The Morality of Acknowledging/Not-Acknowledging the Other’s Holocaust/Genocide

Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, Haifa University

The dialectics of producing moral knowledge

Moral knowledge is part of a struggle over human knowledge in general, and particularly over specific human identities and their potential to activate human beings to struggle against other human beings, their knowledge, identity and lifestyles. The main target is not the people themselves as “others,” but rather the “other” system of which they are its agents, servants and worshippers. The system has no “aim” yet the system, each human system, reproduces itself through power apparatuses and human relations in which moral knowledge has a special role: to regulate human energies so as to realize and secure the well-being of the system. In this sense, moral education, which internalizes moral knowledge in human beings, for the sake of the system’s untroubled reproduction against other systems and their claims is basically a violent process. As part of the normalization of human beings, these processes of moral education are used as weapons for war against other systems and they are a central element of the production of the normalized subject. Such processes can be realized in discourse, manifesting hegemonic, legitimate and relevant knowledge, always prepared to challenge their two rivals. One of these processes is the process of marginalizing rival bodies of knowledge, which threatens to force its knowledge, interests and identity to the centre, by resorting to counter-violence and by introducing its own morality to secure the new knowledge as self-evidence. The other rival is not in the form of an alternative positive utopia to be realized by aggressive strategies of moral education: it refuses violence in principle, and therefore avoids strategic-oriented representations of knowledge (Habermas 1979, p. 97). It refuses to enter any discourse and daily power games, being a negative utopia, that is, being committed to a universal emancipatory project, part of the redemptive tradition of the monotheistic religions and the humanist tradition. It is the concrete presence of the “totally different” from power relations which use moral education to regulate the current order of things and to prevent it from being challenged and transformed. In this sense, Israeli moral education and its instrumentalization of the memories of the Holocaust memory will exemplify the immanent immorality of normal moral education. By critically reconstructing a concrete and specific event, I will show in this paper how knowledge, including moral knowledge, is created, revealed, represented, distributed and consumed within the framework of a discursive process whose dialogue is its “totally different” moral practice and humanistic-oriented political alternative.

There is also another source of knowledge. This source is a non-strategic-oriented knowledge, including moral knowledge. This kind of knowledge is committed to refusing the violence of the strategic-oriented use of knowledge and is another part of being, even if not a positive part of it. This is so because it is never realized into a positive alternative and is never part of the normal reproduction of the realm of self-evidence. This element has no presence in discourse but rather in a dialogue, and has two sources. The first is ontological: human beings have the potential of becoming other than that for which they have been constructed within the framework of a certain realm of self-evidence. This part of human essence is the source of reflection and of true morality. The other source refers to the possibility of a change in the human context to a more humane reality. The hope principle symbolizes it. It is manifested by the unexpected, by the unplanned, and by the uncontrolled. Normally, the system draws manifestations of hope for a further strengthening of its reproduction procedures, and the unexpected, uncontrolled and unplanned dimensions of life, after they take their share in destruction and violence, are being productively transformed and domesticated for the sake of normality and its immorality. Yet it is also an impetus for transcendence, autonomy, resistance, and solidarity, namely, a dialogue and non-oppressive morality.

The negative nature of this utopianism is anti-violent, yet not totally impotent, since it is based on the ontological source of hope and in human essence. The non-strategic-oriented knowledge is a source of resistance and an alternative to the hegemonic realm of self-evidence and its institutional formations. It is realized within a dialogical process or, as is usually the case, has no positive presence at all and appears as an empty abstraction of “the grand refusal.” Unlike discourse, dialogue has a utopian quality that strives for transcendence. But unlike discourse, which manifests itself in reality, dialogue is nothing but a potential, sometimes interfering from “outside” and affecting normal functioning of the power apparatus that constitutes the regular production and reproduction of self-evident knowledge. Discourse reflects and reproduces power in the form of hegemonic knowledge and political realities. Dialogue represents hope and transcendence from the realm of self-evidence and is to be realized in claims for recognition of one’s own identity and aspirations; it is a starting point of the struggle for a non-violent coexistence among different personal and collective identities, their knowledge, and interests. “Our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the refusal to recognize the others, and so a person or a group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Non-recognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being” (Taylor, 1992, p. 25). The history of Western moral education manifests the transformation of the quest for dialogue and transcendence into a productive element of the power webs of knowledge. Through the power of controlling knowledge, institutions and armies, “they” constitute normality and hegemonic moral knowledge. As such, they produce human subjects, articulate their given and potential possibilities to appropriate, and reproduce their voices, their self-evident knowledge and even their conceptual possibilities to rebel and produce counter-violence and change. Yet as an invisible morality the utopian dimension that is immanent to dialogue is never totally defeated.

In this article, the dialectics of moral education are exemplified by dealing with a concrete event. My critique of this event is to be understood within the general framework of the production of human subjects, their psychic framework, their conceptual apparatus, their political potential, and their morality. More specifically, I will try to reconstruct and criticize one dimension in the production of the Zionist subject by one of the means which constitutes and reflects the Israeli private and collective identity: a school textbook. I will concentrate on one textbook, its genesis, its context, and its purpose, denoting the moral dimension that characterizes its approval, its production, and its cancellation. This effort is part of a reconstruction of the moral context and deconstruction of the means and goals of the production of the Zionist moral discourse in Israel concerning the Holocaust.

