Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2000, pages 100-103

Book Reviews

The Holocaust in American Life

By Peter Novick. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999, 373 pp. List: $27; AET: $17.50.

Reviewed by Rachelle Marshall

The Holocaust is a familiar topic to almost all Americans, Holocaust studies are included in the curriculum of most high schools and colleges, the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC is visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists every year, and, like the recent film "Schindler's List," two comedies based on the Holocaust are currently drawing crowds at the box office. But these and similar developments began taking shape less than 30 years ago, long after the events they recall took place.

In his book The Holocaust in American Life, Peter Novick, a Pulitzer Prizewinning historian at the University of Chicago, writes that the attempt by the German Nazis and their European sympathizers to exterminate the Jews of Europe during World War II was originally seen as part of a larger catastrophe, a war that took some 30 million lives. Only much later did the murder of 6 million Jews become a separate event, unique in its horror. Today it is a symbol of Jewish persecution and a sacrosanct subject to all Jews and almost all Americans.

Novick traces in rich detail the remark able change that has taken place over the years in how we think about the Holocaust, and how this change was brought about. As a Jewish American and a liberal he asks why the Holocaust has come to play such a prominent role in our culture, even though it was once ignored, even by many Jews. He also asks if this change is desirable. Novick's answers to these questions are certain to provoke controversy, if not rage, among many readers.

In fact, a subtitle to his book might be "The uses and abuses of the Holocaust." Without ever minimizing the horror and extraordinary suffering inflicted on European Jews during the Nazi era, Novick argues that the Holocaust looms so large today in our collective consciousness because Jewish leaders have deliberately used the event to shape Americans' views about Israel and to forge a stronger sense of identity and group loyalty among Jews.

Until the 1960s neither the Holocaust nor Israel were prominent issues. During the 1950s Germany was a Cold War ally and no one wanted to be reminded of its past crimes. An Israel full of impoverished immigrants held little attraction for most American Jews except as an object of charity.

Even the Israelis' spectacular kidnapping in 1962 of Adolf Eichmann, a chief perpetrator of Hitler's "final solution," was widely criticized. William Buckley's National Review, today an ardent supporter of Israel, deplored Eichmann's capture as part of "an attempt to cast suspicion on Germany" and charged that his trial would promote "bitterness, mistrust, the advancement of communist aims." But it was Eichmann's trial, at which a succession of death camp survivors gave their heart-rending evidence, that highlighted for the world the attempted liquidation of the Jews as a separate and distinct crime, of a different order from other Nazi crimes. During Eichmann's trial the word Holocaust first began finding its way into general usage.

The second critical event of the 1960s took place in June 1967, when Israel wiped out the entire Egyptian air force in one surprise attack and in the next six days overran the West Bank, the Sinai, Gaza and the Golan Heights. Jews were no longer seen as passive victims but as brilliant strategists and able soldiers. At the same time, Israel's lightning victory convinced some members of the Lyndon Johnson administration that its public support for Israel could diminish some of the growing American media criticism of the U.S. war effort in Vietnam.

The new image of Israel as a strong and vibrant nation made it possible for Jewish leaders to restore the Holocaust to general consciousness and use it to strengthen Jewish identity and engender support for Israel. With the sharp decline of prejudice against Jews in America and a falling away of young Jews from the synagogue, the Holocaust today serves as a common denominator for all Jews, religious and otherwise, and the single justification for the slogan "We are one." It fills the need to preserve Jewish continuity in the face of increasing intermarriage (which the president of Yeshiva University in New York has likened to "another Holocaust").

During the 1970s and 1980s Jewish leaders used reminders of the Holocaust to counter growing criticism in America of Israel's refusal to return captured Arab territory, its repeated invasions of Lebanon, and its attack on a Libyan airliner that killed over a hundred civilian passengers. The zealously pro-Israel editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, even accused Jews who criticized Israel's 1992 invasion of Lebanon of granting Hitler a "posthumous victory."

