Poor Thomas Kuhn . Superzionist, a.k.a. Yoram Hazony, author of the quirky The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul, has drafted the author of the seminal but flawed classic of the philosophy of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, to explain why everyone hates Israel.

I’m late in getting to Hazony’s essay, Israel Through European Eyes which he e-mailed to his fans last July 14. But it just reached me, through a series of forwards long enough to man every team in the World Cup. Like all of Hazony’s writing, it displays great erudition, has lots of footnotes, and makes some obvious points while parsing them all wrong.

Behind the excess philosophical baggage, Hazony says something that has been said before—that the antipathy that Europe, and especially Europe’s political left, displays toward Israel is deeply rooted in the Holocaust. Hazony correctly notes that Zionism and the European left learned two disparate lessons from Hitler’s genocidal program. Zionism claimed that no one would defend the Jews if they did not defend themselves, while the Europe emerged from World War II horrified at the death and destruction wrought by chauvinistic nationalism and concluded that national feelings were too dangerous to be left to politics.

The Zionists established a Jewish state, while the Europeans sought to create a pan-European political framework that would make it difficult for the fanatics of any one European nation (but those of Germany in particular) to persecute outsiders and to seek to impose hegemony on the entire continent. So we have Israel, and we have the European Union.

But Hazony can’t just say that. In keeping with his neoconservative heritage, it’s not just enough to make a political point. The issue has to be presented as the product of a fundamental philosophical error—because in the neocon universe, its ideas, more than people, that are the actors in history. Hazony offers an extensive explanation of Kuhn’s theory of scientific paradigms, but I’d suggest that anyone who wants to understand it look elsewhere. Hazony likes Kuhn because Kuhn argued that certain basic sets of ideas, which he called paradigms, inhabit different universes of ideas and therefore cannot be compared or weighed against each other in any rational way. Hazony claims that the European and Israeli views of nationalism and the nation-state are two such incompatible paradigms. Israel defends itself, and Europeans accuse it of Nazism because Israel defends Jews and not humanity as a whole.

But that’s a false dichotomy that applies only to the most ideologically hidebound of Europeans and Israelis. Auschwitz doesn’t have to have just one meaning. Most Israelis outside Hazony’s Shalem Center instinctively understand that being a Zionist does not require one to view the Holocaust solely as a crime against the Jews, and most Europeans do not view it as only a crime against humanity, rather than one against the Jews. The claim that the Jewish people deserves and needs its own nation-state does not contradict the claim that nation-states can be hazardous in the wrong hands. One can believe in the nation state as an essential political framework for preserving and advancing national cultures and protecting distinct groups, while acknowledging that power-hungry rulers and intolerant national majorities have and continued to use nation-states to oppress outsiders and minorities. Nation-states are not an absolute category; there are good ones and bad ones. The good ones build into their laws the proper checks and balances needed to ensure that national pride does not turn into xenophobia and oppression.

Israel has real enemies in Europe, people who accuse the Jewish state, and only the Jewish state, of being heir to Hitler. But when Europeans deplore Israeli settlement of the Palestinian territories, or the botched handling of the Turkish flotilla to Gaza, they do not automatically reject the claims of Zionism. Defending Israel against its enemies requires us to assert the fundamental justice of the Zionist cause—but also to work to fight racism, messianism, and political shortsightedness in Israeli politics and society. This is the important work being done in Europe by left-wing, pro-Zionist groups such as Britain’s Engage.

Kuhn’s theory of paradigms, in its bare-bones form, is almost as over-cited as the ostensible Chinese curse about living in interesting times. It can be roped in to apply to nearly everything, a sure sign of its weakness. But it’s especially unsuited to application to politics because of its categorical structure. In Kuhn’s schema (again, taken simplistically), every scientific endeavor belongs either to one paradigm or another. Nothing is in between. You can make an argument that this is a valid way of looking at the natural sciences (although I think even there it is very problematic). But in politics there are, by and large, no hard categories. A nation-state is not a hard category. There are nation-states of all different kinds, and Europeans of all different kinds, and Zionists of all different kinds. Politics is the art of finding balance between competing and often irreconcilable values. In the real political world, philosophical clarity that ignores contingencies can lead to extremism and disaster.

