Wednesday, March 14, 2012

History’s lessons




History’s lessons



Prof. Ron Bryman

No one should be envious of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He needs to navigate the state of Israel against the Iranian nuclear threat in conditions of uncertainty, while striving to make the difficult, necessary, and right decisions. At this time, it appears he has chosen the correct path – enlisting the world, meaning the U.S., to place increasing pressure on Iran to shelve its nuclear weapons program without Israel needing to do the job itself – a task proportionate to a superpower and which only the U.S. can accomplish.

As someone who was raised in a home with a historian for a father, and as someone who doesn’t ignore history but tries to learn the lessons it teaches, Netanyahu is employing past lessons and using them to lead the country into the future. Indeed, that is what a wise person should do. Therefore, invoking the lessons of the Holocaust, as Netanyahu did in his speech to AIPAC last week, does not diminish the lesson, but makes a sound argument for why we must avoid past mistakes.

It is doubtful that “the world” has learned anything from Chamberlain’s and Daladier’s conciliatory policies toward the Nazis. If you recall, the British and French prime ministers in 1938 claimed to have brought “a thousand years of peace” upon the world with the infamous Munich Agreement. Instead they opened the door to catastrophe, and the Holocaust. Comments by the French prime minister today are not much different in their essence – or their naivete – from those made by Daladier. That is why it is acceptable to try to influence U.S. President Barack Obama, so that he doesn’t follow in Roosevelt’s footsteps, who refused a direct appeal by the Jews to bomb Auschwitz.


The Jewish nation cannot afford not to learn the lessons of its past. It is obligated to. If it doesn’t, then it is misappropriating its reason for existing in the first place and all the nice words we say every year on Holocaust Remembrance Day are nothing but hollow slogans.

Those who hate Netanyahu, and there’s no other way to describe those who reject anything he says regardless of the content, attack his willingness to learn from our past experience.

Author David Grossman, one of the spiritual leaders of the religion of “peace” asked in Haaretz (March 3): “Can Netanyahu, in the entanglement of pressures he has himself created and inflamed, find a sane, clear and practical point to lean on in the present?” Grossman ends the piece with an even graver question/accusation: “Does any one person have any right to consign so many people to death, only in the name of the fear of the possibility that it might never happen?”

It goes without saying that Grossman himself and his colleagues of the same worldview supported the “peace” process, which led, among other things, to many deaths in the name of a “peace” that might never happen. Should we therefore accuse him of “consigning so many people to death”?


Sadly, today too there are many who refuse to learn from history, even from the recent history of the past 20 years, and demand that Netanyahu bang his head against a brick wall, much as they do.


The prime minister is doing the right thing by tying the lessons of the ancient past – the Scroll of Esther and the calamity avoided then – to the recent past – the Holocaust -- for those who insist on not learning from the past are destined to relive it. Netanyahu would be doing a service if he learned from an even more recent past himself, and shook free of the edicts to repeat the act of expelling Jewish Israelis from their homes in their land.

Netanyahu’s job is to navigate Israel and lead it toward a sane, clear and practical future, and the path is predicated on learning the correct lessons taught by events from our distant and recent past.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1542

1 comment:

  1. Well said. Netanyahu is walking on a narrow beam, with many lives and the future of the State of Israel and perhaps, in a way, the entire world at stake. He is certainly wise to take all the lessons that our long and eventful past can offer.

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