Late Saturday night, I received an urgent email from Tomek Kitlinski “Bad, disturbing, but important news again,” followed by a brief description of a recent event in Poland and his extended thoughts about its meaning. Here, his report and reflections. -Jeff

February 23, 2013, a lecture by Adam Michnik, the foremost dissident against Communism, author, editor-in-chief of Poland’s leading broadsheet Gazeta Wyborcza and regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, was disrupted by a group of Polish ultranationalists. Michnik is Eastern Europe’s most outstanding public intellectual whose books, articles, and, before 1989, writings from prison have shaped the thinking and acting for freedom in our region. Esprit, erudition and engagement in pro-democracy struggle make him an exceptional social philosopher and activist. As Gazeta reported, on Saturday in the city of Radom a group of young people in balaclavas and masks attempted to disrupt Michnik’s talk and chanted “National Radom! National Radom!” A scuffle erupted. The far-right All Polish Youth militiamen were shouting during the lecture.

The disruption of the Michnik lecture follows a pattern of aggression in Poland and among its neighbors. Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Russia are gripped by culture wars, as I have explored here. The Polish cultural war is ongoing.

Recently at the University of Warsaw, neo-Nazis threatened a lecture by the feminist philosopher Magdalena Sroda. Ten years ago in Lublin, while Professor Maria Szyszkowska and I were giving speeches about the lesbian and gay visibility campaign Let Us Be Seen, a pack of skinheads marched in and out of the hall, stamping their boots loudly in an effort to distract us. This pattern of disturbing university events could not be more dangerous. Michnik this week is, once again, a focal point of repressive anger.

While ultranationalists hate Adam Michnik for his message of inclusive democracy and they also loathe feminists, LGBT and poetry, Michnik often goes back to his inspiration and friend, the Nobel Prize winning poet, Czeslaw Milosz, who was the object of nationalist outrage over the years, in fact an antagonism that dates back to the inter-war period. Michnik also refers to Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska: quick-witted, unsentimental and impatient with chauvinist clichés. When she died a year ago, on February 1, 2012, the nationalist MP and Law Professor Krystyna Pawlowicz said on Polish Radio: “I don’t associate Szymborska with Poland.”

A group of young writers protested against this xenophobic comment. Michnik wrote that Szymborska zdążyła przestrzec nas przed nienawiścią (managed to warn us against hate). And in Eastern Europe we badly need this warning, as the event last Saturday reminds us.

Outright hatred characterizes Poland’s ethno-nationalism, which combines with misogyny and homophobia. During a parliamentary debate over same-sex unions this month,  Pawlowicz continued her prejudiced discourse, labeling the LGBT community sterile people of no benefit to society and derided, lampooned and insulted the transgender MP Anna Grodzka. Nigerian-born and bred journalist Remi Adekoya wrote in The Guardian: “As a whole, modern-day “Poland is still a conservative, homogenous society, uncomfortable with minorities – be they sexual, ethnic or religious.”

In Poland, poets have played a political role since Romanticism or even the Baroque. Poetry is the cultivation of inner life and revolt; particularly in Eastern Europe, writing and reading has often encouraged social critique and — sometimes — change. (Banned authors!)

Poets here were silenced under totalitarianism and also under a far-right government in the recent past. Roman Giertych, who served as Minister of Education 2006-7, revived the All-Polish Youth with its interwar anti-Semitism and attempted to delete the eminent writer Witold Gombrowicz (a post-modernist avant la lettre) from school curricula because of his queerness. This was a nadir of democracy here, which Adam Michnik described as “The Polish Witch-Hunt.”

That’s why the poetry and political stances of the two Nobel Prize winners for literature, Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz, are of special significance. Both opposed conformity and chauvinism. As a student in intercultural Vilnius, Milosz intervened against an anti-Semitic rally of the All-Polish Youth militia. He translated Yiddish poetry (through a philological rendering of the text), and in his novel The Issa Valley he focused on his anti-feudal pacifist ancestors from the radical Reformation (Socinians). After World War II, Milosz and Szymborska welcomed the new system which promised equality. She became a party member. He served as a diplomat for the People’s Republic of Poland. Although Milosz soon defected, and Szymborska joined the opposition, they remained progressive until their last days. Just before Milosz’s death, they both signed a petition in defense of a feminist and gay pride in Cracow (Toleration March).