The irony of Hazony’s essay is that Kuhn’s philosophy leads inevitably in a direction that Hazony would deplore. Hazony wants to assert ultimate truths, one of them being the Jewish people’s right to cultural and political self-determination. But Kuhn’s view of science leads to relativism—to the assertion, made most explicitly by Paul Feyerabend, that all systems of knowledge are equally valid. Notably, most working scientists think that Kuhn’s paradigm theory doesn’t really accord with the way they pursue their work—it’s too stark and simplified. Most working Zionists should be equally skeptical about Hazony’s theoretical scaffold.

I’m told that this is the first-ever bloggingheads conversation between two guys wearing kippot. You can click above to watch, or go over to the bloggingheads site, where you have the option of jumping to specific topics. If you do, feel free to comment at either site.

Dear Niot,

You told Holocaust jokes at the table on Friday night. Ima and I grimaced and tried to segue into a discussion of the boots you are refusing to buy and your insistence on trudging through the Polish snow in running shoes. We acknowledged that telling jokes with your classmates would be a legitimate way of letting off pressure during your trip, although we didn’t think the ones you told us were particularly funny.

It was then that I knew how I was going to write this letter, a letter that your teacher asked us to deposit with him in a sealed envelope for you to read, in Hebrew, when you arrive in Poland. That’ll be at about the same time that The Jerusalem Report’s readers receive it in their mailboxes in English (and thanks for giving me advance permission to share it with them).
I reminded you that when your older sister and brother wanted to sign up for their class trips to Poland’s Nazi death camps, in what has become a routine part of the Holocaust curriculum for Israeli high school seniors, I objected. “Why?” you asked.

I explained that I don’t want my children to be Jews who are Jews because they are victims. I don’t want my children to be Israelis because the world hates them. Our history, tradition, and culture are rich and powerful and provide adequate reason to want to be a Jew and an Israeli even if Hitler had never been born and the swastika never had reigned.

When your sister said she was going to Poland anyway, I was reminded of a comedy skit I once saw at a club in New York. A man and a woman sat side by side on a small stage with big smiles on their faces. “Hi, we’re Jews,” the woman said. “And we’re dead.”

The man continued: “We’re here to tell you that 90 percent of dead people are Jews. So if you’re not nice to us when you’re alive…”

“…We’ll get you when you’re dead,” the woman concluded with a wicked giggle.

Not funny, you say? Well, it got a lot of knowing laughs from the mostly Jewish audience. Because a certain element in the education that nearly all young Jews get, no matter what their religious background and politics, is that being dead, at the hands of others, is the natural state of the Jewish people. Being alive is the exception. If you’re a Jew and you’re alive it’s because you are unusually lucky, or because the goyim around you are unusually indulgent, or because you’ve fought off your enemies. The bottom line is that everyone hates us.

So five years ago, when your sister came home with the forms to sign up for her school trip to the concentration camps, I worried that the message she’d get there would be “I’m a Jew because everyone hates me. I’m a Jew because most Jews are dead.”

What an awful reason to be a Jew.

Why not “I’m a Jew because the Jewish people produced the Bible, whose stories and poetry have become the common heritage of mankind?” Why not “I’m a Jew because of my people’s ethos of learning, argument, and dialogue, because of the Talmud, midrashim, and thinkers ranging from Maimonides to Spinoza to Soleveitchik?” Why not “I’m a Jew because my people preserved its language and culture through centuries of dispersion and reestablished and recreated them in the modern state of Israel?”

When she returned from her trip, I saw that my worst fears had not been realized. She came back with a more mature and sober view of Jewish history.

