On the deep Zionism of Yom HaShoah. (This is long. I'm sorry for that.) Tonight is Yom HaShoah, the day of commemoration for our murdered millions, for the few but shining examples of those who had the chance to rebel and fight back, and for the unfathomable courage of those who simply survived and rebuilt their lives. It is a Zionist day. It is marked on the 27th of the month of Nissan on the Jewish calendar, which had already been established in the pre-state Jewish community as a day "for remembrance of heroism" for those killed in the Arab Revolt of 1936, which began on the 27 of Nissan, or April 19. There were other suggestions for the date: The ninth of Av, the traditional Jewish fast day that marks the destruction of the two temples and various exiles, expulsions and other calamities throughout our history; the 14th of Nissan, the eve of Passover, the day in which the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was launched against the Nazis; the 10th of Tevet, which falls in the winter and serves as another traditional Jewish day of mourning and fasting. In the end, the Jews of the Yishuv would settle on the familiar 27th of Nissan, the day on which they already mourned those closest to them. The dead of the Holocaust, after all, were still fresh and intimate and known to them, real people rather than moral abstractions. They felt intimately close to the destruction in a way that's hard to imagine now. Indeed, the very bill that established the 27th of Nissan as Yom HaShoah was drafted by MK Mordechai Nurock, a rabbi from Latvia whose wife Dvora and sons Eliyahu and Tzvi-Baruch were murdered by the Nazis. By the time his law establishing Yom Hashoah passed in the Knesset in 1951, over 140,000 "displaced persons" from Europe's DP camps had arrived in Israel. Every Israeli knew someone -- a sibling, a friend, a neighbor -- who had a direct connection to the genocide. In many ways, then, this transformation of the community's existing memorial day into Yom HaShoah was a way for survivors and victims to lay claim to their trauma. And it makes Yom HaShoah something more than only a remembrance of victimhood and death. It connects destruction to rebirth, vulnerability to redemption, the death of European Jewry to the new life of Israeli Jewry. It is a day for remembering not only what was lost, but also why there are no real solutions to the problem of vulnerability except self-reliance. When we teach about the Holocaust, we usually focus on the fundamentals: The experience of the Jewish victims -- the helplessness, the suffering, the mass-death -- the social and political factors that made it possible or the larger moral meaning of the extermination. But this year, in this new age inaugurated by October 7 of forgetfulness and dishonesty, when even the great and wise, professors and activists and even, here and there, some rabbis, allow themselves to purposefully forget their own history in service to the base prejudices of their cultural milieus, allow themselves the ahistorical ignorance of anti-Zionism, it is important to speak plainly about those among us who foresaw, who warned and acted, who saved what could be saved while others dithered and fretted. It is unpleasant, perhaps, but important nonetheless. Put simply (too simply, but I'm trying to keep it short) Zionism, alone among Jewish movements and cultural worlds, knew what was coming. It saw only dimly, vaguely, but this foreknowledge rested on serious analysis and theory, and recommended clear action. "[Theodor] Herzl could utter chilling prophecies about the fate that awaited Jews in Europe," Prof. Jacques Kornberg wrote in his intellectual biography of the founder of the modern Zionist movement. This one, for example, addressed to the Rothschilds: "Will it be a revolutionary expropriation from below or a reactionary confiscation from above? Will they chase us away? Will they kill us? I have a fair idea it will take all these forms, and others." (Complete Diaries 1:131) These prophecies flowed from Herzl's sociological analysis of antisemitism, of its usefulness to demagogues in a Europe torn by the social upheavals and disruptions of modernization. "One impulse behind his Zionism," wrote Kornfeld, "was an ominous sense of the fanatic dimensions hatred of Jews could take, and hence the special dangers imperiling Jews in an age of potential political instability and disorder." Herzl's heir David Ben Gurion, the founder of Israel, was equally prescient. In 1934, as he passed through Geneva on his way from London to Tel Aviv, Ben-Gurion had a rare meeting with two Arab journalists and leaders, Shekib Arslan and Ihsan el-Jabri. It was a gathering set up by the