Was Envy the Motive Force behind the Holocaust?

Götz Aly, a prominent (and often controversial) historian of Nazi Germany, has written a new book attempting to understand the underlying motivations for German anti-Semitism. In Why the Germans? Why the Jews?: Envy, Race, Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust, Aly addresses the basic question that has so often been obscured by recent Holocaust scholarship: why did Jews become the target of such intense and murderous hatred in Germany? His book contains many insights on German anti-Semitism, and he draws on his own family archive in a way that few Germans today would be comfortable doing. (His grandparents were rabid Jew-haters.) But, writes Daniel Johnson, Aly’s simplistic conclusion that envy was the source of all this animus is woefully unsatisfying, and undermines his purported goals:

Aly himself quite rightly criticizes the German tendency to identify with the Jewish victims—“We tend to cast the perpetrators as bizarre, almost alien figures”—and to hide behind abstractions that keep Germans at a safe distance from radical evil. By exposing his own Nazi family to scrutiny, Aly may hope to encourage others to rattle the skeletons in their own closets. But he is blind to the fact that his explanatory framework is bound to have the opposite effect. By making Nazis seem just like everybody else, motivated by the everyday emotion of envy, Aly risks making the extraordinary seem ordinary. It is no accident that his book’s underlying message is a more scholarly version of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Anti-Semitism, Hannah Arendt, Holocaust, Nazism

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF