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Sconfiggere Hitler Neri Pozza 2008 The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise from its Ashes Palgrave Macmillan 2008 leggi la versione originale in inglese |
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The Apostate - A Zionist politician loses faith in the future. Avraham Burg: Israel's new prophet |
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La morte del sionismo |
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http://www.hakeillah.com/4_03_16.htm La morte del sionismo
Avraham Burg ha ricoperto la carica di Speaker della Knesset (equivalente pressappoco al nostro Presidente della Camera) dal 1999 al 2003, ed è stato presidente dell’Agenzia Ebraica per Israele; oggi è parlamentare laburista. La rivoluzione sionista ha sempre poggiato su due pilastri: un cammino di giustizia e una leadership etica. Nessuno dei due è più operante. Oggi la nazione israeliana poggia su un’impalcatura di corruzione e su fondamenta di oppressione e ingiustizia. In quanto tale, la fine dell’impresa sionista è già alle porte. Vi sono concrete probabilità che la nostra sia l’ultima generazione sionista. In Israele potrà anche esservi uno Stato ebraico, ma sarà di un genere diverso, strano e spiacevole. Tempo per cambiare rotta ce n’è ma non molto. Occorre una visione nuova di una società giusta e la volontà politica di attuarla. Né si tratta semplicemente di un affare interno israeliano. Gli ebrei della Diaspora, per i quali Israele rappresenta un pilastro centrale dell’identità, devono ascoltare e farsi sentire. Se il pilastro crolla anche i piani superiori si schianteranno. L’opposizione non esiste, e la coalizione di governo, capeggiata da Arik Sharon, rivendica il diritto di restare in silenzio. In una nazione di chiacchieroni, tutti sono improvvisamente ammutoliti perché non c’è più nulla da dire. Viviamo in una realtà fragorosamente in crisi. Sì, certo, abbiamo ridato vita alla lingua ebraica, a una produzione teatrale meravigliosa e a una valuta nazionale forte. La nostra mente ebraica è acuta come sempre. Siamo quotati sul Nasdaq. Ma è forse per questo che abbiamo creato uno Stato? Il popolo ebraico non è certo sopravvissuto per due millenni al solo scopo di inaugurare nuovi armamenti, programmi computerizzati per la sicurezza, i missili antimissile. Dovevamo essere un faro per le nazioni. In questo, abbiamo fallito. Viene fuori che la lotta bimillenaria per la sopravvivenza ebraica si risolve in uno Stato di insediamenti gestito da una cricca amorale di corrotti che violano la legge e sono sordi sia davanti ai loro cittadini, sia davanti ai loro nemici. Uno Stato che manca di giustizia non può sopravvivere. Un numero crescente di israeliani comincia a capirlo, quando chiedono ai loro figli dove prevedono di vivere di qui a 25 anni. I figli onesti ammettono, con grave sgomento dei genitori, che non lo sanno. Il conto alla rovescia verso la fine della società israeliana è cominciato. È molto comodo fare i sionisti negli insediamenti della Cisgiordania come Beit El e Ofra. Il paesaggio biblico è magnifico. Dalla finestra si vedono i gerani e le buganvillee, l’occupazione no. Viaggiando sulla superstrada veloce che porta da Ramot, alla periferia nord di Gerusalemme, a Gilo, alla periferia sud – un percorso di 12 minuti che passa ad appena mezzo miglio a ovest dei blocchi stradali palestinesi – è difficile capire l’esperienza umiliante dell’arabo disprezzato che deve strisciare per ore lungo le strade costellate di buche e di blocchi che gli sono riservate. Una strada per l’occupante, un’altra per la vittima dell’occupazione. Non si può andare avanti così. Anche se gli arabi chinano il capo e ingoiano la loro vergogna e la loro rabbia per sempre, non si può andare avanti. Una struttura edificata sull’umana insensibilità è inevitabilmente destinata a franare su se stessa. Prendete nota di questo momento: la sovrastruttura del sionismo sta già crollando come uno di quei mediocri saloni per banchetti nuziali di Gerusalemme. Soltanto i pazzi continuano a ballare all’ultimo piano mentre i piloni di sostegno si sbriciolano. Ci siamo abituati a ignorare la sofferenza delle donne ai posti di blocco stradali. Non c’è da stupirsi, se non sentiamo neanche le grida della donna percossa nella casa accanto o della madre nubile che fatica per crescere i figli con dignità. Non ci diamo più neanche la pena di contare le donne assassinate dai mariti. Israele, avendo smesso di interessarsi ai figli dei palestinesi, non deve stupirsi quando questi arrivano intrisi d’odio e si fanno saltare in aria nei centri d’evasione israeliani. Essi si consegnano ad Allah nei nostri luoghi di ricreazione, perché la loro vita è una tortura. Spargono il loro stesso sangue nei nostri ristoranti per guastarci l’appetito, perché a casa hanno figli affamati e umiliati. Potremmo uccidere mille caporioni e ingegneri al giorno, ma non risolveremmo, nulla perché i capi vengono dal basso – dagli abissi di odio e rabbia, dalle “infrastrutture” di ingiustizia e corruzione morale. Se tutto questo fosse davvero inevitabile, se avvenisse per un immutabile disegno divino, me ne starei zitto. Ma le cose potrebbero andare diversamente: perciò, levare la propria voce è un imperativo morale. Ecco che cosa dovrebbe dire il primo ministro al suo popolo: il tempo delle illusioni è finito, è giunto il tempo delle decisioni. Noi amiamo tutta la terra dei nostri avi e in un’altra epoca avremmo desiderato vivere qui da soli. Ma non accadrà. Anche gli arabi hanno i loro sogni ed esigenze. Fra il Giordano e il Mediterraneo non c’è più una netta maggioranza ebraica. Quindi, cari concittadini, non è possibile tenersi tutto quanto senza pagare un prezzo. Non possiamo tenere una maggioranza palestinese sotto lo stivale israeliano, e al tempo stesso pensare di essere l’unica democrazia del Medio Oriente. Non può esservi democrazia senza uguali diritti per tutti coloro che vivono qui, gli arabi come gli ebrei. Non possiamo tenerci i territori e conservare una maggioranza ebraica nell’unico Stato ebraico al mondo: non con mezzi umani, morali ed ebraici. Volete la Grande Israele? Non c’è problema: basta abbandonare la democrazia. Creiamo nel nostro paese un efficiente sistema di separazione razziale, con campi di prigionia e villaggi di detenzione. Il ghetto di Qalqilya e il gulag di Jenin. Volete una maggioranza ebraica? Non c’è problema: o mettete gli arabi su autovetture, autobus, cammelli e asini e li espellete in massa, oppure ci separiamo da loro in modo assoluto, senza trucchi e senza inganni. Una via di mezzo non c’è. Dobbiamo smantellare tutti – tutti – gli insediamenti e tracciare un confine internazionalmente riconosciuto fra il focolare nazionale ebraico e il focolare nazionale palestinese. La Legge del Ritorno degli ebrei si applicherà soltanto nel nostro focolare nazionale, e il loro diritto al ritorno si applicherà soltanto entro i confini dello Stato palestinese. Volete la democrazia? Non c’è problema: o abbandonate la Grande Israele fino all’ultimo insediamento e avamposto, oppure date pieno diritto di cittadinanza e di voto a tutti, arabi compresi. Naturalmente il risultato sarà che quelli che non volevano uno Stato palestinese accanto al nostro ne avranno uno proprio in mezzo a noi, attraverso le urne. Ecco quel che dovrebbe dire il primo ministro al suo popolo. Dovrebbe presentare le alternative in modo chiaro: razzismo ebraico o democrazia; insediamenti o speranza per entrambi i popoli; false visioni di filo spinato, blocchi stradali e terroristi kamikaze, o un confine internazionalmente riconosciuto fra due Stati e una capitale in comune a Gerusalemme. Ma a Gerusalemme non c’è un primo ministro. La malattia che rode il corpo del sionismo ha già aggredito la testa. A volte David Ben-Gurion commetteva errori, ma restava dritto come un fuso. Quando Menachem Begin sbagliava, nessuno si permetteva di contestare le sue motivazioni. Non è più così. I sondaggi pubblicati lo scorso fine-settimana indicavano che la maggioranza degli israeliani non crede nell’integrità personale del primo ministro. Però ha fiducia nella sua leadership politica. In altre parole, l’attuale premier israeliano incarna nella sua persona entrambe le metà della maledizione: una morale personale discutibile e un disprezzo aperto della legge, combinate con la brutalità dell’occupazione e il disprezzo per qualsiasi opportunità di pace. Questa è la nostra nazione, questi sono i suoi governanti. La conclusione ineludibile è che la rivoluzione sionista è morta. Ma allora perché l’opposizione tace a questo modo? Forse perché è estate, o perché è stanca, o perché alcuni vorrebbero entrare nel governo a qualsiasi prezzo, anche a prezzo di partecipare a questa follia. Ma mentre loro tentennano, le forze del bene perdono le speranze. Questo è il tempo delle alternative chiare. Chiunque si rifiuti di presentare una posizione univoca – bianco o nero – sta effettivamente collaborando a questo declino. Non si tratta di laburisti contro Likud, né di destra contro sinistra, ma di giusto contro sbagliato, di accettabile contro inaccettabile, di persone rispettose della legge contro chi viola la legge. Quel che occorre non è una sostituzione politica del governo Sharon, ma una visione di speranza, un’alternativa alla distruzione del sionismo da parte dei sordi, dei muti e degli insensibili. Gli amici di Israele all’estero – ebrei come non ebrei, presidenti e primi ministri, rabbini e laici – devono scegliere anche loro. Devono farsi sentire e aiutare Israele a percorrere la Road Map verso il nostro destino nazionale, quello di essere una luce per le nazioni e una società di pace, giustizia e uguaglianza.