The Holocaust as a constituent element in the moral construction of the Israeli subject is treated here by reference to a textbook that does not deal with the Jewish Holocaust directly, but indirectly by teaching about the genocide/Holocaust of the Gypsies, the Armenians and other peoples in the 20th century, being explicitly committed to educating the students to sensitivity towards other people’s sufferings.

The struggle for and against this textbook as part of an alternative curriculum in Israel’s schools may be understood as a reflection of the opposing moral attitudes regarding the establishment of essentially various collective and individual Israeli identities. Here I try to reconstruct this educational power struggle and reveal its hidden violence as part of an alternative to the hegemonic moral ideology.

Israeli ethnocentrism and traditional Jewish universalistic moral philosophy

Zionist education was historically constructed as a local manifestation of modernity as a national liberation movement. Within this trend, Zionist education formed a new moral philosophy that was to ensure the production of a new Jew and his collective aims in the Jewish world and in human civilization in general (Simon, 1916, p. 1). The Zionist educational project is an outstanding manifestation of the effectiveness of educational aggressiveness against Jewish tradition and internal groups and their collective memories and interests, and as well as against outside enemies such as the Palestinians, their memories, language, interests, and political opportunities and limitations. The negation of the Diaspora and the colonizing of Israel/Palestine was historically conditioned by the effectiveness of Zionist education, one of whose central aims was the destruction of the gola (the Diaspora culture and ethos) in the Jewish individual and collective identity; and the constitution of the ideal new Jew, the halutz, as a warrior-farmer. Israeli culture in general and Israeli textbooks in particular cultivated the halutz hero myth, especially against the background of the Holocaust horrors and the destruction of the traditional Jewish way of life in Europe. The myth of the Israeli soldier, replacing the halutz, was no less constitutive and no less an alternative to the traditional Jew and traditional Jewish values, concepts, morality, and way of life. The negation of the gola and the justification of (re)conquering and colonizing Israel/Palestine was transformed dramatically after 1945, and in textbooks it reached its peak in 1967, namely in the Six-Day War (Firer, 1985, p. 161).

After the end of World War II, Zionist historiography instrumentalized knowledge about the Holocaust as part of building a Zionist moral education. The hegemonic version of Holocaust memories became the central educative apparatus. The historical memory was mobilized for constructing the new Jew as one whose ethnocentric collective identity would be ensured by a particular historical memory in which the term “Auschwitz”, was understood as an immanent and determinist characteristic of not realizing the essence of Judaism in its modern form, namely, strong, independent, and part of a Jewish sovereign national state. The Holocaust remembrance, the word zachor, that served for the justification of Zionist morality and practice, was based on the biblical zachor. The word appears eight times in the Old Testament, representing three basic concepts. One concerns remembering as part of prophesy. The second regards the concept of the Sabbath day as “totally other” than the power games of ordinary days, a utopian idea intended to highlight daily reality. The Sabbath concept of terminating every manifestation of power and secularity is essential and is to be implemented for slaves and animals as well. The third context of zachor is that of war, be it against Pharaoh or against the Amalek, the implacable enemy who lived in Canaan, the Promised Land, before the exodus of Israel from Egypt. Zachor et asher asah lecha Amalek in Deuteronomy 25: 17 refers to the remembering of God’s command to be devoted to His teaching in order to reach the Promised Land and to totally exterminate Amalek: men, women, children, and even their animals. In my view, this zachor et asher asah lecha Amalek is part of the formation of the secular halutz and sabra myth in the collective Israeli identity. The zachor, remembering of the Holocaust victims, had merged into the zachor et asher asah lecha Amalek : the victim of Nazi Germany merged into the concept of the “eternal victim,” seeing every “other,” every goy (other people), as “Amalek.” Implicitly, it means that the Amalek’s just fate is to be the just fate of “the other” in days to come. This extreme conclusion was actually propagated by one of the religious parties in the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset.

The secular Zionist utopia has replaced the traditional, anti-political and universal Jewish redemptive world-view with another, political and ethnocentric one. As part of this view, Israeli moral philosophy represented an alternative ideal subject, the farmer- warrior (halutz), and a totally different world-view that was committed to enforcing at all costs a counter-morality on the Jews, and a new identity on Palestine that became Israel. The traditional Jewish ideal of universal redemption was committed to a universalist non-violent utopia. Its messianism demanded refusal to enter history and the power games of its violent systems. Therefore, it had no place in the halutz morality; the negation of history (as involvement in political power games) was rejected by Zionism as part of the rejection not only of the gola (Diaspora), but also of galutiut (traditional Jewish philosophy as a mental and cultural construct). Figures such as Martin Buber, Ernst Simon and Hai Rot, who tried to synthesize Zionism with humanism, and Zionist humanism with Jewish tradition were marginalized, and their educational influence was minimal though not unimportant.

