THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

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When my initial courtship of Yael came to an end, I decided to invite her to myfamily’s home. I needed to prepare my parents for this historic meeting. I told themthat I had a new girlfriend.My mother smiled, and my father seemed puzzled.“So?” he said.“She will come here tomorrow for the first time. Don’t mess it up,” I begged.I knew my father’s endless curiosity for other people’s backgrounds, andoccupations. At the time I did not understand why he stored so much informationabout the Jews he met, never to be forgotten. I was afraid that my young friendwould be afraid of him and run away from me forever.“Don’t worry,” my mother said, trying to ease my anxiety.“Tell me, who is she?” my father asked.I told them she was French, and that she had emigrated from France not long ago .. .“Nu, nu,” my father concluded, and returned to his business.Yael came over the following day, nervous about meeting my parents for the firsttime, not to mention meeting a minister, a Jewish minister, for the first time in her life.As I feared, my father broke his promise and launched into his usual interrogation:“Who are you?” “Who are your parents?” “Where are you from?” Only the notoriousKGB interrogation lamp was missing in that small room that seemed to grow smallerwith every passing moment.She finally confessed meekly, “I am from Strasbourg.” That was the beginning of agreat friendship between my father and Yael. “Why did you say she’s French?” hesnapped at me, “She’s one of our own; she’s from Alsace. Bismarck gave us backAlsace-Lorraine in the 1870s. Strasbourg is ours!”So spoke the former German Jew, with a sudden burst of national pride. For amoment he relived his German identity, forgetting that it no longer existed.Bismarck’s victory and the repatriation of the Alsace-Lorraine province generatedrhetoric and acts in Germany that may sound familiar to Israelis. Although the landhad belonged briefly to Germany a few hundred years earlier, at the end of thenineteenth century most Alsatians were French. In a parliamentary debate in Berlin,
Sonnemann said, “You will never be able to force them to be German.” The patrioticpress retorted by writing that the re-education of the Alsatians “would commencewith the help of a whip. These alienated children should feel our fist. Love will followthe taming.” The rhetoric of “the Arabs only understand force” was being composed.So it was then, and later, and so it is with us.Service in the Israeli military is key to dignified life as a civilian, or so it was formany years. Despite the recent erosion of their status, the Israeli Defense Forces arestill the foundation and launching pad of the Israeli civilian, and his service is part ofhis identity. Israeli Air Force pilots are still considered among the best in the world.Some intelligence and information technology units are the launching pads for thosehoping to be part of the high-tech industry. Military service opens doors. Formersenior officers are installed in key positions of the civilian administration and citygovernment, and more than one-fourth of Knesset members of the Labor Party areformer generals or colonels. I often hear teenagers deliberating where it would bebest for them to serve, with a view to post-army life. Any debate on conscientiousobjection includes the sentence, “If you don’t serve, it will hurt your career later on.”Some elite units produce future army chiefs of staff, who then enter politics andsometimes end up in the prime minister’s office. Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, EhudBarak, and Shaul Mofaz moved directly from the top army post to the ministries ofdefense or the interior or to prime minister as if it were the most natural path. Inshort, the military is where Israeli leaders are made. We did not invent this system; itis borrowed from Bismarck’s Germany.Both the German and Israeli militaristic regimes excluded entire populations. InGermany, thousands of Jews who were qualified to become officers, and who hadserved in the German army as early as 1880, were never commissioned. In Israel, noArab (more specifically, no non-Jew) will ever be made a chief of staff or the primeminister, nor in the foreseeable future will a non-Jew sit in the Knesset securitysubcommittees or on the Mossad, or on any committee that deals with nuclearcapability. In this sense, Israeli Arabs are like the German Jews of the Second Reich.I must reiterate that the comparison is not between the status of today’s Israeli Arabsand that of the Jews during the Holocaust, not even in the pre-war Nazi years, but
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THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER; WE MUSTRISE
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THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER; WE MUST RISE
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In loving memory of my late parents
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Notes 243Index 247
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none of this could have happened.An
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word “former” is attached to yo
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This is how I explain the fierce pu
Page 20 and 21: eternal renewal of the world. But n
Page 22 and 23: CHAPTER 1
Page 24 and 25: I WAS BORN IN JANUARY 1955 IN GERMA
Page 26 and 27: When I finished writing my first bo
Page 28 and 29: I had heard her say that more than
Page 30 and 31: of my late father. We traveled far
Page 32 and 33: CHAPTER 2THE HOLOCAUST, EVER-PRESEN
Page 34 and 35: youngest son, Noam, did not join th
Page 36 and 37: Bank; New Age and Buddhist experime
Page 40 and 41: WHERE TO BEGIN? HOW DO YOU START CL
Page 42 and 43: ight, and Eban, if the 1967 boundar
Page 46 and 47: MY NEIGHBOR RAMI’S PARENTS CAME F
Page 48 and 49: When he woke up, he continued the c
Page 50 and 51: power. The local leadership of Ben
Page 52 and 53: How could it be that everything “
Page 54 and 55: As the Zionist movement aspired to
Page 56 and 57: everything changed dramatically and
Page 58 and 59: “Masada will not fall again” be
Page 60 and 61: So, three traumatized communities c
Page 64 and 65: WHAT COLOR WAS THE HOLOCAUST? PROBA
Page 66 and 67: seemed to side with me and my frien
Page 68 and 69: into ploughshares and wait patientl
Page 72 and 73: only during the long incubation per
Page 74 and 75: liked to compare the Palestinian Na
Page 76 and 77: Fanon is an expert witness worth li
Page 78 and 79: prevention.” How targeted could i
Page 80 and 81: themselves to speak words that shou
Page 82 and 83: followed the war? If not, how did h
Page 84 and 85: war, therefore they should not know
Page 86 and 87: CHAPTER 6LESSONS FROM THE HOLOCAUST
Page 88 and 89: “nationhood,” including its int
Page 90 and 91: in anger over the Dreyfus Affair, b
Page 92 and 93: 1943, upon hearing of the Warsaw gh
Page 94 and 95: is compared to the Shoah, dwarfed b
Page 96 and 97: ad fortune, to express anger, to re
