THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

So wrote a wise woman, Hannah Arendt, on the Eichmann trial for the NewYorker magazine:German society with its eighty million sons was also protected fromreality and facts precisely by the same means, the same self illusion,lies and stupidity . . . These lies were altered from year to year andoften contradicted one another . . . The habit of self-deceptionbecame so prevalent, almost a moral condition for survival . . . 7Israel today does not stand at the gates of gas chambers. It is reasonable to assumethat if the values of the Palestinians’ transfer and Torah-style genocide will be in ourgovernment’s agenda, I and many of my friends will no longer be free citizens of thisstate. We will struggle with all the legitimate means at our disposal to prevent our statefrom committing moral suicide. We will serve time in prison or leave Israel for good. Iprefer conscientious imprisonment to lowly liberty, and will much prefer an honorableexile to official national evil. It must be said here that willful mass imprisonment orexile, if widespread and ethical, will bring Israel to its end. There are terms underwhich I, as a Jew, must choose exile or imprisonment in my land if our sins, Godforbid, will force us on this path. Meanwhile we must not dismiss the issue by saying“If this happens, I will know what to do.” There is a wide range of options betweenliberty and destruction; all of them are bad and all are likely to become worse. Thenotion that this cannot happen to us because our history as persecuted people makesus immune to hatred and racism is very dangerous. A look inside Israel shows that theerosion has begun. The dose of inoculation may have been too great. This is nothappening to us. Bad things are happening to us. They are frightful reminders of whatwas and must not happen again. They are invisible to us because our language isopaque. We see dim shadows, but we do not dare to break the shackles of languageand look inside.“Language is the medium that allows us to understand the world,” Gauly wrote.“We see nature, society and human motives not as they are but as our languageallows us to see. This is the foundation of our culture. For this reason, it is importanthow we treat our language and what our concepts are meant to express.”Is it a coincidence that the late professor Yeshayahu Leibowich, a native of earlytwentieth-century Riga, was educated in Germany? Did the lessons of Bismarck andthe German empire resonate in his ears when he watched the Seventh Daydestruction in 1967 and refused to be carried away by the messianic ecstasy that