And everything you know of life and history tells you that Israel will not surrender; and that, as the writer Ron Rosenbaum, who normally speaks with a voice that is more cerebral than visceral, said this week in the New York Observer, "This is the way it is likely to happen: Sooner or later a nuclear weapon is detonated in Tel Aviv, and sooner, not later, there is nuclear retaliation--Baghdad, Damascus, Tehran, perhaps all three. . . . The unspoken corollary of the slogan 'Never again' is: 'And if again, not us alone.' "See http://www.observer.com/pages/story.asp?ID=5715:
This column ran on page 1 in the 4/15/02 edition of The New York Observer.‘Second Holocaust,’ Roth’s Invention, Isn’t Novelistic
by Ron Rosenbaum
"The Second Holocaust. It’s a phrase we may have to begin thinking about. A possibility we may have to contemplate. A reality we may have to witness. Somebody has to think about the unthinkable, about the unbearable, and the way it looks now, it’s at least as likely to happen as not. One can imagine several ways it will happen: the current, terrible situation devolves from slow-motion mutual slaughter into instantaneous conflagration, nuclear, chemical or biological. Scenarios that remain regional. Scenarios that go global.What is harder to imagine are ways in which it won’t happen. A peace process? Goodwill among men? An end to suicidal fanaticism? In your dreams.
Instead we must begin to examine the variety of nightmare scenarios...
...As a secular Jew, I’ve always been more of a diasporist than a Zionist. I’ve supported the Jewish state, but thought that it was a necessary but not ideal solution with a pronounced dark side: The concentration of so many Jews in one place—and I use the word "concentration" advisedly—gives the world a chance to kill the Jews en masse again. And I also thought that Jews flourished best where they were no longer under the thumb of Orthodox rabbis and could bring to the whole world—indeed, the whole universe—the exegetical skills that are the glory of the people: reading the universe as the Torah, as Einstein and Spinoza did, rather than the Torah as the universe, as the Orthodox do.
But the implacable hatred of Arab fundamentalism makes no distinction between Jewish fundamentalists and Jewish secularists, just as Hitler didn’t. It’s not just the settlements they want to extirpate, it’s the Jewish state, the Jewish people.
This is the way it is likely to happen: Sooner or later, a nuclear weapon is detonated in Tel Aviv, and sooner, not later, there is nuclear retaliation—Baghdad, Damascus, Tehran, perhaps all three. Someone once said that while Jesus called on Christians to "turn the other cheek," it’s the Jews who have been the only ones who have actually practiced that. Not this time. The unspoken corollary of the slogan "Never again" is: "And if again, not us alone."
So the time has come to think about the Second Holocaust. It’s coming sooner or later; it’s not "whether," but when. I hope I don’t live to see it. It will be unbearable for those who do. That is, for all but the Europeans—whose consciences, as always, will be clear and untroubled."