March 11, 2007
More Historical Analogies Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:30 PM EST Historical analogies, illuminating ones and less illuminating ones, have often featured on this blog. A pico-scandal in Germany bubbled up this week, for last Sunday German Bishop Gregor Maria Franz Hanke, touring the Holy Land, observed that “this morning we saw pictures of the Warsaw ghetto at Yad Vashem and this evening we are going to the Ramallah ghetto.” If the Israelis are using Ramallah as a holding pen while they make plans to gas and incinerate all of its inhabitants, and indeed all Palestinians everywhere Israel’s army can reach, there is nothing much wrong with this sly analogy. If that is not the Israeli plan, there may be a problem. As it happens, Bishop Hanke was not traveling on his own: he was part of a group of 27 members of the German Bishops Conference visiting Israel, and it turns out he was not the only German bishop with a flair for analogy. Crossing a checkpoint into East Jerusalem, the archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Joachim Meisner, informed reporters that “this is something that is done to animals, not people.” Meisner went on to opine that just as the Berlin Wall was brought down so this wall would be brought down, for walls separating Israeli and Palestinian territory served no purpose. While much can be said against the proposed route of Israeli-built barriers—for example, some of the proposed sections look like land grabs—the analogy between the two walls being the same in principle would be exemplary if West Germans had been crossing into East Germany and murdering large numbers of East German civilians, and if the German Democratic Republic’s main purpose in building the Berlin Wall had been to make those homicidal West Germans stop. If that was not the case, this analogy, too, looks problematic. If you do not like the tone of some anti-Israeli polemics, you are constantly warned against confusing anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. This warning is always very helpful, because the temptation to make that foolish mistake occurs more and more frequently these days. The notion that the Israelis are the new Nazis is peculiarly readily easily confused with anti-Semitism, but happily the German clerical authorities have helped us to understand that nothing like that occurred here. The head of the German Bishops Conference, Cardinal Karl Lehmann, subsequently decided that “in light of the painful reality of the separation fence some of the members of the delegation said harsh things, some of which were not appropriate.” Admirably stringent language, but it is hard to tell what, precisely, the Cardinal was talking about, for he also insisted that the Bishop Hanke had no intention to compare the past and the present, for “it is impossible to compare current problems with the murder of the Jewish people.” Here, I think, the cardinal underestimates Bishop Hanke, who may have been doing it with sublime idiocy, but it is impossible to miss the fact that he was indeed making the comparison. A more plausible defense would have been to suggest that we should not be too hard on Bishop Hanke, for other celebrated Germans have recently confused RAF Bomber Command with Auschwitz, the U.S. Eighth Air Force with Auschwitz, and Abu Ghraib with Auschwitz (this last, by the way, not in some sectarian pamphlet, but in the pages of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s great conservative newspaper). Bishop Hanke may not be in good company, but he is in quite a lot of company, and it is at least possible that his intention was less to impeach the Jews than to dilute the gravity of the charges against those who tried to exterminate them, by attributing comparable crimes to not only the Jews themselves but to the other historical actors who once seemed morally distinguishable from the people who ran Auschwitz.
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