrate these themes.
Yakira tells us that he thinks of himself as belonging to the Zionist left. This means primarily that he favors evacuating most of the settlements now beyond the pre-1967 borders, and creating an Arab-Palestinian state. He points out that this is by now probably the majority sentiment among the Israeli population and is no longer confined to those whose identify with the left in Israeli politics. However, by and large, his discussions do not center about the details of current Israeli politics but are focused upon lending moral support to the reality of the state of Israel and its democratic nature and to defend it against those who would use the Holocaust to undermine it.
How does it come about that the Holocaust has any bearing at all on the legitimacy of Israel? “The Holocaust has come to be perceived – and this is how anti-Zionism makes use of it – as the main, if not the sole, justification and explanation for the existence of Israel.” The thesis underlying this perception Yakira calls the “master postulate” used to deny the state’s legitimacy. (p. vii) Those who accept one form or another of the master postulate he calls the “community of opprobrium” (p.220), “an international ideology of opprobrium,” (p.221), “the resentiment crowd” (p. 200) which contains the “Israeli opprobrium community” (p. 310) as a part, all of whom share “a recourse to all of the myths, clichés, half truths, and outright lies characteristic of anti-Israel opprobrium.” (p. 222)
For those on the political left who deny the reality of the Holocaust (the subjects of the first essay), belief in the reality of the Holocaust is belief in a fiction intended to justify the existence of the state of Israel. When the author asked Pierre Guillaume, one of the deniers who is also on the anti-capitalist left, why this fiction was invented, he answers that “the lie was invented by the Zionists in order to justify the establishment of the State of Israel and Zionism’s other crimes against the Palestinians.” (27) Although Noam Chomsky is not among the deniers, his defense of the freedom of speech of Robert Faurisson who is one, has aroused great controversy. Yakira quotes Chomsky in his own defense as saying “I am concerned here solely with a narrow and specific topic, namely, the right of free expression of ideas, conclusions and beliefs. I have nothing to say here about the work of Robert Faurisson or his critics, of which I know very little, or about the topics they address, concerning which I have no special knowledge.” In response to which, Yakira rhetorically asks: “Chomsky, the most knowledgeable person on all matters of politics and modern political history, knows ‘very little’ about the matter of the gas chambers?” (p. 43) Yakira makes an interesting and important point about Jewish insistence on speaking about the Holocaust and creating institutions and memorials to remind Jews and non-Jews alike of Auschwitz. The Nazis made an effort from the very beginning of the murder of the European Jews to conceal their crimes. Thus the Jewish people have every reason to remind the whole world of the Holocaust “in order to counter denial and the various attempts to conceal or obliterate from memory the act of extermination.” (p. 24n)
In the second essay, Yakira turns to “the local community of grumblers.” (p. 66) These are the Israeli intellectuals who, although they do not deny the Holocaust, claim that preserving the memory of the Holocaust and in ascribing religious meaning to it allows Israel to ignore the suffering of Palestinians under the occupation. It also allows them to question the need for and/or justification of the state of Israel. In rebuttal, Yakira cites the writings of several Jewish theologians who have refused to ascribe religious meaning to the Holocaust. For example, Emile Fackenheim refuses to provide a theodicy and instead claims that the Holocaust justifies the 614th commandment, namely “it is forbidden to let Hitler win. The historic decision of the Jews, a nontheological, even antitheological decision, to go on living as Jews, is the fulfillment of this commandment.” This decision is “the active determination, even after Hitler’s demise, to safeguard the physical and spiritual existence of the Jewish people. Despite Auschwitz, not because of it.” (p. 72) In any case, the persistence of the sufferings of the Palestinians under the occupation is largely the responsibility of their own leadership. After all, it was Arafat who refused the far-reaching compromise offered by Barak at Camp David. (p. 304n) Yakira admits that it is legitimate to criticize Israel and Zionism. “But one must distinguish between criticism of Israeli policies or various aspects of Zionist ideology, on the one hand, and criticism of Israel and Zionism as such, on the other – that is, questioning the Jewish state’s right to exist and the legitimacy of Zionism as a program for the establishment of such a state in the Land of Israel.” (p. 82) The second essay is quite long, and Yakira discusses many topics of great interest in the course of taking on “the local community of grumblers,” among which are German attitudes and guilt after the war, the debate among the German historians, the question of how to remember and memorialize the Holocaust, questions about the efforts of Jewish leaders to save the Jews in Europe, the question of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, the question of the nature of evil, the question of Israel and nuclear power, Foucault’s view of the state, the campaign to rehabilitate Carl Schmitt, Goldhagen vs. Browning on ordinary people. Do not overlook what Yakira has to say on these topics, but don’t hesitate to use the index to find your way about.
