Auschwitz revisited

In the week we have been commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz I have been trying to understand why I am so weary and wary of the Holocaust. Despite the undoubted emotional pull of the survivors' testimonies, is there any lasting meaning be found in the ashes at Auschwitz? Should it even be looked for?

I didn't always feel this way.

We recently moved house and a few weeks ago my older son and I were unpacking boxes of books and finding new homes for them. I noticed just how much reading I had done on the subject of the Holocaust, mostly more than twenty years ago.

I had straight histories like 'The War Against the Jews' by Lucy Dawidowicz and 'Holocaust' by Martin Gilbert. I'd read 'Last Waltz in Vienna' by George Clare, Elie Wiesel's 'Night', 'Europa, Europa' by Solomon Perel and Primo Levi's 'If This is a Man', and 'The Drowned and the Saved'. There were Art Spiegelman's graphic novels 'Maus', where Nazis and Jews become cats and mice. Ghetto accounts such as 'A Cup of Tears' by Abraham Lewin and Marek Edelman's 'The Ghetto Fights'. I remembered being completely absorbed by Theo Richmond's detailed account of the destruction of one tiny shtetl village 'Konin'. I had the complete transcript of Claude Lanzmann's epic documentary Shoah. Hannah Arendt's account of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in the 1950s. And of course, Anne Frank's diary, the fully annotated critical edition.

My reading had been a search for meaning - historical, political and theological. I had been trying to make sense of something I knew was shaping my adult Jewish identity.

Last weekend I visited my 88 year old father and asked him to recall for me the visit he made to Auschwitz in the late 1960s while on a business trip to Poland. Perhaps his account could restore my faith in the possibility of finding a purpose in the week's commemorations beyond honouring the memory of the dead.

My father's visit to the death camp took place in a very different world from today. For the first two decades after the war the mood had been for moving on, for forgetting not remembering. The Holocaust was very far from being the defining event of the Second World War it has now become.

While he was on his trip, my father and three work colleagues found themselves with time on their hands when a public holiday was announced to coincide with a Soviet Russian State visit. Their local client, the factory manager of a smelt works in Katowice, suggested they visited Auschwitz, which he explained now ran as a museum.

Although my father was familiar with the name Auschwitz, he told me his knowledge of the how the Nazi's had implemented their killing was vague and sketchy at the time of his visit to Poland. Two of his colleagues had served in the army during the war but their understanding was even less than my father's. So the four British businessmen hired a driver and set off for the day with little or no expectation of what they were about to see.

They reached Auschwitz less than an hour after leaving Katowice and found the camp/museum almost deserted despite the public holiday. In fact, my father and his colleagues seemed to be the only visitors there and were rewarded with a personal tour by one of the senior officials.

They were taken to long wooden huts sectioned off into large glass fronted display cases. Inside the first display were bails of material that my father could not identify. "What is this?" He asked. "Human hair" came the reply, "shaved from the heads of those about to be exterminated." Nothing went to waste, it was explained, "The hair could be weaved into cloth and used for insulation". Next came a display of walking sticks and crutches neatly stacked in huge piles. Then shoes, all sizes, suitcases still with name and home address labels attached, spectacles and false teeth. Apparently, it all had revenue potential for the Third Reich.

After three hours of the tour my father was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the attitude of their guide. "He was more interested in the Nazis' attention to detail, administrative diligence and mechanical ingenuity than in the morality of what had taken place there." Finally, they were taken to see the furnaces that burned day and night, fueled by human corpses.

But what had been new and revelatory to my father nearly fifty years ago has become burdensome and problematic to me. When I look at all the books on my shelves relating to just 12 years out of three thousand years of Jewish history, I have no desire to revisit them or even flick through the pages.

As a student I had thought there were lessons to be learnt and meaning to be divined from what had happened. But now it feels as if the event has been used, abused and politicised, and, from a moral perspective, largely ignored.

As time has passed I have become increasingly pessimistic about our ability to take something meaningful and positive from the horror that is now summed up by the single word 'Auschwitz'.

Some, especially the remaining survivors, see denial and forgetfulness of the Holocaust as the biggest concern we should have. But I think these are the least of our Holocaust problems.

Holocaust denial will remain a fringe issue. The documentation is secure in its veracity and overwhelming in its volume. If anything, today's school children are in danger of thinking that Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin went to war against Hitler because of what was happening to the Jews.