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Israele e’ malata, Israele ha bisogno di guarire dalla maledizione in cui l’ha gettata Hitler. Per farlo occorre un nuovo ‘universalismo e umanesimo ebraico”. Chissa’ se Tizpi Livni, impegnata nel tentativo di formare un nuovo governo, ha letto il libro di Avraham Burg? Un testo che, alla sua uscita in Israele, ha provocato un vero e proprio terremoto pubblico. Burg e’ infatti una voce autorevole nel mondo politico israeliano ed ha lanciato un duro atto di accusa al vuoto di morale e di prospettiva in cui sembra muoversi lo stato ebraico. Figlio di Yossef – fondatore del Partito religioso nazionale – Burg contrariamente alle aspettative, ha scelto di militare a sinistra: e’ stato tra i creatori di ‘Pace adesso’, deputato laburista e infine presidente del Parlamento, una delle cariche piu’ importanti di Israele. Poi si e’ ritirato dalla politica attiva, vittima – ha spiegato – della sensazione sempre piu’ netta che ”il paese fosse diventato un ‘regno senza profezia”’, senza piu’ ”destinazione”. ”La mia concezione esistenziale del popolo ebraico e dell’ebraismo – scrive ora – mi impedisce di vivere cosi’, senza orientamento e senza bussola”. E ancora: il popolo ebraico ”ha propugnato l’umanesimo universalista all’epoca del grandi profeti e la fine dei soprusi e della schiavitu’ medioevali con il grande Maimonide”; anche il sionismo non e’ stato soltanto una semplice iniziativa di ”salvataggio del popolo ebraico minacciato”, bensi’ la sfida ”per costruire un paese e una societa’ dove fosse bandito tutto cio’ che ci e’ stato inflitto in quanto minoranza perseguitata”. Oggi, a suo giudizio, invece questa ”grande istanza umanitaria” non ha piu’ valore in Israele. Una delle cause? Aver costruito un’identita’ collettiva nazionale quasi esclusivamente in rapporto alla Shoah. E su questo immenso, unico, indicibile dolore, aver chiuso gli occhi sul dolore altrui. Inoltre, un uso cosi’ anestetico della Shoah ha avuto come effetto di ridurla, di svilirla, fino a diventare quasi una ”violazione del sacro”. In un passo molto bello del libro Burg dice che non si puo’ e non si deve costruire un destino nazionale su un trauma e lo fa – osserva nella postfazione Elena Loewenthal che ha curato la traduzione – con la profonda ”forza intellettuale e spirituale, persino storica, del popolo di Israele. La sua strabiliante capacita’ di scardinare per costruire, di provocare per ispirare”. La battaglia di Burg – dichiara l’autore stesso – e’ quella tesa a vedere ”il popolo ebraico dichiarare che non ci sara’ mai piu’ un’altra Auschwitz, ne’ per gli ebrei, ne’ per nessun altro popolo al mondo cui, all’occorrenza, noi vittime di ieri, vincitori di Hitler, daremo tutto il nostro sostegno e la nostra protezione”. Perche’ solo cosi’ si potra’ sconfiggere fino in fondo Hitler. A chi lo rimprovera di essere semplicemente un’utopista, Burg replica che almeno essere utopisti significa avere oggi ”una direzione per un mondo migliore”. |
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Se l'ossessione dell'olocausto cambia il volto dell'ebraismo
L'ex Presidente del parlamento Israeliano critica una visione distorta della Shoah: "Tutto iniziò col processo Eichmann" Secondo l'autore israeliano di un libro apparso ora in traduzione italiana, esiste ormai una «impresa della Shoah» che «imperversa» nella vita pubblica, ritorna insistentemente nel dibattito nazionale, condiziona la vita degli ebrei in Israele e nel mondo. «Non passa letteralmente giorno — scrive — senza che io trovi, sul giornale che sto leggendo, qualcosa che riguarda la Shoah: risarcimenti, antisemitismo, un nuovo studio, un libro interessante, un'intervista eccezionale, una testimonianza rara». Le gite scolastiche ad Auschwitz sono diventate un inderogabile appuntamento degli allievi delle scuole israeliane e le visite al memoriale di Yad Vashem sono ormai una tappa obbligata nel programma dei viaggi ufficiali di un uomo politico straniero. Questo fenomeno non avrebbe grande importanza se non avesse avuto, secondo l'autore, effetti inquietanti. Il culto pervasivo e incessante della Shoah ha modificato la cultura politica dello Stato israeliano. È diventato la pubblica giustificazione della durezza poliziesca con cui Israele amministra i territori occupati. Ha militarizzato la società israeliana. Ha generato una estrema destra brutale e fanatica che ricorda all'autore, paradossalmente, il nazismo. Ha creato la convinzione, ormai radicata in larghi settori dell'ebraismo soprattutto americano e israeliano, che la Shoah sia un avvenimento incomparabile e non possa essere esaminato storicamente come altre tragiche vicende della storia mondiale, dai massacri degli armeni alla strage dei ruandesi, dal terrore sovietico a quello cinese. Ha creato un nemico permanente, l'eterno antisemitismo, contro il quale l'ebraismo ha l'obbligo di armarsi e mobilitarsi. Durante una sessione straordinaria del Parlamento israeliano sulla lotta contro l'antisemitismo, l'autore ha constatato amaramente: «Mentre tutto il mondo esprime solidarietà verso di noi, noi diciamo: il mondo è tutto contro di noi». Ma il più grave degli effetti provocati dal culto della Shoah, sempre secondo l'autore, è d'ordine morale. Dominato dal ricordo dal genocidio, l'ebraismo sembra avere rinunciato al proprio umanesimo, alla propria missione universale, alla propria sensibilità per gli umili e gli oppressi, agli straordinari valori morali del suo pensiero filosofico e religioso. Alcune di queste considerazioni sono già state fatte da altri e potranno sembrare potenzialmente antisemite. Ma l'autore del saggio. Sconfiggere Hitler (Neri Pozza Editore) si chiama Avraham Burg e fa parte dell'aristocrazia dello Stato d'Israele. La madre apparteneva a una vecchia famiglia sionista di Hebron ed era sopravvissuta ai massacri del 1929 grazie alla protezione di un vicino arabo. Il padre era un ebreo tedesco, Yossel Burg, che fu leader del sionismo religioso, professore universitario, ministro di gabinetto con David Ben Gurion all'epoca del processo Eichmann (il solo, insieme a Levi Eshkol, che votò contro l'esecuzione della condanna a morte), poi ministro degli Interni con Menachem Begin durante la prima guerra del Libano e infine direttore di musei. La carriera pubblica di Avraham è stata brillante. Ha militato nel movimento pacifista «Peace Now» e nel Partito laburista, ha diretto l'Agenzia ebraica e l'Organizzazione mondiale sionista, è stato presidente della Knesset (il parlamento israeliano) dal 1999 al 2003. Quando il Dalai Lama visitò Israele e chiese di fargli visita, il ministero degli Esteri gli mandò un emissario per raccomandargli di non fare un gesto che avrebbe attirato sul governo di Gerusalemme le ire della Repubblica popolare cinese. Burg rispose seccamente che la visita avrebbe avuto luogo e mantenne l'impegno. Il suo libro è un continuo intreccio di ricordi familiari, annotazioni autobiografiche, lunghi compiacimenti introspettivi e acute analisi storiche. Le pagine politicamente più interessanti sono quelle in cui Burg s'interroga sulle ragioni dell'importanza che la Shoah ha assunto nella politica israeliana. All'origine del fenomeno vi sarebbe il processo Eichmann, nel 1960. Ben Gurion era stato infastidito da un processo precedente nel corso del quale erano stati polemicamente discussi i contatti che la dirigenza sionista, tramite l'Agenzia ebraica, aveva avviato con il regime nazista negli anni Trenta per facilitare la partenza dalla Germania di alcune decine di migliaia di ebrei tedeschi. Questi fatti, anche se noti a molti, avevano provocato un dibattito sulla «purezza» della causa sionista che aveva ferito lo stesso Ben Gurion. La cattura di Eichmann e il suo processo in Israele dovettero sembrare al fondatore dello Stato israeliano, secondo Burg, il modo migliore per reagire alle accuse, chiudere il dibattito, concentrare l'attenzione dell'opinione pubblica israeliana sulla Shoah. Il risultato andò probabilmente al di là delle attese. Mentre «la morte di Eichmann — scrive Burg — avrebbe dovuto chiudere l'epoca della Shoah e aprire l'era del dopo Shoah (...), è avvenuto l'esatto contrario». È una spiegazione interessante e plausibile. Ma esiste probabilmente un altro fattore, non meno importante. Gli anni Sessanta furono quelli in cui Israele divenne il partner privilegiato di Washington nella regione e la comunità ebraica negli Usa cominciò a esercitare una considerevole influenza sulla politica americana. In una delle sue pagine più critiche sugli ebrei d'America Burg scrive: «È molto difficile farsi eleggere contro la volontà dell'elettorato ebraico. Finanziamenti, organizzazione, sostegno pubblico e parimenti la legittimazione, nonché la capacità di nuocere ai candidati sgraditi, hanno reso la partecipazione ebraica alla vita politica americana un fattore di importanza strategica internazionale». Il libro di Burg ha irritato molti israeliani e, come osserva in una postfazione Elena Loewenthal, «potrà agevolmente far da sponda a chi non aspetta altro per negare, accusare». Ma è anche una dimostrazione di libertà, di coraggio, di spregiudicatezza, della capacità ebraica «di scardinare per costruire, di provocare per ispirare». |
