The wisdom of Auschwitz survivor Dr Hajo Meyer (1924 - 2014)

1. The Ethical Tradition of Judaism

Hajo Meyer’s book The End of Judaism (2007, Kindle Edition 2013) is subtitled An Ethical Tradition Betrayed.

“Leo Baeck, the last great Reform rabbi in Germany, characterized ethical Judaism as follows: ‘The respect that we owe other people is therefore not one single commandment, not a commandment among commandments. Instead, recognition of one’s neighbour represents the entire content of morality, the whole richness of that which God demands from us for the sake of our God-given human dignity. It is the very essence of obligation. Hillel, and Akiba later, already emphasized this significance. They found in it the sum of the Torah, the all-encompassing principle.’

“Jewish ethics as set out in the Torah are absolutely clear about the treatment of outsiders. Leviticus 19:34 and Deuteronomy 10:19 state clearly that strangers may never be discriminated against. The reasoning in both books is based on the key phrase, ‘For ye were strangers in the land of Egypt,’ which is a clear statement of ethics.

“Making ethically positive sense out of senseless suffering is part of an ancient Jewish interpretation of history. Rabbi Hillel, one of the greatest rabbis in Jewish history, who lived in the 1st century B.C., exemplified this when he said: ‘That which is hateful to you do not do to your neighbour. That is the whole of the Torah.’…

“The lesson I take from the Auschwitz phenomenon - rather than using it as a yardstick - is to never become like the perpetrators but instead to be always aware of the most fundamental ethical command in Judaism, famously summarized by Hillel: ‘That which is hateful unto thee do not do unto thy neighbour. This is the whole of the Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and study.’ How fundamental this saying was considered, even in Israel, as late as 1974, can be seen from the fact that an Israeli ‘Pocketbook’ on Jewish values puts it on the very first page.

2. The Ethical Tradition of Judaism prohibits Zionist aggression against Palestinians

“Zionism’s original opposition to discrimination on the bases of religion, race, or sex is anchored in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, according to which, historian Martin Gilbert writes:

‘[Israel] would be based on “freedom, justice, and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel.” It would ensure “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race or sex,” and would guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language education and culture.’

“This can also be seen in the autobiography of Chaim Weizmann, who was active in the movement after the second Zionist Congress in 1898, and who became Israel’s first president. He wrote as follows:

‘I believed that a small Jewish state, well-organized, living in peace with its neighbors, a state on which the love and devotion of the Jewish community throughout the world would be lavished...would be a great credit to us and an equally great contribution to civilization.’

“Recent Israeli policies have paid little attention to such niceties and good intentions. After more than 50 years, Palestinian Israelis still do not have equal rights as citizens.”

“For Jews the most important lesson to be learned from the Holocaust is that we should never, ever become like our persecutors. I believe that we as a people, with our rich history and valuable tradition of ethics—a tradition of ethics that has profoundly influenced all legal systems in the West—should never even come close to behaving as our persecutors have toward us. If we do not soon internalize this lesson we will be in danger of betraying ourselves and endangering our very existence as a people with a common and valuable socio-cultural heritage. The meaning of 2,000 years of persecution in the Diaspora simply cannot be that now that Jews have their own state they may persecute others.

“Large parts of the Jewish world are following Elie Wiesel’s recommendation to use the Holocaust experience as a yardstick, such that every crime against humanity so far perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinians seems smaller than what the Jews experienced: so Jews can have a clear conscience because they are not as bad as others have been.

“If we Jews were to opt for an ethically compromised meaning to be gleaned from the Holocaust, according to which it would now be our turn to get revenge for all that was done to us—if we came to believe that now that we were in the driver’s seat we could discriminate against others—then we would have sunk to the level of our former persecutors. We would, in effect, be proving them right.”

3. Zionists in Palestine as the Successors to the Nazis in Europe

“The Nazi criminals who created and maintained the death camp system had another goal in mind besides mass annihilation. They made the lives of those they did not gas immediately so wretched that they were reduced by starvation to little more than ghosts who fought with each other for a blanket or a piece of bread. By this means, the Nazis intended to prove how subhuman Jews were.

