written some years later he says: “I wouldn’t join the infantry because the thought of plunging a bayonet into somebody chilled me. I was willing to string wires and run a wireless and take chances. [They] never came.” What did come, though EVM never wrote a word about it, was a military experience of a different kind, in its own way as gruesome as the carnage at the front.
According to the record, EVM was stationed at Camp Devens, a complex of barracks and warehouses outside Boston, from August 1918 to January 1919. At this time the camp was home to 50,000 men, twice the number it was built for. Some were undergoing training in anticipation of being shipped out to the front, and some were on their way back from it. The first influenza cases were reported in early September. The onset of symptoms was abrupt: headache, sore throat, runny nose, fever. Even more abrupt was the deterioration into pneumonia and death, sometimes within forty-eight hours of the first sniffle. Reddish-brown spots would appear on the cheekbones of the doomed, then spread across the face until, a young doctor observed, “it was hard to tell a colored man from a white one.” By the end of September, the epidemic had brought military life in the camp to a standstill. The hospital built to hold 2,000 patients was now crammed with four times that number. While influenza generally preys on the old or the very young, the strain of 1918 seemed to target those in the prime of life. “This infection,” wrote Dr Victor Vaughan, an epidemiologist sent to Devens, “like war, kills the young, vigorous, robust adults.” Coffins ran short and bodies piled up in the makeshift morgue. “It beats any sight they ever had in France after a battle,” another doctor noted. In the midst of all this, a US district court judge arrived in camp to administer the oath of citizenship to more than 2,000 soldiers, new immigrants recruited off the streets of New York and Boston.
At Camp Devens, Victor Vaughan was disturbed by his calculations. “If the epidemic continues its mathematical rate of acceleration,” he wrote, “civilization could easily disappear from the face of the earth.” But within a month, the epidemic began to recede. In the end, its disappearance was as stealthy and inexplicable as its onset. And though it had taken 20 million lives worldwide, as it receded it was crowded out of the popular memory.13 The disease did not fit the prevailing paradigms of war and heroism, and so, like other historical realities that undermine the stories we tell about ourselves, it was erased.
EVM was at Camp Devens when Victor Vaughan was making his apocalyptic calculations. I’ve searched his papers for some reference to the flu epidemic but could find none. “There is much that has not been told,” he wrote to Dr Paul. “Some day, God willing, I shall tell it.” As far as I can see, he never did, though he had more to say about Camp Devens.
* Ahad Ha’am, founder spirit of the Lovers of Zion, told a meeting in Russia in 1902 that “there is now among us a party [i.e the Bund] which would raise this jargon [Yiddish] to the dignity of a national language” when it could never be but “an external and temporary medium of discourse.”
* In 1917 Jews thronged to the Bolsheviks and were numerous in the Cheka and its successors. Anti-Bolshevism leaned heavily on anti-semitism, as did Stalin’s anti-Trotskyism. In the Great Purge of 1937–38, most of the Jewish Bolsheviks and the remaining Bundists were wiped out.
2
The War Against Analogy
An’ here I sit so patiently Waiting to find out what price You have to pay to get out of Going through all these things twice.
Bob Dylan, “Stuck Inside
of Mobile with the
Memphis Blues Again”
“One should never judge a book by its cover, but in the case of former President Jimmy Carter’s latest work, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, we should make an exception,” declared Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman in 2006. “All one really needs to know about this biased account is found in the title.”1
As Carter discovered, coupling the word “apartheid” with Israel is a quick route to getting branded an anti-semite. The campaign of vilification mounted against Carter—familiar to supporters of Palestinian rights but extraordinary in that its target was a Nobel Peace Prize winner and former President—confirmed how determined the Israel lobby is to rule this analogy out of bounds. The Central Conference of American Rabbis, the largest organization of rabbis in the US, declared that “use of the term ‘apartheid’ to describe conditions in the West Bank serves only to demonize and de-legitimize Israel in the eyes of the world.” (For good measure it also accused Carter of “attempted rehabilitation of such terrorist groups as Hezbollah and Hamas.”)2 Eager to distance the Democrats from Carter’s critique of Israel, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced: “It is wrong to suggest that the Jewish people would support a government in Israel or anywhere else that institutionalizes ethnically based oppression.” Pelosi seems to believe not only that all Jews support Israel but that Jews by nature are always politically correct, uniquely shielded from the fractures and vagaries of history. If the generalization she had made had been a negative one, the racist nature of her logic would have been obvious and would have been condemned. But since she flattered the Jews, and backed Israel, the Anti-Defamation League wasn’t interested.
The more I travel and read, the more analogies I discover, and at the same time the warier I become of all analogies. For an analogy to do its job, there have to be clear distinctions between those features that are and those that are not analogous. One has to examine context and proportion. History does not repeat itself exactly, but it is full of echoes, some revealing, some misleading.
Attacks on what has been dubbed “the new anti-semitism” (an anti-semitism associated with the European left in particular) have focused on the use of what are deemed to be inappropriate analogies, which are interpreted as inherently anti-semitic. Curiously, this argument is usually linked to the further charge that critics of Israel reveal their true, anti-semitic bias when they “single out” Israel.
The European Union Monitoring Committee on Racism and Xenophobia has published a “working definition” of anti-semitism which declares that “anti-semitism manifests itself” in “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” as well as “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.”3 Former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky defined “the new anti-semitism” by applying what he calls the “3D test”: “demonization” (comparing Israelis to Nazis), “double standards” (measuring Israel by different yardsticks than are applied to other countries), and “delegitimization” (denying the Jewish right to a state). Berlin Technical University’s Center for Research on Anti-semitism characterized the new anti-semitism as a critique of Israel in which the Jewish state is “negatively distinct” from all others. Irwin Cotler, the Canadian Justice Minister, claimed that acceptable criticism of Israel ends and anti-semitism begins when critics deny the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, when they “Nazify” Israel, or when they “single out Israel for discriminatory treatment in the international arena.”
To single something out unfairly is to deny its analogous status: for example, Israel’s crimes in relation to crimes committed by other regimes. This “double standard” is said to be a telltale sign of anti-semitism or, in the case of Jews, self-hatred.
Now I strongly agree that there must be a single standard when it comes to human rights and dignity, crimes of war, violence, occupation, and discrimination. Here I’m with the Prophet Amos, to whom the Lord showed “the plumb line” against which all, including Israel, were to be measured. However, in working out where
