Englander's short story (mondoweiss)

Englander or Gezer does not say that the Holocaust legacy gives Israel or Tendler a pass to do anything. In fact it labels Tendler as both murderer and "misken" (damaged goods). I suppose to those who wish to label Tendler or Israel a 100% murderer, to see the misken side can be considered giving Israel a pass, but to an Israel supporter or sympathizer once you call Israel 50% murderer it is not really a pass. I suppose the same thing can be said for Blankfort's assertion that Englander is telling the New Yorker reader who objects to Israel policy to "shut up". Gezer does not tell his son to shut up, when Etgar calls Tendler a murderer, he merely suggests that his son recognize context and see the "misken" side of the Tendler personality. But to those who see only the 100% murderer, such a suggestion might seem like a demand to "shut up".

In fact, in my view, much of Israel's sins are not when it acts (rationally or irrationally) in its attempts to secure itself, but rather when it acts to take land in a way that lacks any security rationale whatsoever. The nakba, or the exiling of the Palestinians in 48, was an act that for the most part had a security rationale, but the building of the settlements, for the most part has no security rationale.

As to the appropriateness of someone of Englander's age writing a story with the Holocaust playing such a major role, I see nothing wrong with that. A question could be raised as to what role the Holocaust would have played in Jewish thinking if the disaster had not been followed so quickly by the establishment of Israel with its needs for wars and rationales. Yet to those who are artists or even sensitive nationalists or co religionists, a disaster of that magnitude casts a shadow over the existence of their nation and even of their self and to expect the genocide in Europe to only play a part in the dreams or unconscious or the art of those born before 1939 is arbitrary and insensitive. Religious Jews mourn the destruction of the temple thousands of years after the fact and although individualism may be the modern creed, mourning the genocide or the damage the genocide has done to the body and soul of the Jewish people a mere 65 years after the fact seems to be human rather than abnormal and certainly no outrage.