Milosz was a critic of capitalism. As a leader of the current leftist Krytyka Polityczna (Political Critique) movement, Slawomir Sierakowski, reminds us, Milosz was a critic of a society subordinated to the market. Right now  Krytyka Polityczna is publishing Milosz’s unknown and unfinished novel Gory Parnasu, a political fiction. His vision of a robotized and demoralized technocracy places this important new publication alongside the poet’s classic reckoning with communism in The Captive Mind.

After Milosz’s death in 2004, the All-Polish Youth was responsible for a hate campaign against the writer. They accused him of not being a “true Pole,” but rather a “friend of Jews and sodomites.” He was characterized as suspicious, dangerous, anti-Polish. In his poetry, Czeslaw Milosz explored the guilt that Poles have towards the Other. I am particularly moved and touched by his poem “Campo di Fiori,” in which Milosz depicts the indifference of Warsaw residents toward the death and suffering in the Jewish ghetto. The poet diagnosed the failure to admit Poland’s guilt; he wrote of his compatriots as “ill with their own innocence.” This verse from his poem “My Faithful Mother Tongue” was quoted by the then All-Polish Youth leader, Krzysztof Bosak (currently part of the newly formed National Movement), in the official statement of this organization, as “deeply offensive to us.”

Szymborska’s death in February 2012 also evoked hostility: she was vilified as a cosmopolitan intellectual indifferent to Polishness. As mentioned, the MP and Professor of Law, Krystyna Pawlowicz, insulted Szymborska’s memory, and now she mocks same-sex unions and transgenderism. Academics, including the leading conservative historian of ideas Marcin Krol, the expert on anti-Semitism, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, the feminists Magda Sroda and Malgorzata Fuszara, the queer scholar Jacek Kochanowski, and the LGBT art curator Pawel Leszkowicz, gathered together to protest against Pawlowicz’s homo- and transphobia.

Exactly twenty years ago abortion was criminalized in Poland; this 1993 law still crushes women’s rights. Ten years ago, a landmark lesbian and gay visibility campaign Let Us Be Seen was vandalized. Pawel Leszkowicz and I participated in this campaign and describe it in our chapter for a Routledge book Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex and Power, edited by Shira Tarrant.

Under Michnik, Gazeta Wyborcza has become a major force in the support of LGBT rights under the pen of eminent journalists such as Ewa Siedlecka, Dorota Jarecka and Piotr Pacewicz; the latter went as far as joining the Warsaw Gay Pride in drag! The Lublin branch of Gazeta regularly publishes reportages on homophobia and anti-Semitism by Pawel P. Reszka.

The  filmmaker, author of the Oscar-nominated movie about a Polish working-class saver of a group of Lviv Jews In Darkness, Agnieszka Holland, defined the current prejudiced behaviors in this country as “humiliating, excluding and scorning.” In a recent interview for the Polish edition of Newsweek, Holland, whose father was a Jewish intellectual, said: “It seems to me that the Jew has been exchanged for the homosexual.”

In 2004, the Szymborska and Milosz-supported Toleration March was assaulted with stones, bottles and caustic acid by far-right counter-demonstrators. As a protest against violence, young sociologists Adam Ostolski and Michal Bilewicz wrote an open letter signed, by 1200 people, which diagnosed lesbians and gays as being seen as “the pariahs of Polish democracy.” Later, Green politician, Ostolski, demonstrated parallels between Poland’s inter-war anti-Jewish policies and the current anti-LGBT prejudices. This insight was developed by analyst and activist Greg Czarnecki in his article “Analogies of Pre-War Anti-Semitism and Present-Day Homophobia in Poland” The ultranationalist attack on minorities and poetry continues.