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http://www.newyorker.com The Apostate “People are not willing to admit it, but Israel has reached the wall,” Avrum Burg says. The self-regard of Israelis is built, in no small part, around a sense of sang-froid, and yet few would deny that the past year was deeply unnerving. Last July, Israel launched an aerial attack on Lebanon designed to destroy the arsenal of the radical Islamist group Hezbollah, the Party of God, and force its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, to return two kidnapped soldiers and end its cross-border rocket attacks. “If the soldiers are not returned,” Dan Halutz, the Israeli Army’s chief of staff, said at the time, “we will turn Lebanon’s clock back twenty years.” Israel bombed the runways of the Beirut airport, the Beirut-Damascus highway, and numerous towns, mainly in the south; Hezbollah, from a network of guerrilla installations and tunnel networks worthy of the Vietcong, launched some four thousand rockets, mainly Katyushas, at cities in northern Israel. Israel degraded Hezbollah’s military capabilities, at least temporarily, but there was no victory. Hezbollah survived and, in the eyes of the Islamic world, in doing so won; Nasrallah emerged as an iconic hero; and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, one of his sponsors, called yet again for the elimination of Israel from the map of the Middle East. Halutz, who had dumped all his stocks on the eve of the war, resigned, and Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, saw his approval rating fall to as low as two per cent. More recently, Hezbollah’s ideological ally in Palestine, Hamas—the Islamic Resistance Movement—led a violent uprising in the Gaza Strip, overwhelming its secular rival, Fatah. Suddenly, Israel, backed by the United States, found itself propping up the Fatah leadership, in order not to lose the West Bank to Hamas as well. Not even the ceremonial office of the Israeli Presidency was immune from the year’s disasters: a few weeks ago, President Moshe Katsav agreed to plead guilty to multiple sexual offences and resign, lest he face trial for rape. Despite a resilient, even booming economy, peace and stability have rarely seemed so distant. In this atmosphere of post-traumatic gloom, Avraham Burg, a former Speaker of the Knesset, managed to inflame the Israeli public (left, right, and center) with little more than an interview in the liberal daily Ha’aretz, promoting his recent book, “Defeating Hitler.” Short of being Prime Minister, Burg could not be higher in the Zionist establishment. His father was a Cabinet minister for nearly four decades, serving under Prime Ministers from David Ben-Gurion to Shimon Peres. In addition to a decade-long career in the Knesset, including four years as Speaker, Burg had also been leader of the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Israel. And yet he did not obey the commands of pedigree. “Defeating Hitler” and an earlier book, “God Is Back,” are, in combination, a despairing look at the Israeli condition. Burg warns that an increasingly large and ardent sector of Israeli society disdains political democracy. He describes the country in its current state as Holocaust-obsessed, militaristic, xenophobic, and, like Germany in the nineteen-thirties, vulnerable to an extremist minority. Burg’s interlocutor for the Ha’aretz article was Ari Shavit, a writer well known in Israel for his confrontational interviews and his cerebral opinion articles. (His Profile of Ariel Sharon, “The General,” appeared in these pages in January, 2006.) Shavit’s interviewing style is aggressive and moralistic—not so distant, at times, from Oriana Fallaci’s in her prime. Politically, he is left of center, but, in the view of some to his left, he has seemed apocalyptic of late, warning darkly of the “existential” threats against Israel. In the preface to the interview, Shavit declared himself “outraged” by Burg’s book: “I saw it as one-dimensional and an unempathetic attack on the Israeli experience.” The Israeli political world is unfailingly intimate. Shavit, who is forty-nine, and Burg, who is fifty-two, met twenty-five years ago, when they were both protesting against Israel’s first war in Lebanon. After the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians by Israel’s allies among the Christian Phalangists in 1982, Burg gave a powerful speech before four hundred thousand people at an anti-war demonstration in Tel Aviv—the biggest rally in the history of Israel. This was his entrance into public life. “Because Avrum was a lefty and a religious Jew who wore a kippa, he really stood out among the left-wing speakers,” Shavit told me. “That gave him a very specific role in our society, and he played it extremely well.” Whatever remained of the relationship between Burg and Shavit frayed badly when they met for their interview. After Burg described Israel as a perpetually “frightened society,” the discussion quickly grew tense: Shavit: You are patronizing and supercilious, Avrum. You have no empathy for Israelis. You treat the Israeli Jew as a paranoid. But, as the cliché goes, some paranoids really are persecuted. On the day we are speaking, Ahmadinejad is saying that our days are numbered. He promises to eradicate us. No, he is not Hitler. But he is also not a mirage. He is a true threat. He is the real world—a world you ignore. Burg: I say that as of this moment Israel is a state of trauma in nearly every one of its dimensions. And it’s not just a theoretical question. Would our ability to cope with Iran not be much better if we renewed in Israel the ability to trust the world? Would it not be more right if we didn’t deal with the problem on our own but, rather, as part of a world alignment beginning with the Christian churches, going on to the governments and finally the armies? Instead, we say we do not trust the world, they will abandon us, and here’s Chamberlain returning from Munich with the black umbrella and we will bomb them alone. Burg has a fairly standard left-leaning view of the Palestinian question: even now, with Hamas in control of Gaza, the longer Israel delays in coming to terms with a sovereign Palestinian state, the more Palestinian society will radicalize and embrace maximalist, jihadi ideologies, and the more Israeli society will lose its moral sense. But some of the views that Burg expressed in the interview were far from standard. He told Shavit that civil disobedience would have been preferable to the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto and that Israel should give up its nuclear weaponry in exchange for an unspecified “deal” with its Arab neighbors. Israel’s “law of return,” which allows any Jew around the world to immigrate and become a citizen, was “dynamite” in the Arab world, he said, and needed to be reëvaluated. One subject that especially infuriated Shavit, and provoked countless letters to the editor, e-mail screeds, and editorial-page rebuttals, was Burg’s depiction of the European Union as an almost irresistibly attractive “biblical utopia” and his flouting of the fact that he holds a French passport, because his wife is French-born, and voted in the recent French elections. When Shavit asked Burg if he recommended that all Israelis acquire a second passport, Burg replied, “Whoever can”—a moment of determined cosmopolitanism. Shavit sarcastically called Burg “the prophet of Brussels.” He went on: Shavit: There really is a deep anti-Zionist pattern in you. Emotionally, you are with German Jewry and American Jewry. They excite you, thrill you, and by comparison you find the Zionist option crude and spiritually meagre. It broadens neither the heart nor the soul. Burg: Yes, yes. The Israeli reality is not exciting. People are not willing to admit it, but Israel has reached the wall. Ask your friends if they are certain their children will live here. How many will say yes? At most fifty per cent. In other words, the Israeli élite has already parted with this place. And without an élite there is no nation. Shavit: You are saying that we are suffocating here for lack of spirit. Burg: Totally. We are already dead. We haven’t received the news yet, but we are dead. It doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t work. . . . There is no one to talk to here. The religious community of which I was a part—I feel no sense of belonging to it. The secular community—I am not part of it, either. I have no one to talk to. I am sitting with you and you don’t understand me, either. This was not the first time that Burg had outraged some of his countrymen. In 2003, when Hamas was carrying out a suicide-bombing campaign, he published an article in the mass-circulation daily Yedioth Ahronoth (which was republished worldwide), saying, “Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism.” That statement caused a sensation not only because of the offices Burg held but also because of his ambitions. “Once I wanted very much to be prime minister,” he admitted to Shavit. “It burned like fire in my bones.” He allowed that he had been living “a lie” while he was in government. “I was not myself.” Now he was very much himself, a man with multiple identities, “beyond Israeli,” a universal humanist. In Ha’aretz, Burg was prepared to explore his spiritual options