Severing a historical bond: the implications of divorcing human rights from Holocaust education

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Israeli discourse has always reflected a tendency to ground Holocaust memory in a particularistic perspective. This perspective involves a disproportionate focus on the suffering of the Jewish people and exclusion of any consideration of the suffering of other peoples, especially the Palestinians. The present article emphasizes that this approach leads to an artificial severance of the Holocaust from an issue that is integral to its historic development: the violation of human rights. The Holocaust could not have occurred without the license and justification for violating human rights; indeed, the Holocaust is, ultimately, an extreme manifestation of the violation of human rights. The present article highlights that in the last decade the Israeli tendency to detach the Holocaust from education about human rights has been justified in the academic literature produced elsewhere in the world. But whereas in Israel the divorce of the concept of human rights from Holocaust education has led to apathy about the violation of the Palestinians’ rights and consequently to the perpetuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, now, paradoxically, the conflict and the infringement of the Palestinians’ rights have made it more difficult for those outside Israel to write about the Holocaust in the context of human rights. The article assumes that the suppression of the historical link between the Holocaust and the violations of human rights that preceded the mass murder of the Jews deprives students of the ability to understand the repressive and destructive potential of modern political systems and of the human beings who live and operate within them. At the same time, this educational tendency also leaves them ignorant of the crystallization of the most significant emancipatory achievement of modern times: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The article concludes that it is necessary to pursue qualitative research into how Holocaust education in Israel affects Israelis’ perception of the Other, and especially the Palestinian. It also recommends a study of the extent to which the overtones of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the literature influences the severance of Holocaust from education about human rights outside Israel as well.