ABSTRACT
“World Jewry has a special responsibility.” This hectoring trumpet call blared forth from the midst of a New York Times op-ed piece (November 9, 1992) by Flora Lewis entitled “Save Lives in Bosnia.” Jews, she argued, had acquired this special responsibility to Bosnian survivors of Serbian camps because their own ancestors had experienced concentration camps; now they had the opportunity “to show that concentration camps provoke the solidarity of victims of persecution.” For Lewis, the lesson of the Holocaust is that Jews now have a responsibility to behave particularly well because their ancestors suffered so much persecution. The unstated corollary of this argument (as Conor Cruise O’Brien once pointed out in another context) is that the descendants of people who have not been persecuted do not have a special responsibility to behave particularly well, and the descendants of the persecutors of Jews can be excused altogether for behavior that would be very hard to excuse in other people. That is perhaps why Lewis went on to give specific instructions to Jews to offer Bosnian Muslims refuge in Israel in order to show “that the Jewish state does indeed want to get on in peace with its Muslim neighbors.” Since the ancestors of these Muslim neighbors did their very best to choke off Jewish immigration to Palestine during World War II, it follows, according to Lewis’s immaculate logic, that these Arab neighbors should now not only be excused for their recent attempts to keep Soviet and Ethiopian Jews from reaching Israel, but should also be offered this conciliatory gesture (which can be expected to have a mighty impact on nations that have always treated Arab refugees like human refuse).
