The writer Ilona Karmel, who died in December, 2000, barely survived the Płaszów death camp, near Kraków, where she was born; she was, in the early nineteen-eighties, a lecturer in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s program in writing and humanistic studies, where I met her. We often attended public lectures and, at times, High Holiday services together, though she did the latter reluctantly, because, she told me, she had a “heshbon,” an account to settle, with God. Once, we went to a book launch for a volume on Holocaust testimonies, edited by a columnist for a local Jewish newspaper. The editor, who was born and raised in New England, routinely spoke of the Holocaust as a focus of Jewish identity, and Zionism as a natural counterpart. On this occasion, she showed a mastery of the myriad ways in which European Jews had been made to suffer. I turned to Ilona, who seemed impatient. “Scars but no wounds,” she said.

It is hard to imagine a more succinct description of the meeting that took place, this past Thursday, in Israel. Some forty heads of state or state representatives—Vice-President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi; Prince Charles; Presidents Vladimir Putin, of Russia, Emmanuel Macron, of France, and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, of Germany (though, significantly, not Andrzej Duda, of Poland)—travelled to Jerusalem to attend the commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, and to participate in the fifth World Holocaust Forum, hosted by Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s Holocaust museum and historical institute. The Israeli President, Reuven Rivlin, speaking at a welcoming reception on Wednesday evening, said, “Tomorrow we will gather to remember and to promise: Never again!” Ilona would not have doubted Rivlin’s sincerity or his erudition, yet she grasped that, for anyone born at a distance from, or after, the war’s atrocities, the claim “to remember”—to present oneself as scarred—is to engage in a kind of anachronistic moral positioning. For liberal writers and politicians, “to remember” is a cue to invoke the supreme cruelty of the Holocaust and to commit to institutions that promote tolerance. But, for nationalist writers and politicians, “to remember” is also an opportunity to appropriate moral prestige, adding to their distinction or shielding their cause from scrutiny.

On Thursday, at Yad Vashem, there were aged survivors in the hall, but it was the political causes, not the survivors’ experiences, that were most obviously on display. Rivlin struck the keynote. “Anti-Semitism and racism are a malignant disease that destroys and pulls societies apart from within,” he said. “No society and no democracy is immune.” For the past year, he has been campaigning, tactfully, to buttress democratic norms in the face of Benjamin Netanyahu’s assault and that of his party, Likud, on Israel’s Arab citizens. In this context, the fact that Rivlin spoke of anti-Semitism along with, and as a variant of, racism implied that Israel was as vulnerable as any other country to claims of national exceptionalism. Yet, unsurprisingly, the parochial justification of the occupation of the West Bank as a historical or divine Jewish right to “the whole Land of Israel,” and Israel’s peculiar forms of legally sanctioned discrimination against non-Jews—both ideological drivers of Netanyahu’s Likud—did not make it into his speech. Rather, Rivlin urged the delegates to adopt the criteria for anti-Semitism spelled out by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (I.H.R.A.), a body formed in 1998 by the former Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson, and supported by thirty-four member countries, to coördinate the campaign against anti-Jewish bigotry—and all other forms of bigotry.

 

Those criteria are reasonable, but they include a provision that would consider it a crime, in some countries, to deny “the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” That provision is freighted with arguable and ill-defined terms, especially in view of Likud ideology, and the nation-state law, which Netanyahu’s government rammed through the Knesset in 2018. Then, immediately after Rivlin proclaimed that “no democracy is immune,” he launched into a different claim. Israel is not “compensation” for the Holocaust, he said; rather, Israel “is our home and this is our homeland. It is where we came from and where we returned to after two thousand years of exile.” Presumably, the assembled delegates were supposed to accept Likud ideology, that the homeland was promised to the Jews alone—or at least to remember everything fatal in the twentieth century except the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Netanyahu spoke next. Those who expected him to use the occasion to plump for his agonal nationalism, his diplomatic eminence, and his reëlection (the next round of voting is on March 2nd) were not disappointed. First came a Manichaean framing, which a Holocaust forum, of all places, seemed vaguely to warrant: “Auschwitz and Jerusalem—an abyss and a peak. Auschwitz—extermination. Jerusalem—revival. Auschwitz—enslavement. Jerusalem—freedom. Auschwitz—death. Jerusalem—life.” Israel, Netanyahu said, is “eternally grateful” for the sacrifices made by the Allies, whose representatives surrounded him. Yet, he said, when the Jewish people “faced annihilation,” the world “largely turned its back on us.”

