How Does the Memory of Jewish Suffering Affect Israel's Chance to Make Peace?

Past and future have mingled most dangerously in the Middle East, a region dominated for the larger part of the 20th and into the 21st century by the entrenched Arab-Jewish conflict resulting in the rapid growth of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. In the hindsight perspective of many decades, it seems that the future of this region has always been nothing but its future past: a repetition of the past, the past continuing into the future unchanging, therefore repressive and explosive. In this perspective, the 1993 Oslo agreement of mutual recognition after almost half a century of bitter Arab-Jewish hostilities appears both amazing and doomed. Incongruously, the leaders on both sides, old men who had fought many bloody battles, seemed to be invoking hope for a better future. But only for a short while; they were warned not to refer to each other's pasts during the negotiations for fear that Jewish history, shaped by implacable, inconsolable remembrance of fated suffering, would create difficulties.

Dispossessed, in the eyes of the West too disadvantaged and disoriented to even have a history, Palestinians would also be troubled by the absolutist security needs of Jewish remembrance. The handshake confirming that utopian moment on the lawn of the White House was not spontaneous but pushed on Israel's leaders by their old enemy Arafat for the world to see--as was the beaming president's embrace (was not the Nobel Peace Prize beckoning?). Coming after almost half a century of failed attempts to resolve the ever-growing problems in the Middle East, the agreement had never meant much more than Bill Clinton's most memorable photo-opportunity. After twelve more years of provocative and oppressive strategies for the sake of Israel's security that have arguably bred the terrible logic of suicide bombings and Israel's terrible retributions, the weight of the past has increased rather than diminished. And the political consequences of making the past so powerfully present have become ever more dangerous, now for the whole world.

Analyses of the "war" in the Middle East have shown little interest in this presence of the past, even though fundamentalist Islam shares the Jewish preoccupation with religio-cultural memory and the resulting political difficulties. They were predicted more than half a century ago by Hannah Arendt, whose political philosophy would focus on the importance of new political beginnings after the catastrophe of W.W.II, and Judah L. Magnes, whose 1925 inaugural lecture as first Chancellor of Hebrew University had called for Arab-Jewish reconciliation. Both were deeply apprehensive about the future of a Jewish state in Palestine built on the certainty that the people without land had a divine right to the land without people. They also feared the Holocaust as “foundation myth” of the new state. The absolute moral authority of Jewish suffering might preclude Israel’s willingness to share with other nations an open-ended, unpredictable future shaped by accidents and contingencies, by concessions, compromises, and responsibilities. The two pillars of "lest we forget" and "never again" would ensure that this new political entity would remain "forever" the exclusively Jewish State of 1948 (as such, not unlike Pakistan as the “land of the pure”) in a place and time of rapid social and political changes, and the threats and promises associated with them.

In the spring of 2002, an Israeli soldier would write on the wall of a house in Jenin, "I don't have another land," justifying his hated and feared presence in the home of a Palestinian family. Given the reality of Israel's military and political power backed by the US, this statement is irrational; given Israel's past-induced, overriding desire to be safe now and forever, it is logical. What Arendt and Magnes had feared would happen, did happen: Israel's political-moral identity would be shaped for generations by the state religion of the memory of extreme persecution. It would be supported by the unquestioning loyalty of the US fighting the holy war against Nazi fascism then and Islamic terrorism now: the dangerous paradox of Israel defending "our values" in the Middle East, if needs be with nuclear weapons, despite rapidly changing populations and their cultural politics in the US.

From 1945 to 1948, Arendt and Magnes argued in articles and speeches against an exclusively Jewish state and for a binational state in Palestine based on the proposal made by BritShalom in 1925 advocating equal rights for Jews and Arabs. The proposal was promptly discarded by Zionists in Palestine and in the US as lacking in national feeling, but Magnes's Ihud (unity) Party founded in 1942 would resuscitate it. The 1946 "Testimony before the Anglo-American Inquiry Commission for the lhud Association" clarified its political goals and influenced Arendt's critique of important aspects of political Zionism, notably its apolitical and ahistorical emphasis on Jewish uniqueness. Magnes's arguments in his slim volume, Like All the Nations? (1930), had emphasized the importance of Jewish-Arab involvement in shared political activities. "Jewish conscience,” he wrote, must realize "that the inhabitants of this country, both Arabs and Jews, have not only the right but the duty to participate, in equitable and practical ways, in the government of their common Homeland." Finding the focus for the solution of (almost) unsolvable problems in the political sphere, he also predicted that “the life of this unhappy country will be much saner and much less hysterical the sooner its population can exercise its political energies."