extraordinary and almost totally forgotten Palestinian leader Musa Alami, an incident I'd never heard of until I read Oren Kessler's book "1936." In their conversation, Ben Gurion told his Arab interlocutors that he expected six to eight million Jews to ultimately populate the forthcoming Jewish state, because Jews were imperiled in Europe. Arslan and Jabri, despite agreeing to strict confidentiality and telling Ben Gurion their conversation was informal and off the record, published his comments with mocking derision in the November 1934 edition of their journal La Nation Arabe. A frustrated Ben Gurion would not meet prominent Arabs again for a year and a half. What did Ben Gurion know, what was he trying to say, and what were his Arab interlocutors failing to hear? In October 1938, a month after Chamberlain's capitulation at Munich and before most people dared to even imagine anything so insane, Ben Gurion was already warning of a coming annihilation of the Jews. (Source: Tuvia Friling's two-volume Arrows in the Dark) "The outbreak of a world war -- which the Arabs are so vehemently in favor of -- will place us once again in danger of abandonment and absolute siege.... Hitler is not only the enemy and annihilator of the Jews of Germany. His sadistic and jealous desire is to annihilate the whole of world Jewry." Indeed, this dire foreboding was the logic behind the Zionist willingness to negotiate with the Nazis for the rescue of Jews, as in the Haavara agreement. This was an agreement in 1933 between the Zionist leadership and the Nazi regime to allow Jews to leave Germany with some of their property -- Nazi Germany did not allow Jews to take their property with them when they fled, causing many to stay behind in hopes of surviving the new regime and rebuilding their old lives. Many diaspora Jewish leaders, especially in America, were angered by the agreement, which they felt legitimized dealing with the Nazis just when they were trying to push for a global boycott of Germany. But the Zionists insisted on the policy, not because they downplayed Nazi intentions, but because they believed the Nazis were infinitely worse than diaspora Jews really understood. They understood (not all of them, but enough of the ones who mattered) that every Jew who could be convinced to leave Germany early through the Haavara agreement, some 50,000 by 1939, would be literally saved by it. In 1939, just a few months after Kristallnacht, Ben Gurion again offered an explicit, public prediction of extermination. "The Nazi pogrom of last November," he told a conference in Jerusalem, "is a signal for the destruction of the Jews of the world. I hope I will prove wrong. But I suspect that this German pogrom is but the beginning. It started in Germany. Who knows what will happen tomorrow in Czechoslovakia, ... in Poland, in Romania, and other countries? Until now even Satan did not dare to carry out such a plan. Now everything is permissible. Our blood, our honor, our property.... There are no limits as to what can be done to the Jews." And in June 1939, three months before the outbreak of war: "Hitler is a fact and he can be relied upon in this regard. If there is a world war and he takes control of Europe, he will carry out this thing; first of all, he will annihilate the Jews of Europe." The Zionists, almost entirely alone, saw it coming. And so on Yom HaShoah we remember not only the dead, though we spend most of the day recalling their names and lives and stories and the whole lost civilization of European Jews. We remember not only what we have lost, but also that it was by our own initiative and wisdom that the survivors came out of that great death and into a new day, a new/old Jewishness, an unapologetic survival and flourishing. Let them rage, my friends, let the antisemites forever build their moral worlds on our story in thick layers of hatred, conspiracy and righteous pretense, offering us, as ever, the most reliable signal of their dysfunction and decline. There's nothing new in that. What is new is us, our clarity and purpose, a Jewish collective shorn of the blindnesses and vulnerabilities of the past. This Yom HaShoah, I will think about what we might have been able to do for our brethren if we'd been established and strong just a decade earlier. I will think on our strength as much as our weakness, on the ever-present, unfulfillable duty to rebuild what was destroyed, and I will reflect on the evil stories of us that never really go away, but that don't, in the end, matter anymore, because those who could see around history's dark and dangerous corners finally freed us from their grip.
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