Remembering: Yad Vashem and Ramallah
By James Gaffney, Prof. of Theology, Univ. of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN
My first visit to Jerusalem was just after the 1967 war and my most recent one shortly before the 40th anniversary of that event was celebrated and lamented by the city`s Jews and Arabs respectively. During the latter visit, local news focused briefly on a group of German Catholic bishops who paid an invited visit to Yad Vashem, Israel`s principal monument to the Shoah (Holocaust) which I happened to visit just after them.
Yad Vashem is an extraordinary place, which serves many functions related to remembering and understanding that historic atrocity. For the ordinary visitor, perhaps most moving is a remarkable exhibit that traces the history of anti-Semitism through the Common Era, the circumstances of Jews just before the rise of Nazism, the Holocaust itself as experienced in various parts of the world, and the subsequent hope represented by the State of Israel. The exhibit is eloquently housed in a kind of zigzag tunnel, whose tortuous shape evokes the recurring turbulence of Jewish history, before finally opening over green Judean hillsides onto Jerusalem visible in the distance.
The German Catholic bishops saw, presumably, what I saw at Yad Vashem. I assume they were similarly moved. I assume also that their German nationality gave added poignancy to their viewing countless scenes of genocidal horror located in their homeland and the lands it dominated and exploited.
But the German bishops did not end their tour at Yad Vashem. In the evening they were escorted through a check point into the Israel-occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank, specifically to the city of Ramallah, very close to Jerusalem and currently the seat of one of Palestine`s two rival governments. Residents of that city, like those of other Palestinian towns, have constantly experienced oppressive restraints, social and economic frustrations, and maddening humiliations, considered to be inflicted or occasioned by Israeli occupation, and exacerbated by the incompetence and corruption of their own divided political leadership.
On returning shortly thereafter to their South German dioceses, the bishops were interviewed by the press. The observations attributed to one of them proved highly volatile. Bishop Gregor Maria Franz Hanke, of Eichstaett, was quoted as saying they had seen "photos of the inhuman Warsaw Ghetto at Yad Vashem in the morning" but went on to add "in the evening we go to the Ghetto in Ramallah-that blows your lid off!" He is reported also to have remarked that some of the treatment of Palestinians, presumably at check-points, would be abusive by humane standards applied to animals.
These comments, in the Suddeutsche Zeitung, evoked an indignant response from the administration of Yad Vashem which appeared in the Jerusalem Post, stating that the bishop`s remarks "illustrate a woeful ignorance of history and a distorted sense of perspective." That was echoed in the German newspaper by Charlotte Knobloch, president of Germany`s Central Council of Jews, who accused the bishop of "political exploitation and demagoguery" (a phrase that made many subsequent appearances).
That the offence might have a broader context was brought out by M. Freund, in the Jerusalem paper, claiming that "we are witness to an increasing array of insults, invective, and verbal abuse hurled at the Jewish State by prominent Europeans. . . . Hanke had the gall to compare Israel to the Nazis, and likened Ramallah to the Warsaw Ghetto. This from a man whose nation systematically murdered millions of innocent Jews."
The director of Yad Vashem expressed his disapproval not only to the press, but to the leading German Catholic churchman, Karl Cardinal Lehmann. He does not seem to have communicated with Bishop Hanke himself. The portion of Cardinal Lehmann`s reply released by Yad Vashem stated that "the `oppressive situation` in the West Bank, `in the shadow of security forces and walls in Bethlehem` was reflected in some harsh statements of which some were certainly not appropriate." Yad Vashem`s accompanying observation appears accurate, that the Cardinal`s reply "fell far short of condemning the bishop`s comparison."
But what was the "bishop`s comparison?" In what has been quoted no explicit comparison is made. One is, however, rather clearly implied. Whether "appropriate" or not-that word which has become a cherished resource for avoiding both logical and ethical discourse-the bishop`s remarks express a sense of shock occasioned by what seemed to him an ironic contrast. What he had just seen at Yad Vashem was a memorial expressing a people`s profound moral indignation at massive, appalling cruelty and injustice. What he shortly afterwards saw at Ramallah was representatives of that same people seeming insensitive to moral indignities, admittedly on a much smaller scale, in which they were implicated. His unsubtle reaction-what "blows your lid off"-is not hard to understand. Neither is it very easy to discredit. He is certainly not saying, "You Jews are no better than the Nazis were." But he does seem to be saying, "How can you, of all people, after the horrors you have endured, appear so dismissive of this people`s misery and your role in prolonging it?" Jews in Israel have heard that question before. They have often answered it. But their answers are of many kinds, expressing deep differences.
