This was the high point of a liberal alignment between an anti-communist, human-rights-oriented American foreign policy, an anti-communist culture in America, and a movement to free the Jews by allowing them to emigrate to the thriving state of Israel.
Jews in particular might wish to understand that moment and savor it, because it will not come again until the same opposition to radical leftism re-asserts itself in American politics. The Jackson-Vanik approach represented a hard liberalism that could stand against communist political repression. Hard liberalism generally sides with the Jews against their enemies, who are always simultaneously the enemies of liberal democracy.
All enemies of liberalism may not be anti-Jewish, but all anti-Semites and anti-Zionists are anti-liberal.
This political axiom means that hard liberalism will stand against a hostile left as resolutely as it does against a belligerent right. And it is just then, too, that we find the rise of Holocaust education. The change is part of a larger tectonic shift with certain specific features.
Edward Said introduced anti-Zionism into higher education. Said greatly surpassed Trilling in influence, but he did so in large part by distancing himself from Western civilization. His book Orientalism theorized that Western scholarship about "the East" was essentially a product of the prejudices of the imperialist, colonialist societies that produced it.
He included Jewish scholars in Western civilization and Israel as part of Western colonizing culture that kept the Arabs as subjugated subalterns. Said's impact on critical theory coincided with the rise of the left in American higher education and the culture it promoted in the media and the arts. The growing number of tenured radicals in the universities coincided with a rapid shift from a civil-rights ideal of equal opportunity to the affirmative-action ideal of equal outcome.
Whereas equal opportunity that admitted individuals based on merit allowed Jews to advance according to how well they could prove themselves, equal outcome counted Jews in proportion to their tiny percentage in the general population and so effectively reduced their numbers. As the theoretical basis for socialism collapsed with the fall of the Soviet Union and its communist satellites, the theories of Orientalism and anti-Zionism replaced it, attacking capitalist democracy for perceived discrimination based on racial, gender, and minority status.
Anti-Semitism had flourished in Europe because Jews were an easy, time-honored, and visible mark, and the same has proven true in America, where Jews and the Jewish state stand in for capitalists, imperialists, whites, and the patriarchy. Not coincidentally, since the s, Arab and Muslim groups, academic and political Arabists, Islamists, and a portion of American Muslims raised on anti-Zionism have revved up the war against Israel in America.
Foreign Policy in , its function was not just to imply that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee AIPAC was improperly manipulating American foreign policy, but to conceal the dramatic increase of Arab efforts in the opposite camp. This funding seeps down into curricula of high schools, like the ones in Newton, Massachusetts, that use the anti-Israel materials these universities produce. These developments, in time, transformed the post-war images of the Jew from victim-turned-hero to exploiter and villain.
Holocaust education of the time fit anti-Zionism like the protective sheath of a sword. Of course, commemoration of the Shoah among Jews began as something quite different. In , when I was in the third grade of a Jewish day school, our principal called a school assembly to explain what was happening in Europe. He said to the several hundred of us: If each of you now took one of your notebooks and wrote on every line of every page the name of a Jewish child, and if I were then to collect all your notebooks, it would still not equal the number of Jewish children who have just been killed in Europe.
This conferred a lifetime of responsibility on us to commemorate our counterparts and to compensate for their loss. Community-wide memorial gatherings began the following year, and commemorative texts were inserted into the prayer books.
Given that Jews still actively mourn the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in B. Once survivors of the war had regained their footing and perhaps started new lives, many felt duty bound to tell their story.
Elie Wiesel led the attempt to ensure that their memorialization remains a chapter in the continuing history of the Jewish people. The Nazis' attempt to destroy the evidence of their atrocities and evade retribution made it all the more important to secure the record, even if one could not bring the perpetrators to justice. Yad Vashem in Israel and other institutions around the world continue this vital task. Establishing all the facts and fighting Holocaust denial remain imperatives.
Nothing I am saying here questions the obligations of commemorating the dead and establishing every detail of the historical record. Rather, the potential for corruption begins with the impulse to make the Holocaust a universal symbol of evil, Nazism synonymous with "hatred," and Holocaust education a redemptive American pursuit. Journalist Judith Miller, then reporting for the New York Times , described how the idea of a national Holocaust Memorial was initially promoted by Jewish officials in the Carter administration.
Relations between Jimmy Carter and the Jewish community at the time had plummeted. Carter had angered American Jewish leaders by endorsing a Palestinian state.
He had also defied the pro-Israel lobby in approving the sale of F fighter planes to Saudi Arabia. People were therefore surprised when Carter changed his earlier opposition to the memorial project and supported the construction of the Holocaust Museum on the National Mall.
