double click on the images you can have the magnification (Of course they are both When updating from ...) 02/03/2007 The memory of the Holocaust and Israel's future, a speech by David Grossman
title: "If Israel could think of the future '
I belong to the generation of the first decade after the Shoah (the Hebrew word use, rather than the Holocaust). I was born in 1954, and as my classmates, I met the survivors.
We saw them, the survivors of the Holocaust, we have heard at night sometimes screaming in their nightmares. When we find the courage to ask our parents to tell us about those experiences, often refused to talk about it. We grew up in this silence. Some twenty years later, my firstborn, who had just three years, returned from kindergarten upset and asked me what was the Shoah, who were the Nazis, what they did and why they had done. And I suddenly discovered my reluctance to talk to my son. Because I realized that when exposed to the concept of those atrocities, the landscape of the cruelty of mankind, that child is still so innocent and naive would be contaminated in some way, changed. Would never be the same again. And I thought that while elsewhere, in other cultures, parents are embarrassed when they expose their children the facts of life, we are here we must begin from the facts of death, so closely intertwined with our lives here.
I'll do a brief "tour" in the area devastated by a disaster, where the facts of life and the facts of death are intertwined in our psyche, our being Jews and Israelis.
remember an episode that I was once told by two brothers born in Vilnius, Lithuania. They were children during the Second World War, and one afternoon they were playing football with some friends in the courtyard of their school, when suddenly there was a raid in the city, were captured.
An hour later they were already locked in the train that brought them to the extermination camp. And looking out through the cracks of the wagon saw their friends continued to play football in the schoolyard. For them, the experience was crucial, which wanted to give testimony, after long years of suffering of the Holocaust: quest'insulto deep, and the notion of how easy it was to tear the fabric of life, their daily reality. For me, this story has echoes wider.
is almost a parable of the ease with which Jews can still be uprooted from society, from countries ranging from the states where they lived, sometimes for generations. In those countries and in those societies, even when they manage to assimilate, in a sense will always be foreigners, will move as if they were constantly surrounded by a dotted line.
For me, the lack of trust is an existential condition of the typical symptoms of Jewish generations and perhaps thousands of years and the fact that we Jews do not feel at home in the world - a sensation at its most horrific event in the time of the Holocaust. A
fifty-nine years since the birth of the State of Israel, we realize that you have brought here this sense of uncertainty. Although we live for nearly six decades in our sovereign state, the earth continues to move under our feet. Our existence is not guaranteed. The State of Israel was founded to provide a home and refuge to the Jewish people, but clearly this is not the best refuge for Jews, is not a place where they can stay safe. On the contrary, we often see that the Jews are the target of unremitting violence, and our existence is at stake here, perhaps more than in many other places in the world. Unfortunately, Israel is not for us what we wanted, a place where every jew will feel absolutely at home, how you feel each of you in your country. Israelis there is still this sense of calm and confidence that should be able to have anyone really at home.
But before we talk about this house I want to focus on its walls, on the borders of our country. As you know, over the past sixty years since the day of birth of the State of Israel, has never spent a decade without its borders mutassero.
not pass through all the turmoil, wars and changes in boundary lines between us and our neighbors, suffice it to say that these changes have been incessant, of course to the north and east, where the boundaries are more ambiguous, but also south, between us and our neighbors to the Egyptians. In the minds of the Israelis, the only stable is the western border: the sea. And it strikes me that for us, intuitively, just the element more fluid, more labile and changeable landscape represents the borderline more solid and stable. The Israelis do not have a concept inherent, clear and real boundaries. Living like that is a bit 'like being in a house with movable walls, which are moved continuously, and never know exactly where it ends where it begins its own space and that of others. If you live in a state of mind like that, others are always tempted to invade, and by instinct tend to over-protection, which means the aggressive reactions. His behavior will always be characterized by something extreme virulence. And it will be unable to respond to a situation in an articulate way, to perceive the nuances. In a sense, Israel is playing, here reconstructing one of the most enduring anomalies that characterized the Jewish people in the diaspora, and the tragedy of his existence in the last two thousand years. The anomaly of a people living among other peoples, most often hostile and suspicious. The lines of demarcation between the Jews and other peoples have been most of the time issue, or not at all clear, and each contact always in danger of being perceived by some and by others as a threat, a danger of penetration into sensitive areas of identity and potentially explosive.