Still, her trip focused primarily only one of the two lessons that we, as Jews, must learn from the Holocaust. It’s an important lesson: that we, as Jews, must defend ourselves. That our people’s history shows us clearly that we cannot be secure without a state and army of our own.

But, face it, we didn’t need the Holocaust to tell us that, and you don’t need to go to Poland to learn it. Theodor Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Berl Katznelson and David Ben-Gurion all came to that conclusion long before Hitler enlisted in the Kaiser’s army in World War I. Just yesterday, in a book I’m translating, I encountered this eye-witness description of a pogrom in Lvov: “The Jewish city is in flames and living people, or burnt bodies, are buried under the demolished houses.… More than a thousand victims were murdered brutally, women raped, men—bayonet wounds and bullet holes on their bodies, piles of burnt bodies, people were trapped in blazing houses and doomed to die in the flames.” That was in 1918, twenty years before the gas chamber was invented.

Growing up in Israel, as you have, in the age of suicide bombings, Qassam missiles, and virulent bellicose anti-Semitic rhetoric from Islamic extremists in Lebanon and Iran, you hardly need to go to Poland to learn that there are still people who want to murder Jews simply because they are Jews, and to learn that if we don’t defend ourselves, no one else will. In fact, that’s what you said at the Shabbat table on Friday night, in your own way—one that a Jewish boy couldn’t have dreamed of saying until just a few decades ago: “I’m a Jew,” you said proudly, “because we’re the strongest nation in the world and we don’t let anyone push us around.”

If that’s all there was to being a Jew, then we could save the cost of the trip to Poland. You could finish high school at the end of the year and follow your brother’s and your father’s footsteps into the army. After doing your part to defend your people, you’d have fulfilled your obligations as a Jew.

But there’s another big, important lesson that you’ve got to learn from the Holocaust.

You see, being a Jew doesn’t just mean fighting to defend Jewish lives. It doesn’t mean just keeping yourself alive. To be a Jew, you have to do something with Jewish your life, and that means understanding your life in the light of your people’s history and texts and stories. It means understanding yourself as a Jew, and as a human being.

At 17, you are into fighting more than into reading. Despite my nagging, you don’t read much beyond the sports pages—certainly not poetry. But there’s a poem I’d like you to think about when you are in Poland—one you’ve probably encountered in literature class or in the seminars that prepared you for your trip. It’s by Dan Pagis, who spent much of his boyhood in a concentration camp. After the war he came to Israel and became a famous Hebrew poet. It’s called “Written in Pencil in a Sealed Boxcar”:

Here in this transport
Am I Eve
With Abel my boy
If you see my elder son
Cain the human being
Tell him that I

Pagis packs reams of meaning into these six lines and 25 words, and we could talk about them for hours. But I want to point out just a couple things about the poem.

The first centers on line five. The original Hebrew is “Kayin ben-Adam,” which means both “Cain the human being” and “Cain the son of Adam.” Cain, we know from the biblical story (which we read in synagogue this past Shabbat), is the murderer, so Pagis seems to want us to identify Cain as the Nazi who has shoved his mother and brother into the transport and sent them off to the gas chambers. This Cain is a human being. Not a monster, not a supernatural angel of death or evil spirit, but a human being, the son and brother of his victims.

The second is that, in Hebrew, as you, though not my English readers, can hear, line three rhymes with line six—something I represent in my translation with an imperfect half-rhyme. From the literal meaning of the words, and the picture that the poem’s title creates in our mind, we see these lines as a scrawl on the boxcar’s inside wall, an message that Eve leaves unfinished because her strength fails, or because she dies.

But the rhyme, like the final chord of a song, provides closure—it makes it sound as if Eve’s message is not “I” followed by more words that we will never know, but simply “I.” If we read it this second way, the message that Eve wants the reader of her words to convey to her son and murderer Cain is “I.” That is, what you have sent to death is an “I,” a human being, just like yourself.

