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June 18, 2009
Over the past few weeks, many in the Jewish community focused much of their attention on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, President Barack Obama’s trip to the Middle East, and Netanyahu’s “New Beginnings” speech aimed at the Muslim world.
Most of the media concentrated on the question of whether there would be an agreement between the United States and Israel on the two-state solution and the freezing of all settlement construction. In addition to these major areas of apparent disagreement, there were two other matters that drew only minimal attention but could have policy implications in the one instance and historical implications in the other.
In light of North Korea’s apparent detonation of an underground nuclear weapon and the testing of missiles just prior to President Obama’s departure to the Middle East, it would have seemed that the potential Iranian development of nuclear weapons would have demanded more of the president’s attention during his trip. Even in Germany, it did not receive the specific connection one might have expected.
Clearly, there is something embarrassing and fundamentally flawed in the way in which the West is addressing North Korea’s failure to honor its previous commitments not to continue testing nuclear weapons and missile technology. Despite economic embargoes, sanctions, and intermittent weapons inspections, North Korea has continued to develop and expand its testing program and to flout efforts by the six-powers nations to control and limit its nuclear activities.
The mullahs in Iran and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, must be laughing out loud at the near-pathetic Western inability to stop or limit the North Korean weapons program. If this is the best the West can muster, what chance is there they will agree on a program of sanctions to inhibit Iran?
In historical terms, there was another sequence that pointed to the upsetting use and misuse of “Holocaust” language. Despite President Obama’s moving visit to Buchenwald and his direct attack on Holocaust deniers, the president and others need to leave the Holocaust in Buchenwald. The Holocaust must maintain its uniqueness, as the Nazi policy to murder the Jews. While admirably attempting to initiate a new relationship with the world’s Muslims, Obama stumbled by implying, however tangentially, that there is a analogy between the murder of the Jews and the suffering of the Palestinian people.
Similarly, implying that the founding of Israel was the world’s expiation for the death of six million Jews by the Nazis can be read — as it is by many Arab and Muslims leaders (as well as in their children’s schoolbooks) — as confirmation of their view that the Jews have no historical right or claim to the Land of Israel independent of their persecution in Europe.
The government of Israel clearly needs to do more to change the status quo in its relationship with the Palestinians, and Israel bears significant responsibility for their continued suffering. But there is no legitimate analogy between the suffering of the Palestinian people and that of the Jews in the Holocaust. In fact, it might be suggested, drawing this fallacious correlation even does a disservice to efforts to focus proper attention on the Palestinian cause.
Nuclear arms proliferation is reaching a point where diplomacy and “engagement” may be meaningless gestures. The Far East and likely the Middle East will soon have to live with nuclear weapons in the hands of countries and leaders whose values and politics may lead the world to a very different resolution than that which emerged from the nuclear arms race of the Cold War.
At the same time, the lessons of the Holocaust as a singular historical event are fading into a common definition for every significant humanitarian crisis. In both cases, Jews and the State of Israel are the losers.
Dr. Gilbert N. Kahn is a professor of political science at Kean University in Union (gkahn@kean.edu).
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