Current Events: Israel At War "Never Again"

Current Events, Episode 164

israel at war, EXPLAINED: “never again”

November 16, 2023

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“Never Again” evokes the promise of no more genocide, as the world has learned the lessons of history and the Holocaust. But “Never Again” has a different connotation for the Jewish People — and helps us understand the decisions Israel is making in fighting this war against Hamas.

Last episode we looked at the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” It’s a slogan that expresses support for a single Palestinian state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, a scenario that requires the elimination of Israel and the Jews who live there.

Today I want to discuss a phrase from the Israeli side: “Never Again.” Something that has been sitting with me these last few weeks is what I’ve come to realize is a fundamental misunderstanding of “Never Again.” And that’s particularly true where it intersects with Israel to reflect a core part of the Zionist idea that is often overlooked or, again, not as well understood. This might all sound like semantics or overly intellectualized but I think it’s essential to grasping the enormity of October 7. Understanding “Never Again” and how it connects with Zionism explains a lot about the decisions Israel has made in the last few weeks, and gives us some clues into the lasting impact of this moment on the Jewish and Israeli psyche.

We’re six weeks into this war now. The big story is that Israeli forces have surrounded Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest, which sits atop one of Hamas’ main command control bunkers and its maze of tunnels. Israel has been delivering fuel and medical equipment, including several dozen incubators for babies, and trying to work out how to safely get civilians out. A short incursion into one of the hospital’s buildings turned up weapons and other materials used by Hamas. 49 Israeli soldiers have been killed, which is a lot. But it’s also less, so far, than people feared it would be. The military seems to be moving steadily but methodically, both to minimize its own casualties as well Palestinian civilians. But the government has also made clear it’s in for the long haul. And speaking of the government, there is more and more talk about what happens afterwards. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is bearing the brunt of the anger over the security failures on October 7, and polls show that most Israelis think he should leave office, sooner rather than later. That raises questions about how military strategy might be swayed by his own political considerations. Israel has also revised down the number of murdered on October 7, from 1,400 to 1,200 — a small bit of positive, though grim, news.

The global wave of hatred directed at Jews continues, although we are seeing more pushback as people wake up to what is happening. 180,000 people rallied against antisemitism in France, against what has been 1,250 antisemitic acts there since the start of the war. The UK is experiencing daily rallies against Israel, which have spilled into open Jewish hate. There have been smaller counter rallies. And 300,000 people rallied in Washington DC the other day, the largest pro-Israel gathering in U.S. history.

And then there are the hostages. Small children who have been trapped for six weeks now underground. There are ongoing rumors of some kind of swap in the making, and the Israeli government drops hints that it knows the location of at least some portion of the hostages. But it’s become clear that their fate is inextricably tied to Israeli perceptions about the outcome of this war. There is a national determination not to leave a single one of them behind, even if it just means recovering a body.

All of this is reflected in the notion of Never Again, a phrase that evokes Jewish power and resolve in a world deeply uncomfortable, if not outright opposed, to such strength. That’s today’s topic. I’m your host, Jason Harris, and this is Jew Oughta Know.

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I would say that most Jews — and probably a great many non-Jews — are familiar with the phrase Never Again. As the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I grew up with it. It’s a ubiquitous part of Holocaust education and gets attached to every other genocide, too.

The takeaway tends to be that it’s expressing the hope — or determination — that the Holocaust — and genocide more generally — will never happen again. It suggests that the world has learned from the terribleness of these crimes and will rally together to ensure such horrors aren’t repeated. That’s a fine takeaway; there’s nothing wrong with it. But I think it misses a big — or maybe the main — point. It’s something that I think a lot of Jews grasp internally, but a lot of non-Jews might not pick up on. When you understand it, Israeli history makes a lot more sense. As does Israel’s actions during this current war.

For starters, Holocaust survivors talk differently about their experiences amongst themselves, and to their own families, than they do to the outside world. Dara Horn, an American Jewish author, talks about this gap between how the non-Jewish world expects to hear Holocaust survivors, versus how they actually talk. In her book “People Love Dead Jews,” she writes about watching a TV series about the Holocaust. “At the end of the show, on-screen survivors talk in a loop about how people need to love one another. While listening to this, it occurs to me that I have never read survivor literature in Yiddish — the language spoken by 80 percent of victims — suggesting this idea. In Yiddish, speaking only to other Jews, survivors talk about their murdered families, about their destroyed centuries-old communities, about Jewish national independence, about Jewish history, about self-defense, and on rare occasions, about vengeance. Love rarely comes up; why would it?”

In other words, survivors talk differently about the Holocaust in English versus Yiddish. One is for the outside world. The other is how to really think about things.

When I was in grad school getting my high school teaching certificate, several of my classmates were working on lesson plans relating to the Holocaust. They all included Anne Frank’s famous quote from her diary. “Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart.” And, again, it’s a nice sentiment. But as Dara Horn once pointed out, no one asked Anne Frank if she still believed that when she was being starved to death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

And so what happened is that the notion of Never Again became a universal idea of a common humanity. The Jewish purpose in this tale is to suffer and die to reveal to humanity how awful genocide is. Never Again takes on a redemptive quality: “sure, it was horrible that the Jews died, but we learned so much from it!”

