Why Europe blames Israel for the Holocaust: Post-1945 anti-Semitism | JPost | Israel News
The acclaimed British novelist Howard Jacobson opened his speech at the
B’nai B’rith World Center in Jerusalem last October with piercing
sarcasm: “The question is rhetorical. When will Jews be forgiven the
Holocaust? Never.”
However, there has been a shift in the underpinnings of anti-Semitism.
Israel has become the collective Jew among the nations, as the late
French historian Léon Poliakov said about the new metamorphosis of
Jew-hatred.
Jacobson was piggy-backing on the eye-popping insight of the Israel
psychoanalyst Zvi Rex, who reportedly said: “The Germans will never
forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”
The anti-Semitic logic at work here is Europe’s pathologically
guilt-filled response to the Holocaust, which, in short, is to shift
the onus of blame to the Jews to cleanse one’s conscience. Two
German-Jewish Marxist philosophers – Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.
Adorno – coined an esoteric sociological term for what unfolded in
post-Shoah Germany: Guilt-defensiveness anti-Semitism.
On the one hand, Adorno and Horkheimer may come across as kitchen-sink
psychology. On the other hand, the explanatory power behind
anti-Semitic guilt animating hatred of Jews and Israel can provide a
window into Europe’s peculiar obsession with the Jewish state.
Europe is largely consumed with imposing discipline and punishment on
Israel. How else to explain the efforts by the German government and
fellow EU member states to label products from the disputed
territories? The EU refuses to apply the same label system to the
scores of other territorial conflicts ranging from China/Tibet to
Turkey/Cyprus to Morocco/ Western Sahara.
The origins of Europe’s disturbing preoccupation with Israel can be
traced to the late 1960s. The Austrian Jewish writer and Auschwitz
survivor Jean Amery recognized that “anti-Zionism contains
anti-Semitism like a cloud contains a storm.”
The German-Jewish author Henryk M. Broder perhaps best captured the
toxic mix of pathological Holocaust guilt with the desire to dismantle
Israel. In an article he wrote in the early 1980s he told his
contemporary Germans: “You’re still your parents’ children. Your Jew
today is the State of Israel.”
Sacha Stawski, an expert on anti-Semitism in the German media, told The
Jerusalem Post on Monday that “Israel-related anti-Semitism is
probably the most common and most persistent form of anti-Semitism in
all levels of society today.”
Stawski, who is a German Jew and editor-in-chief of the media watchdog
website Honestly Concerned, added: “Today it is no longer fashionable
to hate Jews outright, but it is perfectly acceptable to debate about
and to demonstrate against the very core of the Jewish state’s
existence – in a way and with emotions unlike that about any other
country.”
The social-psychological theory articulated by Adorno and Horkheimer
might, just might, provide a macro-level grasp of a pan-European
epidemic that is fixated on turning Israel into a human punching bag.
Benjamin Weinthal reports on European affairs for The Jerusalem Post
and is a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
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