and defend his quest for material well-being. Even as he lamented lost values, he made no apologies for going to court to retain the perks of his old job (particularly a chauffeur-driven jeep) or for his desire to leave behind public service for business. “Life is not just to be a pioneer with a hoe and a bold fighter at Lions Gate,” he said. “Life is also to be a merchant in Warsaw. Unequivocally, that is a richer totality in life.” Soon after the interview was published, Otniel Schneller, a Knesset member from Ehud Olmert’s centrist Kadima Party, said that when Burg dies he should be denied burial in the special section of Mt. Herzl National Cemetery, in Jerusalem, reserved for national leaders. “He had better search for a grave in another country,” Schneller said. One letter to the Jerusalem Post compared Burg to young people who, after military service, go off to India to find their spiritual selves in an ashram. “Yesteryear, Burg would have been disowned as at least a lunatic,” the columnist Sarah Honig wrote in the same paper. “The grave danger is that today he gives voice and lends insidious quasi-respectability to what was heretofore unutterable. By tomorrow, the uncontrollable infestation he spreads might confer outright legitimacy on Israel’s delegitimatization.” If and when Israel’s borders changed, Honig continued, “Burg probably won’t stick around to risk the ensuing slaughter. The new Wandering Jew will pack his sinister seeds and propagate his wicked wandering weeds from afar.” My own unscientific survey suggested that criticism of Burg was, with few exceptions, general and crossed ideological lines. Conservatives like the former Likud adviser Dore Gold said that Burg’s analysis was “dead wrong: what we used to call crum pshat—twisted interpretation—in the Yeshiva world.” A range of prominent political and cultural figures on the left—Yossi Beilin, the chairman of the Meretz-Yachad Party; Shulamit Aloni, a feminist and a former education minister; A. B. Yehoshua and Meir Shalev, both well-known novelists; and the peace activist Janet Aviad and the philosopher Avishai Margalit, a founder of Peace Now—expressed a familial disgust, or worse, for their wayward brother. They sensed in him a kind of undergraduate universalism, a table talk at once snobbish and half-baked. Burg’s remarks about Edenic Europe and his French passport were hypocritical, a particularly Israeli form of bad taste at a time when it could least be tolerated. “For the so-called head of the Zionist movement to say all this—to say, ‘Get another passport for your kids,’ ” Avishai Margalit said to me. “It’s like the Pope giving sex tips.” “Avrum is a friend, but I felt what most people felt—that, beyond the ideological debate, there is something profoundly wrong in his character,” Yossi Klein Halevi, a writer, said. “You don’t take all the perks of the Zionist movement and refuse to relinquish them and then repudiate the most cherished notions of Zionism at the same time. There’s something smarmy about it. He is so totally out of touch with Israeli reality that I’m appalled that he ever had any positions of Israeli authority. That interview really destroyed him, or he destroyed himself.” Avrum Burg lives with his wife in the tiny village of Nataf, in the hills west of Jerusalem. They have six children, all grown. Burg’s bungalow is surrounded by shrubbery, desert blooms, bougainvillea, and a tiny lawn. The Israeli Arab village of Abu Ghosh is a few minutes down the road, and the border with the West Bank is little more than a thousand yards away. The house in Nataf is quiet except for the mewling of cats, whinnying horses, and the attention-beseeching barks of Burg’s dog, Buling, who is missing his left hind leg. The dog, Burg explained, lost the leg when, on patrol with one of Burg’s sons in the West Bank city of Nablus, he leaped at a Palestinian gunman just as he was firing his gun. “Buling saved my son’s life,” Burg said, “so we had to adopt him.” Burg is a vegetarian, and fit; he has taken up marathon running. He is nearly bald, and wears a small knit yarmulke. Normally, this is the yarmulke of the modern Orthodox, though Burg seemed eager to emphasize his disaffection from all things Orthodox; he told me of his affinity for B’nai Jeshurun, a synagogue on New York’s Upper West Side where some of the rabbis are women and the sermons are as likely to quote Martin Luther King as Maimonides. “My alliance with the people at B’nai Jeshurun,” he said, “is much more immediate and intensive and important for me than my alliance with my nephew or my cousin, who lives two kilometres away in the West Bank, a fundamentalist settler.” Burg comes from a conservative Zionist family; his father helped found Mafdal, the National Religious Party. But when he started out in politics he joined the Labor Party; he was deeply influenced by Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a scientist and philosophy professor at Hebrew University who had contempt for the Greater Israel movement’s conflation of religion and politics and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Leibowitz referred to abusive Israeli soldiers as “Judeo-Nazis” and was so upset by the sight of the festivities around the Western Wall after the Six-Day War that he referred to it as a “disco wall.” In the pursuit of increasingly higher offices, Burg avoided such language. He held back, he self-censored. “You’re into the system,” he said. “You’re in the tunnel. I was a devoted politician and so I talked the talk.” But then, he said, “after some fifteen, twenty years in political life I had a feeling all of a sudden that, to use the Biblical term, Israel was the kingdom without prophesy. I realized that the three founding narratives of the national idea of Israeliness were over: the mass immigration to the land, aliyah; the security of the land; and the settling of the land. All three had served their purpose and were no longer the core of the nation’s narratives. I asked myself what was the alternative. This was a long process of thought. I didn’t feel that the political system in Israel was trying to renew its thinking.” In 2001, Burg attempted to succeed Ehud Barak as leader of the Labor Party and lost. Thwarted, if not entirely humbled, he quit the Knesset in 2004. At one point in the last months of his political life, he said, “I went on a very long walk on the Appalachian Trail. I went for five weeks and crossed half the state of Connecticut, the whole state of New York, and half the state of New Jersey. I saw maybe twelve people, none of them Jewish—for the first time in my life. I did a lot of thinking, and I realized that I had to change the pace of my life.” In “Defeating Hitler,” Burg writes that one of the most dispiriting aspects of Israeli political conversation is the constant reference point of the slaughter of six million Jews in the nineteen-forties. “The most optimistic years in the state of Israel were 1945 to 1948,” he said to me. “The farther we got from the camps and the gas chambers, the more pessimistic we became and the more untrusting we became toward the world. It was a shock to me. Didn’t we, the politicians, feed the public? Didn’t we cheapen the sanctity of the Holocaust by using it about everything? Some people say, ‘Occupation? You call this occupation? This is nothing compared to the absolute evil of the Holocaust!’ And if it is nothing compared to the Holocaust then you can continue. And since nothing, thank God, is comparable to the ultimate trauma it legitimatizes many things.” Burg said that contemporary Israelis “are not at the stage to be sensitive enough to what happens to others and in many ways are too indifferent to the suffering of others. We confiscated, we monopolized, world suffering. We did not allow anybody else to call whatever suffering they have ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide,’ be it Armenians, be it Kosovo, be it Darfur. “In the last years, Israeliness has confined itself for itself only and lost interest almost for what happens in the world,” he went on. “For me, Israel is shrinking into its own shell rather than struggling for a better world. Who is responsible for identity? The ultraOrthodox. They sit in the yeshivot”—the religious schools. “Who is responsible for our fundamental relation to the soil? The settlers. The two tribes responsible for the spiritual dimension and the territorial dimension are anti-modern Israel.” Burg is ambivalent about the kind of support that the Israeli government has traditionally received from the United States government and the American Jewish community. His views, in fact, are not far from those expressed in a controversial article published last year in the London Review of Books, by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, denouncing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (aipac) for subordinating American policy to Israeli interests and, by doing so, radicalizing public opinion in the Arab world. “Can you imagine the European Union with a lobby or a pac for the Knesset?” Burg said. “Maybe this was O.K. in the early fifties, but today I don’t need it.” He would prefer that Israel take no financial aid from the United States: “I don’t like it. A state like mine