"Holocaust's unholy hold,"

A most interesting commentary published in the Los Angeles Times,
written by Avraham Berg, an Orthodox Jew, a former Speaker of the
Israeli Knesset, a past-president of the World Zionist organization and
son of a leading Rabbi and leader of the National Religious Party in Israel.

Ed CorriganThe deeper we are stuck in our Auschwitz past, the more difficult it
becomes to be free of it.

Reporting from Nataf, Israel -- Even today, when economic storms are
shaking markets around the world, posing a threat to the stability of
entire countries and societies, Israel continues to conduct its business
far from the turmoil, as if swimming in a private ocean of its own.
True, the headlines are alerting the public here about the crisis, and
the politicians are hastily recalculating their budgets. But none of
this is dramatically changing the way we think about ourselves.

To Israelis, these issues are mundane. What really matters here is the
all-important spirit of Trauma, the true basis for so many of our
country's life principles. In Israel, the darkest period in human
history is always present. Regardless of whether the question at hand is
of the future relations between Israel and our Palestinian neighbors in
specific and the Arab world in general, or of the Iranian atomic threat
and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it always comes down to the same conversation.
Every threat or grievance of major or minor importance is dealt with
automatically by raising the biggest argument of them all -- the Shoah
-- and from that moment onward, every discussion is disrupted.

The constant presence of the Shoah is like a buzz in my ear. In Israel,
children are always, it seems, preparing for their rite-of-passage
"Auschwitz trip" to Poland. Not a day passes without a mention of the
Holocaust in the only newspaper I read, Haaretz. The Shoah is like a
hole in the ozone layer: unseen yet present, abstract yet powerful. It's
more present in our lives than God.

It is the founding experience not just of our national consciousness but
of more than that. Army generals discuss Israeli security doctrine as
"Shoah-proof." Politicians use it as a central argument for their
ethical manipulations.

The Shoah is so pervasive that a study conducted a few years ago in a
Tel Aviv school for teachers found that more than 90% of those
questioned view it as the most important experience of Jewish history.
That means it is more important than the creation of the world, the
exodus from Egypt, the delivering of the Torah on Mt. Sinai, the ruin of
both Holy Temples, the exile, the birth of Zionism, the founding of the
state or the 1967 Six-Day War.

The Shoah is woven, to varying degrees, into almost all of Israel's
political arguments; over time, we have taken the Shoah from its
position of sanctity and turned it into an instrument of common and even
trite politics. It represents a past that is present, maintained,
monitored, heard and represented. Our dead do not rest in peace. They
are busy, active, always a part of our sad lives.

Of course, memory is essential to any nation's mental health. The Shoah
must always have an important place in the nation's memorial mosaic. But
the way things are done today -- the absolute monopoly and the dominance
of the Shoah on every aspect of our lives -- transforms this holy memory
into a ridiculous sacrilege and converts piercing pain into hollowness
and kitsch. As time passes, the deeper we are stuck in our Auschwitz
past, the more difficult it becomes to be free of it.

What does the primacy of the Shoah mean in terms of our politics and
policy? For one thing, it becomes virtually impossible to find a
conversation carried out with reason, patience, self-control or
restraint. Take Iran as an example. With regard to Iran, as with any
other security matter that has potentially existential consequences, we
have no thoughts at all -- only instincts and trauma-driven impulses.
Who has ever heard of alternative approaches to the Iranian issue, of
strategic arguments underlying the passionate emotions, the old fears
and violent rhetoric?

Few people in Israel are willing to try to perceive reality through a
different set of conceptual lenses other than those of extermination and
defensive isolation. Few are willing to try on the glasses of
understanding and of hope for dialogue. Instead, the question is always:
Is a second Shoah on the way?

This is one of the strongest reasons why I voluntarily withdrew from
political life in Israel. I couldn't help feeling that Israel has become
a kingdom lacking in vision and without a prophetic horizon. On the
surface, everything is in order; decisions are carried out, life moves
on, the ship sails along. But where is this movement heading? No one
knows. The sailors are rowing without seeing anything; the lower-ranking
officers are holding their eyes up to the leadership, but the leaders
are not capable of seeing past each coming, rising, tumbling wave. No
one is looking ahead, searching for a new continent. Instead, we are
looking backward, held hostage by memory.

I cannot be an accomplice in such a way of life, with no spiritual
compass or moral direction. Never -- or so I've been taught from infancy
-- have the Jewish people existed only for the sake of existence; never
have we survived only in order to survive; never have we carried on for
the sole purpose of carrying on by itself.

The Jewish existence was always directed upward. Not only toward our
king and father in the heavens, but also our gaze upward was an answer
to the great call of humanity; an answer of liberty in the times of
enslavement in Egypt, an answer to the need of a righteous and
egalitarian law in the days of Sinai when we wandered through the
desert, an answer to the call of human universalism manifest in the
Scriptures of the great prophets, and finally, an answer to the cry
opposing unjust and imperial occupation throughout late antiquity.

Even the Zionist idea was not merely an attempt to rescue the Jews from
violent anti-Semitic prosecutors, but rather was a heroic attempt to
establish a model society. Zionism meant to create a society that
avoided any form of discrimination or oppressive policy toward non-Jews,
of the kind under which Jews had suffered for more than two millenniums.

This utopian vision has fallen silent in Israel. Concerns for personal
survival and well-being, as well as fear about the ongoing bloodshed and
security emergencies, about Gaza and Iran and the realities of
demographics and population, have silenced the moral debate and blocked
the horizons of vision and creative thinking.

I believe Israel must move away from trauma to trust, that we must
abandon the "everything is Auschwitz" mentality and substitute for it an
impulse toward liberty and democracy.

I fully understand that this will require a slow process of change. It
will take more than one or two years for a new Jewish humanism to be
accepted, allowing Israel to become a less traumatic place, a country in
which school trips do not only present Israel's high school students
with extermination camps. Israel must rethink its strict law of return
(which defines Jewishness the same way Hitler did), its relationship
with Germany, and it must reaffirm its commitment to being a democratic
state of the Jewish people, a state that belongs to all of its citizens,
in which the majority decides on its character and essence, with the
utmost sensitivity to all the "others" -- and especially the Arab
non-Jewish minority.

I have a vision of Israel as the driving force behind a global peace
process and worldwide reconciliation and as a society guided by a deep
sense of responsibility to world justice, but it's difficult to accept
this vision when we are confronted every day with the hardship and
perpetual bloodshed reflected in our newspapers. My hope is for a Jewish
people that insists "never again" -- not only for Jewish victims but for
anyone who suffers around the globe today.

Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Israeli parliament, is a businessman
and author, most recently, of "The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From
Its Ashes," published this month by Palgrave Macmillan.