The Banality Of Indifference

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The Prologue and Conclusion of the work: The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide. by Yair Auron

 

 

 

Prologue

 

 

This study seeks to examine both the attitudes of the Jewish community (the Yishuv) in Palestine (Eretz Yisrael) and of the Zionist leadership toward the massacres committed by the Turks against the Armenians at the turn of the twentieth century. These atrocities began in the last decade of the nineteenth century and reached their peak in the massive destruction of Armenians during the First World War. This book seeks also to make the reader aware of the genocide of the Armenian People.

 

At the same time, the book raises theoretical and philosophical questions, particularly in the introduction and final two chapters, which relate directly and indirectly to the specific subject of our research: the debate over

the concept of genocide, and the uniqueness of the Holocaust in comparison to other instances of genocide,

including the Armenian genocide.

 

The opening chapter presents a short historical survey of the history of the Armenians and a description of the events connected to their destruction. Part of the body of research discusses the events in Palestine during the First World War which, directly and indirectly, subjectively and objectively, were related to the destruction of the Armenians. The purpose of the discussion is to expose an aspect of the history of the Yishuv during the War from a perspective previously neglected by the historiography.

 

The central part of the book comprises chapters that discuss "The Reactors" (to the destruction of the Armenians) and "The Indifferent" (to it). The quantitative division between "The Reactors" (the larger part) and "The Indifferent" (the smaller part) should not mislead us. In reality, the vast majority of the Yishuv was indifferent and only a small minority reacted.

 

This research is the result of an ongoing effort to examine a subject that has been repressed and ignored in the Israeli historical and collective memory, as well as in the collective memory of the world, and thus has disappeared from our historical consciousness. I became involved in the subject in the framework of my activity as a researcher of contemporary Jewish studies and as an educator. I was troubled by a sense of oppressive discomfort and criticism of the evasive behavior, verging on denial, of the various governments of Israel regarding the memory of the Armenian genocide and I wanted to examine both the overt factors and the deeper and more complex factors leading to such behavior which to me seems morally unacceptable, particularly since we Jews were victims of the Holocaust.

 

After I began to explore the motives for the present behavior regarding the Armenian genocide, I realized that the issues must be examined from the beginning, i.e., from the period in which they occurred. For more than ten years, I have been involved in the subject and my research has carried me to unanticipated places and events. It has revealed to me, I must confess, a reality that I did not expect. I had hoped to find a greater degree of identification with the suffering of the Armenians, more empathy, and more attempts to help, within the scope of our very limited possibilities. Instead I found much indifference and an attitude that stressed the particular rather than the universal.

 

I have chosen as the motto of the present book a passage from our Jewish sources: "Thus was created a single man, to teach us that every person who loses a single soul, it shall be written about him as if he has lost the entire world, and every person who sustains a single soul it shall be written about him as if he has sustained the entire world." (Mishna, Sanhedrin, IV, 5).

 

This passage was revised in later versions and the phrase "from the People of Israel" was added so that the line no longer reads "every person who sustains" or "loses a single soul," but rather "every person who sustains or loses a single soul from the People of Israel." In editions of the Mishna generally available today we usually find the later "amended" version.[1]

 

In this context, it is worth quoting one sentence from "In Praise of Forgetting," a controversial article by Yehuda Elkana that appeared in the Hebrew daily newspaper, Ha 'aretz, on March 2,1988. Elkana wrote, "From Auschwitz came, in symbolic terms, two peoples: a minority which claims 'it will never happen again,' and a frightened and anxious majority which claims 'it will never happen to us again.'"

 

Between those two versions, in the tension between particularism and universalism, fluctuates Israeli society and the public debate within it. The crime of genocide is an extreme and total case of harm inflicted by human beings on other, innocent human beings. One of the indirect aims of this book is to increase our sensitivity to this aspect of human life—beyond what has happened to us; to raise awareness to the occurrence of genocide or genocidal acts in the past and the present, before our very eyes, and to the danger of its occurrence in the future. In the course of recent years such atrocities took place on a broad scale in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda. It is important, I believe, to encourage the individual to think about this phenomenon, to examine his stand, his personal responsibility, and his possibilities to react. Genocide is an evil against which we must struggle in order to minimize its appearance as far as possible.

