Eighty-six years ago Europe’s Jews suffered the most catastrophic event in their history, ending in a systematic, industrial-scale slaughter. Six million was the body count, its physical manifestation. But the Shoah, or Holocaust, as it is also known, delivered a psychic wound that cannot be so easily measured. Nor has it ever truly healed.
Studies of its history can enlighten us, as has Zionism’s history. But to fully grasp the extent of the Shoah’s effects perhaps we should turn to psychology. A good place to start, I think, is acknowledging that we humans are a species of primates, with whom we share certain defining characteristics. For all our complexities and material achievements, homo sapiens is a social animal, with an ontological need for belonging. Like our closest primate relatives we are tribal animals. To overlook or deny this is at our peril – in Jungian terms, a denial of the ‘shadow’.
Seen from this perspective, Hamas’s horrific surprise attack on Israel last year tore open that festering psychic wound. Thus for many Jews the cry of ‘Never Again’ references the shame and trauma of the Shoah, rather than its lesson for the whole of humanity. For Israelis, who have assumed the mantle of its repudiation (and in so doing embarked on the cruel oppression of yet another people), the psychic affront has been seemingly unbearable. So too the guilt borne by western nations who did little to prevent the Shoah, or in Germany’s case, actually conducted it. That few thus affected would accept that their reactions are largely unconscious goes without saying. Denial of one kind or another has led to unqualified support of Israel and wholesale indifference to the plight of Palestinians.
The Enlightenment provided us with another, more progressive principle of human organisation. Though originally the province of the propertied, and remaining a work-in-progress, the concept of a shared humanity gave birth to the United Nations and its systems of human rights and law. Thus the history of the past two and half-odd centuries can be characterised by the tension between these two poles – the deep-seated, species-specific tribal one, and the one of a common humanity.
This is being played out in high relief now. While a vengeful Israel continues its killing spree in Gaza, with untold thousands of Palestinians wounded or dead and the strip rendered largely uninhabitable, here in Australia we’re embroiled in a war of words. Specifically, what is or is not ‘antisemitic’. ‘Antisemitism’, coined in 1879 by a little-known German Jew-hater is today, post-Holocaust, a powder-keg of controversy. If openly embraced by far-right groups, more generally ‘antisemite’ is a term of abuse.
The 2016 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Working Definition of Antisemitism is a non-binding document including eleven examples of antisemitism, seven relating to Israel. Two of those are contentious, for stifling criticism of Israel and limiting free speech. Yet despite its principal drafter’s objections, Israel and its supporters have campaigned for the definition to be adopted. The Morrison government did so, followed by some universities and other entities here, while Holocaust scholars, highlighting its flaws, have proposed either of two alternatives. The Jerusalem Declaration and the Nexus Doctrine are both more specific than IRHA’s definition and allow critiques of Israel, yet the campaign persists.
Today the world is seeing what Zionism’s critics have realised for some time. That since 1948, when Israel declared itself a Jewish state on largely Palestinian land, the crushing injustices there have mounted, with Palestinians paying a heavy price for Germany’s ‘final solution’ – itself the culmination of centuries of Jewish persecution by a Christianised Europe. And now, whenever signs appear of public opinion shifting in response to the genocidal devastation in Gaza, Israel’s hasbara team gears into action, seizing the victim’s mantle for its own.
The denial here exemplifies what psychologists call ‘splitting’ – our uncanny human ability to countenance two contradictory ideas. Thus Israel can claim to be the Middle East’s only democracy, while simultaneously discriminating against Palestinians living within its borders and spreading its settlements across the West Bank. Or that in waging a preposterously disproportionate war in Gaza, the IDF is the world’s ‘most moral’ army. Most Jews have never been to the territories or witnessed the oppression there. It’s not that facts aren’t available, but many elect to reject them. Closing their eyes and hearts to Palestinian suffering, few understand that as long as the occupation continues there will be a Hamas, or some other similar group to replace it.
Antisemitism has spiked here, but the data are problematic and what they indicate contested. The cause is yet to be determined but it’s curious that the Executive Council of Australian Jewry which conducts the surveys hasn’t deduced a possible correlation with the growing protests against Israel’s actions and Australia’s complicity in them. So far the government’s moves to prevent social division seem only to inflame it. Why appoint a former ECAJ president as its Antisemitism Envoy and a Islamophobia Envoy yet to be announced when the Human Rights Commission is perfectly placed to tackle the problems of escalating racism?
Last week the International Court of Justice ruled, as many have repeatedly declared, that Israel is an apartheid state and its occupation is illegal and must be dismantled. We await the government’s response to it. The time for cognitive denial is over.
On the other hand, what can be taken as casual antisemitism has had a long life. Assertions that Jews pull strings behind the scenes, whether with governments or the media, or that Jews control the banks, are still with us, and as late as the 1980s I heard an ABC radio broadcaster refer to the Jewish international conspiracy without a shred of irony. And as history has shown us, casual forms of racism can quickly morph into something serious when societies implode under pressure, as some are threatening to do now. The 2018 massacre of worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh is a horrific case in point.
Sara Dowse
Sara Dowse is an American-born Australian feminist, author, critic, social commentator, and visual artist. Her novels include Schemetime published in 1990, Sapphires, and As the Lonely Fly, and she has contributed reviews, articles, essays, stories, and poetry to a range of print and online publications.