should live on its own means.” What Israel does need from its superpower ally is the impetus to move forward on negotiations with the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world, no matter how paralyzed, fractured, and desperate the situation now appears. A purposeful American President, he said, can always push forward even the most conservative Israeli Prime Minister. “Even Yitzhak Shamir shlepped to Madrid” for a peace conference in 1991, he said. “Israel needs dramatic decisions, like de Gaulle giving up Algeria.” The longer Israel waits to resolve the Palestinian question, Burg said, the more intractable the problem becomes and the more deeply it scars the psyches of both sides. In towns near Gaza, like Sderot, the political outcry is not for peace talks but for military action. Among some right-wing Israeli politicians, there is open talk of schemes to “transfer” Palestinians to Jordan or other neighboring Arab countries, and this alarms Burg: “You hear the conversation in the Knesset, you hear it in the public, you see the graffiti ‘Arabs out’—like Juden raus. I don’t care all that much about the right-wing hoodlum who writes the graffiti so much as I do the municipalities that don’t erase it. The seeds of national chauvinism are here and flourishing. Of course, I can understand all the fears—can you imagine an American kid hit by a foreign rocket in Chevy Chase? Can you imagine the hysteria? I’ve watched Jack Bauer very closely. ‘24’ iconizes the fears of America. So if this seems right in Los Angeles it must be right in Sderot.” Although Burg is now trying to make a living as a businessman, there are those who think that “Defeating Hitler” is an attempt to reënter the political discussion and, eventually, the electoral arena. And, in fact, Burg’s views on some issues, if not his language, are in keeping with the Israeli mainstream. Even now, with Palestinian politics in chaos, around two-thirds of Israelis, and almost as many Palestinians, are ready to accept a two-state solution—an independent Palestine in Gaza and the West Bank with part of Jerusalem as its capital. What Ari Shavit and so many others are less willing to accept is Burg’s harsh diagnosis of “Israeliness.” “The comparison with pre-Nazi Germany is absurd,” Shavit said over lunch one afternoon in Jerusalem. “Also, Israel was much more militaristic in the old days. I don’t like the role of generals in political life, and I regret the lack of a Truman to restrain the influence of generals—a tough, decent civilian who understands the need to use power but who is decisive in controlling the Army. But there is nothing here of that Junker tradition or even anything like America’s military élites and academies. Israelis live in an open, free society with a very free spirit, even verging on anarchy. To describe us as a Bismarckian state with expansionist chauvinism—if there was a grain of truth to that, it was thirty years ago! Soldiers here take off their uniforms as soon as they come home. They’re not proud of their uniforms or their ranks. Wearing a uniform doesn’t get you girls.” There are anti-Arab racists in Israel, he added, but nothing like those in Burg’s favorite part of the world. “There are actual racist parties in Continental Europe that are far more powerful than any of the sickening elements here,” Shavit said. “There is no chance that an Israeli Day parade will draw as many as the number of people who came out for the Gay Pride parade in Tel Aviv. So to describe this as a Prussian Sparta is ridiculous.” One morning, Shavit and I drove south to Sderot, which is surely the most anxious—and Burg-resistant—town in Israel. Sderot is a “development town,” one of many towns that began as absorption sites in the nineteen-fifties for “Oriental” Jews, mainly religious and poor, from Morocco, Algeria, and other Muslim countries. More recently, many immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who are generally low-income and politically conservative, have moved to such towns. Sderot, with a population of twenty-four thousand, is the closest Israeli town to the Gaza Strip—about half a mile from Beit Hanoun, just over the border. Since 2001, Sderot has been hit by nearly five thousand homemade Qassam missiles launched from Beit Hanoun by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other groups. Qassams are extremely inaccurate, but they have exacted a toll, especially psychologically. The rockets have killed eleven Israelis in Sderot—far fewer than the Gazans who have been killed by Israeli F-16s, helicopter gunships, and troops—and have succeeded in terrorizing the town. In the second half of May, when hundreds of rockets fell on Sderot, eighty per cent of the population evacuated, according to city officials. The mayor, Eli Moyal, a rangy, chain-smoking Moroccan who has been called the Rudy Giuliani of Israel by his admirers, has demanded that the Olmert government take more severe military actions against Gaza and has denounced the leadership for failing to spend enough on shelters. The shelter problem has been addressed by Arcadi Gaydamak, one of the most mysterious figures in Israel. He is a Russian-born, multi-passport-holding billionaire oligarch who is wanted in France for tax evasion and for making illegal arms deals with Angola. (He has denied any wrongdoing.) Gaydamak has provided temporary housing for residents from Sderot during heavy periods of attack, and last summer, during the war with Hezbollah, he underwrote a tent village on the beach in Nitzanim for people fleeing the shelling in towns in northern Israel. Gaydamak recently bought Beitar Jerusalem, the popular soccer team supported by the city’s political conservatives, and used his money to improve its roster. Last year, he offered the people of Sderot free vacations to the beach resort of Eilat; and he has even talked—in Russian and English; he speaks almost no Hebrew—about running for mayor of Jerusalem. When I asked Moyal about Gaydamak, he took a long drag on his cigarette, with such force that he burned it to the filter. “Aaacchh,” he said, exhaling at last. “Don’t make me talk too much about . . . him.” The Gaydamak phenomenon was evidence of a failed government. Nor was Moyal pleased, he said, to have received a gift of more than two million dollars from an American evangelical group for the purpose of reinforcing buildings against rocket attacks. Moyal came to office hoping to build schools, and he has ended up on the borderline of what is widely known in Israel as “Hamastan.” Even as the Israeli government, along with the United States, tries to bolster the Fatah president, Mahmoud Abbas, in the West Bank, with funds and diplomatic blandishments, Hamas has an absolute hold over Gaza. “Look,” Moyal said. “Hamas wants to empty Sderot. If we experience a hundred rockets a day—and Hamas says it has ten thousand rockets in its arsenal—no one will stay, and Hamas will be able to show the world that it can beat Israel with its primitive arms. It’s so simple: make Hamas pay a price for this. But the Israeli reaction is nothing. And if Sderot collapses this will be the end of Israel. Then Hamas will reach Ashdod,” ten miles farther north. “And then what? Evacuate Ashdod, a city of two hundred thousand people? Imagine if they start launching rockets from Judea and Samaria”—the West Bank—“and they hit Tel Aviv.” Moyal said that if the United States could send troops thousands of miles to Afghanistan to fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Olmert could surely order a more decisive force into Gaza. Sharon’s unilateral disengagement, in August, 2005, he said, had been a disaster: Hamas controlled Gaza and the Qassams had not stopped. “The big mistake is that this was all for nothing. At the time, the defense minister under Sharon, Shaul Mofaz, said that if after disengagement there was just one Qassam Gaza City would be shut down. We’ve had a few thousand rockets since then.” Moyal expressed disgust for the generation of Israeli politicians now in their forties and fifties—not least Avraham Burg—and said that it was because of their failure that “we are living in a retro age,” in which the emerging contenders for Prime Minister are two former Prime Ministers: Barak, of Labor, and, Moyal’s preference, Benjamin Netanyahu, of Likud. Later, Moyal took me to the police station where the municipality stores debris from the missiles that have fallen on Sderot. About a hundred of the rockets—twisted metal tubes, thicker ones by Hamas, thinner by Islamic Jihad—lay on a set of shelves. “Here is the latest harvest!” he said, as if the distorted metal were a rack of prize melons. The police paint the date on the rockets the day they fall. Moyal pointed to one from the previous morning, which exploded in a scrubby field on the edge of town. “This is yesterday’s, fresh from the oven.” Nearby, in a tiny office, a few young Army technicians monitored a series of computer screens. They were getting satellite information from surveillance cameras, including cameras mounted on a blimp that hovers above Gaza. More than ninety per cent of the time, when rockets are launched toward Sderot from Gaza, the system, called Red Dawn, picks up their flight and an alarm sounds throughout the