Recalling the Holocaust served notice on the world that the wrong done to Jews was so great as to put Israel beyond criticism and justify any action it might take against those it perceives as enemies. As Israeli scholar Avishai Margalit wrote in a 1988 article for the New York Review, "Against the weapon of the Holocaust, the Palestinians are amateurs." (In 1978 the American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC], Israel's principal lobby in Washington, DC even lobbied against the sale of AWAC planes to Saudi Arabia by giving every member of Congress a book on the Holocaust.)

Fortunately, Novick writes, "increasing numbers of American Jews no longer see things as quite so black and white." Nevertheless, the message that Jews are under constant threat from hostile forces remains a central theme of Holocaust remembrance. Ellen Wills, a columnist for the Village Voice, expressed a widely held view when she asserted, "The status of Jews as persecuted outsiders is at the core of what Judaism and Jewishness is about."

Although many Jews, including this reviewer, strongly disagree with that message, it is drummed into the ears of thousands of Jewish teenagers who are taken from the United States every year to visit death camps in Poland. On arrival they are told by an American rabbi, "The world is divided into two parts: those who actively participated with the Nazis and those who passively collaborated with them." Armed Israeli guards who accompany the young people do everything possible to convince them they are in constant danger as long as they are in Poland. At the end of the tour they are flown to Israel, which many by then are convinced is "my real home."

David Roskies, who reviewed the book for Commentary, monthly publication of the American Jewish Committee, criticized Novick for "demystifying Jewish memory itself as nothing but a tool of Zionist politics" and argued that "The use—and yes, the abuse—of Holocaust memory forms part of a much larger mobilization of group memory for the sake of group survival."

Novick acknowledges the appropriateness of "awe and horror when confronting the Holocaust—now and forever," but he sees danger in making the Holocaust central to Jewish identity. In his view, "group memory," with its emphasis on victimhood, too often encourages inward-turning and a sense of otherness on the part of various segments of society. When groups compete over which one suffered the most, the unity necessary for an effective social order is undermined.

One of the many virtues of Novick's book is its fairness. He not only documents each of his statements but takes care to qualify them. As a result it becomes clear to the reader that the Jewish community in America is far from monolithic and includes many who oppose the tribalism of its leaders.

One such critic is Daniel Singer, who, in the Sept. 27 issue of The Nation, described his recent return to Poland, where almost all of his family died in the death camps. Unlike Novick, Singer, who survived only by chance, does find a lesson in the Holocaust, but it is a universalist, not a separatist one: "When you cast somebody out because he is other, different, alien, when you raise ethnicity to a political religion, you start on a slippery slope that, we now know, can lead to hell on earth."

On visiting Auschwitz Singer writes, "My deep links are with the dead whose ashes are interred here. But this should not be interpreted in any nationalistic fashion. The heritage I claim is that of standing on the side of the victims, of the downtrodden, the exploited, whatever their color or passport, black, white or yellow, Palestinian or Jew." Judging by his book, it is a heritage Novick would be willing to claim as well.

A Continent Called Palestine

By Najwa Kawar Farah, Triangle, Holy Trinity Church, London, 1996, 136 pp. List: $11; AET: $10.

Reviewed by Richard H. Curtiss

When the last Christian Palestinian families leave Palestine, something that may happen within a generation, the world may not notice at first. There still will be European priests, monks and ministers at major Christian holy places. There may even be Easter Sunday and Christmas Eve services for the tourists from Europe and the Americas making their "Holy Land Pilgrimage." But when Western tourists return from those tours asking why there no longer are Christian schools and Christian families in such formerly Christian towns as Nazareth, Bethlehem and Ramallah and in the Christian quarters of Jerusalem, they will receive little enlightenment from the Protestant and Catholic hierarchies at home.

Most long ago lost their voices when the time came to denounce the current Holocaust in the Holy Land. It does no good to a Christian clergyman in a North American city or town to become known as a radical in an age of moderation. And certainly no priest or pastor can afford to be omitted from ecumenical committees in those hometowns because he or she has incurred the wrath of a rabbi. In such a case, the pastor secretly fears, local media would stop reporting improvements in his parish, and congregations in larger communities looking for a new pastor would never hear about his accomplishments. Besides, these clerics apparently reason, in the case of the vanishing Palestinian Christians, what's done is done—or almost done.