I cherish Szymborska’s poem “Starvation Camp Near Jaslo”: it stings us from complacency and its drastic imagery approaches the unspeakable. At this death camp the inmates ”sang, with dirt in their mouth… Write how quiet it is,” the poet adds. Irena Grudzinska-Gross of Princeton rightly calls Szymborska’s work “Still” “one of the most shocking poems on the Holocaust.” It also warns against anti-Semitism after the war and states how prejudiced views of Jewish names continue: “Let your son have a Slavic name.”

The writings of the two poets were a protest against prejudice, social ills and violence. Szymborska depicted the atrocities of the war in Vietnam. Milosz dedicated a study to Poland’s rare leftist thinker Stanislaw Brzozowski and a book of memories to the conflicts and repressions of the interwar period here. He also authored a book on a poet of affectivity, linguistic genius, esprit and (early!) feminism, and a Warsaw Uprising fighter Anna Swir Swirszczynska.

Both poets accompanied us through the difficult post-1989 transition: Milosz warned against the triumphalism of the church, although he valued religion as a cultural phenomenon, translated the Bible as well as the mystic and workers’ activist and worker herself, Simone Weil.

Elzbieta Matynia of the New School invited Czeslaw Milosz to the Democracy & Diversity Institute in Cracow, where he often read not only his own poems, but also those of Szymborska. In 1999 I moderated a meeting with Milosz and international students of this Institute, during which his poetry reading healed rifts between Kosovar and Serbian participants in the audience.

And Szymborska, although less of a public figure, sent her pithy and disturbing poem “Hatred” to Michnik’s Gazeta Wyborcza, when the country was faced with the threat of a rightist coup d’état: she wrote that hatred has a “grimace / of erotic ecstasy” and a “sniper’s keen sight” (to quote the translation of Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak).

In their openness, Szymborska celebrated the male nude whereas Milosz cultivated the memory of Lublin’s gay poet Czechowicz, and wrote openly and approvingly of his homosexuality. Born in the puritan first decades of the twentieth century, they both proved to be progressive in sexual politics (middle-aged poets here are still in the Middle Ages!). In Poland, the visual arts equal activism:  in particular women’s and LGBT art create a splash. But Szymborska and Milosz, who drew on the avant-garde and produced popular poetry, contributed to the democratization of our post-Communist country. Their writings wake us from the slumber of national pride.

Resentment, conspiracy theories, the Great Lustrator, as Michnik puns on the Grand Inquisitor in his book In Search of Lost Meaning, rule Poland. In my view, prejudices have increased as the transition has lost its way, excluding so many people economically. The fight for minority rights must not overlook the plight of the underprivileged. That’s why we protested the layoff of 400 women workers in Lublin – and we succeeded. But all too often unemployment is wreaking havoc, as in Radom. Therefore, as Gazeta reports, in his lecture there Adam Michnik spoke about how the market economy has unleashed terrible social inequality.

In my view, it’s in the dispossessed of the transition that the far right finds its converts who are made to believe by the demoralized ultraconservative political class in an imaginary purity of the nation, from which all minorities are to be forbidden: Jews, Roma, LGBT and feminists are othered and rejected. We are not “one of our own” in Polish culture; according to the extremists, we do not belong here. After an anti-fascist interview I gave, a critical commenter declared: “Kitlinski, you’re a stranger.”

The poetry of Milosz and Szymborska has been important to the political philosophy and praxis of Adam Michnik. Expert on Eastern Europe Roger Cohen has written on Michnik in The New York Times:

“He was ever the provocateur, this Polish Jew whose paternal family was largely wiped out in the Holocaust. This Polish patriot. This crazy, proud Pole with the low-slung jeans that cry out for a belt, the hair conscientiously uncombed, the Polish-Latin lover’s stubble and the mind that is anything but sloppy. As he provoked, he probed: the totalitarian mind was always a target for him, even in its fathomless grayness.”

