Misgivings of the kind expressed by Améry and Levi are condemned as grossly antisemitic today. It’s worth remembering that many such re-examinations of Zionism and anxieties about the perception of Jews in the world were incited among survivors and witnesses of the Shoah by Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and its manipulative new mythology. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a theologian who won the Israel Prize in 1993, was already warning in 1969 against the ‘Nazification’ of Israel. In 1980, the Israeli columnist Boaz Evron carefully described the stages of this moral corrosion: the tactic of conflating Palestinians with Nazis and shouting that another Shoah is imminent was, he feared, liberating ordinary Israelis from ‘any moral restrictions, since one who is in danger of annihilation sees himself exempted from any moral considerations which might restrict his efforts to save himself’. Jews, Evron wrote, could end up treating ‘non-Jews as subhuman’ and replicating ‘racist Nazi attitudes’.
Evron urged caution, too, against Israel’s (then new and ardent) supporters in the Jewish American population. For them, he argued, championing Israel had become ‘necessary because of the loss of any other focal point to their Jewish identity’ – indeed, so great was their existential lack, according to Evron, that they did not wish Israel to become free of its mounting dependence on Jewish American support.
They need to feel needed. They also need the ‘Israeli hero’ as a social and emotional compensation in a society in which the Jew is not usually perceived as embodying the characteristics of the tough manly fighter. Thus, the Israeli provides the American Jew with a double, contradictory image – the virile superman, and the potential Holocaust victim – both of whose components are far from reality.
Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish-born Jewish philosopher and refugee from Nazism who spent three years in Israel in the 1970s before fleeing its mood of bellicose righteousness, despaired of what he saw as the ‘privatisation’ of the Shoah by Israel and its supporters. It has come to be remembered, he wrote in 1988, ‘as a private experience of the Jews, as a matter between the Jews and their haters’, even as the conditions that made it possible were appearing again around the world. Such survivors of the Shoah, who had been plunged from a serene belief in secular humanism into collective insanity, intuited that the violence they had survived – unprecedented in its magnitude – wasn’t an aberration in an essentially sound modern civilisation. Nor could it be blamed entirely on a hoary prejudice against Jews. Technology and the rational division of labour had enabled ordinary people to contribute to acts of mass extermination with a clear conscience, even with frissons of virtue, and preventive efforts against such impersonal and available modes of killing required more than vigilance against antisemitism.