Don't say "Never Again!" unless you really mean it. (And don't pick and choose who you think it is okay to kill.)
Some thoughts on the day after October 7.
So I didn’t post anything in “commemoration” of October 7, 2023, for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most obvious one is that anything I wrote would be lost in the avalanche of often meaningless comments about the the two year “anniversary” of the attack by Hamas and its allies on Israel. Those were war crimes, but so overshadowed now by the genocide being visited by Israel on the people of Gaza (and the people of the West Bank too, where ethnic cleansing is in full throttle) that I would have had to go through the usual ritual of condemning Hamas before criticizing Israel.
Hey, I just did that! So now I can go on and say what I have to say.
Before I do, however, I want to go out on a limb and try to answer the question, “What should Israel have done when it was attacked?”
The answer is pretty simple, but it is part of the Christian tradition and not necessarily the Judeo-Christian tradition. Israel should have turned the other cheek.
That’s right. Israel should have said, hey, what you did was a war crime, it’s unacceptable, atrocious, horrific, but we Jews were victims once and we know we have to try to understand what would drive hundreds of young men to commit such acts under the Hamas leadership. We fought the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto, we engaged in desperate acts before the Holocaust slaughtered us by the millions. So now we are going to admit that we have treated you very badly for a very long time and make a serious peace with you so there will be no more excuses to commit atrocities against us. We will agree to a Palestinian state, we will lift the siege on Gaza, we will honor the right of return at least to a certain extent, do all that you have been asking for all these decades.
We might ask for some security guarantees—a UN PeaceKeeping Force might be necessary for some years to come, but isn’t that better than our killing each other generation after generation? Of course we will not tolerate any more attacks against us, but we will take the initiative to change both the present and the future, and try to prevent generations of future Palestinians from looking at us with little more than revenge and murder in their hearts.
Yeah, dream on, because the current Israeli government and Netanyahu don’t want peace, they want to take over all of Palestine. They always have. So did David Ben-Gurion and early Israeli leaders, as is clear from reading his diaries. But perhaps one day wiser and less murderous, genocidal leaders will rule Israel. Perhaps one day.
But this is not exactly what I wanted to write about today. Rather, I wanted to catch up with something that happened last month in Los Angeles, and is relevant to the current genocide in Gaza and where we find ourselves today. This episode was covered well in Jewish Currents, an excellent publication to which I subscribe and you should too if you don’t already (you don’t have to be Jewish, although I guess it helps.)
Here is what the magazine had to say about what happened at the Holocaust Museum LA. I am going to quote at some length so readers can catch the full essence of events:
On September 4th, the Holocaust Museum LA posted an Instagram graphic depicting interlocked arms of various skin tones, with one arm bearing a concentration camp tattoo. The text accompanying the picture read “‘Never Again’ Can’t Only Mean Never Again For Jews.” Other slides continued this universalist message: “Jews Must Not Let the Trauma of our Past Silence our Conscience. Standing with Humanity does Not Betray Our People. It Honors Them. To Be Jewish is to Remember And to Act.”
Anodyne as these sentences may sound, they were enough to set off a firestorm in the post’s comments section. Some praised the museum for what they believed was a statement against Israel’s violence in Gaza; others were outraged, calling the message “beyond disgraceful.” “Our ancestors are rolling in their graves,” one commenter wrote. On her popular @rootsmetals account, the pro-Israel influencer Debbie Lechtman called the sentiment an “All Lives Mattering of the phrase ‘never again.’” Right-wing advocacy group StopAntisemitism even tried to capitalize on the controversy, commenting, “Donors seeing this – please DM us. We’re happy to help redirect your giving our way, an organization that focuses solely on the Jewish people and fighting the bigotry we face.”
Two days later, the museum intervened, taking down the post and issuing an apology—this time with comments turned off. The graphic had been “part of a pre-planned social media campaign intended to promote inclusivity and community,” the new Instagram post stated, lamenting that it was “easily open to misinterpretation by some as a political statement reflecting the ongoing situation in the Middle East. That was not our intent.” In other words, the post was a call for inclusivity, but there was exactly one case, one group of people, it was not meant to include: the people of Gaza.
All this reminded me of something that the journalist David Rieff wrote years ago in his book about the genocide in Bosnia, “Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West”—
“After Sarajevo, after Srebrenica, we know what ‘Never again!’ means. ‘Never again’ simply means ‘Never again’’ will Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940’s. That is all it means.”
David Rieff, as some may know, was the son of Susan Sontag. I read this book when it first came out in 1995, and thirty years later this phrase and its sad truth have stuck with me. I have quoted it many times, so apologies if you have seen me do it before.
The Jewish Currents article gave some history of the phrase “Never Again!” tracing it to the 1926 poem “Masada” by the Israeli poet Isaac Lambdan. I then consulted several other articles about the origins of the phrase. Apparently it was sometimes used by anti-fascists during the 1930s, then became current among Israelis and some diaspora Jews after 1948; but the phrase really caught on when the right-wing Jewish fanatic Meir Kahane adopted it as the credo of his Jewish Defense League.
(A particularly good history and commentary about the phrase was published very recently by Ben Ratskoff in a Los Angeles Times article, which also described the Los Angeles events.)
Now, Meir Kahane, a convicted domestic terrorist, was assassinated in 1990 in New York City while giving a speech urging Jews to emigrate to Israel before it was “too late.” His killer was an Egyptian born U.S. citizen, who was later convicted for the crime.
If Kahane had not been murdered, what would he be doing right now? Is there any real doubt about it? Unless he had an unlikely late-in-life conversion, he would be cheering on the genocide in Gaza. He might even be sitting among those Israelis in the hills overlooking Gaza who watch the slaughter for entertainment.
For people like Kahane, “Never Again!” means just what David Rieff said it meant: Never again will Germans kill Jews in the 1940s. Otherwise, the sky is the limit if we hate another people enough to dehumanize them and then kill them.
But I do have some hopes. We should fight to keep the phrase “Never Again!” and make it mean what most decent people today think it means. No to genocide, no to war crimes, no to murder, no and again no. Never. No.
This is hardly the first time you have read my thoughts on these subjects, and it will not be the last. Thanks to all those who continue to do so. There are others much more eloquent on this subject, and others who are doing much more than I am about it. What we have in common is wanting words and phrases to mean what they say, without exception. That struggle goes on, and will always go on.
*********************************************************************************************************
To share this post, or to share “Words for the Wise,” please click on these links.
Comments policy: Please be polite and respectful at all times.