GOOD PEOPLE, BAD JEWS
Ha’aretz
Aug 13 2010
Israel
Even 65 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world’s suffering
does not end By Neri Livneh
Even before the real-life model for Don Draper of “Mad Men” arrived
on the scene, the Americans were already displaying their genius as
copywriters. After all, you have to be thinking out of the box in order
to come up with the name “Little Boy” – the essence of pure innocence
– for the atom bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945,
killing an estimated 140,000 people within four months and injuring
tens of thousands more. No one would have imagined that “Fat Man,”
an inherently grotesque figure, was anything other than a character
invented to promote sales of donuts, hot dogs or any of the other
delicacies that have turned America into an obese, fast-food nation,
rather than the pet name for the bomb that was dropped three days
later on Nagasaki, killing more than 74,000 people.
Two weeks ago, while sitting at my neighborhood cafe, I noticed that
the person at the next table was reading a thin book that seemed to
be in Japanese. “It really is Japanese,” the obviously Israeli man
confirmed. “It’s Greek to me,” I joked, but only to myself, and asked
him about the book. It turned out that in two days he would be flying
to Japan for six months in order to complete his doctoral dissertation,
for a university in New York. It was a comparative study of attitudes
toward, and the commemoration of, the Holocaust and the bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Israel and Japan, respectively.
A subject that is both genuinely interesting and truly important.
In my school we didn’t learn about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, apart
from the quarter of one lesson on the conflict between the United
States and Japan in World War II. I’ve heard that these days it’s
even less because the curriculum for world history focuses on Jewish
communities. There were no famous yeshivas in Hiroshima and no one
ever heard of the Rebbe of Nagasaki.
The very little I knew about Hiroshima is from “The Flowers of
Hiroshima,” a novel by the Swedish-born writer Edita Morris. In
the book, Sam Willoughby, an American, comes to Hiroshima and stays
in the home of Yuka-san, who was injured in the blast and lost her
entire family with the exception of her sister. Through their stories
some of the horrors of the event are related: the birth defects that
are exposed in the bath house, the trauma, the guilt and the shame
experienced by the survivors, and also a little of Japanese culture.
Why is it that precisely in a country like ours, which was established
by Holocaust survivors, the atrocity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has
vanished from public consciousness and from the education system? It
was a flagrant war crime, a human trauma that changed history and the
rules of the international game irreversibly, an event that should
have sparked years of ethical debate about the immorality and the
absolute evil inherent in indiscriminate extermination and about the
use of weapons whose damage persists for generations.
One answer might be that in first years after the Holocaust we were
too busy licking the wounds inflicted on us. Also, the Japanese were
allied with the Germans and thus perceived as bad, while the Americans
were perceived as good, and no one had time or energy to pity enemies.
But that rationale is hardly persuasive in regard to the many years
that followed. The explanation lies elsewhere – in the fact that
there were few Jewish casualties at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, rendering
irrelevant the question of whether Little Boy and Fat Man were good
or bad for the Jews.
But I’m afraid that underlying these two excuses is another
explanation, which is the real reason that we also ignore the Armenian
genocide while citing the political exigencies of our relations
with Turkey – namely, our desperate need to always remain history’s
greatest victims. Let it be clear to all that nothing can compare with
the wrong that was done to us and which makes us eternally entitled
to moral mitigations and greater privileges. Indeed, this feeling
only increases as the Holocaust becomes ever more remote in time;
it’s never been more popular as the supreme reason to justify all the
wrongs we perpetrate on those who were not privileged to be descendants
of the persecuted minority to which the whole world owes a debt.
The real reason for our total indifference to anything that takes
place outside our community lies in the wonderful ability of the Jewish
people to overcome the tragedies of others so easily. That’s why it’s
been easy for most of us to ignore for 43 years the distress of those
who live under occupation. News about horrific natural disasters, or
even wars that degenerate into massacres and genocide are generally of
no interest to us, other than in regard to the local Jewish – that is,
Israeli – question. The first thing we do is check to see if there are
any Israelis among the victims. There were few Israeli casualties in
the World Trade Center attacks and in Hurricane Katrina, and Israelis
are not being slaughtered in their tens of thousands in the wars raging
in Africa or in the incursions by great powers into sovereign states.
How did it come about that those who were for hundreds and thousands of
years persecuted relentlessly can now agree to the ongoing persecution
being waged here by the interior minister and the Immigration
Police against people who are actually refugees or labor migrants,
a persecution that will soon reach its peak with the disgraceful
expulsion of 400 children who were born and raised here?
The real answer is that, on the contrary, it is precisely because
we are Jews – and from this point of view, Prime Minister Netanyahu,
Social Affairs Minister Isaac Herzog and Culture and Sports Minister
Limor Livnat are almost as good Jews as the best Jew of them all (that
is, the most wicked ), Interior Minister Eli Yishai; whereas Education
Minister Gideon Sa’ar turns out to be a bad Jew and a good person. All
we can do is pray to the god of the secular people to give us at long
last in our government and in our land bad Jews and good people.
From: A. Papazian
http://www.haaretz.com/magazine/friday-supplement/good-people-bad-jews-1.307804