town. “You have about fifteen seconds to take cover,” Moyal said. Most Israelis believe that the occupation of Arab lands is untenable, and they also wonder how, when both Palestinian and Israeli politics have degenerated, the economy has soared. The Tel Aviv stock-exchange index has gone up two hundred and ten per cent in the past four years. In the coming months, it may turn out that the most important constituency applying pressure to the Israeli government to engage the Palestinians in diplomatic negotiations will be not the activists or the left wing of the Labor Party but, rather, the entrepreneurs and managers who run such successful companies as Teva, Check Point, and Iscar. According to Bernard Avishai, a consulting editor with Harvard Business Review and the author of “The Tragedy of Zionism,” the business élites know that political unrest and, of course, potential war on any front threatens their interests. Those same businessmen are also wary of the most right-wing sector of society: the thirty-eight per cent of the Jewish population that wants the state to be run by religious law, and the thirty per cent that wants Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, to be pardoned. “The continued success of the economy depends on global companies being willing to let Israeli companies into their networks,” Avishai told me over lunch in Jerusalem. “If Israel collapses into chaos—if the Lebanon war had been six months instead of one—that could all end.” Olmert and the two leading contenders to succeed him, Netanyahu and Barak, differ politically, but they are all closely connected to the business élites, and they can easily see that, decades after the country left behind its old semi-socialist pioneer economy for a modern one, it cannot afford to let its most educated and entrepreneurial young people leave for Europe and the United States. Avishai said that about a third of forty-five business and law students he taught a few years ago at the Interdisciplinary Center, in Herzliya, now live abroad, and many of them may never return. According to a study by the Institute for Economic and Social Policy at the Shalem Center, in Jerusalem, Israel is the world’s largest exporter of intellectual capital to the United States. “Will the young people take the job offer in London from Goldman Sachs or will they stay here and wait for the missiles to fall?” Avishai said. “The question is, is this a good enough place to come back to when they are married and have children? Finally, the Israeli government has to confront its own crazies and create a national consensus on democratic ideals, enact a secular constitution, and really confront the settlers. So far, the government is only willing to say that it is making ‘painful’ moves. We are told that we have to grieve with the settlers, think about making deals, but quietly let on that we actually think these are the real Israeli pioneers. Bullshit. Avrum Burg might not express the need to change in the most effective way, but at least he has the courage to insist on it.” Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/07/30/070730fa_fact_remnick#ixzz1VAAVnp9z |
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http://www.independent.co.uk Avraham Burg: Israel's new prophet Avraham Burg was a pillar of the Israeli establishment but his new book is causing a sensation. It argues that his country is an "abused child" which has become a "violent parent". And his solutions are radical. 'The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise from its Ashes' is published by Palgrave Macmillan. In shorts, T-shirt and cotton kippa, Avraham Burg is sitting in his sukka, the temporary booth that every observant Jewish family in Israel builds outside their home for the joyous religious holiday of Sukkot, and talking with some disdain about the holocaust "industry". The sunlight is filtered through the roof of palm leaves, the decorative strings of apples, coloured balls and paper streamers almost motionless on this still October morning. Nearby the autumn desert flowers are blooming and a ladder up against a tree indicates that someone has recently been picking olives. Here in Nataf, the select, upper-middle-class community idyllically set in the Jerusalem Hills where Burg lives with his wife Yael, just 1,000 metres from the border with the West Bank, it's momentarily hard to focus on the sombre subject matter of his latest, explosive book, one which by his own – if anything understated – account "singlehandedly shook the foundations of the Zionist establishment overnight". It isn't long since Burg was a blue-chip member of that same Zionist establishment. The son of a long-serving government minister, from the time of David Ben-Gurion's government, he has a classic top-drawer Israeli profile. True, he was on the left: after army service as a paratroop officer and graduating from Hebrew University he was a star of the movement against the first Lebanon war – his charisma if anything enhanced by the fact than unlike many of his comrades he was religious. He was injured in the grenade attack by a right-wing fanatic on a Peace Now protest in 1983 which killed another demonstrator, Emil Grunzweig. But he was quickly swept into mainstream public life, becoming first an adviser to the then Prime minister Shimon Peres, then a Knesset member, then Speaker of the Knesset, head of the Jewish agency and the World Zionist Organisation and the almost-victorious candidate for the Labour Party leadership in 2001. It was not until his last year as a Knesset member that he began to build a reputation as something of an enfant terrible in Israeli intellectual and political life. In 2003 he wrote a widely publicised and much argued-over piece in Israel's mass circulation Yedhiot Ahronot in which he said that Israel had to choose between "racist oppression and democracy" and that "having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centres of Israeli escapism". But his book The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise from its Ashes – published this week in Britain – caused a much bigger sensation when it came out last year in Israel, at once becoming a best-seller and provoking a furious reaction not only from the right but from many of Burg's former colleagues on the political centre-left. In the book – a compelling mix of polemic, personal memoir, homage to his parents and meditation on Judaism – Burg argues that Israel has been too long imprisoned by its obsessive and cheapening use – or abuse – of the Holocaust as "a theological pillar of Jewish identity". He argues that the living role played by the Holocaust – Burg uses the regular Hebrew word Shoah or "catastrophe" for the extermination of six million Jews in the Second World War – in everyday Israeli discourse, has left Israel with a persistent self-image of a "nation of victims", in stark variance with its actual present-day power. Instead, the book argues, Israel needs finally to abandon the "Judaism of the ghetto" for a humanistic, "universal Judaism". The implication of Burg's analysis, one that perhaps only an Israeli would have dared promote, is that the fostered memory of the Holocaust hovers destructively over every aspect of Israeli political life – including its relations with the Palestinians since the 1967 Six Day War and the subsequent occupation. "We have pulled the Shoah out of its historical context," he writes, "and turned it into a plea and generator for every deed. All is compared to the Shoah, dwarfed by the Shoah and therefore all is allowed – be it fences , sieges ... curfews, food and water deprivation or unexplained killings. All is permitted because we have been through the Shoah and you will not tell us how to behave." For Burg, whose own father Yosef was a German Jew, and for many years leader of Israel's National Religious Party, the "real watershed moment" in this deforming process was the trial and subsequent execution in 1962 of Adolf Eichmann, which Yosef Burg vainly opposed from inside the Cabinet. Instead of Eichmann's death symbolising, as it was meant to do, "the end of the Shoah and the beginning of the post-Shoah period," he says, in reality "the opposite happened... The Shoah discourse had begun." I put it to Burg that for many Israeli holocaust survivors who during the late Forties and Fifties had had to brave the indifference, sometimes even contempt, of those of their fellow citizens who had already left Europe by the time the Shoah began – a painful phenomenon vividly covered in the book itself – the Eichmann trial was actually a liberation, a positive rather than negative, after which Israelis who had not lived through the Holocaust at last began to understand the pain of those who had. Burg's answer is that recognition and sympathy for the victims and survivors of the Holocaust are indeed essential components of "any kind of progress from the departure point of trauma to the final destination of trust". On the other hand "what I criticise in the Eichmann trial and the entire Shoah industry is the contempt, the cheapening attititude of the public system; everything is Shoah. It legitimises everything, it explains everything, it is used by everybody." Here he cites two everyday examples – the first an interview about the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad given last month by Benjamin [Bibi] Netanyahu, the right-wing former – and possibly soon to be again – Prime Minister: "Ahmadinejad is no doubt a problem," says Burg. "He is an issue in the Western world and for Israel's sense of confidence in particular. So what is Bibi's soundbite? 