Here, in this handful of words, is the other message you need to come home with. The near-annihilation of the Jews was not accomplished by supernatural beings or by monsters in human guise. It was perpetrated by human beings—evil human beings raised on a tradition of anti-Semitism and militarism, but human beings nonetheless. Human beings like ourselves.

What Pagis is telling us in this poem is that every human being contains within him both the capacity to be a victim and the capacity to be a murderer. The fact that we have long been victims does not mean that we are immune to evil. On the contrary, now that we are, in your words, “the strongest nation in the world and we don’t let anyone push us around,” we need to take special care that we don’t let our power go to our heads. We need to remember that the non-Jews who live among us, and our enemies, too, are human beings.

Unfortunately, many Jews have become so enamored of physical strength and so sure of their nation’s destiny that they have turned off onto the dangerous road traveled by the self-righteous Slavic rioters of Lvov and their ilk, who were certain that in killing Jews they were doing God’s will and the will of history.

Niot, as you tread the steps of the slaughtered Jews of Europe and take in the enormity of the crime committed against our people, keep in mind that we are not Jews simply because most dead people are Jews. And we are not Jews simply because we can and will fight to make sure that we will never again allow ourselves to be victims of such a crime. To be Jews we must be alive. We are Jews because we are alive and because we have a religion, a culture, a language, and a history that affirms and gives life. A Jew should not settle for being merely a victim, nor merely a defender. Being Jewish means being a person who creates, not one who destroys or is destroyed. This is no joke: we’re Jews despite, not because, of the Holocaust.

With love,

Abba

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The title Amir Gutfreund chose for his novel Our Holocaust has a quadruple meaning. “Our Holocaust” is the Holocaust of the survivors who populate his story; it’s the Holocaust of Hans Underman, the German scholar who intrudes on the story; it’s the Holocaust of the narrator and his childhood friend, Efi, who appropriate the Holocaust of their parents’ generation for themselves; and it’s the Holocaust that human beings can suffer, or perpetrate, under circumstances beyond, and within, their control.

It’s an appropriate book to write about on Tisha B’Av, the anniversary of the destruction of the first and second Holy Temples. The Jewish prophets and sages understood that each of these awful catastrophes, which were accompanied by the slaughter and enslavement of their people, had a double meaning. These previous Holocausts were crimes committed against the Jewish people by other nations, but they were also evidence of the depravity of God’s chosen people, of their failure to adhere to the moral code of God’s law.

In today’s Holocaust discourse, that synthesis is often absent. Some see the Holocaust as an unparalleled crime committed by the Germans, a nation with a culture uniquely degenerate. Therefore, the Jews, as the particular victims of this crime, derive a special status from it. Others see the Holocaust as just another instance of man’s inhumanity to man. From that they deduce that the experience of the Holocaust ought not to have changed the Jewish nation’s perception of itself. But both these propositions are true. The Jews learn from the Holocaust that they can trust to the protection of no other nation but themselves; humanity—including the Jews—learns that no matter what cultural failings led the Germans into the hell they created, the crimes they committed were human crimes. Thus every human being, Jews included, have a duty to guard themselves, and their nations, against the possibility that they will sink into moral dissolution (one need not sink to the level of the Nazis to commit horrible deeds).

(I read the novel in the original Hebrew, but has been published in English in a translation by Jessica Cohen.)

Gutfreund’s novel brings this synthesis home. It begins with the narrator, who bears the author’s name, as a young boy. He and Efi, a girl from his extended family, play Holocaust games and try to squeeze stories of the camps out of their older relatives and out of the residents of Kiryat Hayyim, the quarter of Haifa where some of them live alongside other survivors. Theirs is an amalgamated family of numerous grandfathers, aunts and uncles; the genocide has left so many people alone and so many families broken that families like Amir’s have adopted new members. Amir has no real grandfather, but he has several grandfathers in quotation marks. There’s Grandpa Lulek, a brawny, irreverent man who drives an ancient Vauxhaul sedan and who fought the Nazis in the Polish army of General Anders; there is Mr. Perl, attorney-at-law, who runs a hardware store and keeps careful files on the fate of former Nazis; and there is Grandpa Yosef, a kindhearted man, learned in both traditional Jewish wisdom and in fields ranging from astronomy to geography to history.

