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Book Review:
Yair Auron, The Banality of Indifference: Zionism & The Armenian Genocide
The ending of Yair Auron's book generates the title. It is not so much, he concludes, the "banality of evil" (Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1964) that accounts for the success of genocide, but the "banality of indifference." "The reaction of the multitudes, those located in the space between the immolator and the victims, is characterized by indifference, conformity, and opportunism. The Jews, too, in the circumstances of time and place, do not go beyond this banality, with several exceptions. In Israeli society, there are many people who would prefer not to know about the genocide of the Armenians and the genocide of the Gypsies...In Israeli historical consciousness, the Holocaust plays a central role--becoming increasingly stronger over the years. This consciousness stresses the singularity of the Holocaust. It contains, in my opinion, an extreme and almost utter focus on the Jews as victims, and a disregard--consciously or not, intentionally or not--of acts of genocide that have taken place in the twentieth century, among them the murder of the Armenians and the extermination of the Gypsies" (pp. 372-373).
The Israeli author and lecturer, Yair Auron, begins his sensitive and at times self-tortured narrative on response to the Armenian genocide primarily from the perspective of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine early in the last century, and its Zionist leaders. It was no accident that in the spring following the guns of August 1914 that blasted out the announcement of World War 1, the massacre of the Armenians by their Turkish overlords accelerated to an all time peak. In the nineteenth century, the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, first under the rule of "the Bloody Sultan", Abdul Hamid II and then the would be reformers, the Young Turks, after a series of costly humiliating military expeditions, refocussed on scapegoats within. The goal was supernationalist Turkification, to be achieved through the extermination of racial and religious minorities. The Armenians were the first on the list.
The central portion of the book documents that at the time of the Armenian genocide, the possibility of its extension to include the Ottoman Jews was just barely avoided. One cannot help but be reminded that between the two world wars, when the fate of the Armenians became the forgotten genocide, European Jewry failed to heed the clear early warnings of Hitler's final solution.
Yair Auron devotes the major portion of his new book to the fate of the Armenians and the Jews under Turkish rule during the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, from the beginning of the twentieth century, to the rebalancing of world power in the Near East (now known as the Middle East) after World War l. He is also concerned with the world Zionist movement, bent on establishing a Jewish nation in the Holy Land. In this place and time the Christian Armenians and Jews had much in common. Each stood as a small and impotent religious and ethnic minority in a Muslim dominated region, which, however, ultimately suffered different fates. At the beginning of World War I the Turks allied themselves with the Germans and the Central Powers. This left the Armenians cut off from their long standing British and French friends. Meanwhile Tsarist Russia, overlord of the more prosperous half of the Armenian people was collapsing.
Auron documents the fact that the Jews of the Yishuv were well aware that they were next in line for a Turkish genocide. Rightfully fearful for their survival, they placed their bets on what they thought was their self interest. At the same time powerful Jews in western Europe, mindful of the fate of east- European Jewry, were staunchly loyal to their host countries.
During this period a neutral United States, just beginning to emerge as a great power, played a pivotal role. Auron notes several instances when the US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, took on the Armenian cause. He credits him as "one of the few people who tried to assist the Armenians insofar as circumstances allowed (p. 5)." Auron notes Morgenthau, reporting home on what he described as the murder of a nation, "in September 1915... requested emergency aid from his government, and in the same year the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief (ACASR) was established. In 1916, assistance efforts, under the auspices of Congress were reorganized as the 'Near East Relief (NER)...[which] collected and distributed substantial sums from private and government sources (p. 51)."
Auron credits these efforts with saving "tens perhaps hundreds of thousands of Armenians (p. 51)." In the face of some one and a half million victims, this was a small yet symbolically significant accomplishment.
Auron, deeply troubled by the Jewish community's attitude of indifference, writes off as anomalous exceptions the efforts of those Jews who displayed their concerns. "They did not act as Jews, but as human beings." Yet he concedes "it appears a Jewish component existed in them even when they were sometimes to be found on the fringes of the Jewish establishment and on the outskirts of the organized Jewish world (p. 369)."
Ironically, Ambassador Morgenthau was much more effective in rescuing Jews than Armenians. As an outspoken anti-Zionist he was frequently savaged by prominent Zionist such as Chaim Weizmann and Felix Frankfurter. Yet even before the Armenian genocide began, Morgenthau was by no means alone in warning the Zionists that their actions were spurring the Turks to destroy the Yishuv Jews. Immediately after the outbreak of World War I Morgenthau, realizing that the European life-line to the Yishuv would be severed, appealed to American Jewish leaders for aid. In September 1914, fifty thousand dollars in gold was collected and delivered to Jaffa harbor on board the battle cruiser USS North Carolina. The prompt appearance of US naval might was an even more impressive deterrent to the Turks than the gold.