'It is [19]38 all over again.' Do me a favour. Did we have such a powerful state in '38? Did we have this onmipotent army in '38? Did we have the most important superpowers siding with us in '38? It's not '38 however you look at it. And even Ahmadinejad, when you compare him with Hitler, you diminish Hitler." But because the "Holocaustic language is so common, so well understood," says Burg, the reflex attitude is: "Why not use it?" Last year, he adds, Jerusalem's gay and lesbian community wanted to have a parade in the city. "Immediately all the gut juices of Jerusalem erupted like a wellspring. Immediately the ultra-orthodox in masses went out on the streets. So the police went out to separate the supporters of the parade from their ultra-orthodox opponents ... so one of the ultra-orthodox shouts at a policeman (who happens to be a Druze [Arab]): 'You are a Nazi. You are worse than the Germans, blah blah blah...' The Shoah was privatised, so to say. All of these people who exploit it, violate the sacred memory of the individual [victims] and the collective." Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Burg's paternal origins, Israel's multidimensional relationship with Germany, past and present, looms large in this book. In a notably striking – and for many Israelis highly provocative – passage, Burg points out that Israel actually reached – arguably "too soon" – a "hasty reconciliation" with Germany after the Second World War, before saying: "We will never forgive the Arabs for they are allegedly just like the Nazis, worse than the Germans. We have displaced our anger and revenge from one people to another, from an old foe to a new adversary, and so we allow ourselves to live comfortably with the heirs of the German enemy – representing convenience, wealth and high quality, while treating the Palestinians as whipping boys to release our aggression, anger and hysteria, of which we have plenty." Yet Burg believes that Germany remains also "traumatised" by the Holocaust. "We are both along the same ocean of suffering," he told me. As evidence he points out that so far – and unlike in France, Britain, the US, and Italy – no edition of his book is yet planned in Germany where the publishers warily wait to see what its impact will now be on "world Jewry". In the book Burg, who admires the cultural and artistic milieu of modern Berlin – where he recently ran the marathon (in just under four hours) – argues that in the "day we leave Auschwitz and establish the new state of Israel, we also have to set Germany free". In the meantime, however, one of his most controversial themes is what he himself calls a "both embarrassing and frightening" analogy with Germany's Second Reich. In drawing attention to the importance of the military – and the lack of "any alternative, civilian school of thought" – in the political life of Israel as in Bismarck's Germany, or of the parallels between the lack of representation of Israeli Arabs in many key tiers of public life and the exclusion of Jews from the officer class of the pre-Hitler German Army, or the impunity with which the extreme right can make racist statements about "the other", Burg is emphatically not seeking comparison with the Nazi era, but "of the long incubation period that preceded Nazism and that gave rise to a public mindset that enabled the Nazis to take power". On the one hand, Burg asserts his strong admiration for "my teacher and mentor" Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who thunderously prophesied almost immediately after the Six Day War – in a passage quoted with warm approval in Burg's book – that the "inclusion of one and half million Arabs within Jewish jurisdiction means undermining the Jewish and human essence of the state" and that the occupier will be "a state that is not worthy of being and will not be worth to let exist". Burg reinforces his own comparison with pre-Nazi Germany by referring to Israelis being "locked off" in denial of the ominous stirrings of the extreme right in their midst. And he does not shrink from a reference, in his discussion of the Holocaust's legacy in Israel, to the "pathological circle of the abused child becoming a violent parent". On the other hand he parts company with Leibowitz's depiction of the occupying Israeli forces as "Judaeo-Nazis", which he also regards as "cheapening the conversation... an act of contempt for the lesson of the Holocaust". The German comparison nevertheless fuelled the outrage felt about the book by one of Israel's leading journalists and commentators, Ari Shavit. Last year, in an ultra-combative interview with Burg in the newspaper Haaretz that certainly helped to publicise the book but also to demonise its author among his enemies, Shavit, once an ally of Burg in the campaign against the Lebanon war, wrote that he found the book "anti-Israeli, in the deepest sense" and a "one-dimensional and unempathetic attack on the Israeli experience" that unjustly depicted its citizens as "psychic cripples". In one of many acerbic exchanges, Shavit took issue with Burg's description of the occupation of the West Bank and the Golan Heights as an "Israeli Anschluss". "What do you want me to say about what we're doing there?" Burg retorted. "That it's humanism? The Red Cross?" The reaction was predictable. Otniel Schneller, a Knesset member in the ruling Kadima Party, said portentously that when Burg dies he should be refused burial in the part of Jerusalem's Mount Herzl National Cemetery allotted to national figures, declaring: "He had better search for a grave in another country." Yossi Klein Halevi, a writer, and professed friend of Burg said: "That interview really destroyed him, or he destroyed himself." True, Burg gave as good as he got in the interview. "I told him, Ari, you are the best insight writer in Israel; the problem is that your insights are lousy," he says now. But what it really exposed was the chasm that, at least for now, separates Burg even from many of his own mainstream centre-left generation in an Israel whose future he believes is increasingly being steered by the ultra-orthodox on the one hand and the religious Zionist settlers in the occupied West Bank on the other. "Now Ari represents Mr Israel," says Burg. "He is the camp fire. He is the virtual tribe. He was a kibbutznik, in the middle of the road, a bit of security, a bit of social conscience and a bit of secularism, a bit European, a bit Middle Eastern. Along comes Avrum [his much used nickname] Burg and tells him: 'Ari it is hollow, your Mr Israel: you abandoned the two links to the past to the hands of your enemies. You surrendered the responsibilities for the rituals and traditions to the hands of the ultra-orthodox who bitterly oppose your modernity; and you abandoned the responsibility for the connection to the place to the hands of messianic eschatological settlers. Both are fundamentalists. One is redemptive. And the other is just religious. [You are neither] but you need them in order to feel you are hooked into your past. Can't you create a different, independent, renewed approach to your past and to your future?'" Burg who frequently states his affinity, as a modern observant Jew, with the liberal B'nai Jeshurun synagogue in New York, well known for a strong commitment to social justice, continues: "I told him maybe there's a another world out there. What about Jews in the diaspora, those who worked in the past 200 years to renew Judaism, to make it compatible with humanism and universalism which is part of your secular modern attitude? Don't you want to bring that in? And abandon your pathological relations with the ultra-orthodox and ultra-messianic?' Then he says: 'Are you a Zionist?' The ultimate punch! 