Now Adam Michnik probes the old-new prejudices  of our region of Europe. Ever with courage and wit, he challenges ethno-nationalism. His is a badly needed idea of liberty. With a full awareness of his roots in poetry, imagination and decency, I deplore the violence against his lecture in Radom.

This is the second in a three part “In-Depth” post reflecting on the relationship between Jews and Poles in the relatively recent past, as I have observed this relationship over the last forty years. In the first part, I reflected upon the circumstances that led me to engage in Polish cultural and political life and upon my initial experiences during my research there in the 1970s. In this post, I address the conflicting collective memories of Poles and Jews, particularly as they worked to remember together in a ceremony marking the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in August 1995.

I observed the event from a distance in New York, reading newspaper accounts from The New York Times and other foreign sources (from which the non-digitized quotes in the account are drawn). Viewing the event from the outside emphasized my ambiguous connection with the memory conflicts. As an American Jew, with many relatives who viewed this with little or no knowledge about the Communist experience, I understand their dismay about apparently insensitive things said and done by the Polish authorities. But as a scholar engaged in Polish affairs for much of my adult life, I realize how difficult it is to respectfully remember the Shoah when its existence was systematically underplayed, distorted and even silenced by the Communist authorities, and, in addition, when much of the Western world hasn’t recognized the degree of Polish suffering at the hands of the Nazis. I noted that even people of good will under these circumstances have great difficulty getting beyond their own limitations and reinforce misunderstandings and worse.

In my next “Why Poland?” post, I will explore what happened when all of this exploded out in the open, in controversies over Jan Gross’s book, Neighbors. It is a difficult book with a very difficult central finding, the Polish Catholics in a small Polish town, Jedwabne, killed their Jewish neighbors in mass, on their own, without Nazi direction. The publication of the book and its reception shows how the wounds of twentieth century atrocities are still quite raw, and how symbolic complicity in the horrors continues, as does resistance.

Today’s post, I think, shows how difficult collective memory can be. I think I reveal that there is an etiquette of remembering. Who remembers and how is as important as what is remembered.  This etiquette made it difficult to write and publish my account and makes deliberate consideration of the problems involved challenging. Slowly over a long period of time, discussion becomes possible. I wonder whether there is enough time, something I will explore.

To read the full In-Depth Analysis “Why Poland? Part 2: Commemorating Auschwitz,” click here.

Poles, that is, Polish Catho­lics, see things differ­ent­ly.  Nearly twenty percent of the Polish population died during the war.  Seventy five thou­sand Polish (Catholic) lives were lost in Auschwitz; a high per­cent­age of the survi­ving inmates of the camp were Polish.  The memory of Polish losses is one of close experi­ence.  From the Polish point of view, the inter­na­tion­al commun­ity has failed to recog­nize the depth and exten­sive­ness of Polish suffer­ing.  For Jews and for many others in the West, the immensity of the Nazi crimes has been summarized by the figure six million, six million Jews from throughout Europe consumed by the Nazi death machine. In Poland, the number has been remembered in a different way: six million Poles killed during the war (half of whom were Jewish, but this conventionally is not noted).

It was with this background that the fiftieth anniver­sary of the liberation was marked.  Many Jewish organi­zations and individuals found the Polish plans for the ceremony wanting, and many Poles viewed their objections with suspicion. The World Jewish Con­gress threat­ened to boycott the commemoration entirely.  In its judgment, the Polish authorities were trying to trans­form the ceremo­nies into a Polish event.  At times, the rhetorical con­flict over the planning of the event became very tough.  Michel Fried­man, a leading Jewish spokes­man and member of the German Chris­tian Democratic Party, complained that equal represen­tation of Polish Christian and Jewish victims presented a gross misrepre­senta­tion of history.  He declared: “If I recall the history precise­ly, I have to say that the murderers there were mostly of the Christian religion.”  Friedman, whose parents were saved by Oskar Schindler, believed that the Polish Catholic Church is still anti-Semitic.  He went on to point out: “The people in charge must realize that the world is watch­ing to see that the message of this memorial day is histori­cally cor­rect.”

