Tomorrow is Holocaust Memorial Day. What is, and what should be, the legacy of that unique crime, asks Pól Ó Dochartaigh.
The Holocaust is everywhere. Children learn about it in school, sometimes in places where there are neither Holocaust survivors nor even Jews. Museums have been built so that we may remember, in Jerusalem, Washington, Berlin and elsewhere. And it is right that it is so, for the memory of the Holocaust carries a simple message for all of mankind: "Never again". Yet the message is not always that simple, and this is nowhere more evident than in the changing German-Israeli relationship, especially in the last 20 years, as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict becomes ever more problematic.
When the new Jewish state of Israel, formed in 1948, issued its first passports, they bore the legend "Valid for all countries except Germany". Most Jews could not see how any Jew would wish any longer to set foot on "the blood-soaked soil" of Germany.
In 1952 West Germany and Israel signed a reparations agreement, which met with opposition from both chancellor Konrad Adenauer's own Christian Democrats in parliament (it was passed only with the help of the opposition Social Democrats) and from many Israeli MPs, despite premier Ben Gurion's support. In 1965, despite Arab opposition, West Germany and Israel established diplomatic relations.
In contrast to the GDR, which supported the various Arab and Palestinian causes right up to the demise of communist rule in early 1990, West Germany became and has remained a strong supporter of Israel. Today thousands of Israelis travel to Berlin, and Germany is Israel's strongest supporter in Europe. The transformation has been remarkable, even as the Holocaust continues to cast its long shadow. That shadow, and the way it is used, is not without its problems.
One issue is this: given that support for Israel is a prerequisite for membership of the German political establishment, how sure can we be that the support expressed is genuine? Politicians such as Martin Hohmann and Jürgen Möllemann, who made anti-Semitic remarks in recent years, were excluded from mainstream politics. Others, one suspects, are more clever, and keep their true feelings to themselves. Even Adenauer was ambiguous in his motivations: he knew that German reparations were expected by the world at large, but he also reminded the party faithful that the "economic power of the Jews" was strong, thereby employing a standard anti-Semitic stereotype.
When many on the German right supported Israel in the Six Day War in 1967, they even described Israel's stunning military successes as "Israel's blitzkrieg", a term last used for Hitler's successes in France in 1940. Today, with the rise of Islamophobia in the West, some support Israel purely because it is perceived to be "fighting Muslims".
Wolfgang Benz, one of Germany's leading researchers on anti-Semitism, says German hands are tied: "German foreign policy has no room to manoeuvre. It cannot suddenly decide to be for the Arabs and against Israel." Nor, he says, is there any indication that it would wish to be. On one level that is an entirely understandable response to German history. It is, however, an inadequate response to the contemporary conflict in the Middle East, when, for example, Israeli military actions since 2000, according to the Israeli civil rights group B'Tselem, have killed four times as many civilians and eight times as many children as the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian violence.
One consequence of this Holocaust legacy is that young Germans, who learn more about the Holocaust than schoolchildren anywhere else in the world bar Israel, are in effect asked to stifle their own opinions on the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Again, this is in some ways understandable, but a problem arises in the shape of what Israeli-German historian Dan Diner calls "transgenerational guilt". When young Germans engage in self-censorship because of what their grandparents did more than 60 years ago, it can turn a wish to offer simple criticism into resentment and hostility towards Israel, the precise opposite of what the German establishment wishes to cultivate in its own citizens.
If the Holocaust assumes a central role in German political discourse on Israel, it is also true that its role and function in Israeli society has changed. It was not until the mid-1950s that Israel created an annual "Holocaust Day", partly because the state was busy trying to survive and partly because of feelings of shame that provoked silence. Ben Gurion University psychologist Dan Bar-On considers that this annual event nowadays competes with Independence Day, which falls a week later, as the defining unifier in the collective Israeli consciousness, even for Sephardic Jews, whose ancestors largely did not fall victim to the Holocaust. .
Remembering the dead is central to a national institution such as Yad Vashem in Jerusalem (the name means literally "memory and name"). What is increasingly the subject of discussion is the precise nature of the lessons that are to be learned. Parties on the right of Israeli politics have used group trips to Auschwitz to impart the lesson to young people that "this is what happens when Jews are not strong", thereby justifying a harsh, repressive attitude to the Palestinians.
Tel Aviv professor Yehuda Elkana asked what children are to make of such memories and warned that they can foster blind hatred. Politicians such as Menachem Begin regarded the Palestinians as latter-day Nazis (and for his part Arafat, under siege in Beirut in 1982, implied that the Israelis were Nazis). Elkana saw two distinct groups in Israeli society: those for whom the lesson is "never again" and those for whom it is "never again to us".
Non-Jewish critics of the latter attitude, or of Israeli repression of the Palestinians, are branded anti-Semites, Jewish critics are called "self-hating Jews". The memory of the Holocaust is used to deflect criticism as if, as Chicago historian Peter Novick wrote in The Holocaust in American Life, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict "was endowed with all the black-and-white moral simplicity of the Holocaust".
Dan Bar-On carried out a study that illustrated perfectly the tangled emotions evoked by the legacy of the Holocaust. A mixed group of Germans, Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis met to discuss their experiences of each other, and subsequently visited Auschwitz together. Afterwards, the Palestinians felt they had a better understanding of Israeli insecurities, but the Jewish Israelis still felt closer to the Germans than to the Arabs. Bar-On rationalises that it is human nature to feel more comfortable as a victim than as an oppressor. A recent survey showed that many Palestinians, unwilling or unable to conceive of Jews as victims, simply deny the Holocaust.
If it is to remain relevant to new generations the world over, then the Holocaust cannot be manipulated to narrow contemporary political agendas. Nor should Germany use its historical responsibility to stifle European debate about contemporary realities in Israel/Palestine. The scale and organisation of the murder of six million Jews remains unique in human history. The organisers were German, the collaborators came from virtually every nation in Europe. The lesson is that no nation or religious or ethnic group has more or less rights than any other, and that no one is entitled to value life more highly or cheaply on the basis of race, religion or any other set of criteria. The lesson is encapsulated in just two words: "Never Again!" To narrow that lesson is to abuse the memory and legacy of those terrible years.
Pól Ó Dochartaigh is professor of German and director of the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Ulster