92
MARY Mc:CARTHY
being that Papal Nuncio in Hungary who sent a protest to Horthy
against the deportation of the Jews, adding that the Vatican's protest
did not spring "from a false sense of compassion."
The parable did not speak, obviously, to the mass of Jews. But it
spoke to privileged Jews, those with money and connections, for
to
the
extent that privileged Jews were privileged, entitled to special treatment,
endowed with power over others, they in effect were "Gentiles." The
lesson, then, as I saw it, was addressed exclusively to the Gentiles, who
were on trial through their representative, Eichmann. Some-a few–
were exonerated, and no Jew, as a Jew, figured among the accused; the
Jews were the witnesses, bearing testimony for or against us.
No Gentile who was an adult in the years of the Final Solution can
read
Eichmann in Jerusalem
without some remorse and self-questioning.
American Jews, far from the scene then and now, may feel certain
misgivings too, reading ·the book, especially the richer ones who paid
large sums of money to the Nazis for the ransom of their relatives
and did not concern themselves too greatly with the fate of "ordinary"
Jews. Miss Arendt's harshness on this point may seem to them unkind
and inappropriate in what they still think of as a time of mourning; it is
like somebody who criticizes at a funeral. But the question is whether
those who merely grieve for their fellow beings show more compassion
or proper feeling than those who in retrospect seek remedies, since to
seek remedies implies a continuing concern that what happened shall
never happen again. The State of Israel promises that to Jews, politically,
by offering them a homeland, an army, and a foreign policy. "You are
safe now," it tells them. Miss Arendt is not interested in the safety
of Jews but in the safety of humanity. Trying to learn from history, she
is thinking ahead on behalf of other "superfluous" people who may be
the next "Jews" on someone's list for "resettlement in the east." Yet
the official Israeli lesson supposedly taught by the trial-the need for
a strong national state-is at very sharp variance with any parable for
the Gentiles, i.e., not only non-Jews but all the tribes and the peoples.
As a sample of moral fineness on the part of Miss Arendt's critics,
I offer the following sentence from Abel's piece:
"If
a man holds a gun
at the head of another and forces him to kill his friend, the man with the
gun will be aesthetically less ugly than the one who out of fear of death
has killed his friend and perhaps did not even save his own life."
Forces
him to kill his friend? Nobody by possession of a weapon can force a
man to kill anybody; that is his own decision.
If
somebody points a gun
at you and says "Kill your friend or I will kill you," he is
tempting
you
to kill your friend. That
is
all.