“It is difficult to bring up such a touchy subject as the parallels between the methods used by Israel to suppress the Palestinians and those that I experienced as a second-class citizen in Germany and occupied Holland at the hands of the Nazis, yet such parallels are inescapable.

“The guilt felt by the world for allowing this crime [the Holocaust] to occur led to the UN resolution of November 29, 1947, which provided for the partition of Palestine and created the preconditions for the founding of a Jewish state, whose independence was proclaimed on May 14, 1948. We now know that from the very birth of the new state, its armed forces were much better equipped and trained than all of the Arab armies put together. Moreover, the Israelis had prepared a plan to ethnically cleanse the area of the new state of its Arab indigenous population as thoroughly as possible.

“Still, the Zionist dream of being in possession of the whole of Palestine had to wait until June 1967. In that month, Israel won a decisive victory against its Arab neighbours and conquered the entire region up to the Jordan River. The Palestinian territories, which had been administered by Jordan and Egypt after the armistice of 1949, were now occupied by Israel. This convinced many Israelis, and in particular many politicians that they could do whatever they wanted….

“The National Socialist Volk ohne Raum ideology went hand-in-hand with the ‘Blut und Boden’ (blood and soil) myth, according to which each square meter of earth is sacred. Such extreme thinking also exists in Israel, in particular among the settlers and their ideologues, the extremist rabbis. They, too, promote notions of the sacredness of the soil to resist peace initiatives such as the so-called Roadmap for Peace, while expanding their settlements to the east. The historical justification for annexing ‘Judea and Samaria’ goes back to Old Testament times….

“At a conference that took place in Jerusalem on June 23, 2003, which was attended by about 500 rabbis belonging to the so-called Federation for the People of Israel and Land of Israel, former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu stated: ‘No one in the world, from drawers of water and hewers of stone to prime ministers, has the right to give up one grain of the Land of Israel. The Holy One, blessed be He, gave us the Land of Israel. There is holiness in every single grain.’…..

“Virtually none of the apologists for current Israeli policies … miss an opportunity to praise Israel as the only democratic state in the midst of despicable Arab dictatorships. Inasmuch as the democratic rights of the Jewish citizens of Israel are concerned, this is still largely true. [But] a newspaper like Ha’aretz routinely reports on the cruel treatment of innocent Palestinian citizens in the occupied territories.”

The Dehumanization of the Enemy

“We have seen how the Germans labelled the Jews as a foreign body in their culture… Hitler thought of the Jews as maggots, vermin, a toxic bacillus, and so forth. This complete dehumanization of the enemy crosses a line. Once this stage has been reached, leaders can authorize whatever discriminatory policies they want without significant protest because then, the people in the society assume they are no longer dealing with actual human beings who have human feelings and respond to the loss or death of a relative as they do.

“Prominent Israelis promote the same view of the Palestinian. Former Knesset member Shulamit Aloni was Education Minister in Yitzhak Rabin’s cabinet. On March 6, 2003 she published an article in Ha’aretz in which she stated: ‘Many of our children are being indoctrinated in religious schools that the Arabs are Amalek, and the Bible teaches us that Amalek must be destroyed.’

“To the Jewish people, the Amalekites symbolize the arch enemy, the personification of evil. Deuteronomy 25:17-18 states that one must never forget what the Amalekites did, that they did not fear God, and that they attacked the exhausted Jews during their escape from Egypt. The punishment that they deserve is set out in the Book of Samuel 15:3: ‘Now go and strike Amalek and utterly destroy all that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant.’ And in Exodus 17:14, God tells Moses: ‘I will blot out every trace of Amalek from under heaven.’

“My point is that before the Holocaust even occurred, the Jews had suffered more than enough from discrimination, humiliation, harassment, and the threat of exile in Nazi Germany. In my opinion, the same may be said of the Palestinians’ suffering from 1967 to the present. It is already more than a people should have to bear. I well understand that history never really repeats itself, and that the differences between two historical situations are often more important than the similarities. This does not, however, mean that we cannot learn anything from history.