Like Arendt, Magnes did not believe in Jewish uniqueness. There were historical reasons for the separateness of the Jewish people that made it imperative to now learn how to live in the comity of other peoples. Magnes's utopian impulses, like Arendt's, were not fueled by a radical suspension of the reality of human limitations, as has been the case with so much twentieth-century intellectual utopianism. Both were fully aware of the need to negotiate a compromise between unlimited fears and desires and limited resources and reassurances. Both understood that this process needed to be supported by the coming together of adult people as political agents who, as they came together in the political sphere, were seen and saw each other as equals. Magnes’s answer to the question, "Like all the nations?" was an emphatic, "yes." Unfortunately, it is not heard, much less heeded, today. Like all the nations? has been out of print for over half a century and Magnes is largely unknown today, perhaps because his writings are so timely, so sensible and so uncomfortably different from Israel’s status quo politics in the Middle East and America’s inability to control their client state.

Six decades ago, Arendt and Magnes saw the conflicted, problematic future—now our present—of a Jewish state in Palestine more clearly than we seem to be able to do after more than half a century of wars and violence in the Middle East. Their main concerns then were certain important pre-modern dimensions of political Zionism: its tendencies toward unquestioned group solidarity and separatism; its prescriptive theocratic, utopianist aspects (especially in combination with technocratic aspirations and skills); its denial of historicity in embracing an a priori significant, complete memory story (myth) of Jewish suffering at the center of an enduringly distinct, unique Jewish identity; its denial of temporality in embracing the past as shaping the present and the future; its preference of religious certainty over political negotiations; its unquestioned belief in the redemptive power of cultural memory. Arendt's early critique of the strategies of Zionist identity politics in Palestine was particularly provocative because it made transparent political strategies that invoked a general and absolute authority of past suffering where they really meant specific contemporary conflicts of interest. She understood perfectly well the literal vitality of these interests in the immediate postwar years, the issue of Jewish survival; but she still thought it accessible to rational analysis and discussion.

In political and cultural modernity, other groups, other nations, regardless of their painful past experiences, have had to be content with the muddled stories of temporal, historical processes that were changing them. They have had to deal, that is, with the incomplete, often contradictory and obscure memory stories of the mingling and mixing of peoples, their often difficult interdependencies as they were asked to allow themselves to be transformed in time. Arendt saw these transformations as central to the political modernity of the U.S., in her view a great achievement. In America, she said repeatedly, one can be a Jew and an American, by which she meant that as an American one will be able to change. Not for her the currently chic hyphenated identities that often cover reflexive loyalties such as the reluctance of many American Jews to criticize the political and military conduct of Israel.

Both Magnes and Arendt were deeply concerned about the ways in which these pre-modern tendencies would play out in the new Jewish State built on the Holocaust as a powerful redemptive memory discourse claiming absolute cultural and political authority. Magnes set against this authority his goal of political interaction and negotiation, of a Jewish nation that would conduct itself like all the other nations. Arendt emphasized the imperative of openness to the future, of taking seriously the limitations but also the potential of human temporality. But they both knew that the divine promise of the "land without people" to the "people without land" meant Jewish reclaiming the undiminished whole of Palestine as the permanent property of the "chosen people," regardless of the Arabs' historical presence in Palestine. They also both foresaw that Israel, “creating realities on the ground,” could and would simply claim the Palestinians’ permanent absence. Affirming the uniqueness and absolute authority of Jewish suffering, God and Auschwitz would make it de facto impossible that the Jewish state see itself as one nation among others.