The educational institutions of the secular Jewish community in Israel, both before and after the establishment of the state of Israel, undertook the mission of constructing “the new Jew” as a moral, conceptual and political entity. This nation-building project reflected and produced a special moral philosophy in which there was no place for issues such as the right of a minority group of intellectuals to reconstruct the collective historical memory; the right to shape a new collective identity and new ideals that would activate the newly-constructed Israeli collective to fight against another collective over Israel/Palestine.

An important factor in the efficiency of the Israeli educational project was its ability to avoid such an internal moral debate. It was almost impossible to question the issues of choosing educational manipulations and deciding how to reformulate the historical memory and moral consciousness of the “Israelis.” Yet, within the margins of Israeli culture, there were constant oppositional moral philosophies which, in some cases, like that of the Communist party, even acquired a political form. However, the roots of Zionist educational ideologies were so ethnocentric and goal-oriented that they did not enter into the moral dilemmas of the very foundations of Zionist education.

Here it should be noted that historically, Zionist education in the broad sense confronted dilemmas and various ideological alternatives. My historical argument is that it marginalized philosophical and political challenges to its hegemonic educational project. Furthermore, this educational process is to be understood within the context of a constant armed and ideological fight with the Palestinians over conquering Palestine and “purifying”’ and “redeeming” the Land of Israel from Amalek and making it (“again”) the land of Israel. The alternative concept was indifference to and disregard of the Palestinian identity with the place, or consideration of Palestinian “natives” who were to be recognized, disciplined and treated fairly as long as they did not become Amalek. Concurrently, the Zionist struggle was heading forward against the majority of the Jewish people, who were non- Zionist or anti-Zionist for various reasons: either they were ultra-orthodox and refused to enter history and engage in political power games, adhering firmly to the messianic hope, or, on the other hand, they believed in a secular universalistic utopia such as the Marxist one, rejecting Zionism as a partial, ethnocentric and reactionary utopian alternative.

The instrumentalization of the Holocaust memory in Israeli education

The terrible tragedies that befell the Jews at the hands of Nazi Germany became, historically, an important element of Zionist education. The history of the educational representation of the Holocaust in the formal educational institutions of Israel is to be seen within the context of the change in the status of knowledge and morality and of the socioeconomic transformations in Israel. In this paper, I do not delve into these aspects but concentrate, instead, on the current situation. Nevertheless, I do address a factor that at first might appear surprising: the ever-growing weight of the Holocaust in the Israeli collective consciousness, on the one hand, and the demolition of traditional central Zionist myths and ideals such as the halutz and the sabra, on the other.

The latter trend is a local manifestation of a general Western phenomenon: Instrumental Rationality is gaining the upper hand and Objective Reason is retreating to the margins of current culture. Within the framework of the Objective Reason tradition, there was a place for idealism, collective solidarity and absolute control, but also for transcendence, struggle for emancipation, and claim for the “totally different” reality other than the hegemonic one. It enabled utopia as a regulative concept and made humanist morality possible for the critique, resistance and refusal to power in the name of a rational, universally-valid morality, as in the case of Kant, Marx, Habermas, and Kohlberg. True/untrue, good/evil as central categories within the framework of this tradition constituted moral education as both a utopian quest and a concrete praxis that could deny the claims of power, fashions, and irrationality and open a real possibility for universal and concrete moral responsibility and freedom, if not as an immediate reality, at least as a concrete utopia. Instrumental Rationality developed alongside the Objective Reason tradition and came to its peak in the 20th century. It is a reflection of, a part of, and, to a certain degree, also the condition for the rapid technological advance that has the upper hand in our time. It makes the questions of aesthetics, morality, and truth totally irrelevant to science, technological advance, and social practice. Its relevant criteria are pragmatic and “practical”: efficiency-inefficiency, popular-unpopular, high rating-low rating, and so forth. Basically, this is an anti-humanist morality, in which the questions of justice are reduced to practicality and conformity. In other words, power alone prevails in the name of technological advance, scientific progress, capitalist success, and the social status quo. Disappearing with it is the Socratic quest for revolutionary transformation of the given society and the utopian transcendence of the human condition into other, more just and human ones.

Humanist moral philosophy arose from the tradition of objective and universal reason in its quest for justice, freedom, and equality. However, in a Western arena where instrumental reason has the upper hand, there is no place for the concept and social foundations of this moral philosophy or for revolutionary projects (national, religious or class). Accordingly, the status of knowledge, the means and meaning of representation, and the consumption practices of knowledge and its products have radically changed. The conditions are ready for the production of a different ethic, different human subjects, and different limitations and opportunities. For the most part, we are dealing with the disappearance of the conditions for dialogue and the installation of a system in which the old moral traditions are basically irrelevant. The pragmatic and the “practical” conception of knowledge is attaining hegemony.

