EDITH KURZWEIL
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educate the educators, rewrite the books, provide the democratic struc–
tures, and so on, in post-communist Russia and its former satellites.
Joachim Knoll, of the University of Bochum, saw the location of
minorities in terms of a pendulum that, throughout history, has swung
back and forth between kindness and xenophobia.
An
integrated society,
he stated, guarantees the preservation of language, religion, and culture;
and it stops referring to immigrants as "foreigners," especially after they
have been in the country for many years. Germany, he proved rather in–
controvertibly, "slowly is developing from a national country to an im–
migration country" which, however, still needs to be integrated. In his
talk, as well as in those of the other German participants, both shame for
the past and determination to help avoid anything resembling another
Holocaust - anywhere - could be detected, when one of the Germans
warned against "hidden" anti-Semitism and fundamentalism and suggested
that eliminating illiteracy and "assistance for self-assistance" to the third
world would help alleviate inequalities, and when a number of others
presented their thoughtful studies of contributions by Jewish emigre
writers and intellectuals.
. At 10 a.m. on April 30th, sirens initiated two minutes of silence to
remember the victims of the Holocaust. When immediately afterwards we
continued our discussion on Peace Education, I felt compelled to remind
people that the existence of Israel is not just an academic question, that
some Jews who had managed to escape Hitler were doomed because
their ships were being barred from every port in the world: if Israel had
existed in the 1930s, they might have been saved. I am certain I was
influenced not only by the memory of my relatives who perished in
Auschwitz, but by Peter Jarvis's excellent analysis of the "universal
strangerhood" that dominates modern society and which needs an "out–
group" to confirm the " in-group's" inner reality and sense of belonging
and identity.
Addressing national and religious components of the Arab-Israeli
conflict, Meron Benvenisti enumerated its components. Religious differ–
ences, he said, can be incorporated in a sovereign state. But when na–
tionalism is added, trungs get murky: to outsiders the clash appears to be
over territory, but this is not clear to insiders, if only because collective
identity and nationalism are distinct as well as mutually exclusionary. In
Israel the dispute is not over borders or over colonialism; it is over the
patrimony
of the land and thus is endemic, organic. Therefore, concluded
Benvenisti , this conflict cannot be resolved but must be managed. His
Arab counterpart argued that the roots of the struggle were in the feel–
ings for territory, and that these feelings had become stronger as the im–
pact of the Islamic reform movement had grown, along with its increas–
ing focus on religion rather than on nation. And he predicted that