But historical correctness is very much in the eyes of the beholder.  According to some reports, Polish Cathol­ics were criti­cal of the rest of the world for its tendency to “Juda­ize” Ausch­witz. The equa­tion of the Polish nation with that of the German nation was simply not acceptable in Poland, too many Poles suffered too much under German occupa­tion.  Thus, the Polish Catho­lic Bishops refused to join their German col­leagues in a joint proclamation concern­ing Catholic responsi­bility for the Holocaust because it “could be per­ceived as a joint admis­sion of guilt for the Holo­caust.” In this refusal, they raised questions about their resoluteness against antisemitism.  They choose not to be associated with “the most radical self-criticism from an institu­tion of the church,” as the Italian newspaper Il Messagero put it. But from the Polish Bishops point of view, it was perfectly clear that an equation of German and Polish responsibility is absolutely unacceptable.  This confrontation is especially poignant after the Jedwabne revelations, which I will examine in my next and last “Why Poland?” post.

In the end, a sort of symbolically acceptable resolution of the controversy was attained, despite mutual recriminations and suspi­cions.  Even the inelegance of the commemorations and the events leading up to them seemed fitting.  The two parties, the Poles and the Jews, with the world press observing, tried to accommodate each other, while they remained true to their memo­ries.  They each knew that the enormity of the event being commemorated demanded that the memory disputes had to be re­solved.  They accomplished this by holding three distinct ceremo­nial events: one on Thursday January 26, 1995, in Krakow at Ja­giellonian University, the second, an improvised special Jewish ceremony at the Birk­enau death camp, on the 26th, during a break in the official ceremonies, and the third, the main official ceremony on the 27th.

In the ceremony at Jagiellonian, where one hundred eighty three Professors were once rounded up and deported, Lech Walesa emphasized the enormity of Polish suffering.  He remem­bered that the Nazis set out to destroy Poland’s “intellectual and spiritual strength,” but he did not mention at all Jewish suffering.  A distinctly Polish form of remembrance dominated.

The separate Jewish religious ceremony was organized by the European Jewish Congress.  No Polish officials attended.  The only government figure there was the German President, Roman Herzog.  The Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, was recited.  The members of the media outnumbered the participants, since the Polish government made no special effort to inform survivors about the ceremonies.  To underscore Jewish suffering, Wiesel opened his remarks in Yiddish; the speaker of the Israeli Parliament, Shevah Weiss, spoke in Hebrew, and the President of the European Jewish Committee, Jean Kahn denounced in English, the “nationalistic” ceremony organized by the Polish government.

Yet, by the next day it was evident that the Jewish protests concerning the Polish plans for the commemoration did result in changes in the ceremonies.  President Walesa did note in his opening remarks on Friday the special suffering of Jews and Gypsies, and Poles: Ausch­witz “stands for the suffering of many nations, especially the Jewish nation.” “Whole nations, the Jews and the Gypsies, were sup­posed to be exterminated here together with others – above all, us Poles.”  Elie Wiesel clarified Walesa’s statement: “It is true that not all victims were Jews.  But all Jews were victims.” One Polish survivor observed, as if answering Wiesel: “Most people who died were Jews.  But most people who lived in the barracks [as camp inmates] were Poles.” Walesa was criticized for not specifically mentioning Jewish suffering in his Thursday address, but in two separate addresses on Friday, he included such specific references.

Each side was true to its memories, but in the end accommo­dated to the memories of the other.  The problems between Jews and Poles were not overcome, but those problems were put aside as best as they could be without compromising the integrity of the competing memory sets of each group.

I observed these ceremonies with ambivalence.  On the one hand, I felt relieved that problems that bothered me on my initial stay in Poland, when I visited the Auschwitz Museum and Jews were not recognized as victims, were finally out in the open.  On the other hand, I believed that fundamental misunderstandings were being perpetuated, and knew that addressing these would not be easy.