Consequently, there is less and less room for idealism and devotion to collective aims. This development is also manifested in the Israeli arena of the last generation in respect to the secular Jewish population (Gur-Ze’ev, 1996a, pp. 7-11). The trend, as documented by research (Ezrachi & Gal, 1995) is evinced in growing indifference towards collective aims, growing individualism and materialism, and increasing application of functionalist-pragmatic scientific and managerial strategies in the economy, administration, education and even the military. It includes the dissolution of the “melting pot” cultural ideology of the hegemonic educational agencies in secular Israel, and obvious social and cultural fragmentation as aspects of “the new Israelis.” In some cultural arenas, the legitimacy and relevance of multicultural discourse and its concrete political demands are even admitted. The elimination of the “melting pot” cultural ideology and the bureaucratization of educational praxis, subject to functionalist-instrumental and market-oriented attitudes, have began to make their appearance even in Israeli textbooks. Even so, as Ruth Firer writes, while the authors of the textbooks tried “to be objective” and “a certain readiness becomes apparent to lay some value-issues open to the independent judgment of teachers and pupils... the main Zionist values are still the only center on which the historical description and the evaluation is based. It is the ‘law of Zionist Salvation,’ and the historical construction which confirms it” (Firer 1980, p. xi). A parallel development, likewise documented by research, is the ever-growing centrality of the Holocaust in the Israeli collective identity and formal curriculum, stressing the linkage between the Holocaust, the existence of the state of Israel, and the moral justification of Zionism and the state of Israel (Firer 1989).

Alternative moral education in Israel?

The victory of the political left in Israel’s 1992 general elections may be understood as part of the development reconstructed here, namely the “normalization” of Israeli culture with pragmatic, anti-idealist attitudes, and the erosion of the founding Zionist myths that made possible the constitution, protection and expansion of territory and prosperity within the borders of the Israeli state. Meretz, the Israeli leftist Zionist party, was given ministerial responsibility for education, and it seemed only natural that the Minister of Education should appoint a scholar, Dr. Yair Auron, to develop a new history course on the Holocaust/genocide that befell other peoples in the 20th century.

On November 10, 1993 the course was officially ratified by the Ministry of Education. The material included a textbook, a teacher’s guide, and a general programme for training teachers to meet the new challenge. The programme was presented from the outset as part of a larger history curriculum in which schools had the choice of whether or not to include the programme, and pupils could decide whether or not to register for it.

The special commission of the Ministry of Education favoured the teaching of the new course, since “research proves that young people are both ignorant of and indifferent to disasters and acts of genocide committed in the 20th century, especially to the Gypsies and the Armenians. Such ignorance has marked and long-term effects on the understanding and conclusions of the young Israeli regarding the Holocaust that the Jewish people suffered” (Ministry of Education, 1993, p. 1).

It is worth noting that in the textbook and the attached materials Auron did not present his curriculum as an alternative to the accepted Holocaust curriculum in Israel nor was the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust challenged. Auron wrote in the attached materials for the Israeli teachers: “We stress again: this programme does not intend to replace present programmes dealing with the Holocaust. It does not seek to challenge the uniqueness of the Holocaust” (Auron, 1994, p. 5).

The programmeme had a clear moral intention: to educate towards sensitivity to others’ suffering. This educational commitment synthesized history teaching and the development of the humanistic morality of Israeli youth.

In contrast to the general functionalist-pragmatist neutrality of the hegemonic Israeli culture, and set against the background of the erosion of universal humanistic values and ideals within the Israeli context, this programme sought to overcome the separation of education and teaching. It challenged the objective-neutral pretensions of history teaching, on the one hand, and the irrelevance of humanistic moral philosophy, on the other.

The educational programme was however, never implemented; it was officially cancelled some days before its formal introduction as a trial. The official statement was that “from a professional point of view,” the programme was unsuitable and should be immediately abolished (Yaron, 1994). An alternative programme was written, and at the beginning of the 1996 academic year. It was published as a textbook entitled Minorities in History - The Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (Ministry of Education, 1996).

Two important differences clearly emerge from a reading of the newly approved textbook. First, there is an obvious adherence to a positivistic-neutral philosophy of science. In the history curriculum, this philosophy of science manifests itself in sticking to “facts” and refraining from presenting moral dilemmas and educational implications. With this understanding of history teaching and studying, the new programme restricted itself to a forgotten chapter in the history of the Ottoman empire, which it termed the “Armenian Problem.” In the Auron programme, the Holocaust of the Gypsies and Armenians, which he constantly calls “genocide,” as distinct from the Jewish “Holocaust,” was presented as a historical fact that had to be learned and whose moral implications had to be elaborated and taught in light of universal humanist morality. In the new programme, even in the “Introduction,” the fate of the Armenians at the beginning of this century is not presented as historical fact. The new programme embraces the concept that there is no room for humanistic moral education in a history lesson. The anonymous author writes as if the matter is a debate among neutral, objective experts from various schools of history: “The Armenian, Turkish and Western scholars who have researched this period and the relations between the Armenians and the Turks differ on the interpretation of the events that occurred between 1915 and 1916” (Ibid., p. 1).