“Although the parallels between the Palestinians and the German Jews are close enough to serve as a lesson and a warning, the situations are not at all identical. To begin with, the Palestinians have a territorial claim that is recognized by the United Nations. The most important difference, however, relates to their ability to fight back. The German Jews were completely defenceless during the entire period of their persecution. Absolutely no notable examples of armed resistance occurred. In stark contrast to the posture of the Jews during World War II, the Palestinians use all means at their disposal to resist the their occupation by the Israelis. Ironically, none are more critical of the defencelessness and passivity of the German Jews in the face of humiliation and persecution than today’s Israelis, yet the Israelis fault the Palestinians’ resistance just as they criticize the lack of it on the part of German Jews during the Nazi period.

“For Ariel Sharon, ‘peace’ was a peace dictated by Israel. In contrast, when Uri Avneri, the head of Gush Shalom, the Israeli peace movement, speaks of ‘peace’, he means a negotiated peace agreement with the Palestinians on the basis of equality and mutual respect.”

“The widespread nature of the contempt for Arabs on the part of Israeli Jews is demonstrated by an article by Yoav Peled of the University of Tel Aviv, published in The Guardian, in which he wrote:

‘In Israel the public denigration of Arab culture was historically acceptable, since, like all colonial movements, Zionism had to dehumanize the indigenous inhabitants of its country of settlement in order to legitimize their displacement. Thus, as many studies have shown, depictions of the Arabs as conniving, dishonest, lazy, treacherous and murderous were commonplace in Israeli school textbooks, as in much of Israeli literature in general.’”

4. The Irrational Fears of Zionists

“A majority of the Jews in Israel, and also many in the Diaspora, firmly believe that the Palestinians, with or without the help of the rest of the Arab world, have nothing else in mind than ‘driving them into the sea.’ This fear is only marginally related to reality. Of course, Palestinian or Arab extremists express this threat often enough, just as Jewish extremists and some of the members of the Israeli government utter corresponding threats about the deportation of all Palestinians. The Jewish fear is not realistic, however, for two reasons. In the first place, even if the Arab states were ever to unite, they would not have the military strength to carry out such annihilation when matched against the military might of Israel.

“In the second place, this fear ignores pertinent declarations of the Arab world to the contrary. The last important one of these Arab peace proposals, by all means a fair one, came from the Arab summit on March 27, 2002, in Beirut. Given the intentions of Ariel Sharon, at that time head of the Israeli government, it is not surprising that his government reacted only condescendingly. What is puzzling, however, is that this important initiative did not lead to large public demonstrations in the streets of Israel’s cities. The Israeli propaganda machine may be partly responsible for this lack of response, but it is certainly not the only cause. The Jewish public in Israel is so deeply steeped in its paranoid, yet comforting, conviction that ‘we always have been and we still are the victims,’ that the media remained relatively silent on this dramatic and historic step on the part of the Arab world.

“Two millennia of persecution leading up to the Holocaust caused many Jews to feel that no people suffered as much as they did. The Israeli attitude that nothing is as bad as what Jews experienced in the Holocaust causes them to defend the harsh treatment of the Palestinians with the argument: ‘Sure, we are not always nice to them, but compared to what was done to us, they have it good.’”

5. Criticism of Israel

“Unfortunately, a majority of the world’s Jews in the Diaspora uncritically support Israeli policies. An appreciable number of them work together with Christian fundamentalists who are as uncritical of Israel as the most radical extremists there. Together, these two groups have gained a considerable influence on the present administration of the U.S. and its current president George W. Bush.[108] Thus, it seems that there is little external influence to keep Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians in check—a dangerous situation indeed. As pastor John Hagee proudly claimed recently, ‘The sleeping giant of Christian Zionism has awakened. There are fifty million Christians standing up and applauding the State of Israel’.

“For those Jews who can no longer support Israeli policies uncritically, this situation poses deep problems. In many countries of Europe, such Jews have organized themselves in various national organizations that together try to gain strength via their coordinating organization, EJJP (European Jews for a Just Peace). Contact with similar organizations on the other continents is still in the process of developing. This movement developed primarily out of concern for the continued existence of Israel, but the increasingly egregious behaviour of the IDF in the occupied Palestinian territories has led to greater shame and frustration on the part of the members of its constituent organizations. Unfortunately, the accusation that the majority hurls at those critical of Israeli policy is that they are ‘self-hating Jews’, and in so doing they ignore the old wisdom that only those who truly understand their strengths can have the courage to admit their weaknesses.

