What Would Ike Do?

Anti-Semitism and its alter-ego anti-Israelism rarely wear the same dress to consecutive balls. Yes, of course, there are people so blinded by their own hatred that they don’t really care how their behavior appears to people who disagree with them (and even less than that to the actual objects of their loathing). But then there are those—and they are legion—who feel the need to dress up their bigotry and present it, not as something wicked or depraved, but as something rational and reasonable, even as something noble.

It's a big closet. There are lots of outfits to choose from. And the most favored outfit for today’s anti-Semite is pacifism, the struggle for peace in the world. Who could be against peace? And yet the constant, and ever-more-shrill, calls for a ceasefire in Gaza come not from people who support the effort to bring peace to Gaza by eradicating Hamas (and thus granting the actual Gazans a chance finally to live in peace with the neighbors), but precisely from those who wish the IDF to withdraw so as to allow Hamas and its fighters to regroup and plan their next horror-Aktion against Israeli civilians whose only “crime” is the wish to live openly as Jewish citizens of the Jewish state in the homeland of the Jewish people. By redefining pacifism as a path forward to more numerous, more violent, more brutal, and more devastating attacks against innocents undertaken by people so blind with hatred that even Nazi-style barbarism does not feel like a path too perverse to embrace, such people have truly stepped through the looking glass into a topsy-turvy universe where nothing is as it seems, where words can mean what they mean or what they don’t mean depending on the whim of the one speaking them. When Lewis Carroll has Humpty Dumpty say “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less,” he expected readers to laugh at the absurdity of words meaning only what the people speaking them wish for them to mean.

Adding to the irony is the fact that peace—the real kind, the kind that features individuals and nations living calmly and respectfully by each other’s side and resolving their disputes without rancor or violence—is the single most culminatory concept in all of Jewish prayer. The Kaddish ends with a prayer for peace. The Amidah—the series of benedictions that is the core of every Jewish prayer service—also ends with a prayer for peace. As do also the Grace after Meals, recited at the end of any formal meal, and the Priestly Benediction that features kohanim like myself coming forward to channel the very choicest of God’s blessings to the congregation. So if there ever were a people devoted to the idea that the yearning for peaceful coexistence between nations is the beating heart of prayer undertaken for the good of the world (as opposed to the kind undertaken solely for personal advancement or gain), it would be the Jewish people. And yet the calls for a cease-fire are becoming more shrill by the moment, more overtly hate-filled, more blatantly anti-Semitic.

Many years ago, Joan and I lived in Heidelberg, a storybook town dominated by a gigantic, half-ruined castle in what was then West Germany. How I got there and why someone like myself whose entire life could reasonably be described as a response to the Shoah would have agreed to live there at all, let alone for years—that will have to be my subject on some different occasion. But we were there—and the experience was some combination of fascinating, stirring, bizarrely otherworldly, and gratifying. I taught at the Institute for Jewish Studies in Heidelberg’s downtown core, but we lived in a suburb called Rohrbach, once a little town on its own called Rohrbach-bei-Heidelberg but by the time we got there long since redefined as a neighborhood within the city limits of its much larger neighbor. This was forty years after the end of the war, yet the Shoah was my constant companion. I couldn’t walk to the market without passing the red sandstone monument marking the site of the synagogue destroyed on that site on Kristallnacht in 1938. I couldn’t walk to work down the Plöckstrasse without remembering that it was once the Adolf-Hitler-Strasse. Nor could I take little Max (then just a baby) to the park by the river—the one place he still vaguely recalls as an adult—without passing the square in which the surviving Jews of Heidelberg were finally assembled before being shipped east to their deaths.

And yet the town I was living in was a peaceful place, a university town in the old-fashioned sense of the term: a place alive with concerts and lectures, with sporting events and social gatherings. The disconnect for me personally was beyond jarring: these were Germans, these people I was living among, yet they appeared to me neither warlike nor barbarous. If anything, my neighbors seemed like regular people pursuing their regular lives along fully banal lines: shopping for dinner, drinking beer in a pub, waiting for the streetcar, going to the movies, reading a newspaper in a café, attentively watching children playing on a climbing structure in a park to make sure they were safe. No one in our building on the Heinrich-Fuchs-Strasse seemed like the kind of savage who could murder entire communities’ worth of people in a single morning or who could operate gas chambers or who could shoot babies in their mothers’ arms. If anything, they seemed like peaceful sorts trying to earn livings and eager to live meaningful, productive lives. If there were any unreconstructed Nazis hiding out in Rohrbach, I never came across them. Or heard of their existence, even.  I’m usually a fairly good judge of people’s characters. I knew the history of the place in which I was temporarily living. But none of the people in our building or on our street struck me even remotely as the kind of person who could have brought such unimaginable suffering to the world, such misery, such violence, such uncontrolled and uncontrollable hatred.

When I think back on those days these days, I find myself wondering how exactly the most bellicose, savage, brutally violent nation ever to exist (with the possible exception of their Japanese allies), how such a nation became peaceful to the point at which the thought of today’s Germany going to war with Denmark or Holland is not just unlikely but truly unthinkable. And, yes, I say that known full well that there is serious (and growing) support for the ultra-right-wing Alternative für Deutschland party among the German electorate. But war with Holland? With France? That really is unthinkable, which brings me back to wondering what turned people whose entire national ethos was fueled by the most base kinds of hatred and bigotry into the nation Germany is today?

It certainly didn’t come about because General Eisenhower, having embarked on the boots-on-the-ground land invasion that followed the carpet bombing of Germany’s largest cities, decided that what was really needed to bring peace to Europe was a unilateral ceasefire.

What was needed, the Supreme Allied Commander knew, was to eradicate Nazism by neutralizing the Nazi leadership, by bringing the military to its knees, and by granting the German people a way out of this unimaginable catastrophe they had basically brought upon themselves. The defeat of Nazi Germany was total. The nation’s Armed Forces ceased to exist. The government was replaced briefly by ad hoc governing authorities created by the Allies, but soon after that by a democratically elected government of Germans eager to shed the horrors of the past and embrace a future that could steer the nation away from extremism and savagery, and towards playing a useful and helpful role in a reconstituted Europe built on the ashes of a nightmarish past. The role of the vanquishing nations then turned to assisting the vanquished to rebuilt by treating the citizens of Germany generously and fairly, by inviting them to imagine a peaceful future for their nation and then assisting them in making real that dream. The Marshall Plan was part of it. But even more essential than the money provided by the Plan was the willingness of the victors to redefine victory so that it no longer meant the annihilation of the enemy nation but its reconstitution as a useful partner in rebuilding a world that lay in ruins because of them.

People who truly yearn for peace should be thinking along similar lines with respect to Gaza.

The last thing that would ever lead to peace would be for Israel to leave Hamas in place, to go back to “regular” daily life, and to concentrate on working on some hugely lopsided deal to rescue the captives being held by Hamas. What is needed to bring peace to Gaza, on the other hand, is precisely what Israel is doing: working to eradicate Hamas by neutralizing its leadership, by bringing to justice the perpetrators of the October pogrom, by freeing the captives, and then, generously and willingly, to find a way for the citizens of Gaza to create a future for themselves that features peaceful relations with Israel and a governing body for themselves that has their own best interests at heart.  If General Eisenhower was here to put his two cents in, I think he would agree wholeheartedly.