From the official documents I have collected, it does not seem that the most important reason for canceling the first programme was its “low professional level.” However, I prefer not to address this problem here, nor the institutional manoeuverres that brought about the elimination of the programme and its representation in the form that suited the Israeli educational/political establishment. I will even refrain from dealing here with the important implications of the involvement of the Turkish Foreign Office in the affair, except to add that the programme became an international political and cultural issue. On a visit to Ankara, an Israeli Minister, Yossi Beilin, was asked by the Turks “if the history programme that teaches about the Armenian genocide had been approved” (Aluf, 1995). There were more reasons for negating a humanist moral education that was immanent to Auron’s alternative history textbook. These reasons had nothing to do with foreign pressures or instrumentalist-oriented scientific ideology. As I will try to show, these were the deeper and the more important reasons. What we are facing here is immanent ethnocentric Israeli moral education. This education, it will be argued, is but a manifestation of the normal moral education in action which functions as a weapon against the “other”, her/his identity, memories, and interests.

The morality of the instrumentalization of the Holocaust memory

The memories of the Holocaust were reproduced by the Zionist establishment to meet basic interests. They were intended to serve institutionalized ethnocentrism under the slogan Haolam kulo negdenu (the entire world is against us), which is also a popular Israeli song, and to counter the development of the breakdown of the traditional Zionist myths and ideals that served the hegemonic Zionist ideology.

The supreme effort at conscious institutionalized instrumentalization of the Holocaust memory to serve the collective-idealist identity was made in 1988 at the trial of John Demjanjuk. The trial was turned explicitly into a collective educational catharsis, echoing the effects of the Eichmann trial. It was meant to be a major educational event: schoolchildren were mobilized to the court-room by the thousand, Israel Television was invited to broadcast lengthy daily coverage, specifically to dramatize the atmosphere to the public, and so on.

The problem with the educational fiasco of the trial was not that Demjanjuk failed to meet Adolf Eichmann’s murderous standards or the uncertainty of his being “Ivan the Terrible” who, with his own hands, operated the Nazi death machine in Treblinka. The “problem” was that the year was 1988. By then, as part of the victory of the Zionist project and the military, economic, technological and ideological success of Israel, the collective consciousness of most of (secular-Jewish) Israeli society was of a different orientation, affected by different apparatuses from those of the 1960s, when Eichmann was tried. Somewhat reflecting this shift is Yehuda Elkana’s article of the time, entitled “In Praise of Forgetfulness,” as opposed to the zachor (remembrance). His moral demand was to “uproot the Holocaust tyranny from our lives” in order to be free to shape the Israeli present in light of a humanist possible future and not to live under the eternal fatalistic shadow of the Holocaust (Elkana, 1988, p. 13). This was necessary because the Holocaust did not serve only to justify the existence of the state of Israel, but also to justify the occupation of the territories captured in the 1967 war, with their two million Palestinians who were given no human and citizenship rights, and to justify the terrible methods that were “needed” or, in any case, used during the Palestinian uprising ( the intifada) which was going on during the Demjanjuk trial.

By doing so, the Israeli political establishment refused, in the face of a changing cultural and social reality, to challenge the universal implications of the Holocaust, especially in relation to the ideological and military struggle against the Palestinians. The Palestinians, as a rule, accepted the official Israeli understanding and manipulation of the Holocaust as the justification for Zionism and for the right of the Jewish state to exist. But they turned it upside down: “Your Holocaust has become our karita (Holocaust),” said Imil Habiby, an important Palestinian writer and political activist (Habibi 1986, 27).

However, the instrumentalization of the Holocaust and its morality did not end only as a function of the exhaustion of the spirit of (secular) Zionism. It was reactivated and reinforced by a new development. The new forces of the Israeli culture industry replaced the relevance and the effectiveness of the traditional educational establishment in accomplishing the mythicization of the terrible tragedy that the Jewish people suffered during World War II from Nazi Germany and its supporters. Thus, when the new textbook came out as a humanistic moral lesson to provide an implicit alternative to both Israeli ethnocentrism and its instrumentalization of the Holocaust memory, on the one hand, and to the anti-humanistic instrumentalist-functionalistic approach, on the other, it had to be rejected and dismissed on the spot because of its humanist educational potential. In what follows, I will try to show that its dismissal created/reflected a moral space in which the denial of the Jewish Holocaust and the Jewish refusal to acknowledge the fact that the Holocausts of “others” and to accept that they are occupying different places on the same level. Using Lyotard’s postmodern moral philosophy, my argument is that the Jewish refusal to acknowledge the Holocausts and the suffering of others might be understood as part of the Nazi victory over Jewish morality. Standing in opposition to this argument, the present hegemonic Israeli reality does not represent traditional Judaism, but rather its political and moral negation.

The Auron textbook was committed “to arousing the youth’s awareness of the reality of acts of genocide, or acts that have the characteristics of genocide in the past and even the present, and to the danger of their recurrence in the future” (Auron, 1994, p. 5). This universal approach to the morality of Holocaust memories and their critical evaluation was part of the general attitude of the political forces that formed the leftist government (1992-1996) and found interest in the work of the historian and educator Auron. This was the motivation for inviting him to write a history course for highschool students. After all, this more universalistic moral attitude was a major driving force of the leftist intellectuals and politicians against I.D.F. (Israeli Defence Forces) methods of fighting the Palestinian uprising and against the very occupation of the territories and the evil done to their Palestinian residents.