So in the absence of any other explanation from the Christian establishment, cautious variations of "the Israeli line" on the extinction of the world's oldest Christian community will soon be appearing in America's mainstream media. That line will be that it wasn't the petty but persistent harassments and the occasional stunning brutalities of the Israeli occupation that drove the PalestinianChristians from the land of Christ, but "their Muslim Palestinian neighbors."

That this will be a big lie of the kind that succeeds only if the perpetrators control the lion's share of a nation's media is vividly attested by the life story of Najwa Kawar Farah, daughter of a Christian family rooted for centuries in Nazereth. There, until the creation of Israel in 1948, the Arabic-speaking inhabitants followed a lifestyle not radically changed from the time of the Nazarene who, 2,000 years earlier, changed the world.

But Najwa Kawar, first-born child of Aref and Adma, who could trace their families back to the ancient Christian Church of the Apostles, had become a talented writer and poet even before she married a young Palestinian Anglican minister, Rafiq Farah. And thus, unlike hundreds of thousands of her Palestinian countrymen, Muslim and Christian alike, she has been able to record the hardships she and her clergyman husband suffered during a half-century of unrelenting Israeli expansion.

She was a young woman in 1948 when the British Mandate ended and, after brief but terrifying fighting, her largely Christian hometown became part of Israel. Fifteen years later, exhausted by the problems of ministering to Christian congregations increasingly isolated, marginalized and traumatized within Israel's borders, the Rev. Rafiq Farah applied for and received a transfer outside of Israel to East Jerusalem. Then, only two years later during the 1967 war, which heavily damaged their hilltop house while they took refuge in the more sheltered home of Muslim Palestinian neighbors, Israeli armies overran East Jerusalem and all that remained of Palestine.

After 10 more years under an increasingly stringent Israeli occupation, and as hope faded for an Israeli withdrawal from East Jerusalem and the occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza, the Farahs moved again in January 1977, this time to an Anglican pastorate in Lebanon, and a home on the same street as the American University Hospital in "Muslim" West Beirut. By that time, Beirut had for two years been the epicenter of a bloody and debilitating civil war that was to continue for another 13 years. And in 1982, only five years after the Farahs and their son and two daughters had arrived in Lebanon, the Israeli army again followed them, seizing West Beirut after a bloody siege by land, sea and air that destroyed much of the city around them.

Although Mrs. Farah's book is on one level the personal history of a talented writer, wife and mother whose life has been lived in the Holy Land, Lebanon and, eventually, the United Kingdom, on a second level it is the personal account of the dispossession from its homeland of the Palestinian Christian community. And, on a third level, it is a painful, first-hand saga of the entire Palestinian diaspora.

If the story of Najwa and Rafiq, their daughters Randa and Karma, and their son Amin differs in any significant way from that of their Muslim compatriots, it is because some of the Christians had more financial resources to ease the physical hardships of dispossession and, with more family ties abroad, better personal and professional opportunities to leave their homeland forever.

This reviewer spent the entire year of 1946 in post-World War II Germany, still filled with dazed, hollow-eyed survivors of the concentration camps. Invariably when I asked Germans, "How could you have let this happen?" the answer was, "We didn't know."

Someday, when people ask, "What happened to the Christians of Palestine?" the answer will be found in this book. But what will the readers of this book, or even just of this review, answer when their children ask, "How could you have let this happen?"

In the disillusioned eyes of children who discover that those they love and respect did know, but did not stop the Holocaust in the Holy Land, we all may realize, too late, the truth of Najwa Kawar Farah's simple statement regarding Palestinian Christians and the outside world's Christian "ecumenical community" that "neither can live without the other."

Following are quotations, by era, from Mrs. Farah's A Continent called Palestine. More than anything a reviewer can say, they record the broken dreams, lost opportunities and deep heartbreak that accompanied the exodus of each Palestinian, regardless of religion, from his or her beleaguered homeland.