And we have become very good at remembering. We do it with great care and respect and afford enormous dignity to the survivors and their testimonies. This week's marking of the Russian army's liberation of Auschwitz proved this once again. So, we remember with no difficulty. It's acting on the remembrance that defeats us.

Since the end of the Second World War we have had Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. All of which suggest that despite the creation of so much international law on human rights and genocide, humankind has not progressed an iota as a result of Auschwitz.

I can now see that my own long-term reaction to the Holocaust has led me not to focus on anti-Semitism and Jewish security (although neither can be ignored) but on the values and teaching that I see as central to Judaism. Justice, Compassion, Humility, individual and collective Responsibility. These are not new lessons but very old ones. As a Jew, I choose to apply these to our relationship with the Palestinian people because this is the issue on which we must judge ourselves. In the 21st century this is 'the Jewish question'.

While a growing number of Jews both in Israel and around the world share this perspective, it is still a minority opinion.

When it comes to the Palestinian people, the Holocaust has hardened our hearts and closed our minds. The scale of our own suffering has made us blind to their suffering - which we see as all of their own making.

Perhaps this was inevitable. Why should a people abused and broken become saints? The opposite result is more often the outcome. I am asking for too much. Expecting something that no group is capable of.

And so I have become both weary and wary of trying to take meaning or lessons from the Holocaust. Yes we must continue to teach it as an appalling stain on humanity. And an exercise in empathy is never wasted. But we must not expect it to unlock the human heart.

Maybe all we have are the stories of bureaucratised murder, random survival, and unexpected acts of kindness that Primo Levi called 'Moments of Reprieve'.

My father and his colleagues had planned to eat a meal together that night back at the hotel in Katowice. But after the visit nobody was hungry.

On the return journey my father asked their driver if he had known about the camp during the war. "Oh, yes", he replied. "We knew something was happening. We could smell it." My father asked him whether anyone at the time felt they could do anything about it? The driver replied "Yes, we would wind up the windows tight, so we couldn't smell the stink".

See also: A Letter to Anne Frank

Lessons from Mandela's long walk to freedom

Nelson Mandela 1918-2013

As President Obama said yesterday (Thursday 5 December), echoing words said at the death of Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela no longer belongs to us but "to the ages".

I remember first becoming aware of the struggle against Apartheid in 1980 after listening to Peter Gabriel's song about the death in police custody of the black civil rights activist Steve Biko. I was playing the same song in my car last night with my son just before we returned home and turned on the television to hear the breaking news coming out of Pretoria.

'Biko' was part of my awakening to the issue of human rights as a teenager. As a student in Manchester in the mid eighties the boycott strategy of the Anti-Apartheid movement and the campaign to Free Nelson Mandela were part of my emerging political understanding of the way the world ticks. More recently, the South African story has influenced my understanding of the situation in Israel/Palestine. They are not identical scenarios but there are enough similarities to draw conclusions.

So what are the lessons we must take from Mandela's long walk to freedom?

• Palestinian violence, however provoked, will always undermine the cause of human rights and allow all resistance to be branded as terrorism and be brutally suppressed. Meanwhile, genuine grievances will be dismissed as irrelevant compared to the needs of Israeli State security.

• The campaign for freedom in Israel/Palestine must be a global call for the restoration of human rights. All the complexities and history must not obscure the basic fact that one people has been dispossessed, and continues to be discriminated against, by another people.

• Change will not come from above until politicians around the world recognise a tipping point in the public understanding of the Palestinian people and their story. The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement will create that consciousness and eventually shift the political paradigm in Israel and globally just as the same tactics did in South Africa.

• The way ahead must acknowledge the human rights of all those who call the Holy Land their home. Solving one injustice must not create another (that's what happened in 1948). This fundamental understanding of the equal worth of all humanity and the need for compassion on all sides was the outstanding contribution of Nelson Mandela in the immediate post Apartheid years. Jews and Palestinians must acknowledge each other's narrative. The future cannot be built on past hatred. However, just as in South Africa, there can be no doubt as to who has been the oppressed and who the oppressor.

Some will see this as utopian nonsense. The same was said about South Africa. Some will say that the Palestinians lack a Nelson Mandela that can unify the people and show moral and political leadership.

I strongly believe that the Palestinian Mandelas do exist. They are men and women who are currently in exile, sitting in Israeli jails, or working right now to build a non-violent worldwide campaign to liberate their people. You may want to read the statement from Marwan Barghouthi in Hadarim prison who has been in Israeli jails since 2002.

