Yesterday, this newsletter mentioned how greatly the Zionist understanding of the Holocaust differs from that of those who insist it has a “universal message.” Most often, that universalizing message boils down to feel-good banalities. One example is Heather Morris’s 2018 novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz, which has now been released as a television series. Tanya Gold writes:

Morris’s book is about a real person: the Slovakian Jew Lale Sokolov, who was the tattooist at Auschwitz-Birkenau from 1942 to 1945. He fell in love with a fellow prisoner named Gisela Fuhrmannova, married her after the war, moved to Melbourne, and lived a useful life. Lale met Morris in the years before between Gisela’s death and his own. He told her his story, I think, because he wanted absolution for surviving. He didn’t need it and, even if he did, it won’t come from a writer as credulous and self-important as Morris.

In Morris’s hands Lale is a magic Jew: ever-imaginative, resourceful, and lucky. Promoted to tattooist, and so saved, he has freedom of movement in the camps, and he dispenses food, medicine, even life itself. The problem with this, of course, is that death in Auschwitz—and almost all died, the majority on arrival—becomes, by compare, a sort of moral failure: a lack of imagination, resource, and luck.

It fulfils the criteria of the Shoah novel for idiots, at least. It makes the reader feel better, know less, and care less, about the people who are fictionalized.

To Elliott Abrams, Donald Trump’s plan to remove the entire population of Gaza while the Strip is rebuilt is “unworkable,” at least “as a concrete proposal.” But it is welcome insofar as “its sheer iconoclasm might lead to a healthy rethinking of U.S. strategy and perhaps of Arab and Israeli policies as well.” The U.S., writes Abrams, must not only move beyond the failed approach to Gaza, but also must reject other assumptions that have failed time and again. One is the commitment to an illusory stability:

For two decades, what American policymakers have called “stability” has meant the preservation of the situation in which Gaza was entirely under Hamas control, Hizballah dominated Lebanon, and Iran’s nuclear program advanced. A better term for that situation would have been “erosion,” as U.S. influence steadily slipped away and Washington’s allies became less secure. Now, the United States has a chance to stop that process and aim instead for “reinforcement”: bolstering its interests and allies and actively weakening its adversaries. The result would be a region where threats diminish and U.S. alliances grow stronger.

Such an approach must be applied above all to the greatest threat in today’s Middle East, that of a nuclear Iran:

Trump clearly remains open to the possibility (however small) that an aging [Iranian supreme leader Ali] Khamenei, after witnessing the collapse of [his regional proxies], mulling the possibility of brutal economic sanctions, and being fully aware of the restiveness of his own population, would accept an agreement that stops the nuclear-weapons program and halts payments and arms shipments to Iran’s proxies. But Trump should be equally aware of the trap Khamenei might be setting for him: a phony new negotiation meant to ensnare Washington in talks for years, with Tehran’s negotiators leading Trump on with the mirage of a successful deal and a Nobel Peace Prize at the end of the road while the Iranian nuclear-weapons program grows in the shadows.