This is, however, only one element of the politics of moral production in the Israeli left. This element is the traditional humanistic driving force in Israeli culture that was always immanently weak, marginal and ineffective in the history of Israeli education. The other element is the instrumentalization of relevant knowledge, in keeping with the need to realize instrumental rationality in high technology and in more advanced managerial practices, and to produce the new Israeli as an efficient producer/acquirer with no Utopian quest or any responsibility for or solidarity with the other members of the community, to say nothing of universal moral sensitivity and responsibility. These forces presented themselves in the slogans and political practice of the multi-party popular movement of “Peace Now” and activated the peace process of the so-called leftist Israeli government - not moral humanistic sensitivity or the acknowledgment of the Palestinian “other,” his sufferings, and his rights to self-determination, political difference, and moral equality. Thus, when it seemed that the new textbook was more of a success than intended, namely, that it implicitly questioned the very foundations of Zionist morality and the justification for the state of Israel and the hegemonic Zionist meta-narrative, it proved to be more than what even a leftist Israeli Zionist Minister of Education could accept.

At the same time, one has to take into account that in order to balance the Israeli policy of concessions to the Arab world and to practically accept the establishment of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories, Israel was working out a mutual defence agreement with Turkey. It was deemed vital to counter and complement the withdrawal from the Golan Heights and the return of this territory to Syria by means of a non-Arab regional power like Turkey. The pact was vital, and therefore moral, one could argue that it was morally justified to accept the Turkish demand not to raise the issue of the genocide/Holocaust committed by the Turks against the Armenians eighty years ago, at least in the establishment’s educational channels.

I believe that such a formal moral evaluation should be rejected from a humanistic moral point of view. It is possible to argue that humanistic moral philosophy calls for the recognition of the other as a (potential) partner and as one who has rights of his/her own, and an identity to be respected and studied as far as possible. It calls for seeing the other as a partner in a dialogue in which human essence is to be realized and transcended. Such a dialogue is conditioned by the cultural fusion of horizons. From this point of view, it is vital to acknowledge the Gypsies’ and the Armenians’ or the Rwandans’ Holocaust. This recognition does not imply forgetfulness of the Jewish Holocaust, or any diminution in the understanding of its uniqueness in the history of human evil. The failure of the official Israeli educational system to acknowledge the memory of the Armenian or Gypsy Holocaust, or the refusal to call it genocide, manifests an important dimension in Hitler’s victory over traditional Jewish morality, as seen in the daily practice of the state of Israel.

The forces and considerations involved in the elimination of the humanistic history programme from the Israeli curriculum was not decided only by political pressure from a foreign country. It is incorrect to view its moral implications solely from the angle of its political dimensions. Other forces were involved and, to my mind, they were much more consistent, deep and enduring. Institutionally, these were manifested by Mossad Yad Vashem, a state institution responsible for the historical memory in Israel of the Holocaust. This institution, which also operates the Holocaust Museum in Israel, is the most relevant manifestation of the present Israeli collective consciousness.

The counterpart of this Israeli ideology is not being a “frier” a term which, in practice, means being foolish enough to accept moral responsibility for someone other than oneself or to act morally in the Kantian sense of the term (Rudinger & Fyge, 1993, p. 136). This synthesis of the popular manifestation of instrumental rationality and traditional Israeli ethnocentrism cannot afford sensitivity to the other’s suffering. In order to justify collective immoral and evil acts or even the very constitution of the “Israelis” as the marginalization of the Palestinians and their world, the Israelis historically developed the need to collectively justify the morality of the eternal victim whom “the entire world is against.” Within such a moral proposition, “we” are not bound by “their” moralistic rhetoric or “their” call for mercy, recognition, and fairness. Equipped with thousands of years of “knowing them,” “we” have our own moral code and our apparatuses of moral evaluation. This is both implicit and sometimes explicit, as in the texts of (the politically extremist and religious fundamentalist) Rabbi Kahane, in the justification of Zionist morality (Mergui & Simonot, 1987; Breslauer, 1986).

According to my argument, this moral construct was built into hegemonic Zionist education, being reproduced even in the Labor movement, as Ze’ev Sterenhel suggested in his Society’s Perfection or Nation Building (1995). In this sense, Yad Vashem is the last and the authentic protector of the Zionist spirit, with its official license to evoke the dead and to speak in their name, acting as a moral guide to the guilt of those who came out of the ashes alive and tried to build a normal life in the post-Auschwitz world and the potential of the new (Palestinian) Amalek. This moral synthesis was explicit and assumed a concrete form at the time of the Gulf War, when German gas was again targeted against the eternal victims, this time by Saddam Hussein (Zukermann 1993).

I would like to argue that this instrumentalization of the Holocaust and the production of the ethnocentric Zionist morality is both anti-Jewish and anti-humanist. This is because both are instrumentalist, rational and transcendental orientations that represent a universalist orientation negating the current economic, technological and moral globalization. This is, however, an issue which I hope to develop further elsewhere.