“This accusation of self-hate is simply absurd. Many of the members of this movement are proud of their Jewish heritage and of the important contributions that Judaism has made to the key ethical and social ideas that animate Western civilization. They are convinced of the important and beneficial role that Israel could play in the Middle East. The prerequisite for this, however, is that both the Israeli state and Israelis themselves give up their paranoid ghetto mentality and respond in a more moderate and nuanced manner to Palestinian attacks….

“Ultimately, I can’t reconcile silence about the current state of affairs with my conscience. What is going on in Israel is painful, deeply tragic, and shameful.”

6. Is Today’s ‘Anti-Semitism’ Caused by Zionist Israel?

“It is a bitter example of historical dialectics that the Jewish state, originally established in order to protect Jews from anti-Semitism, has spawned a new phenomenon often mistaken for anti-Semitism: namely anti-Israeli sentiment. sentiment. While at times old anti-Semitic attitudes may partially feed this response, it is the current aggressive and shameful policies of the State of Israel that are chiefly responsible for its growth.

“Anti-Israeli feeling and opinion are easily attacked as being linked with traditional anti-Semitism primarily because many Jews outwardly stand behind Israeli policies without voicing the slightest criticism, even when human rights and international law are severely and continually violated. Thus, criticism of the State can easily be interpreted as criticism of the Jewish people. It was understandable that the young nation, which seemed to be threatened on all sides, was practically above the law after World War II and the almost total annihilation of European Jews. Nor was it surprising that Jews outside of Israel identified with their potential refuge.

“As we now know, however, the image of Israel as a vulnerable underdog in the coming political and military struggle was a myth. The important and revealing work of modern critical Israeli historians such as Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe has shown that from 1940 on, the Haganah prepared detailed plans on how every single Palestinian village could be conquered and the population evicted from their houses. The fact that these plans were successfully executed was due to the decisive military superiority of the Jewish forces, of which the Jewish leaders were already fully conscious before 1948. The image of a tiny, helpless Israel being again attacked by superior forces in 1967 was a myth promulgated by Israeli politicians to gain the sympathy of the world.

“How deeply this myth became ingrained in the minds of Israelis could be detected even in the reasoning of sincere critics of Israeli policy. According to former Israeli Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair, something went completely wrong after Israel’s spectacular and complete victory over its Arabic neighbour states in 1967, when Israel opted for becoming a colonial power and setting up an apartheid regime in the occupied territories. Until 2002, however, even Ben-Yair still thought that up to 1967 Israel was indeed in great danger. Based on what we know now, it would be more accurate to say that, after that date [1967], Israel felt strong enough to display openly and without shame the colonial ambitions it had been nurturing secretly for years.

“After having barely manifested itself in the past five decades, anti-Semitism, always latent in the Christian world, is now finding a new foothold. Virulent, aggressive anti-Semitism needs no excuse for its expression, while latent, endemic anti-Semitism, found even among refined individuals, now surfaces readily in proportion to the overt actions of the Israeli Army after having been taboo since the Holocaust…

“It cannot be the case that the Holocaust forever makes all its survivors and their descendants proof against any criticism from now to eternity.”

The Holocaust as Benchmark

“The Holocaust has, consciously or unconsciously, been transformed into a sort of benchmark that is applied in the new context of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. In comparison to the Holocaust, sick Palestinians who die en route to a hospital because of roadblocks seem like a trifle. If, for example, Palestinian children are killed when the Israeli Defence Forces bomb the house of a suspected Palestinian terrorist, the Israelis view them as little more than collateral damage. This impulse to misuse the Holocaust as a yardstick to play down the suffering and injustice done to others overlooks the simple but fundamental truth that all suffering can destroy the life and soul of a human being.

