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PARTISAN REVIEW
He then continues by accusing the women and mothers who lived
near the terrorists, as well as the houses that sheltered terrorists, and
ends by blaming everyone in Lebanon for the Holocaust itself, for
which all there will be punished :
I accuse the residents of Lebanon - all of them.
For the Nazis' mistreatment of us in the World War.
Because in every generation, one must see himself
As if he were destroying Hitler
Always, always
And that is what Begin is doing.
I accuse you all!
Naturally.
Because I am always , always the victim.
By literalizing the figure of the Holocaust here, stretching the link–
age to the Holocaust as argument for the war to its breaking point,
the poet seeks to invalidate this figure as a basis for military action.
Just before their afterward to
Fighting and Killing without End,
the editors have reproduced a poster in which Chaim Nachman
Bialik's "Upon the Slaughter" is printed in Arabic and Hebrew, side
by side, overlaid on an Israeli map of Beirut. In this graphic way,
the poster forces the reader quite literally to read the map of Sabra
and Shatilla between and through the lines of Bialik, the national
poet. It also literally re-figures Jewish experience in Arabic, with its
own pool of references, allusions, and tropes-even as it incorpor–
ates into Bialik's lines the suffering of Palestinians . For once "Upon
the Slaughter" is used to represent another pain (as it was by writers
in the Vilna and Warsaw ghettos), it not only organizes the pain of
others, but also absorbs - and thereby remembers - it , as well.
As the greatest test for Abraham's faith had been his aborted
sacrifice ofIsaac, the least bearable kind of suffering in Jewish tradi–
tion seems always to have been that of children. Almost every figur–
ative allusion to the Holocaust in recent Israeli anti-war poetry
begins with an image of suffering children. At some level, it seems to
have been just this unprecedented prospect of having both to fight
children and find them massacred in Sabra and Shatilla that broke
Israel's resolve in this war and turned so many soldiers against it.
For we find once again that even as the memory of Jewish children
murdered in the Holocaust compelled Israelis to fight, it seems also
to have paralyzed them as soldiers sympathetic to suffering children.
Thus, Tzvi Atzmon recites one Jewish calamity after another