But for Jews, this isn’t the point. We’re not interested in dying for the sake of some feel-good revelation that the world can learn from. We don’t see Anne Frank as a metaphor for humanity. We see her for what she was: a young Jewish girl who was cruelly murdered because she was a young Jewish girl. Never Again isn’t about trying to get the world to a place where they all love Anne Frank so much they won’t kill her. It’s about making sure they can’t. For Jews, Never Again is less an expression that hopes for a general end to genocide. It’s a resolve that we will do whatever it takes to make sure it never again happens to us. Never again will another Anne Frank be a helpless little girl with no one to protect her. Never again will the Jews will be led to the gas chambers without putting up a fight. Never again will we ignore those who declare their intention to to exterminate us.

When we looked around for the concrete expression of Never Again, we found it. It was called Zionism.

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Zionism predates the Holocaust by decades, even centuries. And it was the early Zionist leaders who in the late 1800s, predicted that, at some point in the near future, Europe would try to rid itself of Jews. And so the effort began to move Jews in large numbers to the Land of Israel, then called Palestine, in order to carve out a homeland in which Jews would have autonomy. That is, a place where Jews would be in control of their own society so that they could live freely and openly as Jews. Zionism became the political expression of Jewish self-determination, a form of Jewish nationalism that saw Jews returning to their ancient land to settle and develop a national homeland. And as you hopefully know from having listened to Season 2 of Jew Oughta Know on the history of Zionism, this Zionist ideology took on many forms and adopted many ideas, from politics to culture to religion to agriculture and more.

One of those ideas was self-defense. Many Zionist thinkers realized that, like all free peoples everywhere, freedom would depend on the Jews’ ability to defend themselves.

A hundred years ago, in 1923, Vladimir Jabotinsky wrote an essay called “The Iron Wall.” It was something of the foundational document of what became the political right-wing in Israel, spelling out the key principles that guided thinking about Jewish and Israeli defense. In “The Iron Wall,” Jabotinsky wrote that as long as the Arabs had a spark of hope that the Jews could be prevented from turning Palestine into the Land of Israel, they would never stop attacking. Only when such hope was lost due to the iron wall of defense would the Arab extremists realize the Jews couldn’t be defeated; then the Arab moderates would be willing to make concessions. And, said Jabotinsky, since it would be impossible for the Jews to ever expel the Arabs, then you will get two independent nations in Palestine and all will be well. Remember this wasn’t written last month or last year, thought it sounds like it could have been. This was pre-holocaust thinking.

“The Iron Wall” highlighted what became an integral part of Zionism — the emphasis on safety and security for the Jewish People in their homeland. Zionism understood that Jewish self-defense was essential for Jewish self-determination. Jews learning how to fight became an expression of their Zionism, much as working on a kibbutz and learning Hebrew.

And so after the Holocaust, Never Again found itself situated within what soon became the Jewish State of Israel, and that state had an army. And when the Arabs tried to annihilate Israel the day after it declared independence, Israel won. It was proof of concept for Never Again, solidifying the idea that Never Again means “never again to us.”

The challenge at that point was how to balance Never Again with the military power Israel now had to make it a reality.

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Jews had never before had the kind of power that the State of Israel and the Israeli army offered them. It was an historical anomaly. Jews had never ruled over other people, at least not since ancient times. They had never managed their own military, never made national strategic decisions. They never had to consider the impact of possessing the most powerful weapons in human history, such as nuclear bombs. And they had never had to consider the impact of having such power on their internal psyche. Having been rooted in powerlessness for millennia, what did it mean to suddenly have power? It was — and remains — a very uncomfortable question.

This is obviously a huge discussion. One way of mitigating this power is to encase it within the law: rules and ethics and codes of conduct to ensure that the power isn’t abused. From the beginning the Israel Defense Forces — the IDF — adopted what is known as the “purity of arms.” Force is to be used at the level that is required to subdue the enemy, and limited to prevent unnecessary harm. In other words, the Israeli solider uses his or her weapon only for defense, and without targeting civilians. This developed into a sprawling code of military ethics called “Ruach Tzahal,” meaning “Spirit of the IDF,” which contains a massive list of values and responsibilities expected of the army. Front and center is the requirement for the IDF and its soldiers to preserve human dignity, and to recognize the worth of all human life.

So Never Again didn’t mean a free-for-all in which the Jews could just carpet bomb their enemies. David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister, said that “the fate of Israel depends on two things: its strength and its righteousness.” It’s one of the reasons why the Israeli military is so careful about civilian casualties, and why it goes to such great lengths to avoid them, even when it is inevitable, such as the current war with Hamas.

All of this was made more difficult after the Six Day War in 1967, when Israel suddenly found itself in control of more than a million Palestinians, and an area of land three times its own size. The following decades of occupation have at times challenged the purity of arms doctrine. And they made harder the question as to what kinds of situations fall under the umbrella of Never Again. What is, say, a security threat versus an actual existential threat? How much force, and what kind, should be applied in different kinds of situations? How do you preserve human dignity and magnify Israel’s righteousness while also defending yourself against what is often a hostile population?

