In November 2005, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution A/RES/60/7, designating 27 January as the annual International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust ( www.un.org/en/holocaustremembrance/docs/res607.shtml ). The UNGA website ( www.un.org/en/holocaustremembrance/index.shtml ) explains that 27 January was chosen because it is “the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp”. The Resolution “reaffirm[s] that the Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of one third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities, will forever be a warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice”. And so 27 January has become the international Holocaust Memorial Day. Israel is an exception: in 1951, when the Holocaust was still a horribly fresh memory from the immediate past which the majority of Israel’s population had personally experienced, the Knesset decided on 27 Nisan as the memorial date. This day has twin significance: first, this was the date of one of the fiercest battles of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – the battle of 2nd May 1942, commanded by Marek Edelman, the commander of the bunker at Franciszkanska 30. Second, it is a week before the Memorial Day for fallen Israeli soldiers, which is itself the day before Israel Independence Day. And so, two days to memorialise the Holocaust, representing two fundamentally different world-views. The UN marks 27 January, commemorating the day that Auschwitz was liberated; and Israel marks 27 Nisan, commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and (indirectly) connecting to Israeli independence. What is the significance of these two dates? Though secular humanism has long since replaced Christian theology as the dominant ideology of Western society, the teachings and culture of two millennia of Christianity still have enormous influence over Western relationship to Jews. And since Western civilisation is the dominant force among the intelligentsia (even if not among the masses) in much of the world, the UN Resolution is indicative of the way in which Christian (or post-Christian) civilisation relates to Jews. Christian (or post-Christian) civilisation chose the day that Auschwitz was liberated, reflecting this Christian (and post-Christian) attitude to Jews. Because Christianity has its paradigm of the “perfect Jew”, arguably the most famous Jew in history, the Jew whom most Europeans for most of Europe’s history have worshipped as their Lord and Saviour. The “perfect Jew” in Christian (and post-Christian) theology is the Jew who walks calmly and unresistingly to his own death; the Jew who is pre-destined to be crucified (or shot, or gassed), because that is his mission in life; the Jew who, by his death, expiates the sins of mankind. In Christian (and post-Christian) theology, the perfect Jew is the Jew who, as the Roman executioners nail him to the cross, raises his eyes in mute prayer: “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do”. The perfect Jew is the one who, in his death-agony, declaims: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” What the Jew must never do is raise a sword or a gun and fight back. The fighting Jew is definitely not in the script of Christian (and post-Christian) theology. The perfect Jew is the one who raises his hands in meek surrender. The Jew in the Warsaw Ghetto who raised a knife, a pistol, a rifle, a hand-grenade, who fought the Nazis, who killed the murderers, is an aberration for Christian (and post-Christian) theology. So Christian (and post-Christian) civilisation cannot memorialise the Jew who fights, cannot honour the memory of the Jews who died fighting in the Warsaw Ghetto. The Jewish State and Jewish communities commemorate the Holocaust as a time when Jews were murdered and fought back against their murderers, a time when Jews killed and died with weapons in their hands. Christian (and post-Christian) civilisation memorialises Jews who died in the gas chambers and were shot in mass graves, outnumbered, unable to resist and protest, and whose sole salvation lay in the Gentile armies which defeated the Nazis – epitomised by the Red Army which rolled into Auschwitz on 27 January 1945. The deaths of those Jews – the “good” Jews, even the “perfect” Jews – “will forever be a warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice”, and thereby expiate the sins of humanity. Just as a Jew, crucified by the Romans as a Jew, was taken over by Christianity for universal salvation, so too the Holocaust directed primarily against the Jews has been hijacked by Western civilisation as a universal “warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice”. And this applies, mutatis mutandis, to the Jewish state – the only state in the world which is expected to risk its citizens’ lives, even its very existence, for the sake of peace. Israel’s destiny, in Christian and post-Christian theology, is to play the rôle of the perfect Jew: to go calmly and unresistingly to its own death, and thus to appease its enemies – to die in order to expiate the sins of mankind. If the last fourteen months have taught us anything, it’s that the fighting Jew is still an aberration. Yes, defenseless Jews who are massacred, kidnapped, raped, tortured, or otherwise abuse can receive sympathy. And the killers, the kidnappers, the rapists, the torturers, and the abusers might even be condemned. But the Jews who dare to raise arms against those attackers, the Jews who fight and kill to defend themselves and their people, the Jews who fight and bleed and kill to rescue their kidnapped brethren, will inevitably be excoriated no less than their attackers. Christian and post-Christian theology would rather erase the memory of the Jews who took up arms in the Warsaw Ghetto: they emphatically did not fit the narrative of the “perfect Jew”. Just as the Jews in Israel who take up arms and fight do not fit the narrative of the “perfect Jew”. Hence we come to the ultimate obscenity: Jews who fight and if necessary die for Jewish survival are somehow equated with the Nazis y”sh (may their names be blotted out) whose overarching ideology was to exterminate every single Jew on G-d’s earth. The most powerful defence, and the ultimate counter-argument, against this theology is our Jewish State, the State of Israel, “the Jew among the nations”, the State which commemorates the Holocaust by eternalising the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The State for whom the fighting Jew is absolutely not the aberration, but the true Son of Israel.