A necessary, although certainly insufficient, condition for confronting this evil is knowledge and awareness of the existence of evil and the circumstances of its occurrence. Those who stand on the sidelines inevitably give succor to the murderers, never to the victims. Morally, we cannot sit idly in the face of criminal acts of genocide. We cannot accept the argument that "nothing can be done...such things happen." Evil does not cease to be evil when it hurts another.

 

I wish to express special thanks to two people whose help went far beyond what is generally found among researchers. In moments when I despaired over the slow progress of my research, or when I doubted its relevance and importance, they never failed to encourage and support me. They are Dr. Haim Zeligman, researcher at the Yad Tabenkin Research Institute and member of Kibbutz Givat Brenner, and George Hintilian, historian and member of the Armenian community of east Jerusalem.

 

My thanks also to my friends Dr. Ariel Horowitz and Orly Zarfati, who joined with me in developing a curriculum for the teaching of "Sensitivity to the. World's Suffering: Genocide in the Twentieth Century," and to Avi Antman for his friendship and unflagging support. Thanks also to Ms. Amira Hagani, who edited this book with skill and dedication, and to Ms. Maggie Bar-Tura for her excellent translation.

 

The people of the Nili Archives in Zichron Yaakov, the Central Zionist Archives, the Nubar ***** Armenian

Archives in Paris, and the staff of the Yad Tabenkin Library at the Efal Seminar Center, have my gratitude for their assistance and their unfailing courtesy.

 

I am also grateful to the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture for its generous grant. I extend my thanks to the Zoryan Institute for Contemporary Armenian Research and Documentation, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Toronto, Ontario, for its generous support in making this book available to the English-reading public. I would especially like to thank Kourken M. Sarkissian and Dr. Levon Chorbajian for their encouragement, as well as Professor Vahakn N. Dadrian for his remarks on the English translation. The English edition has been revised and updated, making use of additional sources that have become available.

 

My thanks also to Dr. Irving Louis Horowitz, Ms. Mary E. Curtis, and Laurence Mintz from Transaction Publishers for their professional assistance.

 

No one is to be held accountable for the book's shortcomings, for which I alone take responsibility.

 

Dr.Yair Auron

Tel Aviv, 1999

 

 

Note

 

See on this subject the important essay by Haim Yehuda Roth, "The Moral Fluctuation in Jewish Ethics," in his book, Religion and Human Values (Jerusalem: Magnes Publishers, 1973), pp. 89-91. Haim Yehuda Roth points to the fact that the commentaries almost never address this and writes, "This fact leads one to reflect that our great teachers, who reveal such deep sensitivity to the most minute details of history and philology, are afflicted by amazing obtuseness in everything having to do with morality."

 

 

 

 

Conclusion

 

 

This study has attempted to examine the attitudes of the Jewish community in Palestine and the Zionist Movement toward the massacre of the Armenians at the time of its occurrence and thereafter. Although this part of the study is ended, the study is by no means completed. As the first of its kind, this research almost certainly does not exhaust the full range of attitudes. During the years in question, some Jews acted in various places in the world on behalf of the Armenians; they expressed support for their struggle or empathized with their suffering. The present research does not deal with them; however, they should be remembered: the Danish thinker, Georg Brandes; the Russian Jewish poet, Osip Mandelstam; Henry Morgenthau, Sr., the American Ambassador in Constantinople from 1913 to 1916, and his replacement, Abraham Elkus, among others. We do not know what motivated them to come to the support of the Armenians. They did not act as Jews, but as human beings. In this context, we question the uniquely Jewish motives, morality, and identity in their stand and their actions. In any event, it appears that a Jewish component existed in them even when they were sometimes to be found on the fringes of the Jewish establishment and on the outskirts of the organized Jewish world.

 

The study offers an opportunity to explore a particular case of general phenomenon that goes beyond the Armenian genocide and the Jewish attitude, and that is the reaction of the bystander who remains on the sidelines while atrocities take place.

