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ホロコーストの有無を超えるイスラエルの生存の権利主張
これは、元バラク首相の助言者の言である。ホロコースト云々以前から、ユダヤ人の国家の要求と、それへの支持があったとの主張である。
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http://www.forward.com/articles/7513
Forward Forum
THE STRATEGIC INTEREST: Israel's Right To Exist Is Based on More Than the Holocaust
By yossi Alpher
March 17, 2006
The wave of renewed Holocaust denial set in motion by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continues to resonate. With Iranians sponsoring anti-Holocaust conferences and cartoon contests, Tehran has become the venue where Western Holocaust deniers choose to congregate.
Thankfully, at the strategic level, Ahmadinejad's rhetoric has merely served to further isolate his country, as the rest of the world escalates its campaign to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Tongue-in-cheek, it might even be said that Ahmadinejad gave Holocaust denial a bad name.
Still, on two levels, I am troubled by the Diaspora Jewish and Israeli response.
First, at the didactic level. Shortly after Ahmadinejad launched his campaign, I received an e-mail from an Iranian friend, a very courageous professor of political science. He wanted to speak out in Tehran academic circles against his president's antisemitic rhetoric, but he lacked the tools. Could I send him the materials he needed to correct his countrymen's abysmal ignorance of what really happened in the Holocaust?
I did my best. I contacted Israeli Holocaust experts and scanned the Internet. But I quickly discovered that the prevailing wisdom among Holocaust experts demands that Holocaust deniers be ignored rather than engaged in debate. I also found that there is a particular paucity of Holocaust education materials directed, in terms of content and language, at Arab and Muslim audiences.
The idea that Holocaust deniers should themselves be denied the dignity of a reply may make sense in Western circles, where they are a tiny and vilified minority. But I'm not sure this is necessarily the right way to deal with Holocaust denial in the Arab and Muslim worlds, where it is rife. Perhaps Holocaust educators can sit down with experts on Islam and give some thought to this issue.
The second level on which I am troubled by our response involves old-fashioned Zionist patriotism. Ahmadinejad invoked Holocaust denial with a specific purpose in mind: to undermine Israel's moral and historic right to exist as a sovereign Jewish nation in its historic homeland -- and thereby lend credence and credibility to Iran's efforts, through support for terrorism and military nuclear schemes, to eliminate Israel. In this regard, he made two points: either the Holocaust never took place, in which case Israel has no moral right at all to exist; or the Holocaust did take place, in which case it is the Germans and the Austrians who should, in penance, host a Jewish state, and not the Muslim world, which did not contribute to the Holocaust.
Implicit in these arguments, which are popular in the Arab and Muslim worlds, is the assumption that Israel was created solely, or principally, because of the Holocaust. Israel and Diaspora Jewry, along with the civilized world, hastened to condemn the Iranian leader for denying the Holocaust. But they never properly responded to his assertion that the Holocaust is Israel's raison d'etre. Hence they left unanswered the dual argument that, first, the Muslim world should not have been "forced" by the guilt-stricken West to bear the burden of Israel's creation on its sanctified Islamic soil and, second, the Palestinian people should not have had to "pay" for the West's misplaced guilt.
At the risk of boring the reader with a recapitulation of the political history of the Zionist movement and the creation of modern Israel, I believe we should be saying something different to Ahmadinejad and his Arab and Muslim audience.
The Holocaust undoubtedly constituted an important consideration in the creation of Israel as a haven for the Jewish people --but not, in historic and diplomatic terms, the main consideration. Israel was created by the institutions of the international community, giving it international legitimacy of a sort few nations enjoy.
In 1922, long before the Holocaust, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 was endorsed explicitly by the League of Nations, which appointed Britain the mandatory power and charged it with creating a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people. In 1947, two years after the end of World War II, the United Nations created the state of Israel. The relevant document, U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181, never mentions the Holocaust.
True, the Zionist movement was founded more than a century ago largely in response to pogroms and other persecutions of Jews in Czarist Russia, with the notion of heading off a Holocaust by removing the Jews from areas of danger, an endeavor in which it failed. Undoubtedly, too, the timing of the creation of Israel was heavily influenced by the presence of around 1 million displaced Jewish Holocaust victims seeking refuge and the world's pangs of conscience after the events of World War II.
But the Zionist pioneers of the early aliyot had Jewish nationalism in mind, not pogroms. And the international institutions that created Israel recognized the Jews as a people with legitimate national and historic rights, regardless of the Holocaust.
We can only speculate as to whether, had there been no Holocaust, the half-million Jewish settlers in the Yishuv would have succeeded eventually in carving out a Jewish state in Mandatory Palestine. I believe, given the dynamic nature of the Zionist movement during the pre-Holocaust years, that the momentum would in any event have led to the creation of a state.
We can debate this issue at our leisure. But we should not allow Ahmadinejad to dictate the agenda for discussing Israel's legitimacy. And without in any way denigrating the centrality of the Holocaust in modern Jewish history, we should reply to the Holocaust-deniers by insisting on a more balanced narrative regarding Israel's formidable legal, national and moral roots.
Yossi Alpher, a former senior adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Barak and former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, is co-editor of the bitterlemons family of online publications.
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