Adona
Pseudonym
for all of the Kosovar children
and their families. |
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Some
Jewish Views
Jews back Kosovo attack, citing Holocaust
JTA
DANIEL KURTZMAN
WASHINGTON -- When President Clinton seized on the lessons
of two world wars and the Holocaust to make his case for military intervention in
Kosovo, he echoed an argument that many survivors have made themselves.
Clinton invoked both the appeasement of Hitler and the Allies' failure to act sooner in
World War II in explaining the rationale behind the NATO bombings. The raids are aimed at
forcing Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to halt attacks on ethnic Albanians in
Kosovo.
"Just imagine if leaders back then had acted wisely and early
enough, how many lives could have been saved? How many Americans would not have had to
die?"
Clinton said in a nationally televised address Wednesday of last
week amid the first wave against Serb targets in Yugoslavia.
For American Jewish groups and Holocaust survivors, the moral
imperative to end Serb atrocities against the ethnic Albanians is clear.
"We must come to the defense of defenseless victims," Nobel laureate and
survivor Elie Wiesel said, expressing his full support for the NATO action.
"We cannot allow people like Milosevic to go on killing men and women and children.
We should have done it earlier, but it's not too late."
Although they may avoid direct comparisons between the atrocities committed by Serbia
against ethnic Albanians with the Nazis' systematic extermination of 6 million Jews,
Holocaust survivors and scholars say the Jewish experience and the lessons of the
Holocaust help to shed light on what is at issue in Kosovo.
"I don't like to compare anything to what we have been through, but if the world had
reacted then the way we are reacting now, many tragedies would have been prevented,"
Wiesel said.
Hyman Bookbinder, a longtime Jewish activist in Washington and a member of the Committee
on Conscience of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, agreed.
"As Jews we dare not be indifferent to mass tortures like we've been seeing
here," he said.
The organized Jewish community has also declared unwavering support for U.S. intervention
in Kosovo.
The Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an umbrella group representing national Jewish
organizations and local Jewish communities, expressed its hope that the action would pave
the way for a diplomatic solution to the conflict.
It said, too, that it would urge local community relations councils to help build support
for the action at the grassroots level.
The Jewish War Veterans of America, never an organization to take lightly the commitment
of U.S. troops abroad, expressed support for the air strikes but made clear it would
oppose any commitment of ground forces into a "civil war in a sovereign nation."
Said Bob Zweiman, past national commander and international liaisons officer for the
group: "We should get in and get out as soon as possible and we should have a firm
exit strategy."
Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said that if Jews
remain silent in the face of atrocities committed against other ethnic or religious
populations, "we will lose all our credibility. Otherwise, people will say Jews only
cry when Jewish blood is spilled."
At least one Holocaust scholar feels an important lesson of the Shoah was being ignored as
NATO carried out the biggest allied military assault in Europe since World War II.
Deborah Dwork, director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at Clark University in
Worcester, Mass., said she was troubled that there had not been a greater response to the
humanitarian needs of the tens of thousands of refugees on the borders of Kosovo.
Focusing solely on military action against the Serbs as a means of addressing the
Kosovars' plight, she said, was tantamount to the argument the Allies made in World War II
that the best way to rescue Jews was to win the war. "We don't think so highly of
that rationale," Dwork said. In addition to the bombing campaign, she added, a
simultaneous focus on humanitarian assistance is needed because "I don't know whether
this military intervention will ameliorate the lot of those individual people."
Discussing the Kosovo situation, the Clinton administration made clear that it was well
acquainted with the lessons of World War II and the Holocaust, summoning images of Nazism
and referring to "genocide in the heart of Europe."
As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright emphasized in an interview on PBS' "The
Newshour with Jim Lehrer," blood has been spilled before on the European continent
because "free people did not understand well enough how to stop tyranny and evil and
ethnic cleansing and genocide early enough."
Albright, who discovered in 1997 that her grandparents died in the Holocaust, said,
"We now have an opportunity to gather together the
lessons of the 20th century and stop this before it totally spins out of control."
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