I dream of the day on which the State of Israel will finally have stable boundaries, fixed and defensible, recognized by the United Nations and the entire world, including Arab countries, the United States and Europe of course. Borders fixed by a process is not unilateral, through negotiations with former enemies and reciprocal agreements, and not as Israel is doing today, with the imposition of the wall which is surrounding. The sense of this new frontier will be agreed that security and identity, which will allow the people of Israel for the first time to feel at home. And finally to arbitrate within, for the first time, the dilemma that has marked his entire life.
Decide whether we are people of space or time. We are the people of eternity, leolam am, as we say in Hebrew? Six thousand years of conscience - said the philosopher George Steiner - have a homeland.
So, we are a people six thousand years, a people of eternity, with nostalgia for this place - Eretz Israel - but no hurry to settle here, even if you offer this possibility because we exist in the sphere more universal, more abstract version of the religion and culture, pure and simple nostalgia. Or we are now mature, prepared to begin a new phase - a phase which will be the full realization of the process begun in 1948 with the creation of the State of Israel.
I talked about space, but I would like to talk a little 'time too. Sixty years after the creation of the State of Israel, many Israelis have no certainty about its future, and wonder whether the next fifty or sixty years, this state will continue to exist. Again, everyone wants a strong, is so important to our very being. But there is always a certain fear in the hearts trembling. The Israelis can not be sure of having a future in Israel as can be, I believe, everyone in your country. I think probably a question like this has never occurred to an Egyptian citizen, Chinese, Italian, German or American. While for us it is a perennial shadow over our heads. And 'quite natural that such an American newspaper to publish the projected crop yields expected in the U.S. in 2025. But no sane Israeli will never prepared for a future so far. And 'perhaps for this reason that often the policy of our government's plan leaves much to be desired. As for me, I can testify that when I think of Israel in 2025 immediately feel in my heart a kind of click - as if I had violated a taboo by providing a dose of over-abundant future.
My hope, my hope is that if you come to set boundaries stable and solve the problems between Israel and its neighbors, it may also begin to cure some ills, to overcome that sense of non-acceptance of Israel and Jews. And to regain a normal political universal in past centuries has been closed to us, the Jews - even though fifty-nine years now we have a state. Why this is perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Jewish people: the fact that throughout history the other peoples, other religions, particularly Christianity and Islam, have seen the Jews as a symbol or metaphor for something else - as a parable, a religious lecture on some original sin. Have not ever seen for what it is in itself: a nation among other nations - human beings among other human beings.
I'm talking about something very thin, with a deep sense of alienation from the rest of the world. This sense of existential alienation of the Jewish people in their relations with other nations may perhaps be truly understood only by the Jews themselves. I'm talking about the aura of mystery, enigma that surrounded the Jewish people during generations. An enigma that time and again pushed other nations to seek a solution in many ways, by attributing to Jews and biological definitions racist, or lock yourself away in the ghettos, behind fences, confining their existence in certain areas, in specific professions, until ' Finally, horrible attempt to give a Jewish enigma "final solution". For two thousand years Jews have been expelled and exiled in many different ways, whether open or cleverly masked by the political reality, from normality, the practical reality of what is called the family of peoples, the human family. Were stripped of their humanity, with measures sometimes very sophisticated and knowledgeable of demonization, and sometimes even idealization. But demonizing and idealizing in fact mean the same thing: they are two sides of the same coin, dehumanization. The jew has been treated as something exceptional, mysterious, metaphysical, metaphorical, with a system of internal control, a constitution different from common, with supernatural powers or even lower nature - as in the definition coined by the Nazis Untermensch .