Guttfreund’s story moves slowly at first (too slowly—the first section, about Amir and Efi’s childhood, would be better were it 50 pages shorter), but picks up steam when Unterman the German makes his first visit, and then when Grandpa Yosef embarks on a tour of the Caribbean islands after the death of his invalid wife, his autistic son, and his dog. Amir and Efi, who were for so long told that they were not old enough to hear their elders’ stories, grow up and into “the age.” Amir begins to chronicle the stories of his father, his various grandfathers, and of other residents in Kiryat Hayyim; it is this section of the book that packs the most powerful punch.

Amir’s conclusion, when he has finished telling the stories he has collected, is that while the victims of the Holocaust included many saints and no fewer sinners, most were simply ordinary people. Likewise, some of the perpetrators were sadists and monsters, others tried to do some good, but most were simply ordinary people. In the end, this is the horror, and the warning—the Holocaust was committed against, and by, human beings like ourselves.

***************************************

Our Holocause was a finalist for the 2007 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for this book; my book, A Crack in the Earth, was a finalist for the 2008 award. More Sami Rohr books I’ve written about on South Jerusalem:

Jewish Literature As It Ought To Be: Naomi Alderman’s “Disobedience”

Tel Aviv Ennui: Yael Hedaya’s Accidents

Black and White and Jew All Over: Eric L. Goldstein’s “The Price of Whiteness”

The Family as Text: Tamar Yellin’s “The Genizah at the House of Shepher”

Standing Between: Ilana M. Blumberg’s “Houses of Study”

An American participant in this discussion of the Holocaust criticized Israeli author David Grossman’s novel See Under Love, for depicting a Nazi concentration camp commander with human depth. In the third part of that novel, the commander and one of his victims share memories of children’s stories.

I responded that, in my reading, Grossman used this device to show that, however deep into inhumanity the Nazis had sunk, they were still human beings. While the Nazi evil represents a decay of natural human morality far deeper than any other in the modern age, the Nazis were nevertheless human beings and their actions represent an extreme to which any human being, and any nation, has the potential to reach.

“That’s bullshit!” shouted another American Jew who participated in the discussion. “I can’t accept all that junk about there being a little Eichmann in all of us.” Normal human beings and normal societies, this person insisted, have moral and social mechanisms that stop them short long before they reach the crime of genocide.

But the two American Jews I’ve cited differed not just in their thinking from me and the other Israeli in the discussion. There was an important biographical distinction as well. We two Israelis had been soldiers, which the Americans had not.

We two Israelis recalled times when we, tired, hungry, wet, and cold, had felt our morality and human empathy disipating in the face of our overwhelming desire to sleep, eat, and warm ourselves. We were not Eichmanns–we did not lose our humanity, did not take out our frustrations on those weaker than we, did not commit murder or genocide. But we both remember that feeling, and how frightening it was. We felt that we could understand how decent people could turn into animals in extremes, especially if their society dehumanized their enemies and if their commanders told them to take out their frustrations on the weak.

This awareness in no way excuses Eichmann and his cohorts. But it shows that the Holocaust teaches the Jews two things: We must defend ourselves and never again allow ourselves to be the victims of genocide. And we must work hard to preserve our own humanity, especially at times when the basic needs of survival threaten to blind our moral vision.

The best advice I ever got as a soldier was shouted at me by my NCO course company commander. “No matter how little time you have to sleep, no matter how miserable you are, don’t shut your eyes until you’ve washed yourself and changed your underwear. It’s not just hygiene–it’s to remind yourself that you are human being, not an animal.”

