A Measure of Things Human

[Celerity]

https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/a-measure-of-things-human/


Displaced Palestinians return to the war-devastated Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip on January 19, 2025. © Omar Al-Qatta/AFP/Getty



In March 1988, the late Israeli historian Yehuda Elkana, an Auschwitz survivor, published an explosive op-ed in Haaretz on “the need to forget.” He wrote that although he often spoke of the Holocaust to his four children and freely shared his personal recollections of it with them, he had refused to accompany them on visits to Yad Vashem. He had been reluctant to follow the Eichmann trial and he opposed the trial of John Demjanjuk, who had been a guard at the Sobibor death camp and was awaiting sentencing then. Elkana was convinced that the memory of the Holocaust had been co-opted for destructive ends, that it had been maliciously harnessed to fuel hatred and violence against the Palestinian people.

He published his piece when he did—in the midst of the first intifada, not long after footage emerged of Israeli soldiers beating bound and blindfolded Palestinians—perhaps hoping there was still time to reverse course. He explicitly argued that “had the Holocaust not penetrated so deeply into the national consciousness,” the conflict between Jews and Palestinians would not have produced acts of terrorism and abject violence; he even conjectured that the peace process might not have stalled. For Elkana, the time had finally come for the Jewish people to abandon the belief “that the whole world is against us, and that we are the eternal victim.” While the wider world could very well continue to remember the Holocaust, Israelis now had to forget: “Today I see no more important political and educational task for the leaders of this nation than to take their stand on the side of life, to dedicate themselves to creating our future, and not to be preoccupied, morning to night, with symbols, ceremonies, and lessons of the Holocaust.” Democracy, Elkana warned, was at risk when “the memory of the dead participates actively in the democratic process”—when politics becomes a pathway for unending revenge.

The essay was an attempt to prevent his nation from continuing down a catastrophic path of inexcusable violence fueled by existential pain and panic. Over the last 37 years, Elkana’s message has been occasionally invoked alongside calls for the reconfiguration of Holocaust memory in Israel and abroad. In a way, he was both ahead of his time and behind it: Perhaps he already saw on the horizon the contours of our current era, or perhaps he did not dare imagine how much worse things could get.

For the writer and critic Pankaj Mishra, Elkana’s message came too late. Peace talks soon stalled, and the Israeli far-right began describing the process, according to Mishra, as a “prologue to Jewish annihilation,” invoking the specter of another imminent Holocaust. With his new book, The World After Gaza: A History, an impressive polemical history of the present, he joins the small but growing group of thinkers who, like Elkana, have sought to salvage the liberal and humanistic lessons of the Holocaust from being eclipsed by militant and vengeful interpretations. If the moral collapse represented by the Shoah marked the beginning of a new historical era, the destruction of Gaza has inaugurated another one. In Mishra’s telling, the world “after Gaza” is irrevocably sundered from that which preceded it, because the obliteration of Palestinian life in the territory has exposed the West’s moral hypocrisy to a new generation that is understandably unsatisfied with the euphemisms and evasions offered up to it as explanations. The war in Gaza, for Mishra, marks “a final rupture in the moral history of the world,” the end of an era “in which the Shoah was a universal reference for a calamitous breakdown of human morality.”

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[pansypoo53219]

1. it looks worse than ukraine.

[SWBTATTReg]

2. Gosh, where does one start in this mess, to rebuild buildings as well as trust, etc.? On both sides?

I fear the road is a long road, and unfortunately, there seems to be some that don't want healing to start or continue, but to continue the hate for their selfish reasons. A true shame.

[Skittles]

3. the "Holy Land"