The Star and the Stripes by Barnett Michael N.;

Author:Barnett, Michael N.; [Barnett, Michael N.;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691165974
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

Figure 5.3. Global Distribution of Jews by Illiberal and Liberal Countries

In addition to no longer having the same need for human rights, American Jews could hardly be despondent because human rights had never really been effective. The hard-won minorities treaties had been reduced to kindling for the Nazis. To compound the indignities done in the name of minorities treaties, Nazi Germany had bellowed the language of minority rights as its tanks rolled into its neighboring countries with the pretext of protecting German minorities. The nascent refugee regime provided almost no refuge for European Jews before, during, or after World War II. Human rights, international institutions, and international law were vacuous at best, and misleadingly dangerous at worst. And even though the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Israel were born the same year, they became quickly separated at birth.

In addition to being ineffective, the international human rights institutions were drifting away from Jewish interests. Beginning in the 1950s decolonization and the democratization of the United Nations reordered the human rights agenda: it lost interest in the rights of minorities in the West as it focused on the more urgent and demanding fight for self-determination and independence of the colonized. Jewish organizations remained a part of human rights discussions, and occasionally they lobbied the United Nations to look into anti-Semitism, but it almost always declined, either because of a lack of interest or the presence of more compelling issues.101 The Jewish Problem might still be a problem in some parts of the world, but not as great as it once was or in comparison to others.

The declining urgency of the Jewish Problem was the tip of a broader sea change: the relationship of Jews to the cosmopolitanism of suffering. After World War II the Jews, and by extension Israel, symbolized the world’s victims, worthy of sympathy and support. Not only were the needs of Jews as great as those of any other people, but their security had become a sign of the international community’s health. With the passing decades, however, Jewish circumstances radically improved, and Israel, which was designed to solve a minority problem in Europe, developed its own minority problem with its Arab inhabitants. And then, after 1967, Israel became one of those states that ruled over another people; from a human rights calculus, Israel was to the Palestinians what the colonial powers were to the colonized. American Jewish and Israeli officials increasingly reminded the world of the long history of Jewish suffering and that Israel had not started the 1967 war, but from the perspective of the present, there was no objective reason why the international community should privilege Jewish (and Israeli) suffering.102

The difficulty of making the case for the Jews was compounded by the universalization of the Holocaust. The Holocaust remained a Jewish event, but it also belonged to the world. “Never again” no longer meant “never again will the world stand by and allow the Jews to be killed” but rather “never again will the world ignore the genocide of any people.

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