Before 1948: My father was Greek Orthodox and came from a very large familyÉHe inherited much wealth from his father, Tanous Kawar, who owned a lot of land and built public baths, a soap factory, stable, a khan and a sesameh press as well as a number of houses. My mother belonged to the Arab Anglican church. After the death of her father, when she was eight, she was sent with her older sisters to an orphanage, also known as the Prussian School because of the origins of is foundersÉ

I remember 1938 as the year a bomb was planted by the Irgun, a Zionist terrorist group, in a cafŽ in Haifa, killing 24 Palestinians and injuring 37. There were more bombs—on a bus in Jerusalem on 4 July, and in the melon market on 6 JulyÉ

I was teaching in Nazareth [in 1940 and] one day I received an invitation to speak at the Greek Orthodox club in HaifaÉI spoke to a full house for an hour and a half [and] drew attention to what I felt was wrong in our society and in education. I closed by addressing the Palestinian question:É"If you are negligent, you will lose Palestine"ÉI received a standing ovation but the next day I was ordered by my headmaster to present myself to the Department of Education to give an account of what I had saidÉOne of the strict rules for all government employees was that they should not be involved in politics. This law was one of the most subtle and subversive weapons used by the [British] Mandate government to thwart the efforts of the Palestinians to express themselvesÉ

My uncle was aware of the importance of recording Palestinian tradition and culture and suggested collecting Palestinian folk tales. The idea was put to the head of the [Palestinian Broadcast Service] and the call went out for listeners to send in the tales they knewÉI contributed three tales, but the program did not last long, for terrible events awaited us. They were events that ended the most beautiful tale of all—the tale of life in Palestine—and destroyed my uncle's house, crushed our dreams and turned us into refugees. It was like entering a dark tunnel, finding, like generations of our families before us, that the land which we had loved and where we had been born was to be usurped, snatched from beneath our feet under all kinds of pretexts and that this wrongdoing was supported by the most powerful states in the worldÉ

1948-1965: The village of Deir Yaseen lay on the western edge of Jerusalem. On the night of 9 April 1948, 250 men, women and children were massacred there in cold blood, many of them lying asleep in their beds. The murderers from the Stern and Irgun gangs, two Jewish terrorist groups who committed atrocities against British and Arab persons before the establishment of the State of Israel, were not satisfied with killing but went on to mutilate the bodies and cut open the bellies of pregnant women. The act horrified the Arab world and made the Palestinians panic, leading to the exodus of whole populations from many cities and towns, fleeing in the thousands in the belief that the same fate awaited the rest of themÉ

Following the British withdrawal from Tiberias, the Arab populations panicked. Most fled to Syria and Jordan as the Haganah moved in. Some families came to Nazareth. My own aunt's family fled to Amman, never again to see their much-loved home with its long terrace and beautiful gardenÉ

The ending of the Mandate was announced as 15 May 1948, and the British were ordered out of Haifa on 21 April—but the Arab exodus had already begun, following the massacre of Deir Yaseen. The people left in the thousands, abandoning their homes.

I hoped to find some comfort in a prayer meeting, a Christian fellowship run by Norwegian missionaries who had been working among the Jews in RumaniaÉThese prayersÉwere thanking God for fulfilling his promise and ingathering the Jews to their homeland and supporting themÉI thought of the streets I had seen, where my friends and relatives had been driven out, and thought of their misery. They were also godly peopleÉWas driving the Palestinians from their homeland an act of God?

Was it God's will to disinherit them, some in just one night or one hour, turning them into refugees in caves and camps, homeless, lost, condemned and dispossessed? How could Christians believe this? Was this really the will of God? That a whole people should be thrown out, subjected to such suffering? How could Christians believe that God, Creator of heaven and earthÉwould thus treat the very creation he came to redeem? Throw out a people which he created to bring in others whom he favored above all?