But it was no surprise: One should have appreciated the leverage this gave him to steer its mission in the universalizing direction he preferred. The phrase associated with the Holocaust memorial project, "Never Again," left unspecified the agents and means of deterrence, and even the goal itself. I fear I may be questioned before God about my silence in the face of blatant oppression. Israel claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East, yet it engages in some of the same tactics that the world has condemned when carried out by others in the region.
Military police confronting protestors who demand basic human rights, enforcing curfews through physical violence, and demolishing entire neighborhoods in search of a few men. The Palestinian people have been oppressed for nearly years — starting with the Ottomon Empire in the early s, before the British, the Jordanians, and finally, since the late 20th century, the Israelis.
When we consider the traumatic history of the Jewish people, and the horrors of the Holocaust, we must also consider the collective transgenerational trauma of the Palestinians.
And yet, we hear so much about the violent tactics some Palestinian groups engage in. Those are the headlines the news media writes. I wish the world would also see the non-violent approaches the Palestinian people have taken. Although these sentiments decreased since the second Palestinian uprising in , recent riots have led to recurring violent exchanges Rokem, Weiss, Miodownik, This shows that localized geographies of citizenship are pivotal in the struggle for ontological security.
Violent attacks, including Palestinian terrorist attacks, do not only create a physical threat but challenge the ontological security of the Israeli state by interrupting its routines Lupovici, Furthermore, it threatens the narrative of the Israeli state as a security provider.
In , a series of attacks by Palestinian youths in Jerusalem, prompted by the Israeli invasion of Gaza, led to a militarization of space Hever, While encouraging Israeli citizens to carry weapons for self-defense, the Israeli government used a campaign of preventive arrests targeted at Palestinian individuals surveilled by algorithms on social media ibid. However, these efforts had little effect on the sense of security experienced by the Israeli public ibid.
Psychologically, societies are known to adopt conflict-supporting beliefs to cope with the negative consequences and stress of ongoing threats Canetti et al.
Although these are valuable coping mechanisms, the perpetuated belief systems on the antagonism of the Other can bias narratives of conflicts and can inhibit peaceful solutions, thereby routinizing the very practice of conflict.
By sustaining these narratives, the state of Israel continued to pursue policies of segregation and illegal expansion into East Jerusalem to secure its position of ontological stability Hever, Nevertheless, particularly in the context of Jerusalem, both Israeli citizens and Palestinians are becoming increasingly sensitive to the contribution of these routinized relations of conflict to the cycle of violence Lupovici, Thus, securitized practices of establishing ontological security by the Israeli state have perpetuated tensions and further complicated the inherent beliefs and identities of Israelis.
Consequently, current developments show a rising demand to create space for alternative ways of security and narratives of identity. Israel does not only experience physical threats over border disputes with its neighboring countries but an existential identity and stability threat in the form of conflicts between Islamic and Jewish, Arabic, Hebrew, and Zionist identities.
Thus, the status of Jerusalem is elevated to an issue of survival. However, the process of securitization sidelines social and political problems by framing the geography of Jerusalem as a security issue that requires military and institutional intervention rather than policies to reduce the tensions. The perceived threats to a coherent Israeli identity and the subsequent militarization of Israeli practices do not strive to reduce the probability of violence and inter-group clashes but rather seek to provide a sense of security through isolated group identity.
The routinization of conflict and securitization has perpetuated both ontological and physical insecurities in the context of Jerusalem. Nevertheless, simply reminding Israelis and Palestinians of the constructed nature of their identity is likely not an effective strategy for desecuritization. At the same time, the reproduction of antithetical identities undermines political attempts for de-escalation and leaves little theoretical space for the emergence of alternative identities.
Hence, to desecuritize, both parties must recognize each other as legitimate counterparts while simultaneously addressing inherent instabilities and the complexity of a multitude of ethnonationalist identities. While Jerusalem remains a highly segregated space, there are also opportunities for grassroots organizations to create dialogue and investigate common identities and experiences. Notably, the investigation of Palestinian narratives of securitization lay outside the scope of this study.
Nevertheless, the research hopes to encourage a more detailed investigation of how the security and existence of a Palestinian identity are influenced by the presence and practices of the Israeli state. Alatout, S. Towards a bio-territorial conception of power: Territory, population, and environmental narratives in Palestine and Israel. Political Geography, 25 6 , Doi: Aljazeera , May Avni, N.
Political Geography , Busbridge, R. Political Geography, 79 , Canetti, D. Journal of conflict resolution, 61 1 , Giddens, A. Modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. Stanford University Press. Hever, S. Jerusalem Quarterly, 75 , Hoffmann, N.
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