Never Again, Again?

I wonder if the diary of Anne Frank has had as much of an impact on today's youth as it did on my generation. The astonishingly mature and beautifully composed diary she wrote during her two years in hiding brought home to us with searing immediacy the Nazi horror that had ravaged Europe and devastated the Jews in particular in the years before we were born. Here was a young person, like us, living in a household full of people, like us, struggling with the aches and pains of growing up, like us. Except that, in Anne's case, she was confined with her family in the annex behind her father's food-products business and hounded for her very life because she was a Jew.

It was both shattering and inspiring to know that a person who had been made to live with such dread fear and to face such naked inhumanity, and at our age, could still believe in the goodness of the human heart. Anne's words spoke directly to our souls, not filtered through today's Holocaust curricula, which present Hitlerism as an example of "intolerance"?as if the ferocious, dehumanizing, exterminationist anti-Semitism of the Nazis was just a stronger form of "discrimination" or "prejudice," akin to opposing affirmative action or some other piece of the civil rights agenda.

The lesson of the Holocaust is not about intolerance, but about evil, the implacable evil that can possess and corrupt the souls of vast numbers of people, the evil that is not amenable to logic and rationality, the evil that cannot be appeased, but that must simply be opposed. And when I see the world turning against Israel today, I am saddened to realize that the lesson has not yet been learned.

No, it's not the same as last time. The devil doesn't assume the same shape twice. The Jews have a homeland now?thanks to two-thirds of European Jewry having been killed by the Nazis?and today they have the means to fight their tormentors. But even the differences between then and now suggest an underlying similarity. The last time the world would not defend the Jews; this time the world will not let the Jews defend themselves. There are no gas chambers today, but there is the carnage of repeated suicide bombings, and there are people who feel the Jews should continue to walk defenselessly among the bombers and treat for "peace" with those who send them. There are no Nazis, but there is a terrorist Palestinian leadership supported by great numbers of Palestinians and Muslims who wish only death to Jews and the Jewish state. And, like then, the Jews are once again alone, enduring the condemnation of Europe and?unbelievably?of the Vatican as well.

Elite Western opinion posits false equivalencies between inconceivably barbaric acts of terrorism on the one side and defense against that terror on the other. It erases the difference between the deliberate, savage targeting of civilians as they ride on buses and eat in restaurants, and the unintended but inevitable harming of civilians in war. It demands that the Israelis return again and again to the "peace process" that has resulted in the worst violence in their history. At the same time, it ignores all that the Israelis have done to bring about a Palestinian state. It pretends that only some perverse willfulness prevents them from resolving the conflict by withdrawing to the 1967 boundaries, even as Palestinian leaders announce that they will not stop until they have destroyed Israel.

In the Arab world, an Egyptian imam calls for continued extermination of Israeli men, women and children, and nothing is heard from the "moderate" Muslims, they who have always indignantly insisted that Islam is a religion of peace. Even when young Palestinian girls add their bodies to the pile of "martyrs"/murderers, there is no protest from the Muslim peoples. We can certainly feel for the lively, dark-eyed, dark-haired Palestinian children as well, knowing that their worst enemies are the adults of their own community who prefer child sacrifice to building the homeland they could have had if they had only been willing to accept Israel's existence.

Yes, after decades of pious memorializing about the Holocaust, the world has still not learned the lesson of the evil that can only be opposed, not appeased. I used to wonder how such a thing as happened to Anne Frank could happen at all, and if it could ever happen again. Well, it seems I have lived long enough to find out.