While still President of South Africa, Mandela gave a speech in December 1997 to mark the United Nations Day of Palestinian Solidarity.

"It behoves all South Africans, themselves erstwhile beneficiaries of generous international support, to stand up and be counted among those contributing actively to the cause of freedom and justice. But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians; without the resolution of conflicts in East Timor, the Sudan and other parts of the world."

This is a statement that recognises how interconnected justice must be. It reminds us of Martin Luther King Jr's. statement that: “Justice denied anywhere diminishes justice everywhere.”

Sadly, when others, close to Mandela during the South African Apartheid struggle, speak about Israel (such as former Archbishop Desmond Tutu) they are often dismissed as over-stating their case in drawing any parallels to their own experience. That couldn't be more wrong. Tutu recognises injustice when he sees it.

As I have said many times on this blog, Jews have a right to a homeland through our historic, religious and cultural connection to the land. But it doesn't have to look like this. In fact, what Mandela's story tells us is that it can't look like this. The way in which Israel is currently constituted is ethically unsustainable and it is eating away at the soul of Judaism.

For me, and for a great many others, Mandela may belong to "the ages" but he also belongs to every struggle that has justice and human rights at its core. And that means he belongs to all those who want to see a just peace in Israel/Palestine.

In the end, as Obama said in his tribute, there is a moral arc to the universe that can be bent towards justice. Until that moment comes for Israel/Palestine we wait and we work and we take inspiration from the life of a great man.

Yom Ha Shoah, Ahmadinejad and why we need to break the Holocaust narrative

After publishing Letter to Anne Frank in January, I hadn't planned to say anymore about the Holocaust this year. But I feel compelled to return to the subject now as we reach the Jewish day of Holocaust remembrance, Yom Ha' Shoah, on April 19th.

So why come back to the Holocaust so soon?

In a word: Iran

Listening in March to Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to AIPAC (America's mighty pro-Israel lobby) and then reading the commentators who have supported his position since (try Melanie Phillips from the UK's Daily Mail), has demonstrated to me, once again, just how easily the Holocaust is recruited into the propaganda campaign to justify Israeli actions, in this case, airstrikes on Iran.

For Netanyahu, Iran is the new Nazi Germany, Ahmadinejad the new Hitler, and his nuclear programme is an underground Auschwitz in the making. This analogy displays not only a wilfully ignorant presentation of Middle East politics but a poor grasp of European history too. No matter though. For what it does do, is allow Netanyahu to accuse the world (and in particular Barack Obama) of abandoning the Jews to a terrible fate once again. No doubt this week will provide more such opportunities.

Netanyahu builds up his stockpile of radioactive moral blackmail hoping to ensure America will back Israeli airstrikes. And if you still feel uncomfortable about Ahmadinejad's calls to 'wipe Israel off the map' you may like to read this piece from the Washington Post's 'Fact Checker' which puts the whole thing into a less hysterical perspective. All of this beating of war drums, as I've said before, keeps the Palestinians well off the international radar while maintaining the fiction of Israel facing an existential threat that trumps all other moral issues.

For a rounded assessment of the human and environmental impact of dropping bunker bombs (containing depleted uranium) on Iran's nuclear facilities, take a look at Marsha B. Cohen's article at Lobelog. Thanks to Jerry Haber at the Magnes Zionist for drawing my attention to this piece.

History should certainly inform our understanding of contemporary events but Netanyahu's (and others) misuse of the memory of the Holocaust for political advantage has become so acceptable that most people don't even realise it's going on.

So what has happened to our understanding of the Holocaust and how can we counter what has become such a narrow and partial understanding of its meaning in Jewish and world history?

Catastrophe and Redemption

The truth is, the rhetoric of Israeli politics has become so entangled in the Nazi genocide that it's become all but impossible to untie the knots of ethical misappropriation. We have become locked in a narrative of catastrophe and redemption that is now being used to justify immoral actions.

Rather than a profound lesson on the values and behaviour of Western civilisation in the mid 20th century, the Holocaust has become an exclusively Jewish piece of property, an emblem of unique Jewish suffering, our symbol of eternal victimhood. The State of Israel is presented as our justified salvation and the necessary state apparatus to prevent a second Holocaust occurring.