 

But Netanyahu was not really arguing a point of history; he was flattening history to make a dogmatic claim. What he wanted to drive home was the need for Jewish power—which Zionism, or his version of it, demands. “Auschwitz is more than the ultimate symbol of evil,” Netanyahu said. “It is also the ultimate symbol of Jewish powerlessness”—a state of affairs that could no longer be risked with, say, Jews as minority supplicants in Western liberal democracies. There is, rather, the Jewish state: “strength of arms, the courage of our soldiers.” Jews, moreover, now have a voice that “is heard in the White House and in the Kremlin, in the halls of the United Nations and the American Congress.” It wasn’t too difficult to imagine whose voice Netanyahu was referring to. And the message it had to deliver was equally clear: “Israel salutes President Trump and Vice-President Pence for confronting the tyrants of Tehran that subjugate their own people and threaten the peace and security of the entire world.”

Netanyahu—his audience contemplating Jewish vulnerability—was having a good day. And it was not over yet. Macron delivered a learned defense of liberal imagination (“Each time in our history,” he said, “anti-Semitism always preceded the weakening of democracy; it translated our inability to accept others”) and challenged the assembled—Putin directly—to revive the United Nations Security Council to settle international disputes. But, treading carefully to criticize Likud policy without seeming cavalier about Israel’s and Jews’ security, Macron also reiterated his support for the I.H.R.A. definition of anti-Semitism. He had pledged his support the previous day for preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon; he now said nothing about the occupation. Macron, Prince Charles, and President Steinmeier all delivered moving paeans to tolerance, and condemned anti-Semitism, partly in tortured Hebrew, but skirted European concerns about confrontation with Iran and any hopes for serious diplomacy regarding the Palestinians. (Prince Charles, visiting the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, in Bethlehem, the next day, tacked in the other direction, speaking of empathy for Palestinian “suffering and division,” while avoiding any statement that might be thought political.)

Even better for Netanyahu, while he was giving Pence a tour of Jerusalem’s Old City, word leaked that Trump had invited him and Benny Gantz, his main rival in the upcoming election, to the White House on Tuesday, to join him in presenting his so-called peace plan. According to reports in the Times, the plan is tailored to Netanyahu’s specifications, which the Palestinians will reject out of hand: Israeli annexation of all of Jerusalem, most of the settlements (read: thirty per cent more of the West Bank), and the Jordan Valley. The Israeli media has suggested that the Palestinians would get a state, though virtually no return of refugees, and only if Gaza is disarmed and the Palestinian Authority recognizes Israel as a Jewish state. We have to await the full text to see just what Trump’s plan will call for.

VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER

The Final Days of a Father’s Life

 

But, clearly, announcing the plan in a White House ceremony, while Trump is being tried in the Senate, and five weeks before Netanyahu faces voters—and on the very day the Knesset is scheduled to debate, and likely deny, his request for immunity from prosecution—is a transparent stunt to promote both men. Gantz, who is trying to poach some of Likud’s right-wing voters, and in the process has clumsily endorsed annexation of the Jordan Valley—“in coordination with the international community,” according to the Times—could not dismiss the plan out of hand. But he obviously knew he was being invited into a public-relations ambush, to sit in Trump’s presence while Netanyahu grandstands with Trump’s White House allies. So, on Saturday evening, Gantz announced that he would go to Washington, but to meet with Trump privately, on Monday, to discuss how Trump’s plan could serve as “the basis for progress toward an agreed settlement, vis a vis the Palestinians, and the states of the region, while continuing and deepening a strategic partnership with Jordan, Egypt, and other regional states.” He will then return to Israel to vote no on immunity for Netanyahu. But Netanyahu will also meet with Trump, and will stay in Washington after Gantz returns. There, at least, he will likely have another good day.