That’s not the magic way to fight Nazism–I’m sure Eichmann bathed and changed his socks regularly. But I did find that the ritual of washing and sock changing underwear helped me keep my animal needs from overwhelming me.

So yes, the Nazis descended to a depth of moral depravity unprecedented in human history. But they began their descent as human beings, just like the rest of us.

Only bits of the journal, I’m sorry to say, are online, and Primor’s article isn’t one of those bits. If you want to read it, you’ll need to find a hard copy. But here are a couple of key points:

Yes, there’s anti-Semitism in France. But in that country, Jews play a role in national politics far beyond their number. The percentage of the French public ready to accept a Jewish president has risen drastically since World War II.

Belgium was accused by Israelis of being anti-Semitic after it passed a law that allowed for local prosecution of war criminals whose crimes took place elsewhere in the world, and pro-Palestinian lawyers attempted to bring Israel’s then-prime minister, Ariel Sharon, to trial for his role in the Sabra and Shatilla masacres. Primor explains that the law, albeit poorly written, was passed so that Belgium could try Rwandan war criminals who’d found refuge there. When the flaws in the law became clear, it was rescinded.

As for Germany, Primor brings survey evidence that the level of anti-Semitism has dropped significantly since the post-war period, and the drop has continued in recent years. Asked if they’d object to having neighbors from various minority groups, fewer Germans (13 percent) objected to Jews than to Arabs, Turks, Poles or Africans.

So why the perception among Jews, especially Israelis, and among non-Jewish Europeans that anti-Semitism has risen? One reason, Primor notes, is the echo of the Arab-Israel conflict among immigrants in France and Belgium. Another is that the modern media provide us with knowledge of every incident. So last Saturday, when a 17-year-old Jew had his skull cracked by a club-wielding attackers in Paris, Reuter picked up the story and broadcast it world-wide. There’s no denying the horror of the incident, or the fear it induces in Jews. Young Rudy Hadad was apparently wearing a kipah when he was attacked; I admit I’d be less likely to wear a kipah in Paris after reading this. But what makes the news is not necessarily what’s prevalent. The unusual incident is more newsworthy than the endemic problem.

And one more reason for the perception, Primor says, is that European criticism of Israeli policies gets labeled anti-Semitism. Yet:

most of those criticizing Israeli policies in the territories are not antisemites; sometimes they are actual friends of Israel who fear for the fate of the Jewish state.

When Europeans criticized the Greek junta of 1967-73, Primor says, no one suspected them of anti-Greek racism.

Israel is not a frightened, helpless Jewish community in an European ghetto. It can demonstrate a greater degree of self-confidence in the face of legitimate criticism.

Overall, I find Primor’s argument impressive. (This is a tad ad hominus; I usually find Primor’s arguments impressive.) Still, I’d qualify what he says in two ways.

First, though it’s true that much European criticism of Israel is legitimate, a certain strain goes over the line. A representative example was John Pilger’s article in the New Statesman last year, where he trumpeted the call to boycott Israel by saying:

No other country has such a record of lawlessness: not one of the world’s tyrannies comes close.

Excuse me, John? Did you really write that?

Don’t get me wrong; I’ve written extensively on how the occupation violates both international and domestic law. But Israel as more lawless than China, Sudan, Burma, Zimbabwe? Forgive me if I suspect that Mr. Pilger’s attitude is much like that of American racists who only notice those offenses allegedly committed by blacks. Like others of his school, Pilger argues for dissolving Israel in a one-state solution. No matter that Palestinians themselves reject this by a two-one margin.To suggest that self-determination is the right of all nations, except for the Jews, who are uniquely disqualified, at least suggests a peculiar inability to accept Jews in the neighborhood of nations.

It’s true that some Jews would agree with Pilger, and with the British advocates of a boycott of Israel (about whom David Newman writes in the same issue of the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs). Small comfort. As former cabinet member Avraham Poraz once infamously said in a different context (here in Hebrew), “a Jew can sometimes be an anti-Semite.” (Poraz, it seems, felt badly that the anti-Semites wouldn’t let him join their club because he’s Jewish, but that’s a different discussion).

