THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

Judaism and paranoid Zionism is over. The time for integration in a free, positiveworld has come. The faith of the Jewish people in the world and in humanity must berehabilitated.Our obsessive need for heroism is caused by a great weakness and a lack ofconfidence. We no longer rely on unequivocal inner strength. Military heroism, likemany physical manifestations of force, has become part of the nation’s obsessionwith its appearance. The hero develops his muscles, admires his reflection in thepond, the house mirrors, and other shiny surfaces. Israeli belligerent heroism, and theunnecessary brutality that comes with it, are integral parts of a narcissistic nation thatadores itself. Isn’t narcissism caused by lack of self-confidence? After too manyyears of the world’s indifference, the heroism of the rebels and the fighters created apleasant illusion of normalcy, of historical continuity and a heritage of battle, struggleand heroism, like all the other nations whose family we wished to join. The Frenchhad Joan of Arc, and we have Hannah Czenes. The English had Robin Hood in theSherwood Forest and we have Yitzhak Sade in the Carmel and Menashe forests. TheSwiss have Wilhelm Tell, who shot the apple and never missed, and we have oneeyedMoshe Dayan, who lost the eye to a sniper’s bullet “when in Syria the Palmahmarched,” as the song goes.The missing link between Bar Kokhva (a.d. 135), the last physical hero of theancient Jewish history, and the heroes of 1948 and the later struggles is found in theghetto rebels. As a military event, the Warsaw ghetto uprising was not as importantcompared the multitude of battles in World War II. When, several years ago, an IDFcommander said that in order to enter and control a refugee camp we needed tostudy and learn the doctrine used by the Germans to gain control and occupy theWarsaw ghetto, he caused a great, hypocritical protest. Saying this, he revealed somevery precise axioms. The first is the overt and covert association between whathappened there and what happens here: moral deterioration and its extensions. As Ihave written many times about our actions in the territories, this is not the Holocaust!It is not all good, either. The commander’s technical truth was no less important thanthe ethics of it: the Warsaw ghetto was in essence no more than one big refugeecamp. This is not an extraordinary military story or operation. Nothing that the fewbrave rebels did could have shortened the colossal war or brought down the evil Nazidictatorship. Not one Jewish life was saved. The rebels rebelled, the Germanssuppressed, and at the same time other Jews were methodically and mercilessly