Democratic Poland has an obligation: to confront the past in a way that is qualitatively different from communist accounts of history.  On the face of it, the obligation is rela­tively simple.  While the Communists told lies and dis­pensed propa­ganda, democrats should truthfully consider histo­ry.  Yet, the realiza­tion of this obligation is no easy matter.  Collective memory after the totalitarian experience is a troubled and troubling enterprise. Like the envi­ron­men­tal pollu­tion left behind from the great socialist industrial dinosaurs, the totali­tarian control of cultural life has had lasting effects that are not easily remedied.  This is an overlooked obstacle in remembering Ausch­witz, not appreciated by outside observers, as well as actors on the inside.

Until 1989, the remembrance of things Jewish in Poland was framed by official public institutions of the Party-state, by the Catholic Church and its lay institutions, and by the movements and institutions of the opposition.  As was the general rule, the Party-state domi­nat­ed and the society responded.  Jewish issues were not, of course, a pressing or a major problem.  But they did have a way of coming up at the center of major political confrontations, often without Jews being much in­volved.  The Jews who were very visible in the first communist governments, perhaps at the instigation of Stalin, became for the Polish anti-Semites the symbols of Stalinism.  This identification was used by the nationalist Party faction.  But once this faction employed the old xenophobic formula to attempt to gain power in a wave of repression in 1968, opposition to antisemitism took on a new importance.  It was not only a way to assert good liberal creden­tials, indicating commitment to modern western values.  It was a way to fight against the Party.  This worked until the Party itself, after martial law, started to use a respectful memory of the Jewish presence in Poland’s past to gain legitimacy in western eyes.  Then for the first time since the immedi­ate post-war period, Polish-Jewish relations were opened to critical public examination.  Although this examination was still dis­torted by censorship and the limitations of Communist control of most forms of public communi­cation and debate, it marked a change in the form and content of collective memory.  Things could be discussed openly that could not be discussed previously and the way they could be discussed was fundamentally changed.  Such changes, of course, escalated after the fall of communism.

The public discussion had then, and until quite recently continued to have, an odd abstract quality.  It was as much shaped by post-war Polish politics, i.e., in the absence of Jews and after the Holocaust, as it was shaped by evidence of Polish – Jewish interactions before and during the war.  The great theorist of collective memory, Maurice Halbwachs would have understood, as would have Pierre Nora. The questions raised were broad and theoretical, and were more shaped by myths than by historical investigations.  They were instigat­ed by the passing of commemorative dates, such as the commemora­tion of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, or inter­na­tion­al cultural events, such as the release of the Claude Lanzman’s film, Shoah, than by a system­at­ic con­fron­ta­tion with the trou­bled rela­tions between two peoples.  Were the Poles victims like the Jews or victim­iz­ers of the Jews?  Should the Poles apologize for their behavior during the war, as many stood by with approval or mute accep­tance as the Holocaust was perpetrated in their backyards, or even took part in genocidal actions?  While a few courageous Poles frankly explored the degree of Polish responsi­bility, loud outcries of protest denounced such explora­tions as betrayals of the national honor.  Journals in which such discus­sion was opened were besieged with anti-Semitic condemna­tions from their readers.  Memories and beliefs privatized for a half century were given public expression.  Public memory was opened; the time of an easy collective memory was over, thus the controversies over commemoration of Auschwitz.  And something even more difficult was yet to be confronted: a troubled history with significant dark unacknowledged corners.  While collective memory may serve the interests of the present, as Halbwach’s theorized, there is a way that historical investigation, and concrete evidence from the past, such as the evidence brought forward by Jan Gross, in his book Neighbors, can challenge and change those very interests. In an upcoming post I will report on these controversies and reflect on their meanings, and also try to explain what I see in the much of Central Europe, premature Holocaust fatigue.

