Inventing new Nazi victims
A week ago, the Israeli branch of the German Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation and Netanya College organized a debate on a manifesto published in the wake of the 2006 Lebanon war by a group of 25 German social scientists, most of whom work on conflict resolution and peace research. According to the Ebert-Foundation website, the manifesto calls for a re-evaluation of Germany's relationship with Israel, arguing that the friendship between the two countries has become mature enough to allow for criticism. That sounds like a rather reasonable argument, because there is indeed little justification for the notion that German history should oblige Germans to be completely uncritical of Israeli policies. But the manifesto does more than just claim a right to criticize Israel - it also attempts to rewrite history.
Consider this report, which, when checked against the original German text of the manifesto, is indeed quite accurate: "According to the manifesto, German responsibility toward the Palestinians is 'one side of the consequences of the Holocaust which receives far too little attention.' It [i.e. the manifesto] went on to argue that it was the Holocaust which Germany perpetrated that brought about 'the suffering that has persisted [in the Middle East] for the last six decades and has at present become unbearable.'"
Comments (2)Hitler's heirs
Before President Bush left Israel last Friday to continue his trip to several countries in the region, he visited Yad Vashem. In the international press, this visit was widely described as "an emotional tour of Israel's Holocaust memorial", and reports highlighted that Bush "stopped in front of an aerial photo of Auschwitz [...] and told his secretary of state that the US should have bombed the death camp to stop the extermination of Jews there". Bush described Yad Vashem as "a sobering reminder that evil exists, and a call that when evil exists we must resist it."
Whether it would have been indeed feasible to bomb Auschwitz is still a controversial question; but what is striking to note in the context of our own times is that, as one expert explained, the Jewish leadership "was afraid to ask publicly for the Allies to bomb the death camps, believing that would turn the conflict into a war for the Jews". This can hardly fail to bring to mind that fantasies about wars being fought "for the Jews" have remained quite popular - whether among respected academics, pundits and commentators who worry about the "Israel Lobby", or among the wider public that shares such concerns. And when it comes to the Middle East, it is of course entirely acceptable to assert that there "was no war that broke out anywhere without their fingerprints on it" - and in the context of the Hamas Charter's Article Twenty-Two there is no need to ask whose "fingerprints" it is all about.
History lessons yet to be learned
The recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear capabilities prompted many commentators to conclude that the US intelligence community was trying to learn the lessons from its failure to accurately assess Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. However, the question is of course whether the right lessons were learned - or, as the Washington Post's "Fact Checker" columnist put it bluntly: "The history of the CIA is littered with spectacular intelligence mistakes. Sometimes, the correction of one error can lead to a new error, as analysts atone for past mistakes by moving too far in the opposite direction."
This debate reminded me of the research I did for my Ph.D thesis about the work of the CIA's predecessor during World War II, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Back then, one of the issues intelligence analysts had to deal with was information about the fate of Europe's Jews. What becomes disturbingly obvious when you study how this information was evaluated and reported is that intelligence assessments are never produced in a political vacuum; instead, and perhaps inevitably, they are influenced by the political orientation of the analysts and their interpretation of the political and military context in which the intelligence would be relevant.
About this blog The Warped Mirror
How the world sees Israel - comments and analysis by a contemporary historian.
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