Judas, deicide, the Antichrist, the wandering jew, the eternal jew, jew poisoner of wells and the generator of plagues, and of course the Elders of Zion that conspire to take control of the world, and many other satanic figures and grotesque as that of Shylock or other similar, that dot the folklore, religion, culture and even science. Maybe that's why Jews have found some solace in self-idealization, in regarded as the chosen people - a perception which I think is also very problematic.
Even today, the president of a Member State of the United Nations, Iran, declare openly that Israel should be eradicated because it is the cause of the ills of the world. In his eyes, Israel is something like an evil, an evil existence. And his call is enthusiastically by many in the world, from different religions and cultures.
If we look at very recent past - the years 1993-1994, beginning of the Oslo process - we can remember a dramatic change of the perception that the Israelis had in the world and themselves. In that short time the Israelis began to understand the intoxicating taste of being part of a new world and modern, to be accepted in totality more progressive, civilized, liberal and secular, in a kind of normality to a people among the peoples. He had outlined a new opportunity to create between Israel and the rest of the world a different reporting system, less frantic, more egalitarian and based on reciprocity. But it was a brief moment, too short. Clearly, in recent years, after relations with the Palestinians ended up in a dead end, have lost hope and the threat perception has prevailed, even for the world's growing animosity towards what is happening in Israel and at times its very existence. With the strengthening of anti-Semitism, the demonization of Israel, calls to wipe the Jewish state. This has sucked again wounded in the tragic Jewish Israelis, and reviving the most painful scars, the memories most crippling. So much so that the Israelis always been more open to opportunities, the hopes, the ability to regenerate that part of Israel and for us it was a sort of permanent promise, in recent years, is shrinking more and more, is wiped out, kept back in old channels of the traumatic and painful history and memory of the Jewish people.
Anxiety Jewish experience of persecution, victims of the past, the sense of isolation and loneliness in the world are deeply engraved in us, in our collective psyche. Because for us, the fear is still there. Sometimes it is depressing to see to what extent is always present. When I am abroad, especially in Europe, I often note that when we speak of the Holocaust refers to what happened then, in an earlier time - but when we take over, in Hebrew or in any other language, we refer to those events which have happened there: there's a huge difference, huge, between the concept of 'when' and the 'where'. Who speaks of events in the time it refers to a past that will never be repeated. Closed. While referring them to a place, which means that part of the potential of human behavior from somewhere else, in parallel with our existence here, that danger can always come back. In that Israelis do not escape. As if they were condemned to this way of perceiving reality, the intensity and uniqueness of the trauma, but also by the recurrence of the threats to Israel.
Once again we must note that even the latest generation of Israelis - the "new Jews" believed that even now freed from the anxieties of their parents - was confronted every day with the memory of the Holocaust, almost always ordered to return to that past, at all levels of life, associations, codes of conduct, in view of the world in ethical decisions and policies, and early in the smallest things, the problems of everyday life minutes. Again and again we realize that even if you do not want it, we are always under the heavy shadow of what happened there, in that country. We are always the pigeons of the Holocaust. It will be very difficult for Israelis to get rid of their anxieties, from distorted from their past by war, violence they experience every day, as it is sometimes difficult for a person free from a defect, a physical or mental tare around which he built his whole personality. Sometimes it seems to me that our tragic history, along with the tragic situation that we live here in the Middle East, it falls on me like a tare, personal and national. Many of us have become accustomed to the distortion of our situation, so that they refuse to believe in the possibility of alternatives. Some people build entire political and religious ideology to ensure the continuity of this deformation. These are the real dangers that Israel must overcome as soon as possible.
