On Wed, 31 Mar 1999, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> The FT also noted Israel's "failure to condemn Serbia," attributing it to
> possible gratitude for Serb sheltering of Jews during WW II, while Croatia
> killed some 30,000.
Actually it's deeper than that. The Israelis have been identifying with the Serbs throughout the time that American news media has been painting them as Nazis, even back during the partition of Bosnia. It's because they have an entirely different understanding of the meaning of the Holocaust. American Jews (and liberals) understand it in "universal" terms, as something that might happen anywhere to anyone, something we must always be on the look out for, that we will be guilty if we don't prevent. The Israelis look at it as something that happened once, to them, and that came out of the unique historical development of Germany: the Sonderweg explanation. Which makes sense when you think about it in identity terms: if it could happen to anyone at anytime, then the fact it happened to the Jews is just a horrible absurd accident. That's not the kind of myth you can legitimate a state with.
So when the Israelis apply the grid of the holocaust to understand the Balkans, they get exactly the opposite picture of the one we in America draw. Everyone is assigned a role in terms of whether they were on the side of the Nazis or the side of the Jews in the original holocaust. So the Serbs, who were slaughtered in the same Ustashe camps, are the beleaguered victims, and the Croats, who were Nazis, are the evil aggressors. As for the Albanians, and the Bosnians before them . . . alas, when it comes to armed Muslims, the Israelis are all too willing to believe they are terrorists and to be sympathetic to their enemies. So they end up identifying with the Serbs.
Shevrach Weiss, the speaker of the Knesset under Rabin and a political scientist, was on Israeli TV the other day telling Israelis they should get with the program and realize that Milosevic is the bad guy. But he's a minority voice. A friend told me that Israeli journalists were still allowed in Kosovo when all others were kicked out because the Serbs told them "you are the only ones that will understand. This is our Jerusalem."
Oy, if history is cunning I'm a doorknob.
Of course the Israelis, like most little countries, don't pay much attention to news that doesn't concern them directly, so Bosnia was barely a presence in their newspapers. (I once asked a friend what the Israeli take on Chechnya was, and he said sarcastically "What? Are there Jews there?"). Unlike America the hegemon, whose news shows mention every disturbance in the world because it's all potentially something we might butt our noses into.
Michael __________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com