This paradigm of Holocaust understanding is closely guarded by the Jewish establishment and any attempt to break through it is quickly repelled with accusations of anti-Semitism or even Holocaust denial.

After the Holocaust, many Jews in the diaspora see Israel as an essential personal and collective 'insurance policy'. It needs to exist in case 'things turn bad again'. Israel is the Jewish life-raft. But Netanyahu's Iranian rhetoric turns this idea on its head. The life-raft itself is now presented as the target of a new Holocaust. If you accept this thinking then, for a Jew, the most dangerous place on earth to live is now Tel Aviv. If this is the case, then one of the great dreams of Zionism - to normalise the condition of the Jews - has become a nightmare.

Alternative voices

Marek Edelman, Warsaw Ghetto fighter

One of the most-read posts on Micah's Paradigm Shift in the last year has been Lost Jewish Voices (part two) in which I gathered together some pre-1948 Jewish thinkers whose views on Zionism are now considered far beyond the Jewish pale. My aim was to demonstrate the plurality of Jewish opinion that flourished in the first half of the 20th century, in the hope that these views (rooted in Jewish ethical thinking) could be rediscovered by a new generation.

In this blog-post I'd like to do something similar with the Holocaust. Below I've brought together opinions that go against the mainstream Jewish/Zionist narrative on the meaning of the Holocaust, the lessons that should be learnt and how it should guide our understanding of current events.

The life and actions of Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, challenges several commonly held views about the nature and meaning of the Holocaust.

Rather inconveniently for the Zionist reading of history, Edelman was a Bundist, a Jewish socialist who refused to accept the notion that the Jewish people had no future in Europe. To the Bundists, the Zionist were prepared to abandon the battlefield of racism to the enemy instead of staying and working for a society of respect and tolerance for minorities.

Edelman did not see the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as a step on the road to necessary Jewish empowerment. After the war in stayed in Poland, became a well-respected heart specialist, campaigned against the Soviet backed communist government and in the 1980s became an activist in Solidarity, the independent trade union opposition. You can read more about Edelman in this obituary from the UK's Daily Telegraph in 2009.

Here's what Edelman said about the meaning of the uprising and the accusation that Jews went passively to their deaths. Behaviour, argued the Zionists, that would never be repeated by the Jewish State:

"We knew perfectly well that we had no chance of winning," Edelman recalled. "We fought simply not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths. We knew we were going to die. Just like all the others who were sent to Treblinka." Edelman believed that far from going passively, those who went to Treblinka had shown the ultimate courage. "Their death was far more heroic. We didn't know when we would take a bullet. They had to deal with certain death, stripped naked in a gas chamber or standing at the edge of a mass grave waiting for a bullet in the back of the head. It is an awesome thing, when one is going so quietly to one's death. It was easier to die fighting than in a gas chamber."

Another familiar accusation that Israeli leaders, Binyamin Netanyahu in particular, like to present is that the world stood idly by while the Jewish people were systematically destroyed. It all adds to the myth of an eternally persecuted people who are now owed special privileges by those who 'abandoned' them. The Israeli novelist and commentator Shulamith Hareven counters this view in her 1986 essay 'Identity: Victim':

"During the Second World War, not only did the world not remain silent, it lost more than sixty million men fighting Hitler. True they were not fighting because of us, and certainly they would not have offered aid for our sake only. They were fighting against fascism in general...but the loss of more than sixty million men in war does not exactly mean that the world sat by with it's arms crossed...sixty million families suffered losses, and those of us who survived, including the small number of us then inhabiting Israel, survived because of them."

Another important observation from Hareven is how children, Jewish and non-Jewish, grow up today knowing only one thing about the the history of the Jews in Europe - and that's the Holocaust. It's as if two thousand years of Jewish history count for nothing apart from an endless catalogue of persecution culminating in genocide. The development of rabbinic Judaism, the rich cultural achievements of European Jewry in literature and science, the massive contribution to Western civilisation, it all gets forgotten. It's as if the story of the Jews in Europe is nothing but an unfortunate aberration, a deviation, an interruption, from the story of Jewish statehood. In fact, we are what we are today because of the experience of living outside of the Land of Israel. Harevan sees the moral danger of this partial view of Jewish history:

"If I and only I occupy the throne of the victim, then no stranger can occupy it....under no circumstances are we to forget our tragedies. But whoever bases our identity on them and them alone, distorts the greatness of this people."