 

In the same or in similar circumstances, peoples, groups, and movements do not share uniform views, nor do they behave in a uniform manner. To the question that was hidden in the pages of this volume and sometimes peeked out from and between the lines—why does one person react while another does not?—there is no answer. An abundance of emotions, opinions, and differing circumstances shape one's decision, consciously or not, to take action. Persons absorbed in themselves, in their group or their people, have trouble relating to the distress of other individuals, movements, or nationalities. The leaders of the Yishuv and the Zionist Movement were engrossed in a hard battle, existential in many senses, to preserve and advance the nascent Zionist enterprise. During the period of the First World War, there was a straggle for existence, for survival. In this battle, the Zionist Movement succeeded. An almost total absorption in the Jewish cause, in effect the Zionist cause, appears to be one of the main reasons why the leaders of the Yishuv and the Zionist Movement ignored or remained indifferent to the Armenian tragedy. For the most part, their view of the world from a Zionist perspective caused them sometimes, it must be admitted, to take the side of the "Young Turks," the side of the immolator, or to stand on the sidelines. Considerations of realpolitik tipped the scales. Those who related, who reacted, who protested, those who felt a moral and humane, sometimes explicitly Jewish revulsion at the genocide of the Armenians shared two characteristics. The first factor was their descent. Among the reactors, the majority were born in Palestine: Itamar Ben-Avi, "the first Hebrew child;" the native-born members of Nili; the children of the pioneers of the first wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine, the first generation of "sabras," although they were not yet known by this term at that time. They were connected to the land; they spoke Hebrew, Arabic, and French; and they were more critical and less submissive to the Turkish ruler than the new immigrants, mostly Russian-born, who arrived in the second wave of immigration after 1904. Open to Western culture, some had studied in France and were familiar with and influenced by French culture. They displayed more sensitivity and openness to the suffering of the Armenians. Differences of sociology and mentality, and perhaps even an intergenerational struggle over the leadership of the Jewish society in Palestine, led to a confrontation between the "native" Palestinian approach and the "born-in-exile" approach. The second factor put to the fore was their personal, idiosyncratic differences. The reactors and those who extended a hand of support—Bernard Lazare, Itamar Ben-Avi, Aaron Aaronsohn, Yaakov Rabinovitz, Israel Zangwill, and Aaron Reuveni—were in one way or another exceptional. They did not follow convention; they were each of an independent mind, "troublemakers," critical in their approach to the Zionist establishment.

 

We have already noted in the Introduction that acts of genocide can occur when there is a group of bystanders—the indifferent—between the immolator and his victim. They are the overwhelming majority who are not directly involved in the action. The necessary but insufficient condition for destruction—that other forces do not come between the murderer and his victim, particularly forces identified with political and military power—is irrelevant in the sense of simple rescue, in the case at hand. Morgenthau and Elkus were able to offer tangible assistance, and did so to the best of their ability. The Yishuv was not able physically to come to the rescue. But our investigation has a moral significance. In the circumstances of that time, pragmatism and self-interest were frequently the most significant considerations, and many of the leaders of the Yishuv and the Zionist Movement were not immune to them.

 

For the reader who finds it difficult to digest this reality and needs a comparison with others, we should add that a less-than-comprehensive examination of the behavior of peoples during the period of the destruction of the Armenians teaches us that indifference and inaction were the most prevalent stands taken. The examination of their behavior—their indifference—has a practical aspect, in addition to a moral one. The European Powers were able, in fact, to come to the rescue and did not do so. They added insult to injury and, after their victory, reneged on their explicit and public promises given to the Armenians during the war.[1]

 

In recent decades, a number of works have appeared dealing with the attitude of peoples, including Americans, to the destruction of the Jews in the Second World War. In 1968, Arthur Morse published his book, While Six Million Died, which appeared in Hebrew in 1972. In 1993, Yad Vashem published the Hebrew edition of David Wyman's book, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945} The central issue of the book is the question that continues to trouble Jews and non-Jews alike for whom the Holocaust is an open wound, the question that remains unanswered: How was Hitler allowed to implement his plan in such enormous dimensions? Why was there no serious effort at rescue?