'Are you a Zionist, Mr Burg?'" So what is the answer to this undoubtedly relevant question? "For me, Zionism was the scaffolding that enabled the Jewish people to move from the previous exilic reality into sovereign responsibility. The Zionists succeeded two-fold: we have sovereignty and, second, even exile was redeemed and became 'diaspora'. We have the most impressive diaspora, politically, culturally, economically. Never did Jews have so much influence on so many superpowers round the world and we have unbelievable sovereignty, stronger than King David's. So isn't it about time to remove the scaffolding and see the beauty of the structure? I am a human being. I belong to humanity. My middle name is 'I'm Jewish' and my given name is 'I'm Israeli'. I do not need a fourth definition unless this fourth, artificial definition is a tool to discriminate in Israel against some elements that are not necessarily Jewish, in a very inhuman way." Shavit was also agitated by Burg's enthusiasm for the European Union, reinforced by his startling assertion that Israel "from my point of view is part of Europe". In particular Shavit highlighted Burg's French second passport (Burg's wife is French-born) and his "far-reaching" and "pre-Zionist" act in voting in last year's French presidential election. (Burg, who told Shavit that he had done so as a Jewish "citizen of the world" explained to me that he had voted for Ségolène Royal in protest at Sarkozy's 2005 condemnation of Paris's mainly Muslim banlieu residents after the 2005 riots as "scum".) Certainly Burg sees the EU as a potential lever for a solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which the parties cannot, in his view reach without external help and – here Burg is striking out, for an Israeli, in unusual territory – the prospect of belonging to something bigger than this perpetually fought-over land. Fearing that the days of the conventionally envisaged two-state solution may be "numbered" Burg says both societies have been "abducted" by fundamentalist religious elements who believe in their competing versions of a single state. "We are abducted by the settlers; they are abducted by Hamas. If Bibi Netanyahu comes back to power and Hamas stays in power there will be an awful clash between our one-state-solution vision and their one-state-solution vision. None of these religious zealots really expresses the real will of the people and one of the only ways I know how to redeem the people from being hostage is to offer an alternative background." Europe is a model, he says, because of its success, after centuries of war, in achieving peace and a "kind of biblical process of unification". Much more ambitiously, however, he argues that if the EU were to hold the prospect as it has, however ambivalently, to Turkey, in a decade's time or more, of actually admitting Israel and an infant Palestinian state to membership, this would itself be an irresistible incentive to reach an agreement. Experience suggests that Israel reacts to mere rhetorical demands to give by saying "But we've got gonish" – Burg uses the Yiddish word for nothing – in return. "Nobody buys it. But if you say that at the end of the process Israel will have borders to the East and openness to the West, Israel will say, you know what, that's a deal. The entire Europe for the West Bank? That's not bad." And, he adds, "just imagine what that would do for a Palestinian in the West Bank or in Gaza. His children might get the best education in France or Italy and then come back again. It's free. It's open. The minute you see a process beginning like this the killing will stop or will be reduced. The minute you don't have a vision, you don't have an outlet. Killing is the outlet." Given Israel's strong tendency to be as suspicious of Europe as it is attached to its alliance with the US, isn't this too much to expect? Burg – who does not even rule out the EU also making similar offers to, say, Lebanon and Syria in return for a full panoply of democratic institutions and universal human rights – accepts that it is a "challenge". But Burg argues that whereas the US expects to "meld the previous identities of its members in an American oneness" the European model creates a "civil political entity" that preserves "all the previous identities of its various members". Which is better for the Jews, he asks? "Is it getting lost into the American melting pot or is it being a stone in the ongoing beautiful mosaic of Europe?" To be fair, Burg is anything but starry-eyed about the EU's ability to play the much more important role in the Middle East he is clear he wants it to. "The problem is that in the past 60 years too many politicians in Europe owe their tranquillity to being guaranteed by American rifles," he says. "They won't jump in and assume responsibility." The international Quartet, in which the EU is supposed to be an equal partner with the US, is "not functioning". He is scornful of the EMU inability to persuade the US to join in a determined new policy that would say: "We can't tolerate a nuclear arms race in the Middle East; we can't tolerate fundamentalism here; we cannot tolerate the suffering in Gaza, we cannot tolerate the road blocks, the settlements. But we say stop this and we offer you something in return. That's a new conversation." The failure to achieve this so far especially rankles because "even with Obama in the White House, America is too far away to hear what's going on here. It doesn't hear the knocks on the door. Europe hears the knocks on the door. Europe sees the shadows passing under the window." For Burg's vision of an EU stretching out to the eastern Mediterranean – in its own interest – has a much bigger goal: dealing with the growing presence of Islam in its midst. Burg says ominously that far-right Europeans such as the late Jörg Haider , Jean Marie Le Pen, or the Swiss anti-immigration politician Christoph Blocher "have a solution. We've tried it a couple of times in the past. Let's do it again. They're nicer. They dress OK. They don't have a funny moustache but at the end of the day they have the formula." The alternative, he argues, is the long-term development of a democratic, "European Islam". "What happened to Judaism when it encountered Christian democracy? What happened to Christianity that was so violent only a couple of centuries ago when it met and merged with democracy? It was changed. Now imagine in 50, 75, 100 years' time you have a European Islam [in which people are told] we respect you for respecting your roots and origins and traditions and rights. And we would love it if you internalised the value systems of our world as well – equality and liberties and so on. And now imagine this 100 million people, or 50 per cent of them, saying: you know what? This big devil is not so diabolic. All of a sudden from the Noah's Ark of Europe the harbinger sends a message: Islam and democracy can function together. And it's not one individual, it's the masses of European Islam, like European Jewry, like European Christianity." For Burg this is impressively personal. As a representative of European Jewry that was "kicked out and expelled from Europe because of [its] otherness I have to give my utmost to prevent the late Mr Haider and other fascist semi-racists making the Muslims in Europe the new Jews." Which brings us back to the book. Utopian or not, his alternative vision for Israel, laid out with especial eloquence in the final chapter, is for it to become a beacon of liberty and racial tolerance, its humanistic values drawn on centuries of Jewish existence preceding the Holocaust and "with the acceptance of the other as an equal to be appreciated". Part of this process, he argues, is for Israel to replace the Holocaust as a memory exclusively for Jews and use it instead to become the vanguard of the "struggle against racism and violence against the persecuted" throughout the world. "There are two kinds of people coming out of Auschwitz," he told me. "Those who said never again for the Jews and those like me who say never again for any human beings." Burg remains what he has always been: a vehement opponent of the post-1967 occupation. One of the reasons for right-wing fury at the book was its repeated references to the misery it inflicts on the Palestinians. But he says that while "until recently" he was sure that if that "primary reality" was solved "you solve everything", he now believes that "even the occupation is the outcome of something earlier and this is the mentality of trauma, be it 2,000 years of trauma or the intensifying of it in the six years of the Second World War. In order to solve these traumas I have to address my fears, my ghosts, my genies. And that's what I'm trying to do here." He says he wrote the book partly because "Israel became a very efficient kingdom with no prophecy. You don't have real political thinking here. You have academia living in their ivory towers or politics that has no brain whatever. What I tried to offer is some alternative political thinking." What has most encouraged him about the book's reception is its impact on younger Israelis, groups of whom he is still invited to address 18 months after its publication. "All those who wanted to kill me are Labour centrists, 50-plus, secular, well-off economically, and they said, 'Well Avraham now that we've made it, you come with your stupid questions. Stop it immediately.' I lost many of my classical supporters in the centre. On the other hand I gained very interesting new ground among the younger generation who understand that something is not working in this kingdom." So would the politician-turned-prophet, who was once the great Prime Ministerial hope of the Israeli left, turn back to politician again? Burg, who at 53 is currently a partner in running a labour-intensive agriculture business, acknowledges there is pressure – "I won't say a lot, but some" – to do so. He is, he says, no longer "obsessed" by the idea as he once was. But "if the situation happens, maybe I'll say yes." What's more important, he insists, is that "if people today ask me, Avrum, why don't you come back to politics, for me it's a huge, encouraging statement that the day will come when my views might be represented in the Knesset, that someone who was only a year ago the national pariah is perceived as an alternative to so many problems here. That's amazing."
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