Avraham Burg now a pariah in Israel for raising Nazi parallels

[MikeWB]

Avraham Burg now a pariah in Israel for raising Nazi parallels


http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/19/ ... rofile.php

How a Zionist in Israel went from leader to public scourge

By Ethan Bronner

Friday, December 19, 2008

JERUSALEM: There was a time not so long ago when Avraham Burg was viewed by many Israelis as proof that the inherent tensions of Zionism - religious versus secular, insular versus worldly, Jewish state versus state of all its citizens - could be reconciled with grace. Here was a religiously observant Jew with a cosmopolitan outlook, a decorated paratrooper who believed deeply in peace with the Arabs, an eloquent, fast-rising public figure accessible to a broad range of citizens.

Widely known by his nickname Avrum, Burg, a happily married father of six and the son of one of Israel's most admired and longest-serving government ministers, was talked about as a candidate for prime minister. Long before his 50th birthday, he had headed the World Zionist Organization and served as speaker of the country's Parliament.

But four years ago Burg not only walked away from politics. He pretty much walked away from Zionism. In a book that came out last year, and has just been translated and released in the United States, he said Israel should not be a Jewish state, that its law of return granting citizenship to any Jew should be radically altered, that Israeli Arabs were like German Jews during the Second Reich and that, in fact, the entire society felt eerily like Germany just before the rise of Hitler.

In other words, rather than reconciling the country's complex tensions, Burg ended up imploding from them.

"I realized something about myself and Israel that frightened me," he said recently, looking back over the past few years. "I realized that Israel had become an efficient kingdom with no prophecy. Where was it going? What is a Jewish democratic state? What does it mean that Jews define themselves by genetics 60 years after genetics were used against them?"

Israel is no stranger to self-examination. Its leaders and thinkers, indeed many of its average citizens, are aware that nearly everything about the place defies normal categorization and is subject to debate. This is a source of both pride and irritation. But many said that Burg, 53, was not just asking delicate questions. He was poisoning the well from which the nation - and he - had long drawn its water.

As Ari Shavit, a writer for Haaretz newspaper, said to him in an interview when the book was published here, "Your book is anti-Israel in the deepest sense. It is a book from which loathing of Israeliness emanates."

Burg rejected that accusation and still does. He wrote from love, he said, and if the issues he raised are troubling, if they cause a stir, that was very much his aim.

There is no doubt that he raises some serious questions: Is Israel too focused on the Holocaust as a touchstone of history? Can it stay both Jewish and democratic over the long term or is it time to look for another model? What kind of future is there for Israeli Arabs?

Less clear, however, is whether Burg has provided any serious answers. This is partly because his book and discourse vacillate between two poles - congratulating Jews and the Zionist movement for their success thus far and warning them that they are turning into a kind of self-justifying Sparta, a warlike entity on the verge of tragedy.

His central point is summed up in the English title of his book: "The Holocaust is Over; We Must Rise from its Ashes." The Nazi slaughter of six million Jews, he says, has become the central trope of Israeli life, dominating it in a way that distorts the country's outlook. Teenagers are sent on trips to Auschwitz; every enemy of Israel (Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran) is viewed as the reincarnation of Hitler."

Burg has shifted the title of his book over the years. When he was writing it, he called it "Hitler Won." When he published it in Hebrew he called it "Defeating Hitler."

Partly, he said in the interview, his thinking is evolving, and partly his American editors made some smart cuts and suggestions. But it also seems clear that he has modified and adjusted his arguments, especially for a foreign audience. Some of his more alarming assertions in the Hebrew version (for example that the Israeli government would soon be likely to pass the equivalent of the Nuremberg laws, like making it illegal for Jews and Arabs to marry) are gone in the English one. ...

What are Burg's prescriptions? He wants a new Jewish identity focused not on the particular but on the universal, asserting that "if we do not establish modern Israeli identity on foundations of optimism, faith in humans and full trust in the family of nations, we have no chance of existing." He wants Israel to dismantle the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem and replace it with the headquarters for the International Criminal Court, making this the epicenter of international prevention of genocide.

In truth, he has gained almost no traction here with such recommendations. Yet what is perhaps most interesting of all is that Burg continues to play a public role in Israel. He is invited to speak to young people, he writes occasional opinion columns and he is greeted warmly, even embraced, in this city's cafes. This may be because, despite it all, Avrum Burg is family. And whether he likes it or not, Israelis look out for family.

[sullivan]

Nice to see that Avraham Burg has seen some sense, but this worries me more than a little...

He wants Israel to dismantle the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem and replace it with the headquarters for the International Criminal Court, making this the epicenter of international prevention of genocide.

[high_treason]

I know I was thinking the samething, making Jerusalem the center of world government....but still how did he come to the same conclusion as Gilad Atzmon, Norman Finkelstein and Jack Bernstein regarding israeli identity and the holohoax. Yet they don't mention it at all, as if each one is seperate in his ideas. I think it might be to make people think its just an individual opinion and not a growing movement within Jews and Israelis in particular, I also recall the ex editor of Haaretz saying israel is a failed state and should be dismanteled but they always like to make it seem as a voice in the wilderness.