The violence of normal moral education

The historical locus of the morality of recognition/non-recognition of the other’s Holocaust/genocide reflects the cultural capital of ethnocentrism today. In the name of anti-ethnocentrism, there is a great momentum towards a new kind of ethnocentrism. The rebellion against Judeo-Christian morality and humanist traditions that were intrumentalized gave birth to anti-universalist and relativist attitudes that founded a new kind of moral knowledge, cultural critique and politics. Within the framework of the current multiculturalist ideology, there is a central place for cultural pluralism which accentuates the moral need for the negation of any universal pretensions and meta-criteria for moral judgments, discursive struggles between opposing historical memories, and their genres. By stressing the local, fragmentary, contingency and incommensurablity of values, as well as of practices and criteria of moral judgment, this discourse develops a new kind of moral justification that is based on the incommensurability of values and interests of various groups and cultures. By denying universal reason and general validity of non-violent moral dialogue, even as a utopia, this ideology develops a new kind of ethnocentricity, closeness, and anti-humanism in which, basically, any collective act reflecting a group’s consensus will not be exposed to moral critique as immoral.

The political realizations of humanistic morality in relations among different cultures, their collective memory, and their ethics have usually ended in the denial of the identity of the “other” and sometimes also in the actual distraction of their society. This is also true for minority, ethnic and gender groups in the Western hegemonic culture. In the second half of the 20th century, this process has become entirely rational through integration into the global instrumentalization of knowledge and the reification of human relations. In the Israeli arena, this is to be seen in the current stage of the reification of the Holocaust memory, it being part of an extensive, conscious industry, the organization of groups and of youths who go directly from rock and drug festivals on “memorial trips” to Auschwitz, and so forth. In such a system, there is no room for remembering and respecting the other’s Holocaust. This is so because such an acknowledgment would demand recognition of the “other” as having values, rights, memories, and an identity of his or her own. Such recognition is simply a demand for dialogue. Under present post-industrial and post-modern conditions there are no spiritual and conceptual conditions for such a moral way of life, for such autonomy by a moral person, or for dialogue as the realization of a utopian human dimension.

In his book Le Differend (Lyotard, 1983), Lyotard suggests that between essentially different genres, between different speech groups, there is no room for understanding, agreement, and mutual recognition. The differend occurs as an unchallenged gap between different speech groups with the result that one of the parties will be deprived of the means to represent his case in a manner that will enable him to prevail in the dispute, thereby making him a victim (Ibid. xi). The polemic is “solved” by one of the parties succeeding in colonizing the other and forcing on him his criterion for argumentation and consensus. This applies to the ability to recognize the other’s identity and the legitimacy of his utopia, but it also applies to the moral ability to recognize the other’s Holocaust, namely his or her lost identity, his or her lost voice. In this sense, the Jews, as victims of the Holocaust that Nazi Germany inflicted on them, are doomed, according to Lyotard, to perpetuate the Holocaust, unable to redeem the lost memory of the survivors. Lyotard could have developed his claim further to argue that consequently the Jews are doomed by the logic of the differend with the inability to recognize the other’s Holocaust and the other’s lost memory.

The moral philosophy represented in this pessimistic view is that of complete and essential incommensurability, such as that in the most radical version of the multiculturalist ideology. Within this framework, there is no place for freedom nor for an autonomous subject and reflectivity, for a moral resistance and critique. In the absence of a utopian axis, this pessimistic moral philosophy is not dialectical. It abandons the humanistic claim for reason, freedom, and transcendence within a universally -valid dialogue and, as such, cannot but reconstruct and obliterate reality. However, it can not evaluate reality, judge it, rationally criticize it, or change it in a human way for the sake of a more human reality. From a postmodern moral philosophy such as Lyotard’s follows the moral inability and the unjustified resistance to the moral productions of the Israeli educational system. The new history textbook that has replaced the humanistic one might be seen as a manifestation of Lyotard’s argument, being relevant, beyond good or evil, even on the political level.

I would like to present a total rebuttal to Lyotard’s pessimism, while being a pessimist (Gur-Ze’ev, 1996b), accepting in general terms most of his claims. I accept his description as a valid ontological reconstruction of discourse, but not of dialogue. As a utopian, I claim that the dialogue, or Juergen Habermas’ ideal speech situation might serve as a guideline to a different moral philosophy from the one that Lyotard suggests. The implications of Lyotard’s or Michel Foucault’s moral philosophies today serve the arguments of radical trends in the multicultural discourse attacking the arrogance and repressive practices of Kantian morality. However, this argument concludes with some new versions of ethnocentrism, in the name of empowering the marginalized and censored voices and identities. Under such conditions, Zionist ethnocentrism and the morality of refusing to acknowledge the other’s Holocaust is reaffirmed. This understanding of the ways in which moralities and identities are produced affirms power as the sole moral criterion. Power is meant not in the negative, anti-moralist sense but as a positive productive element, which produces “good” and “bad” and the concepts and criteria for defining and reproducing/destroying them and their human subjects who are to be understood as their products, carriers, and victims (Foucault, 1980, p. 117).