Page 98 and 99: e the cause of constant political f
Page 100 and 101: use the refugee problem to denounce
Page 102 and 103: Almost everywhere the Shoah serves
Page 104 and 105: with the moral parity among the chi
Page 108 and 109: THE HIGH POINT OF MY SEVENTH GRADE
Page 110 and 111: at least, before the Warsaw ghetto
Page 112 and 113: than a million Jews who had walked
Page 114 and 115: ebels and the disciples of the yout
Page 116 and 117: exterminated. A group of Jewish you
Page 118 and 119: grenade. Natan Rapoport, the sculpt
Page 120 and 121:
we will not respond. We will sacrif
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against Us.” It is self-evident,
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of now we got lost. We need to retu
Page 126 and 127:
CHAPTER 8
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BECAUSE OF ADOLF EICHMANN, I CAN’
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discussion about garbage technology
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gap between my father’s world and
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independent Jewish Commonwealth, th
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Eichmann harmony at the right pitch
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the victors at Nuremberg presented,
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the highest order. Without people l
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The landlady did not lie, and never
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of whom only one was a non-Jew, a g
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The Grunwald trial had become the K
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Canaanite left, and the yearling of
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to shape a new Israeli generation t
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trial . . . he would use expression
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light to humanity. But they continu
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suspended daily, and not just to ev
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minister who came from “there,”
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CHAPTER 9
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“WHO REMEMBERS THE ARMENIAN HOLOC
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. . . an ideologue with firm belief
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Today we are armed to the teeth, be
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and Romanians. We would have shut o
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It turned out that the Dalai Lama,
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War II, an estimated half a million
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An empire without colonies launched
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So familiar and yet so far removed
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was the first governor of southwest
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mention other states, the Jewish wo
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square and deserted the universal h
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peoples’ holocausts. In a world i
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we raise our guests and force-feed
Page 188 and 189:
CHAPTER 10
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JUDAISM IS A CIVILIZATION THAT IS T
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the Jewish Pantheon, namely in the
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dogma are the most dangerously viol
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His words express no condolences an
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most meaningful clash to take place
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Korah’s racism lacks the mechanis
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aka HaRambam. All of them belong to
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lecture, a professor stood up.“I
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The revolution that did not happen
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the deceitful war in Lebanon, for t
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and not in Le Monde, in French? His
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a new prayer book, a Siddur, in whi
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CHAPTER 11MAKE GOD SMILE AGAIN
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Does it really matter who is guilty
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Divine intervention did not come to
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enemy-brethren? My Shoah question i
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wept, and kept watch; but when the
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acceptance of those who were discri
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and impatient beliefs win over many
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Chinese tyranny.The sum total point
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—Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Sigmund
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and outlooks. It was not just a dif
Page 234 and 235:
CHAPTER 12
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HOW MANY TIMES SHOULD A MAN DIE? H
Page 238 and 239:
Israelis made a motion. So I starte
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innovation that included my sister
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heard this melody at any other home
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nations that do not know you and on
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I never made secret of my opinion t
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admissible. I am sorry, but this do
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prime minister with Germany’s pre
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only synagogue where the cantor Mei
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3. An official press release by Net
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6. Yehuda Elkana, “In Defense of
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INDEXAbraham, 107, 158, 178, 184, 2
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British Mandate of Palestine, 99-10
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faith, 206-9, 211, 213, 240Finkielk
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198, 203-16, 226, 231-3, 239; color
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Jonas, Hans, 205-6Jordan, 67, 82-3,
Page 268 and 269:
Namibia, 161-5, 174Napoleon III, 52
Page 270 and 271:
Rwanda, 86, 144, 151-2, 155, 158, 1
Page 272 and 273:
Ukraine, 29, 32, 36, 74United Natio
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THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

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