“The severe and widespread psychological damage caused by the Holocaust, intensified by feelings of guilt (whether justified or not), have served as the underpinnings of Jewish extremism. This extremism may manifest itself as religious fundamentalism or aggressive nationalism, as when Jewish settlers celebrated the anniversary of the death of a man who murdered twenty-nine praying Palestinians in cold blood in 1994, and received official sanction to do so. Such abuses are justified by an argument, whether explicitly expressed or not, that essentially says: ‘Until we Jews commit as many horrible crimes as non-Jews have committed against us, we can do whatever we want.’

“This attitude was demonstrated in a most shocking way by the famous Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, who either asked or allowed Henryk Broder, a well-known German Jewish journalist on the editorial staff of the prestigious German weekly Der Spiegel, to write a foreword for the German edition of his book, A Case for Israel. Broder’s foreword includes the following mind-boggling quotation:

‘In the eyes of the general public, [Israel] has made the transformation from a victim to a perpetrator… This is true. Israel is presently more perpetrator than victim. But that is good and it is right. After all, for nearly two thousand years the Jews were in the role of the perennial victims, and their experiences in this role were bad indeed. Perpetrators mostly have a longer life expectancy than victims, and it is much more fun to be a perpetrator.’

“As a survivor of Auschwitz, I have this to say regarding Broder’s appalling remark: I remember extremely well from my days in Auschwitz-Gleiwitz how much fun the camp commander, SS Hauptscharführer Moll, had when he ordered his big Alsatian to attack one of my comrades. He nearly laughed himself to death …”

“Non-Jews, for their part, need to gradually shed their feelings of guilt about the Holocaust and consider themselves free to criticize Jews who commit obvious crimes. No one should be exempt from accountability. Anyone wishing to be known as a friend of the Jews will fail when withholding the critical truth from his Jewish friends. Not confronting criticism can have disastrous consequences in the long run. The illusion of being untouchable can only sustain the continuation of inhuman acts, with the resulting danger that real anti-Semitism will end up finding open doors.

“A real danger is that most Jews will, out of a misguided feeling of loyalty, continue to lend their unqualified support to Israel. As a result, it will become more and more difficult to distinguish between criticism of State policies and criticism of Jewish individuals.

“As we have seen, under the influence of the Enlightenment, the emphasis in the German-Jewish reform movement finally shifted entirely to social ethics, while the Judeocentric and xenophobic passages in the Old Testament had already lost all relevance more than a thousand years before….. Today, however, extremist rabbis of fanatical settler gangs are using these same passages to justify cruel acts against the Palestinians… Extremist Imams, just like the extremist Rabbis among Israeli settlers, personify radical evil. It is therefore essential for our Western democracies to find ways and means of preventing, within the legitimate means provided by democratic constitutional States, such soul-destroying fanatics from continuing their attempts at seduction.”

7. The Failure of Judaism: What the Loss of an Ethical Foundation Tells Us.

The Failure of Israel.

“The present state of affairs in and surrounding Israel is … vastly different from what was once hoped. The works of the so-called New Historians, such as Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe, have shown that the Zionist politicians in charge always intended to occupy the whole area that made up Mandatory Palestine, and saw to it that their military and political power was superior to that of the Arab countries. Doubtless both parties share responsibility for the ever-worsening enmity between the two peoples, but due to its proportionately greater power, Israel bears a greater share of the responsibility. The Israelis have refused to end the often-cruel occupation of that part of the country that was marked out by the UN for the Palestinians. They have also established ever more ‘facts on the ground’ by building additional settlements, roads for Jews only, and a dividing wall that often deviates several kilometers from the official border, thus separating more Palestinians from one another.

“The policies followed by the various governments of Israel have been ineffective with respect to coping with the Palestinian challenge. This means that Israel no longer provides a safe haven for Jews…. one of the main reasons for the massive support by nearly all Jews and most people of good will for the new state in the first decades of its existence…. In terms of achieving this primary goal of the Jews, the State of Israel must be considered as having failed.

“It is bitter and disappointing that a majority of Jews in Israel and the Diaspora seem to have chosen the hard, nationalistic, revengeful side of Judaism. These feelings of bitterness and disappointment are shared by all those Jews (unfortunately a minority) who are consciously aware of the deep social ethics at the heart of Judaism. They include those active in the peace groups in and outside Israel, and the brave Israeli Army ‘refuseniks’ in the occupied territories.

