Boaz Evron

Evron, Boaz. “The Holocaust: Learning the Wrong Lessons.” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3. (Spring, 1981), pp. 16-26. [first published in ETON 77, 1980]

This short piece is almost 30 years old, but it sounds to me quite current. Has the situation not changed? Have the available arguments and ways of thinking not changed to reflect the new situation? Or, more likely, am I ill informed? The essential arguments, or way of seeing things, do not sound so very different from the scandalous Mearsheimer and Walt position paper on the Israel lobby from 2006 (also in the LRB). I suppose that Evron is addressing Israelis where Mearsheimer and Walt were addressing Americans; but the idea that the presence of the Holocaust (as a fact or provocation bound to the state of Israel) in international relations distorts things in dangerous ways is surely the key idea in both cases. Or would M and W say that their argument has nothing to do with uses of the Holocaust, that it’s all about a lobbying organization just like any other, only better? I’d have to look back at their paper with some care to see what they say about this.