April 2, 1999   16 Nisan 5759

Making Sense Of Kosovo
Serbian crimes in Kosovo are not the Holocaust. Nevertheless we are
compelled to respond.

Michael Berenbaum Special to the Jewish Times

Consciousness of the Holocaust is at an all-time high and yet the greater
the consciousness, the greater the confusion. Over the past few weeks we
have heard many comparisons between Kosovo and the Holocaust. Slobodan
Milosevic has been compared to Adolph Hitler, ethnic cleansing to the
Holocaust and the bombing of Kosovo has been likened to bombing the death
camps. Perhaps some clarification is in order, and some reflection as well.
Is what is happening in Kosovo a Holocaust? Horrific as it is, Kosovo is
something else.
Is Milosevic, Hitler? Evil as he is, Milosevic is someone else.
Why the comparisons to the Holocaust?
In a world of moral relativism, the Holocaust has become the symbol of
absolute evil and hence the cornerstone of all values. The destruction of
the European Jews is invoked as a justification for action. To remain
neutral while the atrocities of Kosovo are being perpetrated is to re-enact
the indifference of the Allies to the fate of the Jews. An early response
is required, otherwise, once again Allied leaders will be guilty of
appeasement, and the price for inaction will be paid by innocent civilians
who will be slaughtered.
But is ethic cleansing - evil as it is - truly comparable to the Holocaust?
Ethnic cleansing was an early stage of the Holocaust - an early stage, not
the final stage.
The great historian of the Holocaust Raul Hilberg lists six stages of the
Holocaust: definition, expropriation (apartheid, segregation, legal
discrimination, dis-emancipation), concentration, deportation, mobile
killing units and death camps.
In 1935, Jews were defined by the Nuremberg laws based on the religion of
their grandparents. They were defined not by the identity they affirmed or
the religion they practiced, the values they embraced or the traditions
they observed, but biologically, based on the identity of their
grandparents. Conversion did not provide a means of escape, nor did
assimilation.
From 1933 onward, the rights of Jews were systematically taken away in
Germany and in German-occupied or -allied territories. Discrimination and
prejudice soon gave way to legal disenfranchisement and to the gradual but
ever-growing loss of liberties. On the economic front, it became
increasingly difficult for Jews to participate in German economic life, to
hold property or even to earn a living. Four hundred pieces of legislation
were enacted over 12 years that took the Jews from an integrated part of
the German economy, isolated them, segregated them and led to their demise.

As we have seen in recent years, the process of expropriation continued
even after the war and spread to neutral parties; states claimed "heirless"
and "abandoned" property, insurance companies denied claims for policies,
and banks turned a blind eyes to depositors. Even greater museums soon
forgot the original owners of great works of art that had come their way.

The goal of these initial stages of the Holocaust was ethnic cleansing, to
make Germany Judenrein, free of Jews. Nazi ethnic cleansing policies were
not an exclusively anti-Jewish policy. Poles were forced to evacuate entire
areas that Germany seized after the 1939 invasion of Poland so that they
could be inhabited by ethnic Germans re-embraced by the Third Reich. Cities
of Europe were ethnically cleansed of their Jews, who were forced into
ghettoes in the East. But in the evolution of German policy, ethnic
cleansing was a way-station to annihilation.
Beginning in 1941 with the implementation of the "Final Solution to the
Jewish Problem," the goal was not just to make Germany Judenrein, but to
rid the earth of Jews.
Nazi policy toward the Jews was not in quest of territorial gains or
geographical expansion. The goal was the mass murder of an entire people,
which moved from the concentration of Jews in specified locales, such as
ghettoes and transit camps, to the killing itself. At first, the killers
were sent tothe victims in mobile killing units, called Einsatzgruppen,
but this was psychologically difficult for the killers and disquieting to
the local population, who feared that the Jews would be first and they
next.
So a better way was found. Instead of mobile killers and stationary
victims, the Nazis made the victims mobile and sent them to killing
centers, factories of death in which a relative handful of Germans could
dispose of millions of Jews. The instrumentality of the mobility was the
railroad, deportation to the death camps.
The movement was rapid. In Poland, the ghettoes contained Jews between 1939
and 1942. In early 1942, the death camps were made operational. In the
summer of 1942, the deportations began in earnest and within a year, there
was only one ghetto left in Poland, a country which was virtually cleansed
of its Jews.
In Hungary, as the Academy Award-winning film "The Last Days" demonstrates
so dramatically, the process was even more rapid. The Germans invaded on
March 19, 1944. Within days Jews were defined and their property
expropriated. By April ghettoization had begun and between May 15 and July
8, 437,402 Jews were deported to Auschwitz on 148 trains and the country,
with the lone exception of Budapest, was Judenrein, cleansed of its Jews by
annihilation.
So, as awful as Milosevic's policies of ethnic cleansing are, they are not
the Holocaust. Yet just because Kosovo is neither Warsaw nor Auschwitz does
not free us of an obligation to respond. A consciousness of the Holocaust
must not raise our threshold of tolerance for evil.
Permit me an example. About 16 years ago, I attended a conference on
Ethiopian Jewry in which a delegation which had just returned from Ethiopia
reported that Jews were dying of starvation and malnutrition, were facing
systematic discrimination and disease, but they could discern no systematic
program of annihilation. Suddenly, the audience breathed a sigh of relief:
Ethiopia was not a Holocaust, we could return to business as usual. I
feared then, and now, that the Holocaust had raised the threshold at which
action was mandatory.
Ethnic cleansing is evil. It is intolerable and must be resisted.
And even if events in Kosovo are not the Holocaust, they have taken, or run
the risk of soon taking, the form of genocide. In the United Nations
Convention, "genocide" is characterized as:
the killing of persons belonging to a group; causing grievous bodily or
spiritual harm to members of a group; deliberately enforcing upon the group
living conditions which could lead to complete or partial extermination;
enforcing measures to prevent births among the group; forcibly removing
children from the group and transferring them to another group.

