I am Jewish. While at my advanced age, and being completely secular, this may not seem too important in my life; yet it is. I was born in a time when there was only a small minority of Americans who cared about that walled in place in Poland where those of my extended family were corralled. I was struck by the similarity of these two locations, these virtual nation-prisons by this article in today's L.A. Times. It begins:
Almost seven months after the cease-fire that ended a devastating war in the Gaza Strip between Israel and the militant group Hamas, the fighting's ruinous effects are visible everywhere in this ragged coastal enclave.
Reconstruction efforts have barely gotten off the rubble-strewn ground. Electricity flickers feebly through just six to eight hours each day. The economy, never robust, is in tatters. Government salaries mainly go unpaid. The infighting between Hamas, still the dominant power in Gaza, and the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority has grown even more bitter after a stillborn unity accord.
Continue on to a different era, almost 80 years ago, to another Gaza like enclave.......
Most Americans in 2015 are sort of supportive of Israel; Most Americans in early 1938 were sort of supportive of Germany, even in spite of some of the excesses of the new Nazi government. This national sentiment can be understood from from this article in a popular weekly, "Liberty Magazine" in the May 21, 1938 edition "What Hitler Told Me" by Edward Price Bell (No link available - or extant copy)
Marxism, Communism, chaos --out with them! Lassez-faire -- out with it: it leads to general poverty and at last total social upheaval! Private property and initiative? Yes, but with a proviso: they must not ruin all by serving the few in distress of the many. Lower tariffs, monetary stabilization, full resumption of international monetary stabilization, full resumption of international trade, work, peace- Herr Hitler speaks up for them all.
My copy is falling apart, and there is no collection of all of these journals, unlike major newspapers of the time that had a small daily edition on special permanent rag bond for major libraries -- now digitized for posterity. This magazine (a "60 Minutes" of its day) was meant for the average national reader that gives a sense of the era. If interested go on the Wikipedia link above, to get a sense of it's broad populist view which reflected the mood of the country.
The Chancellor responded to "the Jewish question":
We are not against the Jews as Jews, but we are for the Germans as Germans. Jewish domination of Germany is gone. Germans will run this country, the only country they have any desire to run; they will keep their fingers out of other people's pies. Whatever may be the relative merits of Jewish and German cultures, we want our own. We will not be unjust to a minority. Neither shall we permit ethics or technique of any stamp to establish the intellectual, professional, and financial sway of one person minus over ninety-nine persons plus. That is our idea of democracy.
"Historiography," the content of history books, is quite different from "History", that which flows from an immediate past, understood by current values conveyed by what we now call "the media," to shape an unknown future. This is why I include this segment from a magazine that for all I know may not even exist anywhere else, certainly not for public access. So, I can read it now just like the original owner who may have picked it up at the news stand for a nickel to read on the subway going to work. If he were not a Jew, and maybe struggling trying to hold a job as the depression went on and on, he might admire this man Hitler who united his country and brought them out of the despair of losing a war, and having to pay ruinous reparations to the victors. Hitler had the guts to say, "Hell, No" to face down the rest of the imperialist countries who set up a "League of Nations" to preserve their power. As far as his being rotten to Jews, the guy on the subway may have thought, "...well they are too damn powerful and like he says in the article, he just wants them out of Germany. It's not like he wants to kill them or anything like that!"
American Historiography of the 1930s, what we were exposed to growing up, shows a different Hitler than the one interviewed in this article. I'm not sure its possible for readers to suspend, even for the moment, a lifetime of association for this essay. But, that's what I'm trying to do to express my own feelings - so I'll just continue for those who want to stay with me.
The current events in the Jewish Homeland, the one place that would welcome me just because of who I am, because my spirit was there when Moses accepted the "law" from God in my name -- is profoundly disturbing. It is disturbing at a level where the normal concepts of morality, justice and fairness that guide us don't really offer much of a resolution.
Rather than make this into a long free association, I will bring it to a close. My message is that all of the dialogue both here and across the world about the Israel-Palestine question is rather meaningless -- at least for me. While I have in my hands an expression of American popular opinion, now three quarters of a century old, its value is to illustrate how we can't understand fully the mentality of the Jews who occupied Palestine after WWII and are to this day dominating a minority group to preserve their own well being.
If I were to take the words of Hitler quoted above and, along with a few changes, substitute "Palestinian" for "Jews," and the interviewee then to the current leader of Israel, would it be illustrative? Can anyone reading this get beyond the Hitler known to us now, to what he was to the world before the article, or even before he became chancellor in 1933. Ironically both he and Franklin Roosevelt took power only weeks apart, and both were feared and hated by segments of their own country.
Does this indicate that Netanyahu is as evil as Hitler and the majority who voted for him are like Nazi's; or does it mean something else? I'll try to address this with a personal story of two friends, both born early enough to have read the "Liberty Magazine" article as children. The first, H. faced hostility because he was a Jew in a small town in Pennsylvania, where even though he was a star High School quarterback, no girl was allowed to date him. He became a Navy officer and a later a rocket scientist, and used to be an atheist, "just like you Al," he says. His daughter moved to Israel, and after a slow death from cancer, H. told me he made a deal with God, "I will believe in you if I can see my daughter again." He is a right wing extremist who hates Obama, and spreads lies about him, and adores Netenyahu, and thinks that all Palestinians are scum.
Another man the same age is of German origin, and talks about the long affair he had with the niece of Eva Braun in Chicago. He tells me she never wanted to talk about her Aunt, who for a few hours was the wife of Adolf Hitler. J. does not accept the number of six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, saying that it was half that, and not as many as the Germans who were killed by the vicious Russians. In his heart of hearts, I'm convinced he still has a soft spot for that man who is now synonymous with evil.
What's my message? How's this: History, really historiography, is inherently distorting, as even in a country such as this where nothing is proscribed, we self select. I don't want to read anything about Hitler being a decent fellow, yet, I value holding the magazine that describes him just this way, and knowing that such a sentiment was accepted by the American public. My message is that human affiliation, affection, patriotism is paramount. When it is the Wansee Conference preparing the extermination of minorities we deplore it. When it is the Manhattan Project, creating a weapon that we would have used to incinerate as many civilians as necessary to achieve our national goals, we applaud it.
And like the flow of history, this essay has no ending.