I found myself immersed in the difficult, even impossible, situation of the Arab community remaining in what was called, by the Arabs, the occupied land of Palestine. The problems were immense: getting identity cards and travel permits, the attempts to reunite families, the need for education, the villagers thrown off their land within Israeli boundaries and forced to become refugeesÉIt was a strange situation, worse even than being colonized, because colonizers would not usually turn you out of your own countryÉ

When we heard of the rise of the movement of the Free Officers in Egypt, the demise of the old regime ending with the expulsion of King Farouk in a bloodless coup d'etat, and the rise of Abdel Nasser, it was like the breath of life to a dying personÉIf our hearts and minds were following Nasser's speeches, we were brought back to our own miserable situation on 29 October 1956, when a curfew was ordered to black out our windows. It was the outbreak of the Suez warÉ

Two days later, some friends came to our house, bringing stories of a massacre in Kafr Qasim, an Arab village in IsraelÉOn 29 October, the day the curfew was imposed, an army officer called on the mukhtar of Kafr Qasim at 4:30 p.m., giving him the order for the curfew to start at 6 p.m. that evening. The mukhtar replied, "But there are 400 people already outside the village. I don't have enough time to call them all back."

The officer promised that everyone returning from work would be allowed to pass safely, on his authority and on that of the Israeli Government. At 5 p.m. the massacre started at the west end of the village. Forty-seven people were killed, among them women and children. Two members of the Knesset were able to get to the village, although it was under siege, and pass on the story of what had happened to a journalistÉbut all that resulted was a three-year prison sentence for one man, who was later pardoned. The officer who gave the order was merely reprimanded and given a token fine of one pennyÉ

We heaved a sigh of relief when the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Movement, emergedÉWe rejoiced that the title included the word "Palestine" because the very name of our country was seldom heard. The kingdom of Jordan, which had annexed part of Palestine, called it the West Bank. According to a speech by Golda Meir, Palestinians no longer existed and never did. We were to be considered refugees, not people with an identity and a countryÉ

What I believed and still believe—is that the greatest power lay in Arab unity. I also saw that the fedayeen attacks would give Israel the excuse to retaliate, usually out of all proportion to the harm done. We ended up being stigmatized as terrorists, when we were the victims of one of the greatest onslaughts on one people's history and civilizationÉ

I cannot attribute all my religious difficulties to the fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible carried out by a sizable number of Christians, but it was certainly a cause of dismay and frustration for many Palestinian Christians. I found the link made between the Promised Land and the modern state of Israel contradictory to Jesus' teaching. He never renounced the teaching, inspiration and religious experience of the Old Testament and neither did I as His follower, but He questioned much, and so did I.

The Holocaust was a shameful crime in the history of humanity. It seemed to me that the West paid for its war crimes, satisfied its pangs of conscience and received God's forgiveness for the Holocaust by giving the Jews a homeland—and thereby making the Palestinians scapegoats, carrying the sins of the world. Two wrongs did not make a rightÉ

1965-1977: I remember pushing my babies in their pram and feeling a shudder run through me when I saw a street with a new Hebrew name instead of the Arabic one which I remembered. I saw the countryside changing swiftly from the Arab villages that blended with the landscape, to kibbutzimÉWe decided to ask Bishop Qubain in Jerusalem if we could move to the eastern part of the city, at that time still controlled by Jordan. In the spring of 1965 permission was finally grantedÉFor the Arab community, the departure of any family made us feel more vulnerable. I knew that others had been resilient, had stayed, but I was yearning for another lifeÉOn our last day, I went into each room of our house and said goodbyeÉI knew I would remember that house all my life, the place where my children were born and where they had spent their childhoodÉWell-wishers stood at the Mandlebaum Gate for a final goodbye and we cried. Was this not, after all, the Gate of Tears?É

The Six-Day War was a victory for Israel, who had new territories, new sources of water. For the Arabs it was utter defeat. How did I feel? Perhaps I was the saddest, angriest person on the West Bank, not only because of the defeat in the war and the Arab disunity, but simply because I knew what was awaiting us. My experiences in Israel had taught me what lay ahead. It was like living a nightmare for the second time: land was seized, houses demolished, people were banished and families separated, tortured or placed under house arrest. Peasants who had lived on their ancestral lands for generations were now evicted, their olive trees uprooted, their animals dragged outÉ