 

Wyman concludes with the determination that the true obstacle to the rescue of the Jews by the United States was the absence of will on the part of the American establishment to do so. In other words, the American establishment lacked the desire to save Jews.

 

In her study, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt describes Adolf Eichmann's last minutes before his execution: "[H]e [Eichmann] was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness has taught us—the lesson which could not be verbalized and comprehended—the banality of evil."[3]

 

Arendt's important, original, and, some would argue, controversial book was rejected by Israeli intellectuals and by the Israeli academic community, which included some of Arendt's close friends. Despite its wide publication throughout the world, her book was not translated into Hebrew. The book has harsh words, some possibly unfounded or incorrect, for the role of the Jews and their retrospective responsibility for their own destruction. But the central claim of the book, which makes it original and important, is the thesis of the "banality of evil," that evil is part of the experience of all human existence. There has never been a meaningful discussion of this claim in Israeli society. For years, Israeli society has preferred, out of its own needs and considerations, to place evil on "a different planet," to stress a dichotomous Manichaean world of good and evil and not to see evil (of which the Nazi's deeds are the height) as a diffuse element, existing on different levels — refusing to acknowledge the prevalence of the "banal evil" within its midst. Only in the last decade have different voices begun to be heard in Israel's public debate.

 

With all due caution and humility, I suggest that we consider the concept of "the banality of indifference." The picture that becomes increasingly clear regarding the attitude toward acts of genocide (of which, we emphasize, the Holocaust is the most extreme and unique case in this category) is a picture of the banality of indifference.

 

The reaction of the multitudes, those located in the space between the immolator and the victims, is characterized by indifference, conformity, and opportunism. The Jews, too, in the circumstances of time and place, do not go beyond this banality, with several exceptions.

 

One of the formative influences on the historical consciousness of a society is the question of what society can and wishes to know about historical occurrence. In Israeli society, there are many people who would prefer not to know about the genocide of the Armenians and the genocide of the Gypsies. In any event, there is no doubt, indeed, that most know nothing about it.

 

In shaping historical consciousness, beyond the rational dimension, which is given expression in historical research whose task is to reveal historical truth, there are also emotional forces at work, sometimes irrational, both conscious and unconscious. Historical truth, historical research, and historical consciousness are not synonymous. The task of research and education is to try to influence the formation of historical consciousness. The researcher and the educator are meant to be among the formative agents, together with the government, the media, and various interest groups in society and communities that wish to influence the historical consciousness of their society.

 

The attempt in writing this book, which now draws to an end, was that of a researcher to uncover—with as much precision as possible— the historical veracity of events decades after their occurrence. The book seeks also to arouse questions and deliberations about the historical consciousness of the Israeli and the international communities. In Israeli historical consciousness, the Holocaust plays a central role—becoming increasingly stronger over the years. This consciousness stresses the singularity of the Holocaust. It contains, in my opinion, an extreme and almost utter focus on the Jews as victims, and a disregard—consciously or not, intentionally or not—of acts of genocide that have taken place in the twentieth century, among them the murder of the Armenians and the extermination of the Gypsies.

 

We ought to emphasize the characteristics that make the Holocaust unique while comparing the Holocaust with other instances of genocide. At the same time, in shaping the historical consciousness of Israeli society, we must try to act in such a manner so as not to ignore genocide when it relates to other peoples. Retrieving this missing element—"the lack of presence" in the historical consciousness—will allow us to explore "our" Holocaust in a broader, more comprehensive, and perhaps more correct perspective, in terms of the Jewish experience, in particular, and human experience at large.

 

 

Notes

 

1. The fact that there is almost no research dealing with the question of the

attitude of the Great Powers toward the Armenian massacre is significant.

See, for example, Akaby Nassibian, Britain and the Armenian Question

1915-1923 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984).

2. The English edition was published by Pantheon Books in 1984.

3. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (revised and enlarged edition) (New

York: Viking Press, 1964), p. 252.