The third essay concerns a particular non-Israeli grumbler, Hannah Arendt. She denies neither the reality of the Holocaust nor the legitimacy of the state of Israel. But she opposed partition in 1947 (p. 319) and at one time favored a binational state (p. 320); she grumbled about the trial of Eichmann. She denied the continuity between ancient and modern anti-Semitism. For such reasons, Yakira claims that “genuflection to Hannah Arendt is…an obligatory part of the anti-Zionist ritual.” (p. 313) Concerning her famous book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Yakira claims that “it is probably the worst thing she ever wrote. In fact, it is just a bad book. What is more, the book is morally scandalous.” (p. 230) He affirms, however, that she is a classical Zionist and quotes her sentence “Any real catastrophe in Israel would affect me more deeply than anything else.” But her book on Eichmann fails because she failed to understand “the irreducible value of the story of the extermination as it was told by the witnesses” (p. 258) and thus failed to recognize the legitimacy of the victims point of view (p. 291), because her thesis about the banality of evil diminishes in some way the significance of the wrong done to the Jews, because she mistakenly minimizes Eichmann’s role in the extermination process (p. 277), among other things. Although Deborah E. Lipstadt also offers severe criticisms of Arendt’s book in chapter six of her new book, The Eichmann Trial, on the whole it is better balanced than Yakira’s interpretation in presenting some of its good points along with the bad. For example, she finds value in the notion of the banality of evil. Arendt’s “contention that many of the perpetrators were not innately monsters or diabolical creatures but ‘ordinary’ people who did monstrous things not only seems accurate but is the accepted understanding among most scholars of the perpetrators.” [1] But Lipstadt parts company with Arendt on the application of banality to Eichmann himself. “However, in Eichmann’s case, her analysis seems strangely out of touch with the reality of his historical record. Though he may not have started out as a virulent anti-Semite, he absorbed this ideology early in his career and let it motivate him to such an extent that even well after the war he described for Sassen, the Dutch Nazi who interviewed him in Argentina, the joy he felt at moving the Hungarian Jews to their death at an unprecedented clip and his pleasure at having the death of millions of Jews on his record.” [2]
Finally, the postscript, contains among other things a discussion that may be of particular interest to the readers of this review of the late Tony Judt’s criticisms of Israel. In the first place, on Yakira’s reading, Judt claims that because “the world has entered a post-national, post-state era…Israel, with its outdated nationalistic ideology, is thus an anachronism.” (p, 321) Second, according to Judt, “a two-state solution has been rendered unworkable by the now-irreversible settlement of Jews in the territories Israel has occupied in 1967.” (p. 322) Thus, a binational state represents the only solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Yakira replies that the evacuation of the Gaza strip shows that evacuation of the settlements is possible although difficult. Moreover, a one-state solution would mean that Jewish existence in Israel would become physically precarious, a violation of their right to a homeland in which the Jews can be secure and defend themselves. (p. 307) “What is unacceptable is trying to force the dissolution of an existing political framework, be it Jewish or Arab, against the wishes of its citizens.” (p. 324)
I hope that this review has persuaded you to read this book in order to discover for yourself the cogency and moral depth of Yakira’s detailed critique of recent anti-Zionism.
Charles Landesman
Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
Hunter College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York
clandesm@aol.com
[1] Deborah E. Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, Schocken, New York, 2011, p. 169.
[2] Ibid., pp. 169-170.
