Will We Ever Be Forgiven for the Holocaust? The question is rhetorical. When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust? Never.
“Criticism of Israel functions as a sort of antiseptic bath, or mikveh — no matter how mired in the impurities of anti-Semitism you might be when you go in, you come out as fragrant as a bride awaiting her groom.”
http://forward.com/articles/185720/will-we-ever-be-forgiven-for-the-holocaust/#ixzz2ivRxpyfz
Howard Jacobson, Man Booker Prize winner and author of such novels as “Kalooki Nights” and “The Finkler Question,” delivered this year’s Jerusalem Address at the B’Nai Brith World Center in Jerusalem, from which this essay has been adapted.
The shocking psychological truth is that man rejects the burden of guilt by turning the tables on those we have wronged and portraying ourselves as the victims of their suffering. The Roman historian Tacitus spells it out. “It is part of human life,” he wrote, “to hate the man you have hurt.” Those we harm, we blame — mobilizing dislike and even hatred in order to justify, after the event, the harm we did. From which it must follow that those who are harmed the most, as in the case of the Shoah — are blamed the most.
Holocaust denial, in any of its forms, obeys this pattern. For foisting the lie of the 6 million upon the world, Jews are accused of compounding the wickedness that was the just cause of the Holocaust — had it only happened — in the first place. By virtue of the way Jews cynically exploit the Holocaust to serve their political and financial purposes today, are they shown to be deserving of what they suffered yesterday or, rather, since there was no Holocaust, what they ought to have suffered yesterday.
Must the terrible logic that ensures — that an irreparable wrong will never be forgiven — induce in us an equally terrible vigilance: Instead of Never Forget, must our motto be Never Mention? Is silence the only precaution we can take against its happening again?
The creation of the State of Israel was meant to settle that question for us. In many ways it does, and in many ways it still doesn’t. For some Jews, it is precisely Israel we need to stay shtum about. Such a refusal of sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust, grounded in this modern rehashing of the libel of the grasping, heartless Jew, is retrospective blame in action.