When I first found out about the Rabbinical letter banning the sale or rental of property to Arabs, I noticed that my old friend and colleague, Nachman Ben – Yehuda, was quoted condemning it in the Toronto Globe and Mail. I then wrote to him asking for more extended reflections for DC. I received this post from him over the holiday weekend. He took his time, he explains, hoping for consequential official response. He offers his sober deliberate considerations. -Jeff

There are times and places where people like to stick together with their own flock, in defined, sometimes confined, geographical locations. In these locations, they live their own life style, with their own dress codes and eat their own foods. The Amish in Pennsylvania and the Jewish ultra-orthodox in Mea Shearim in Jerusalem are two examples. People outside of these communities and non-members may find it difficult to move and live in such social habitats. Moreover, in the case of ultra-orthodox communities, strangers who live in their neighborhoods and practice a non-religious life style may find themselves facing aggression and violence. I am writing about this to contrast it with the call of some rabbis in Israel not to rent apartments to Arabs in Israeli cities.

Israeli Arabs are just that – citizens with full and equal legal rights, and Israeli cities are not confined communities with a uniform worldview and way of life. Israeli cities, like most other cities of the world, are centers of diversity, including the religious and the secular, Jews, Christians and Muslims, old and young, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, etc. These cities are open. Renting an apartment is basically an economic issue. Making and publicizing a general call not to rent apartments to Arabs (or to any other culturally defined group) is quite simply racism.

The rabbinical pamphlet received very critical comments from some Israeli politicians and others, but this did not prevent activists from the Israeli right and religious right to stage a large demonstration on Thursday, December 23, 2010 in Jerusalem where public support was openly given to this pamphlet.

What can, or should, be done? I think two roads are open. First, the police could reasonably open investigations aiming to bring the pamphlet writers and their supporters up on charges of instigation or other relevant violations of the law. This is a route that will probably last for a very long time (investigation, charge, court, appeal). Those sticking to the idea of not renting to Arabs would probably invoke issues of freedom of speech and of Jewish identity (right wing religious “identity” to be sure). And, because tens, maybe hundreds would be investigated and charged, this is probably not an effective way. On the other hand, the public arena can and should be used. Many of these rabbis are paid with the taxpayers’ money and as such represent the state of Israel in at least some religious and moral issues. The state should demand that they retract their statement within a very short period of time, or else risk their employment. Moreover, the state should make it very clear, officially and unofficially, that such statements are unacceptable.

I have waited, deliberately, to respond to this issue, waiting to find out what would happen. Unfortunately, nothing has. In other words, those Israelis spreading hatred, intolerance and racist views against about 20% of the citizens of Israel may have learned that that they can do it and get away with it.

It is inconceivable that such a pamphlet or public demonstration would have taken place in, say, the 1960s. To my mind, this pamphlet and demonstration is a reflection of the increasing influence of the politics of hatred that is pervading this region. For many years, the common ideal here, if not the practice, was of peace, co-existence and togetherness between Jews and Arabs, we now hear more and more about separation and living side by side, with each side barricaded. The movement within Israel to the political right, and to the religious right, is the ground upon which such pamphlets of hatred, fear and racism have developed.

And it is difficult to change these people’s behavior. It is induced by two very powerful motivators: fear and hatred. The level of fear and hatred has not been counterbalanced by politicians who have real peace and mutual co-existence in their hearts and do their best to create or sustain the conditions, ambiance and situations where Jews and Arabs can live here peacefully together. The social and cultural change reflected in a pamphlet like this is a direct result of years of mistrust, hostility, terror, propaganda, and first and foremost a continued failure (some of it probably intentional) of regional politicians to exercise their primary responsibility to their people, to negotiate a peace or some political settlement to the conflict, to the benefit and well being of both Jews and Arabs.

Worse yet, as the top to bottom approach is not working, attempts to better the situation in daily life, a politics of small things as Jeff puts it, suffers a serious blow with such hostile steps as calling for, and actually not renting apartments to Arabs, and “explaining” why such a call is “justified.” Fear and hatred wins at the local level as it is winning at the summit.