That said, I still prefer to avoid the anti-Semitism argument against European critics of Israel. Primor is right that it too easily spills over into emotional battering of legitimate critics. The real problem, as Noah Feldman writes in the New York Times, is that all together too many Europeans have never really come to terms with living with the Other. But the outsiders to be hated today are Muslims.

…even after 60 years of introspection about the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust, Europeans are not convinced that culturally and religiously different immigrants should be treated as full members of their societies. European anti-Semitism between the world wars featured accusations of criminality, religious backwardness, genetic inferiority and, above all, the impossibility of assimilation.

In Europe, “Muslim” is the new “Jew.”

In theory, Europe remembers the Holocaust. But the depth of that memory may be doubted when many Europeans seem to have forgotten that their continent was home to other outsiders well before the arrival of today’s Muslim minority.

So anti-Semitism is gone. And yet it’s flourishing. And that should concern both Jews and Europeans deeply.

God, since I was twelve years old, I have wondered how Hitler could be one of your children. I’ve never received a satisfactory answer. Could you contact me offline to clear this up?

I couldn’t help but pass on this message:

God is busy for the next day (a thousand human years) trying to figure out how the crown of Her creation, human civilization, came to include such evil. She will respond to Her email afterwards.

Harold’s answer:

Darned press secretary. Given my age, doesn’t he know that I’m operating on a fifty-year deadline here?

Well, yes, it does seem that press secretaries are the same all over. But I suggest to my professorial friends that those three comments might be a good outline for a course on religious thought after the Holocaust. I welcome suggestions for which readings should be included in each of the three sections.

“How is God going to bring them back to the land? The answer is fishers and hunters,” Mr. Hagee said, referring to how Jews ended up in the modern state of Israel. “A hunter is someone who comes with a gun and forces you. Hitler was a hunter.”

As we know, McCain actively pursued Hagee’s endorsement. As the NY Times notes,

At a speech last year before Mr. Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, he thanked Mr. Hagee for his “spiritual guidance to politicians like me” and said, “It’s hard to do the Lord’s work in the city of Satan.”

Hagee has every effort to make his views public via every media available. His comments expressing empathy for Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin appeared in a book that became a bestseller in its market. The same book looks forward to an apocalypse in which enough blood is shed on Israeli soil to create a river of blood 200 miles long. One of the scholars who introduced me to this literature correctly spoke of the “pornographic violence” of the visions of the end promoted by Hagee and others of his school. The battles, as in every other tract of this sort, are followed by the Jews accepting Jesus.

Hagee is a prominent promoter of the theology known as dispensational premillennialism. It’s the same set of beliefs pushed in the Left Behind novels about the End, which sold in tens of millions of copies, the same beliefs preached by Endtimes populizer Hal Lindsey, by televangelist Jack Van Impe and radio preacher Chuck Missler. All push a “future history,” supposedly based on a literal reading of the Bible, that includes great suffering for all who do not accept their beliefs – but particularly, starkly, overwhelmingly for the Jews. In Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series , a critical development is a world dictator’s orders:

“I will sanction, condone, support, and reward the death of any Jew anywhere in the world,” he says. “Imprison them. Torture them. Humiliate them. Shame them. Blaspheme their god. Plunder everything they own. Nothing is more important.”

The dictator is a demonic character, the Antichrist, but his action is an essential step toward the Second Coming. The scenario, purportedly based on Scripture, allows the believer both to hope for the event and absolve himself, or herself, of responsibility. It’s the same guilt-free glorying in genocide that Hagee justified in his riff on the Holocaust:

That will be offensive to some people. Well, dear heart, be offended: I didn’t write it. Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth.

