The Suffering of Others

Profs. Israel Charny (left) and Yair Auron (right)

Last Monday (June 5, 2006), the Open University in Israel sponsored a one-day seminar titled קורבנות אחרים [Other Victims] that included addresses by Professors Israel Charny (ישראל טשרני) and Yair Auron (יאיר אורון). As the title of the colloquium suggests, the seminar was meant to correct a lacuna in Israeli education and research. Neither the universities nor the schools are teaching Israelis enough about acts of genocide other than the Shoah (Ha'aretz Hebrew; Ha'aretz English).

Even with respect to the Holocaust, a study conducted by researchers Eyal Naveh and Esther Yogev in 1996, with a sample of 800 Israeli students, revealed that some 85% had minimal knowledge of the Nazis' murder of the Roma ("gypsies") during World War Two. Furthermore, surveys conducted from 1996-2004 among participants in an elective course on genocide showed that 85-90% of the students admitted knowing "very little" about both the murder of the Roma by the Nazis during the Second World War, and the Armenian genocide perpetrated by Ottoman Turkey beginning in 1915.

For many Jews in Israel and the diaspora, comparisons of other genocides with the Shoah remain a source of discomfort, in part because such comparisons have sometimes been carried out in an attempt to relativize the destruction of European Jewry during WWII, as during the Historikerstreit ("historians' controversy") in Germany during the 1980s. But at times the effect of insisting on the "uniqueness" of the Shoah has blinded us to the suffering of others. It must be especially painful to Armenians to see so little awareness among Jews about the Armenian genocide. Worse, due to the same geopolitical considerations (Turkey) driving American policy, the State of Israel does not officially recognize the Armenian genocide. Charny and Auron have been at the forefront of raising awareness of the Armenian genocide in Israel - as well as about genocide more generally.

As the title of Auron's book suggests, genocide is defined not only by the "banality of evil" (Hannah Arendt) but also by the "banality of indifference." Preventing genocide thus requires being open to the pain of others and opening the memory of "our" tragedies to "their" suffering.

Both Israel Charny and Yair Auron are pioneers in the study of genocide in Israel. Charny is the director of Israel's Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, the editor of the excellent two-volume Encyclopedia of Genocide (1999), and the author of many other works. Auron, a lecturer at the Open University, where he teaches courses on genocide, is best-known for two important books dealing with the Armenian genocide, both of which have been translated into English. The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide (2001) examines the reactions of the yishuv, the pre-1948 (i.e., pre-state) Jewish community in Eretz Yisrael (Palestine), to the Armenian genocide - reactions that ranged from callous indifference to attempts to actively aid the victims. His more recent book, The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide (2002), deals with the role of the Armenian genocide in Israeli society and politics from the creation of the state until the present - reviews to follow. In an interview with Shahar Ilan of Ha'aretz, Auron, quoting genocide researchers, called denial "the final stage of genocide."

The colloquium also marked the publication of two new books, in Hebrew, as part of the university's Genocide series. I have not been able to confirm the full titles of both books, but one, edited by Auron, is called "מחשבות על הבלתי נתפס" (Thoughts about the Inconceivable), and the other is edited by Gilad Margalit of Haifa University.