Israel losing its memory in pursuit of security

[Tripmann]

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0608/1224272053591.html?via=rel

Post-Holocaust taboos of humiliation and collective punishment have now withered to nothing, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE

PERHAPS THE most haunting opening sequence in cinematic history is that of Claude Lanzmann’s epic documentary, Shoah, released in 1985. We see a moment of verdant serenity. A flat-bottomed boat is being punted down a slow, tree-lined river. A handsome, middle-aged man with curly grey hair is standing in the prow, singing, in a lithely melodic tenor voice, a plaintively nostalgic Polish folk song about a lovely white house.

If you watch all nine hours of Shoah – and it is pretty much a human duty to do so – two thoughts become imperative. The first is a complete understanding of why so many Jews felt the need for a homeland of their own. In the simplest sense, people like Simon Srebnik needed a place where they could feel safe. You understand the existential force of that need. You grasp the raw power of the determination never again to be dependent for survival on the decency of European societies or on the liberal pieties that had proved to be so useless against barbarism. You know exactly why Jews would want to be able to wield violence rather than be subjected to it.

Watching Shoah, though, you also understand something else, something that is in tension with this first realisation. You understand the ways in which systems of violence, if they are unchecked, escalate towards a rationalisation of the unspeakable.

Once you decide that your group is especially exempt from the demands of common humanity, there is virtually no limit to what you will do to others. Lanzmann shows, through a slow accumulation of banal detail, the ways in which the attempted extermination of an entire people became normal. Shoah is, more than anything else, a description of the consequences of any group with power over others deciding that it is above the demands of humanity, and the others are below them.