The murder of the Armenian political, cultural and business leadership in Constantinople in April 1915 marked the beginning of full scale genocide. The month before, Ambassador Morgenthau made arrangements through his friend Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, to have the USS Tennessee evacuate a number of Jews from Palestine to refugee camps in Alexandria, Egypt. Among them were David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Zvi, (destined to be Israel's second president). Both men were avidly pro-Turkish. Indeed Ben Gurion had tried to organize a Jewish corps in support of the Ottomans, but when his name appeared on a Zionist list he was jailed and charged with treason. On arriving in Alexandria he was jailed again by the British, and then evacuated to New York, in both instances thanks to the intervention of Ambassador Morgenthau.
Auron notes that in 1918 Ben Gurion and Ben-Zvi published a book projecting an Eretz Yisrael within the framework of the Ottoman Empire. In this book, Ben Gurion went so far as to state, "it must be said, to the credit of the Turks, that their rulers behaved toward the conquered with a degree of tolerance and generosity which is unparalleled in the history of the Christian peoples of the period (p. 324)." It is indeed astonishing, to learn, from Auron's book, that "Ben Gurion does not mention in a single word the massacres of the Armenians at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century," which had been widely publicized in the United States and Europe. Whatever Ben Gurion's public strategy may have been, he wrote privately to his father in 1919 "Jamal Pasha [then Turkish military ruler in Palestine] planned from the outset to destroy the entire Hebrew settlement in Eretz Yisrael, exactly as they did the Armenians in Armenia" (p. 325).
One can only surmise that Ben Gurion's praise of the Turks was linked to his scheme to achieve a Jewish Homeland under an Ottoman umbrella. Auron describes a similar posturing by Theodor Herzl during the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901. At Herzl's initiative, the Congress sent public greetings to Abdul Hamid II, known as the bloody Sultan for his massacres of Armenians and other Ottoman minorities. The telegram was an "expression of dedication and gratitude which all the Jews feel regarding the benevolence which his Highness the Sultan has always shown them." Auron, acknowledging the importance some Zionist leaders placed on wooing Ottoman friendship, writes "The Sultan's note of thanks, sent the following day, was a relief to Herzl " (p.104).
Among most of the top Zionists the attitude toward the Armenian genocide continually ranged from indifference to denial. Chaim Weizmann was the notable exception. He had been swayed by the British diplomat Mark Sykes, a great friend of the Armenians, who in turn brought his influence to bear on the foreign minister, Arthur Balfour, leading to the Balfour Declaration. Auron describes Sykes' vision of "a postwar Middle East based on a Jewish-Arab-Armenian alliance under British influence (p. 216)." Sykes' dream died with him in 1919, coincidentally with the withdrawal of support by the British, French and the U.S., each for different reasons.
Auron reveals the question which stands at the center of his study, about one third the way through his book: "why does one person care [about genocide] while another remains indifferent; why does one individual react while another refrains from reaction or even condemns it" (p. 101). Auron avoids giving a direct answer, but his book is a multi-layered response. He explains that while the dominant leaders were for the most part indifferent, a minority, constituted what he terms "the reactors": those who found ways of expressing horror and alarm as the genocide proceeded.
The bulk of the book deals with the era of the first World War and its aftermath, when the Armenian genocide raged, while the Jews in the Yishuv and the Zionist stood in fear of a similar fate. The author pleads the case, I believe quite reasonably, for the Yishuv's self-absorption at this time: "When the question of the Yishuv's attitude to the Armenian tragedy is raised, the answer is usually that the Jewish population and its leadership put all of their energy into survival, to ensure that the 'Armenian experience' would not be repeated in Palestine (p. 12)."
However, in a chapter on "The Attitudes Toward the Armenian Genocide after the Establishment of the State of Israel", Auron finds difficulty, as I do, in explaining away the official Israeli attitude of indifference. He cites a number of examples demonstrating that "the State of Israel has consistently refrained from acknowledging the genocide of the Armenian People (p. 352)." He even goes so far as to blame U.S. failure to acknowledge the Armenian genocide on Israeli pressure. In fact it can also be credited to Turkish pressure on the U.S. government, dating back to the Cold War.
In sum, this author drawing on a broad range of sources, duly noted, has probed deeply into some painful questions with his own bold and original insights.
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