American and European policymakers face a series of bleak alternatives. The
policies of ethnic cleansing are brutal. Neighborhoods are attacked and
burned; men, women and children are forced to take flight; people lose
their homes, their villages, their cultures. Rape and brutality go hand in
hand with geographic conquest. Television makes these images all the more
graphic, all the more compelling, and vividly demonstrates the impotence of
the NATO alliance.
The United States has developed a peculiar doctrine in the aftermath of
Vietnam. American soldiers may not be put in harm's way. We have a huge
military budget, an ever-increasing military budget, yet each time the
military is about to be used, an array of forces on the right and the left
protest American action. The military, they seem to argue, must not be
placed in the line of fire, even if the result is the saving of hundreds of
thousands of lives from death and starvation in places as remote as Bosnia
and Somalia.
Our military was sent in to evacuate American citizens in Rwanda. It left
before the genocide. In Rwanda, volunteers from international relief
agencies stayed to assist the victims while armed soldiers from Belgium and
France fled before the slaughter.
The burdens of being a superpower are precisely the burdens of the exercise
of power. I think that President Clinton was right to use force. Milosevic
has responded to force in the past and capitulated to Western pressure, but
only after he understood that force would be used. In Bosnia, Ambassador
Richard Holbrooke succeeded at Dayton only after the United States
demonstrated a willingness to bomb. Still, Kosovo may be much more
complicated.
Military and political experts are rightfully doubtful that air power alone
will cause an alteration of the policy of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. In
the short term, the bombing will strengthen Milosevic's popularity in
Serbia, as even his opponents must rally around him because Kosovo is of
vast emotional and religious importance to Serbians. An analogy to
Jerusalem is often offered.
What if the bombing does not create an opening for diplomacy? Force creates
its own logic and its own problems. For the bombing to be credible, it must
be sustained and intense. It must clearly indicate to Milosevic's military
that there is a price to be paid for ethnic cleansing. Will it have to be
followed by ground troops? Perhaps. Should we arm the ethnic Albanians to
defend themselves? Perhaps.
Bombing is not a simple option nor a zero sum game. It does indicate
concern. It does cause consequences. It does demonstrate that the West
regards current behavior as intolerable. And I believe that all this is for
the good - or to be more precise, demonstrably against evil. Surely, it is
much better than the silence of the Allies in the face of the Final
Solution to the Jewish Problem. That is why President Clinton and our NATO
allies have my support for this military action. n

About The Author
Michael Berenbaum, Ph.D., is a Holocaust scholar and author. Together with
Michael Neufeld, he edited a forthcoming book "The Bombing of Auschwitz:
Should the Allies Have Attempted It?" (St. Martin's Press).
He is the author of more than 10 books, including "After Tragedy and
Triumph: Essays In Modern Jewish Thought And The American Experience"
(Cambridge University Press, 1991). His work as co-producer of "One
Survivor Remembers: The Gerda Weissman Klein Story," was recognized with an
Academy Award, an Emmy Award and the Cable Ace Award.
Berenbaum's positions have included: project director of the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum, director of the U.S. Holocaust Research Institute; and
Hymen Goldman Adjunct Professor of Theology at Georgetown University.
He earned his doctorate from Florida State University in 1975 and has done
academic work at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Jewish Theological
Seminary and Boston University.