Our intention here isn’t to probe these questions. My point here is that for decades this Never Again formulation worked. We have Israel and Israel has an army and that army has achieved many victories against enemies who have threatened to annihilate us: “us” being Israel and the Jews in general. The army enabled the State of Israel to grow and prosper. It allowed Jewish life to flourish abundantly and vibrantly and without having to cower in secret. And the security provided by the army allowed for democracy to take root in a very inhospitable corner of the world.

There was terrorism, yes, and war, and Israelis were still killed year after year. But as tragic as it was, an act of terrorism didn’t threaten to bring down the whole country. And when a soldier died in battle, the whole country understood that he or she died standing up. Fighting for the Jewish right to live. After two thousand years, no longer helpless. This was the central tenet of Zionism: that with the ability to defend themselves, Jews could determine their own fate, and could live life on their own terms. That’s “Never Again.”

All of this was shattered by what happened on October 7.

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On October 7, when Hamas launched a war by murdering 1,200 people and taking more than two hundred hostages, Israelis realized with an extraordinary shock that Never Again had failed. On that day Jews returned to the helplessness of the Holocaust. Some fought back, heroically, sometimes successfully, other times not. But people were murdered without mercy. Children begging for their lives. Women raped to death. The sick tortured. Entire families executed in front of one another. Jews burned to death just like in the Nazi death camps. For an entire day, and all the days that Hamas planned for October 7, Never Again failed, and the outcome was so horrific that I, for one, still have trouble processing it. Decades of Never Again resolve — and the psychological security it brought — was completely undone.

So what happened wasn’t just a failure of security, or a failure of military readiness, or a failure of political leadership, though it was all those things. This attack went deeper. It was a failure of Zionism. It was a failure of the promise of the State of Israel. In an instant it set the Jewish psyche back by decades, as we were all transported into the memories of parents and grandparents whose experiences we thought were just that — awful memories that won’t happen again. It turns out they weren’t, and so the question is how to come to grips with this, and where to go from here.

What Israel is doing now is trying to get back its Never Again. The world is looking at the intensity of its campaign against Hamas and throwing out accusations of rage and revenge and collective punishment. And sure, there are some in Israel talking about those things, and certainly there is the human instinct of getting back at those who have committed such horrible crimes. But most Israelis understand that this is about Never Again; about getting to a place where neither Hamas nor anyone else can repeat this kind of attack on Israel ever again. What has to happen for Israelis to reclaim Never Again? How do they do so within the confines of purity of arms? How do they demonstrate both strength and righteousness — or is one more important than the other right now?

As if Gaza wasn’t complicated enough, this situation is made even more so by the unprecedented situation of the hostages. We’re off the map here. In 2011 Israel dealt with the capture of a single Israeli soldier by releasing more than 1,000 Hamas prisoners, some of whom went on to orchestrate the October 7 massacre. That scenario can’t be repeated. In 1986, Ron Arad, an Israeli Air Force pilot, disappeared after his plane crashed in Lebanon. His whereabouts remain unknown, including if he is still alive. Decades later he is still a household name, a heavy weight on a country which has a fundamental principle of leaving no one behind. Now multiply that by 240 and you start to appreciate the unfathomable enormity of what we’re dealing with here. How can Israel possibly get back to Never Again without resolving the fates of those hostages? It makes the military campaign that much harder, that much more intense, that much more urgent.

So in military terms we’re talking about restoring Israel’s deterrence. The Iron Wall of military power that will ensure Hezbollah and Iran stay in their corners — which, so far, is working. Hezbollah continues to attack Israel every day, deliberately targeting and harming civilians in what are, in each instance, a war crime. But they’ve stopped short of a full-scale attack, and Iran has made noises that it, too, is going to hold back.

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis are displaced from their homes around the Gaza and Lebanese borders, and cannot return until deterrence is assured, which it will be in due time. Hamas will lose this war. But beyond that is the open question of how long it will take for Never Again to return. Israelis are looking at deeply traumatized generations who may never get back that phrase. For so many, we’re back at the end of the Holocaust. What is required is a rebuilding of the Jewish state, and a rebuilding of the Israeli army, to the degree necessary to reimagine how Zionism can once again mean safety and security for the Jewish People.

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So a little intellectual history today, but I think it’s important to understand how front and center this concept of Never Again is — and how it differs so much from the general idea of ending genocide with which we associate it. Never Again is about ensuring that what the Jewish People experienced before the State of Israel — and, now, what it experienced on October 7 — can never happen to us again. So as you’re taking in the daily barrage of news, keep this in mind. For Israel, it’s what this whole war is about.

More coming soon, thanks so much for hanging in there with me through all this. If your community or institution is looking for a speaker, you can reach me out to me through my website at jewoughtaknow.com or my email jewoughtaknowpodcast@gmail.com. I make Zoom calls and in-person calls, and the only time my wife lets me drink sugary soda is when I fly, so I’m here for it. Talk to you soon, Am Yisrael Chai — the Jewish People live.