The bishop`s implied comparison was certainly not quantitative. He may or may not have known or kept in mind that the Warsaw Ghetto became the "storage place" of half a million victims, where thousands starved each month, thousands more were destined for gas chambers, and resisters were massacred and driven to suicide. Quantitatively there is no comparison to Ramallah, whose numbers are so much smaller, whose people were merely deprived of freedom, hope, security, provisions, opportunities, and respect, and where tragic injury and violent death are much less frequent. No doubt the bishop should have remembered this. Probably he should have mentioned it. But his failure to do so does not invalidate his moral distress.
The experience of injustice commonly does, in conscientious persons, deepen sympathy with victims of injustice, and quicken efforts to assist them. Of this, it is hard to think of better examples than the many modern Jews of Europe and America whose efforts and achievements in pursuit of civil rights and human rights have been so conspicuously disproportionate to their numbers. Sometimes it is otherwise, as with many freed American slaves resettled by religious philanthropy in West Africa, who lost little time in becoming themselves slaveholders.
I find it curious that the moral indignation expressed over the bishop`s remarks contain no hint of serious moral argument. The critics were satisfied to express outrage that enormous wrongs suffered should be even associated with lesser wrongs done They dismissed the unwelcome comments with unsupported accusations of ulterior motives-"political exploitation and demagoguery". They imputed guilt by association on grounds of the bishops` common nationality with persecutors of a previous generation.
But if we set aside the defamatory rhetoric that accompanied it, the basic objection still deserves examination. Is it wrong to invoke the memory of great collective suffering, even of suffering that exhausts the superlatives of moral outrage, in support of moral dismay at tolerating the oppression of others on a much more modest scale? I cannot see why it is, and I would suggest one venerable Jewish precedent for doing so.
In at least seven separate passages of the Torah, God`s injunction to treat alien and disadvantaged persons with kindness and justice are immediately reinforced by the reminder that the whole people of Israel were once aliens and slaves in the land of Egypt. Although the point of this reminder may seem obvious, it is also made quite explicit. Thus in Exodus (23.9), "You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt." I know of no Jewish commentator who has anticipated outrage at comparing the historic ordeal of Egyptian enslavement, the biblical paradigm of oppression and point of departure for Israel`s whole conception of being saved and chosen, with local abuse or neglect of vulnerable strangers. Is there something about the magnitude of the Holocaust that trivializes this biblical comparison? Is there something about it that disallows that admonition, "for you know the feelings of the stranger"?
Do Israeli Jews "know the feelings of the stranger?" Many unquestionably do. But, in the opinion of one of them, an extraordinarily well qualified observer, most do not. "Most Israelis` analytical ability is impaired by their collective political consciousness and unwillingness to take the cumulative Palestinian pain from this Intifada, and the Oslo years that preceded it, into account. Israeli political consciousness has refused, and continues to refuse, to grasp the sum total of the details, characteristics, actions, and consequences of ongoing Israeli rule over another people. When one tries to talk of the "totality" known as the occupation, the media-our social barometer-respond with resentment. . . . Today, reports on "Palestinian suffering" are perceived as national treason. Israelis conclude that the suicide bombings are the result of a murderous tendency inherent to the Palestinians, their religion, and their mentality. In other words, people turn to bio-religious explanations, not socio-historical ones."
Amira Hass, the Haaretz reporter who wrote these words, has taken the surest and hardest way to "know the feelings of the stranger." Herself a descendant of Holocaust victims, she lives, immersed in those feelings, in Ramallah. She is the only Israeli reporter in Palestine who spends each day in the world she tries to make comprehensible to that incredibly different world just beyond the check-points.
The well-supported belief that the Shoah exceeds in maleficence all other recorded instances of mass atrocity conveys many lessons the world cannot afford to forget. But to exceed is not to transcend. Cruelty however extensive and cruelty however limited are not incommensurable. And to be reminded of one by the other is not dishonorable.
Those of us who resist the prohibition to compare, in due measure and with due respect, the victims of the Shoah with the victims of Israeli occupation, may perhaps be pardoned for pointing out one neglected contrast. The former are dead. The latter are alive. The former are an outrageous memory. The latter are a moral emergency. About the former something should have been done. About the latter something can be done. If it is done it will be by those who "know the feelings of the stranger." And in Israel brave voices of such people can still be heard, over the din.