“How all those mentioned who have adopted the ethical side of Judaism feel in detail about the state Judaism finds itself in today, I cannot judge, but I, myself—educated in the moral principles stressed so explicitly by the reformers of the last eighty years before Hitler—am deeply convinced that Judaism has betrayed itself. To those who think I exaggerate, I recommend the letters to the editor received by Rabbi Lerner, the editor of the American Jewish liberal journal Tikkun, after he tried to convince his readers that according to a basic law of Judaism every human being has been created in the image of God. Having had the temerity to argue that Palestinians were also human beings just like the Jews, and that therefore they should be treated as human beings, the death threats he received were frightening in their aggressiveness.

“Eventually, colonialism leads to a deep contempt of the natives. In August 2002 the new Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon used the metaphor of malignancy in saying, ‘The Palestinians are a cancer…an existential threat’. Another statement of his that appears in the same interview shows that this was not a slip of the tongue:

‘There are all kinds of solutions to cancerous manifestations. Some will say it is necessary to amputate organs. But at the moment [by reoccupying Gaza and the Palestinian cities on the West Bank] I am applying chemotherapy, yes.’

“In the same week we find in the same journal ‘Sharon backs Ya’alon Remarks on Cancerous Palestinian Threat’: ‘IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon’s controversial remarks earlier this week were “true and correct” and described “the situation as it is,” Prime minister Ariel Sharon said yesterday. I wonder whether any human being that believes in the humanistic ideas of the Western world could ever be favourably impressed by the discriminatory and dehumanizing thinking of these most prominent Zionists. In early 2003, Sharon was re-elected by an impressive majority of the Israeli society, which obviously endorsed such thinking. I think that I am justified to conclude on this account that Zionism has failed, too.

“Faced with the possibility of the end of Judaism, it is justifiable to ask why the Jews deserved to survive for 2,000 years in the Diaspora in spite of all—or perhaps because of—all the adversities they had to face. From my perspective, the answer is that they had much to contribute to mankind with respect to intellectual and cultural endeavour, and particularly in the field of social ethics. For nearly 2,000 years, they were often the only distinct foreigners in many European countries, they had no political power, and they showed a remarkable instinct for survival as a group. Due to their lack of power, they could only rarely oppress others. On the contrary, after the emancipation they were at the forefront of humanitarian and socially constructive endeavours. The reform of an ancient religion to fit into modern, secularized society and the focus the reformers put on the ethical content of Judaism was a major achievement. It paved the way for the disproportionately large contribution that people with a Jewish background made to society, especially from the second half of the 19th century on. Thus, if Judaism as a whole reached the highest point in its history in the eighty years before Hitler came to power, it is at present in decline. Due to the collective paranoia of an appreciable number (if not the majority) of Jews, they have returned—unnecessarily as I see it—to the dark side of Judaism.

“Israel is rapidly on its way to completely degenerating into a Middle Eastern power in the worst sense of the word. Those in the Diaspora who refuse to utter audible criticism of Israeli policies betray their heritage of being an enlightened people. If this trend continues—and there are no indications that it will change in the foreseeable future—Judaism will have nothing positive to contribute to the world any more. The number of Middle East powers with pre-Enlightenment regimes and views is large enough that the role of a degenerate Jewish state will be of no significance.

”My disappointment is solely concerned with the way Judaism has developed as a body of culture and morals. It seems to me improbable that the pioneer experiment of Israel, which started out full of hope and ideals, can still be saved and that lasting peace and mutual trust between Israelis and Palestinians can still be achieved. The negative forces that were present from the start, especially the disdain with which the Palestinians were looked upon, have prevailed over humanistic idealism and social ethics. However resilient Judaism has shown itself to be, however great the vitality which has enabled it to stand up to nearly two thousand years of challenges in the Diaspora, history appears to be proving itself stronger than this millennia-old culture. Although the long history of the Jews under unremittingly adverse circumstances since antiquity more than testifies to their fortitude, the impact of the Holocaust may have destroyed the innermost fabric, the deepest nature—in short, the essence—of Judaism forever.”