This country needs to experience the peace, and not only because peace is essential for its security, its economy and so on, but also to be able, in a sense, to know himself, becoming aware of what is still encapsulated as dormant in his be. To discover the routes of its identity and character, the existential choices that have been voluntarily suspended pending the war to end, waiting to be permitted and lawful living life fully explore all the dimensions, and not just that of restricted survival at any cost. And 'This is the insidious trap that for generations has been closed on us Jews and Israelis. We are a nation that throughout its history has survived to live out his life, but now we live just to survive. That is nothing. Life is much more than mere survival - especially when you can have a military power capable of ensuring, or to support in reality, a few steps more courageous and rational. Sometimes, when I hear the Israelis - and sometimes very young - about themselves, their anxieties, that not even dare to aspire to a better future when I will reveal, in myself or whoever is close to me, the 'existential anxiety intensity, the weight of historical memory, I measure the full depth of this damage, the scar that history has had on us. In a climate of lasting and stable peace, perhaps we can heal from these tares, these anxieties.
If Israel is at peace with its neighbors, will have the opportunity to explore and express all his talent, his uniqueness, and to experience what normal is capable of performing as a people, as a society. We'll see if the State of Israel will create a reality at once spiritual and practical, full of life and inspiration and a spirit of solidarity if we, citizens of Israel, we will free ourselves from the destructive metaphor that other nations are projected onto we saw in us the eternal foreigners, the excommunicated, perennial among other nomadic peoples, if we go back to being a people of flesh and blood, and not only a symbol, not just an abstract idea or a fable or a stereotype. Neither idealized nor demons, but a people on its own land, a people whose country is surrounded by international borders and peacefully agreed and defensible. A people who can enjoy not only a sense of continuity and security, but also a rare experience of reality, practicality, to be finally part of life and not a story larger than life, as in the past. Perhaps then the Israelis will be able to experience and enjoy something that after six decades of independence still do not really know: a deep sense of security, existential security, something that I would call a solidity of existence as we express it in a moving Saturday night in our prayer, the prayer of Mussafia: "What you can plant within our borders." You
delegates, who resided here on behalf of your respective countries, have an important role to play in helping these hopes and aspirations. In many ways, Israel is not a state like any other with which we maintain your relationships. If you want to play a positive role in this area, helping Israel to resolve conflicts with its neighbors and its enemies, you must be careful not only as diplomats, but as human beings, not only in your formal role as representatives of a foreign state, but almost as psychologists, to capture all the nuances, all the motions, even the most subtle, crossing the soul, the psyche of the Israelis. Be sensitive to their anxieties, their life experience that is truly unique. And help them distinguish between the imaginary fears resulting from past traumas, the echoes of their history and the dangers they face real and concrete in their everyday life. Your responsibility, your commitment to the good of Israel and its existence is born to the fact that a small portion of the infirmities and weaknesses of this country is the result, the consequence of what has been the attitude of ' Europe, the attitude of the whole world towards the Jews.
course, Israel is above criticism. I think it is your duty to criticize Israel when it deserves it, but at the same time to help this country not to fall back again and again into the traps that have been strained by his own weaknesses. And to hear what the Israelis in their hearts still can not believe: that they can have a safe and legitimate in the world. That the world may be the home, the homeland of the Jews. You have to remind them that there are alternatives to a life of violence, hatred and fear. And do everything possible to make a climate that gives Israel the ability to communicate with its neighbors in order to be able to realize the extraordinary human potential we have here. You can do much most of what you are doing today. Do not let the sun in the hands of the Americans all the responsibility for this work of mediation to achieve peace between Israel and its neighbors. Because the Americans - I am sorry to say - in recent years are not doing nearly nothing, and sometimes they do indeed do everything to prevent any possibility of dialogue between Israel and its neighbors. How are they doing in these days, with regard to the negotiations, possible and desirable, with Syria. Do not hesitate. And keep in mind that in times like these, when in the presence of an empty action, a lack of vision and leadership in the world, is much easier to act for change. History will not forgive you if you continue to stand aside, allowing Israel and its neighbors to let in vain for the last time profit margins, while it is still possible to resolve this conflict.
(Translated by Elizabeth Horvat)
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