Auschwitz and the possibility of a non-violent moral education

The recognition of the ways in which subjects and moralities are produced and the part that they play in the evil industry might also serve as a passage to an alternative. It might serve as an important element of a reconstructionist and critical moral alternative, allowing understanding of the way in which the apparatuses of power manifest themselves, creating moral subjects, philosophies, their clashes and the responses to their struggles. To a certain degree, it can help us to develop a sort of resistance to the Zionist hegemonic moral education, a resistance that while being “baseless” and anti-metaphysical, might redeem the neglected memory, its voice and its interests. Yet, at the same time, it is part of “Auschwitz”, of reality as a one-dimensional unheroic tragedy, where there is no place for a meaningful moral act or for good or evil moral education. The Critical Theory of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin, as a new stage of Jewish (negative) theology, overcomes the moral limitations of today’s postmodern discourse. It represents a philosophical and political alternative. To my mind, this understanding has special meaning in today’s Israel which, while negating the basic concepts and ideals of Judaism, refuses to acknowledge the other’s demand for justice and recognition even as a victim. This is one of the manifestations of “Auschwitz” having the upper hand.

This brutal fact must be rejected. The grounds for such a rejection are not to be found in the current reality. It is a utopia, a glimpse at the hope principle. I believe that such a Jewish-humanistic approach can be helpful in defending reason and non-repressive moral philosophy against all the facts of a reality that negates it at every moment and in all places. The dead Armenians are lost and cannot be redeemed. Their Holocaust is irreversible. The struggle is about the memory of their Holocaust, or the Holocaust of not being able to acknowledge the others and act morally to save the memory of their Holocaust.

Utopian pessimism is the framework for saving practical reason from new multicultural versions of naturalism and functionalist instrumentalism. Because the hope principle represents a counter-force, disrupting the continuum of history, this possibility is not entirely closed. We can and we should educate for a universal critique of productions of moral/immoral ways of life, recognizing the diversity of its representations and the dangers of its transcendence into its opposite, as represented by current moral education in Israeli history textbooks. This is possible on two central levels. The first, is a negation of the hegemonic ideology and its practices, a resistance which is both philosophical and political. It is a moral alternative by its very resistance to the manipulations of the system that systematically, as part of its normalization processes, blocks the possibility of human realization of its potential as autonomous subject and moral agents. Morality is realized in this sense by resisting the system and revealing the anti-moral aim and practice of the educational system. Second, within educational institutions, and especially in schools, there is a place for intellectual teachers to struggle for dialogue with their students. Dialogue, in contrast to discourse, can be realized only by autonomous subjects, or by individuals struggling rationally for the realization of their autonomy as a moral action. By its nature, dialogue represents the universal conditions for resisting everything that blocks such dialogue, and therefore is a non-violent moral practice. A dialogue can only be realized as a rebellion against the system and its realm of self-evidence. Within this framework, with no positive utopia - even today - it is still possible to struggle for autonomy, solidarity, transcendence, and self-constitution of individuals as a central part of their role in a dialogue as a way of life. The universality of evil and of reason gives us a chance in moral education even in the face of global Instrumental Rationality’s triumph.

There is so much anger, hate, and disorientation around us ! Today’s moral education can and should use these feelings as an impetus for a humanist moral alternative, especially in schools. However, such an education should also acknowledge that this alternative cannot expect to have the upper hand and in itself become a force for essential change. As the Israeli example shows, any humanist moral education can expect to overcome evil. It can resist, criticize and make its point. Yet as soon as it becomes meaningful and relevant to the degree of challenging the hegemonic ideology and its interests, it will be overcome or integrated into the realm of self-evidence. The other alternative is becoming a new ethnocentric or reactionary dogma and, as such, education can promise optimism and gain, at least temporarily and locally, the upper hand. Humanistic moral education at school should avoid these two means for “efficiency” and “success” and struggle for dialogue, in the light of the hope principle, as the realization of human potential, and against all the facts of reality. Historical change of reality can open new prospects for such an education, but its moral obligation is not determined by it. When and if the day comes, and the crisis destroys the general globalization process and its rationality, then the humanistic moral education will become potentially relevant again. Such a possibility does not guarantee the prevention of a new Holocaust and an even more effective realm of self-evidence than the current one; yet it opens new possibilities. The educational work of today, both inside and outside schools, will then be of vital importance.

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Abstract

The issue of producing and controlling the memories of the Holocaust is evaluated in this paper as a valid universal example of the struggle over self-identity and the recognition of “the other” as a moral subject. The normal realization of morality is presented as part of the denial of the other’s identity, knowledge and value. The dialectics of the memories of the Holocaust and the possibility of a non-violent moral education is examined by questioning its treatment of the suffering of “others” in the Israeli arena. The author concedes that practising the Holocaust, denying the Holocaust and refusing to recognize the genocides/holocausts of other peoples do differ, but maintains that they are to be evaluated as moral stages of one and the same level. The Israeli refusal to acknowledge the genocides/holocausts of other peoples is analyzed as a testcase for the possibility of a humanist-oriented moral education today.