596
PARTISAN REVIEW
We know the meaning of genocide, both those of us who saw the
holocaust and those who were born later. Perhaps this is why the
world will never understand us, will never understand our cour–
age, or comprehend the doubts and the qualms of conscience we
knew during and after the war . Those who survived the holo–
caust, those who see pictures of a father and a mother, who hear
the cries that disturb the dreams of those close to them , those
who have listened to stories - know that no other people carries
with it such haunting visions .
And it is these visions which compel us
to fight and yet make us ashamed of our fighting .
...
[my emphasis
1
... We carry in our hearts an oath which binds us never to
return to the Europe of the holocaust; but at the same time we do
not wish to lose that Jewish sense of identity with the victims .
This movement between past and present persecution, be–
tween the compulsion to fight and the shame of fighting, exemplifies
Israel's own ambivalent need to remember the Holocaust and to
forget it: it is simultaneously the reason for the Jews' life in Israel–
for the state itself-and that which incites empathy in them for their
new, defeated enemies. The consequences of these figures can only
be speculated upon: at what point does this memory, and the subse–
quent empathy it generates for a defeated enemy weaken the resolve
to fight further, and at what point does it make Israel stronger?
Always struggling with this dilemma, Israel found in 1982 a renewed
tension in it, represented now by her soldier-poets in their anti-war
poetry.
Thus, when Prime Minister Menachem Begin responded to a
reporter's questions about Israel's bombing of Beirut, he reflexively
asked, "And if Hitler himself was hiding in a building with twenty
innocent citizens, you still wouldn't bomb the building?" The Prime
Minister was immediately challenged by Holocaust historians Ye–
huda Bauer and Ze'ev Mankowitz and by novelist Amos Oz, among
others, who answered, "No, Mr. Prime Minister, your example is
not an equivalent. ...
"2
In fact, one of the distinguishing charac–
teristics of the anti-war poetry flowing from Lebanon during and
2. Amos Oz, "Hitler kvar met, adoni rosh ha-memshala" [Hitler is Already Dead,
Mr. Prime Minister], in
Chatziat Gevul: Shirim Mimilchemet Lebanon
[Border Crossing:
Poems from the Lebanon War] Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim , 1983, p. 71, in Hebrew.
This translation as well as others from the Hebrew are mine unless noted otherwise.
Also see Yehuda Bauer, "Fruits of Fear,"
Jerusalem Post,
3June 1982, p. 8; and
Ze'ev Mankowitz, "Beirut is not Berlin ,"
Jerusalem Post,
4 August 1982, p. 8.
