It is now the third week of the Israeli assault on Gaza, and I'm faced with the vastly less important fact that I've been trying to write this post for two weeks. I was going to write a whole thing about Hannah Arendt in order to make this point, but I'm starting to think that the whole analogy is just a way of making myself feel better. So here's what I actually want to say.

I've been spending probably far too much time on Facebook, and as a result I've been reading far too many articles written by people who accuse anyone who's not for the bombing of Gaza of anti-Semitism. And that really pisses me off. It pisses me off even more when the writers or commenters accuse people who are against Israel's actions in Gaza of being so anti-Semitic that they're like Nazis, because they want Jews to die, or they want the Jewish State to be destroyed.

Now, of course, that could just be hyperbole, and I know that someone somewhere wrote that as a rule, an online conversation that goes on for a certain length of time will inevitably involve someone calling someone else a Nazi. But I don't think that's all it is here--I'm thinking it also has to do with the museum-ification of the Holocaust, where what the Nazis did becomes incomparable and unanalyzable. Even worse, where Jews are considered to be somehow always and everywhere innocent victims who are incapable of participating in genocides or atrocities: i.e., if it's genocide, the Jews aren't doing it. If the Jews are doing it, it isn't an atrocity. Because in the Holocaust, people committed genocidal acts against them. And then there's the corollary: if it's critical of the actions of the Jewish State, it's anti-Semitism. And if it's anti-Semitism, it's intended to kill Jews, because the Nazis were anti-Semitic and they intended to kill Jews. Therefore, Israel's actions in Gaza are not atrocities and not genocidal because they are being committed by Jews, and if you are critical of what Israel is doing in Gaza, you're like a Nazi. I'm not saying that all Jews or even all supporters of Israel's actions in Gaza say this or think this way, but it seems to be what's floating around. And it really upsets me.

If the lesson of the Holocaust is that Jews can't be criticized and can't commit atrocities when they act as Jews (meaning, I guess, that if a Jew was an American soldier he or she could be criticized as an American, but a Jew or a non-Jew acting for the Israeli army can never be criticized because the State of Israel always, by definition, acts as a Jew) then that's not much of a lesson. If "never again" really means "never again except for people we don't like," again, not much of a lesson. And if the lesson is, anyone, even a Jew, who criticizes the Jewish State, is an anti-Semite, then that is really a problem. It's the same thing as saying that anyone, even an American citizen, who criticizes America is "anti-American;" in fact, those two statements feel disturbingly similar to me. Because I think that anyone or anything that's immune to criticism is also immune to change for the better. It's protected from the possibility that it might have to admit that it's wrong, and self-correct--but that's also to say that it's barred from the possibility of self-correction.

In 1963 German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt was blasted for mentioning, in what became her famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem, that Jewish leaders in the Third Reich had collaborated with the Nazis. She was virulently attacked by Jews world-wide for saying this, even though most of them probably knew it was true (but Jews can't be Nazis, can't be part of genocide). People were so busy being angry about this fairly minor part of her book that I can't help but think they ignored or mis-interpreted her more central point, which was that Eichmann (a Nazi who the Holocaust Encyclopedia refers to as "one of the most pivotal actors" in the deportation of European Jews) was not himself a virulent anti-Semite, but someone who didn't think critically about what he was doing. To quote Judith Butler, Arendt "did not think [Eichmann] acted without conscious activity, but she insisted that the term 'thinking' had to be reserved for a more reflective mode of rationality....To have 'intentions,' in her view, was to think reflectively about one's own action as a political being, whose life and thinking is bound up with the life and thinking of others." Arendt agreed that Eichmann had in fact acted in a way that was unremarkable for where and who he was, in the sense that the accepted wisdom among anyone he knew or could meet was that the Jews were a menace to Germany's future. She didn't think that excused his actions--far from it. She thought he was a criminal. But she worried that he was a new kind of criminal created by a combination of totalitarianism and the industrialized world, where bureaucracy creates a distance between the person with the intent and the multiple people who perform little peices of the action without ever thinking about what it would mean outside their own context. She worried that in a world where participating in actions without thinking about them was normal, even "banal," genocide would indeed happen again.

Maybe Hannah Arendt was wrong about Adolf Eichmann; certainly a lot of ink has since been spilled discussing whether he was or was not a "real" anti-Semite. But I think she was right about the importance of thinking intentionally beyond slogans and beyond the policy of your country just because it's the policy of your country. People were so furious at her for criticizing other Jews and the state of Israel when she wrote about the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, that they missed that she was doing exactly what she said Eichmann didn't do--thinking and speaking critically about her people and her state--and that to Arendt, one of the lessons of the Holocaust was that bad things happen when people stop doing that. She insisted in criticizing Israel because she felt that having a Jewish state that acted morally, thinkingly, would be a triumph against the Nazis,and she knew that for there to be the possibility of morality, there has to be critique and discussion and the possibility of self-correction. I think there are far worse lessons we could learn from the Holocaust.

I say this not to say that thinking people can't disagree about what's going on in Gaza right now. Maybe they can. And I don't say this to say that Israel is a Nazi country, although I'm sure some people will think that's what I'm saying. But I do say this to say that insisting on Israel's innocence no matter what, or on Israel's right to do whatever it's doing because it's doing it are not good ways of honoring the Jewish dead, if that's what you want to do, or protecting the Jewish people, if that's what you think you're doing. Averring that bombing Gaza is necessary because "they all want to kill us" is not so great either. So think about why you think what you think. Think about what you'd think if these same events were taking place in another country. Have an argument. Be angry--Hannah Arendt certainly was. Maybe in the end you'll still think what you think now, and maybe you'll have some good reasons for it. Maybe you already do. But don't insist that the only way to be a loyal Jew is to defend Israel no matter what it does. And please stop calling people who don't support the bombing of Gaza anti-Semites or traitors, just because they don't support the bombing of Gaza. Thanks.