Regularly, such preachers talk about how they really love the Jews, even as they look forward to a second Holocaust. As Missler said in one lecture, claiming to interpret New Testament verses:

And those words echo in our ears as we think of Auschwitz, Dachau, the horrors of Europe in the 30s and 40s, and realize that what Jesus is saying is it’s going to be worse next time around, that that was just a prelude…

(For more on LaHaye’s vision and its political implications, see my article at the American Prospect. For more on the ideology of dispensationalists and their supposed support of Israel, see my book, The End of Days:Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount .)

If Sen. McCain really didn’t know about any of this before he pursued Hagee’s endorsement, at the very least it shows absolutely abysmal staff work and research. Utter incompetence is the most charitable interpretation one can give. A more reasonable explanation is that McCain was demonstrating the audacity of cynicism.

Ever since Hagee and his fellow travelers started forging links with Jewish groups, some Jews have dismissed their apocalyptic views. Their attitude has been, “We don’t believe this will happen, so what do we care? Right now they’re helping us.” But when people hope for the end of history, they are saying the world is broken and must be fixed. Their vision of how it will be fixed tells you what they think is broken. In the dispensationalist vision of a repaired world, Jews will die or convert. That is, the continued existence of Jews who do not accept Jesus is an unbearable flaw in our world as it is.

At the same time, their reading of the Bible tells them that Jews must return to their homeland and gain independence before Jesus can return. So they support Israel. Hagee’s twist in the sermon that just came to light is that he also justified the real, historical Holocaust – not some imagined future genocide – as serving God’s purpose of returning the Jews to their land so that the End can come.

I should note that the theology implies that all Jews should be ‘ingathered.’ In his 1996 book, “Beginning of the End,” Hagee wrote: “Jeremiah declared that the Jews must return to Israel before Messiah comes.”

So: What methods for encouraging American Jews to return to their land would Rev. Hagee justify as God’s will? Just asking. What he’s already said shows how thin, how blurred, the line is between theological philo-semitism and old-fashioned theological anti-Semitism.

I would suggest that the problem of what Hagee believes about Jews, and what he’s willing to justify, should be raised again and again to Jews who have been willing to build alliances with him: Joe Lieberman , AIPAC , Malcolm Hoenlein (the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations).

In fact, much as I hate to admit it, Jews do owe John McCain thanks: By seeking and getting Hagee’s endorsement, the good senator has finally forced a spotlight on what the pastor thinks, and may have set off a needed debate on the alliance with him and others of his school.

Harel died last weekend, at age 90. The Hebrew obit in Ha’aretz quotes him describing what drove him. When he was 21, he said, he read Franz Werfel’s novel “40 Days of Musa Dagh,” about the Armenian genocide during World War I. “The book influenced my generation. I knew it by heart and my sense of mission grew sharper. I knew it was my job to save Jews.” Later, commanding the immigration ship Knesset Yisrael, he stood on the deck and looked north toward Turkey, and “the story of the Armenian people’s fight connected to my mission. To bring the survivors of the Holocaust, the refugees, to a safe shore, was the greatest thing I could imagine.”

For Harel, according to that testimony, there wasn’t a line between answering one genocide and another. He was helping Jews because fate had put him in a place where those were the people he could help.

Last week was the memorial day for the Armenians. It passed virtually unnoticed here. But the Knesset, at last, is supposed to hold a committee hearing on whether to recognize what the Ottomans did to the Armenians as genocide. The government isn’t happy, because the Turkish government isn’t happy. So far Foreign Minister Livni hasn’t asked the Knesset to drop the subject, as she did last year.

This week Israel will mark Holocaust Day. Recognizing or refusing to recognize what happened to the Armenians defines our own remembrance in a fairly stark manner. Do we see what happened under the Nazis as uniquely evil because it happened to Jews, or as a specific case of the incomprehensible ability of human beings to do evil? In opposing evil, are we obligated only to ourselves or to humanity?

Yossi Harel and his fictional doppelgänger have inspired a good many people who see the lesson in the most particularistic terms. According to his own testimony, he believed deeply in the wider meaning of his action.