As early as 11 June [1967], residents of Jerusalem's Maghrebi quarter were given notice to quit their houses before the bulldozing began to create a space facing the Wailing Wall. About a thousand people were evicted by force from their homesÉOutside Jerusalem, the destruction of villages began and some 20,000 houses were blown up in the first 10 years of the Israeli occupationÉ

If the West deemed it fit to regard Jewish beliefs as a justification for the return of the Jews, then surely there was far more cause not to turn out the Christians from the place where Jesus lived, died and was resurrected, and just as much reason not to bar the Muslims from their own highly revered shrine of the Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. The interaction between the indigenous people and the ecumenical community in Jerusalem is the very essence of the Christian experience. Neither can live without the otherÉ

You will never understand the extent of the Palestinian frustration and anger until you put yourself in our shoesÉDaily life became intolerable. We were captives in our own land. Our days fluctuated between the ordinary, the worries of any household anywhere, and the horrendous, when we had the status of captives, victims of unbridled cruelty and obsessive powerÉ

I do not believe in a God that prefers one people to another. I do not believe that the God who created this vast universe has nothing to do except guard a piece of land. God is the father of all creation, a God of loveÉ

Nasser was buriedÉand it is said that five million people walked in the funeral procession. History may prove that he made many mistakes, but he was a breath of fresh air to the Arab world, which had lain incapacitated after 400 years of Turkish ruleÉ

1977 to the present: Our decision to move to Beirut in January 1977 may well mystify the reader of this storyÉI can still see my neighbor coming down the stairs to our common yard, practically shouting at me when she heard of the decision. "You must be mad. Who on earth see the flames burning and throw themselves into it?"

...In the summer of 1982 Israel launched its invasion of Lebanon, with the name of "Peace for Galilee"ÉI remember the massive aerial bombardment of Beirut and South LebanonÉI cannot describe those daysÉThey were shapeless, unreal, millions of bombs pouring on to west Beirut, like a gigantic, devilish concert staged in the air, at sea and on land. The whole city shook, smothering fires blackened the buildings with soot and swirls of smoke. I remember one Saturday when 24,000 bombs dropped from the air, aircraft swooping down like vultures and leaving trails of blood and flesh, innocent blood and fleshÉ

The deadliest and most destructive American weapons were dropped on Beirut indiscriminately: cluster bombs, phosphorus bombs and suction bombs fell on refugee camps, residential quarters, apartment buildings, schools, air raid shelters, hospitals and embassiesÉAlong with the terror-bombing, the Israeli army laid siege to Beirut for two and a half months. Life became very grim as water, food, electricity and petrol became scarce. Contrary to all human rights laws, they did not even allow through supplies of milk, blood or medical equipment for the hospitals. We heard that milk was poured out at the roadblocks rather than be allowed to enter the cityÉ

People thought I would be relieved to leave Beirut, but I was not. Something inside me was pulling me to stay. I came to realize that in grief and sadness there is an intensity of involvement which normal life does not create. Lebanon was a country which I had always loved and I had desired to end my days in a little village somewhere in its beautiful, peaceful mountains. Instead I found myself in a taxi, cautiously maneuvering a way down the familiar streets, through the chaotic drivers on the main road by the seashore to the airport. I looked at the tall palm trees, the glistening waters of the MediterraneanÉ.Goodbye, Beirut. Goodbye, Middle East. Goodbye 40 years of work, of ministry. How short a time it seemedÉ

Our children, settled round the world, thrive with their families. Even though we no longer live in the Middle East, we have followed events closely—the Intifada, a sign of hope for so many Palestinians worldwide, the Gulf War, and then the Peace Settlement, yet the memories of the Palestine I once knew stay with me. The winds of Jerusalem, swaying the treesÉIn the night I hear the sound of the wind, exciting and mysteriousÉI long to journey with it. The stars shine, twinkling yet elusive—and I remember, sharp as a pain in the heart, the starlight through the fig trees and olive trees of my homeland.