When 166 people argue about the appropriateness of one of my posts, I owe them a defense - as one reader suggested. I have reread the rules, but still do not know what an HR is. Clarification would be appreciated.
It just so happens that at this very moment I am reading the book by the former speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Avraham Burg entitled; “The Holocaust in Over, we Must Rise from its Ashes, published in 2008 by Palgrave, MacMillan. I hope the publisher will realize the urgency of putting it out in paperback.
I will not describe the book, as the title is self-explanatory. But I will cite a passage that should reassure readers as to the appropriateness of yesterday’s blog. In the chapter entitled “Balancing Heroism and the Shoah”, on page 96, Burg writes (in a somewhat clumsy translation):
Lieutenant General Ehud Barak, then chief of the IDF staff, paid a visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps about the time of the 1992 Shoa Remembrance Day. He gave one of his most beautiful speeches there, a cynicism-free speech of pure Israeliness. The crooked axioms that fed his mind and ours are glaring. He said: “At the end of March, 1942, gas chambers were operated here in full force. And we, the soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces, arrived here fifty years later, perhaps fifty years too late.”’
These words must be read again and again in order to understand the depth of ignorance that created this text. Barak seemed to suggest that only a delay prevented us from liberating the camps. It was a glitch, no more than tardiness. The fallacy is that at the time, Israel did not have an army or a military capability; we were not even a minor player in the world stage. The chief of staff had his times mixed up, and the same happened to all of us. Many of us believe that the state of Israel could have, and should have, saved more of the slaughtered Jews of Europe. Except for one simple fact; the state did not exist then.”
If anyone still feels that my reading of Tarantino’s film ‘Inglorious Basterds’ is inappropriate, I enjoin them to read Burg's book from cover to cover. Many things in it will surprise them.