If the forum was destined to host a clash of the scarred, it might well have been between Israel and Poland. Netanyahu and Duda, the President of Poland, have nursed public grievances. In February, 2018, the Polish government, dominated by the far-right Law and Justice Party, proposed a bill to parliament that would make it a criminal offense to accuse the Polish nation or the wartime Polish state of being responsible for, or a partner to, Nazi crimes. This set off the Israeli government because of violence carried out against Polish Jews by other Poles, most notoriously during the Jedwabne pogrom, of 1941, and the Kielce massacre, of 1946. But the proposed bill also cut against the Likud axiom that Polish anti-Semitism is a feature of the diaspora. (The Israeli Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, said that Poles “suckle anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk.”) The law, in any case, was amended, in June of that year, and Netanyahu and Poland’s Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, signed a joint declaration agreeing, in effect, that some Poles were implicated in the crimes, but not as any kind of official policy. (“Unfortunately, the sad fact is that some people—regardless of their origin, religion or worldview—revealed their darkest side at that time,” the declaration said.)

But the real reason Duda declined to come to the forum was that he was not offered a speaking slot. That was more Russia’s doing than Israel’s, though it also exposed the extent to which “memory” can become spin. Since the last forum, at Auschwitz, in 2015, Poland and Russia have been in the grip of a diplomatic standoff. That year, Poland was hosting, and Putin had recently invaded Ukraine. The Polish President at the time, Bronisław Komorowski, along with leaders of the World Jewish Congress, Haaretz’s Anshel Pfeffer wrote, failed to issue Putin a personal invitation to participate, and Putin, miffed, boycotted the event. Since then, he has found it increasingly useful to traffic in a rehabilitated reputation of Stalin’s staunch wartime regime and the undeniable heroism of the Red Army. Poland’s Law and Justice Party, for its part, has railed against the postwar Soviet occupation of the nation; it has also found it useful to recall Stalin’s 1939 pact with Hitler to divide Poland and his consequent massacre, in 1940, of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn forest, as symbols of Polish tragedy. So, last December, Putin began a new disinformation campaign, charging that Poland had formed an anti-Soviet alliance with Germany, in 1938, and annexed a part of Silesia during the division of Czechoslovakia. He also recalled, out of context, a dispatch from that year by Poland’s Ambassador to Nazi Germany, Józef Lipski, in which Lipski endorsed Hitler’s apparent plan to deport Jews to Africa. The inference was that Poland had no right to pose as a victim—not, at least, as Russia’s victim.

With Russia strongly influential in Syria, and Israel bombing Iranian forces there—and with Russia detaining an American-Israeli backpacker for trivial drug possession—Netanyahu seems to have felt that it would be prudent to keep Putin content, and Duda off the stage. Earlier in the day, in a Jerusalem park, Netanyahu, with Putin at his side, unveiled a memorial to the siege of Leningrad, Putin’s birthplace. Putin seems to have returned the favor by not advancing new claims against Poland during his address at the forum.

But he did note that the Nazis had collaborators in some of the countries they occupied. “Where these criminals were operating,” Putin said, “the largest number of Jews were killed; thus, about 1.4 million Jews were killed in Ukraine.” For a moment, one could almost forget how times have changed, that Ukraine’s current President is a Jew, or that Russia’s proxy forces are at war with Ukraine, or that Putin has been trying to deflect anger at Russia’s meddling in the 2016 American election by falsely implicating the Ukrainians. Later, he conceded that “the Nazis intended the same fate [as Jews] for many other peoples. Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Poles, and many other peoples were declared Untermensch.” But, with Duda absent, his first point hung in the air like a dirigible.

“I have never seen a time when European governments are so quiescent with regard to the Netanyahu government—so willing to accommodate its uses of the Holocaust,” Amos Goldberg, an expert on Holocaust history and a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told me. He added, “The Israeli, Polish, and Russian governments, all custodians of grim histories, are also reactionary populists—all using memory to make their nations dangerously self-justifying. For Israel, this means insisting that Polish anti-Semitism is endemic; for Poland, it means seeing Polish anti-Semitism as episodic. But this is not a real fight over history. It is a rival ‘memory’ in the service of a similar politics.”

By Bernard Avishai in The new yorker