Poet, feminist and political activist, Irena Klepfisz' father fought alongside Marek Edelman in Warsaw, but was killed on the first day of the uprising. In an essay written in 1989, she asks if the horror inflicted on the Jews has numbed our ability to measure right and wrong:

"As long as hundreds of Palestinians are not being lined up and shot, but are killed by Israelis only one a day, are we Jews free from worrying about morality, justice? Has Nazism become the sole norm by which Jews judge evil, so that anything that is not it's exact duplicate is considered by us morally acceptable? Is that what the Holocaust has done to Jewish moral sensibility?"

Avraham Burg is a former Speaker of the Israeli Knesset and now an out-spoken critic of Israel. His 2008 book 'The Holocaust is over. We must rise from its ashes' was in part an examination of the Israeli national psyche. Like Hareven and Klepfisz, he identifies how Holocaust understanding has limited our ability to relate to the pain of other genocides and shrunken our moral imagination:

"Never again? We have made 'never again' possible for ourselves. What about never again for others? Never again? On the contrary, it happens again and again, because of indifference. This apathy to their fate was made possible primarily by the operating system that was installed in me at birth: The Holocaust is ours,and all other killings in the world are common evils, not holocausts. Well, if it is not a holocaust then it is none of my business. Therefore I am not responsible. Therefore I do not have to cry out in protest. The lives of many thousands, perhaps millions, could be saved if the State of Israel, and the Jewish people, myself included, had stood at the head of the international struggle against hatred and the annihilation of any people anywhere, regardless of colour gender, creed origins, or residence. We did not stand at the head of this struggle. And the swords are still drawn."

David Grossman has been described by Jacqueline Rose as almost a 'non-Zionist Zionist', he's certainly one of Israel's outstanding 'critical friends' and an internationally respected novelist. Here, writing in 2003, he wants to emphasise the universal aspects of the Nazi years:

"I don't belong to those who believe, that the Holocaust was a specifically Jewish event. As I see it, all civilised, fair minded persons must ask themselves serious questions about the Holocaust. These are not Jewish questions. They are universal questions."

I hope these quotes illustrate how the dominant Holocaust narrative should be radically challenged to create an outward looking, inclusive response to the horrors we have experienced.

In the meantime, we face the prospect of thousands of Iranians being killed, generations to come affected by a uranium polluted atmosphere, a destabilised Middle East, a stalled Arab Spring, a world economic recovery reversed, and an upsurge in militant Islamist terrorism. And all this in the name of an unsubstantiated threat that relies for its moral underpinning on the misuse of Holocaust memory.

Let me conclude with words from the UK's Reform Judaism prayer for Yom Ha Shoah. This prayer recalls not only the six million who perished but also the many non-Jews who had the courage to stand outside the mob and suffer with us. These words sum up for me what ought to be the lessons of the Holocaust for all humanity:

"May such times never come again, and may their sacrifice not be in vain. In our daily fight against cruelty and prejudice, against tyranny and persecution, their memory gives us strength and leads us on."

P.S. Please note the new descriptor for Micah's Paradigm Shift: Israel-Palestine from a UK Jewish perspective. Rescuing the Hebrew covenant one blog post at a time.

Occupy the Haggadah! - Radical thoughts for Passover

Passover approaches and a fearful angel descends upon the homes of the Children of Israel.

But this is not the Angel of Death, sent to take the first born son from every household of ancient Egypt. And this time, no daubing of blood on our doorposts will tell this angel to ‘pass over’ our homes.

For this is the Angel of Ignorance and Denial.

This is the angel that blinds us to our own ills, that curses us to become the very Pharaoh we say we despise.

In the days to come, as we have for thousands of years, we will sit down together and tell the story of our freedom from slavery. We will open our wine-stained and motzah-crumbed Haggadot, and from its pages we will relive (as if we ourselves were there) our founding mythology, our birth as a people liberated from oppression.

It is a powerful and compelling tale that weaves its message through every part of our holy scriptures and prayerbook liturgies. We are told that a tyrant can be brought low, a people can be made free, the world can be changed.

The Pharaoh lodged in our soul

But do we revere the Exodus text while dishonouring its message? Each year we celebrate our freedom but fail to recognise the Pharaoh that shares our Seder night meal with us, lodged somewhere in our soul, distorting our view of ourselves and others.

We are mistaken if we think our own suffering at the hands of countless Pharaohs throughout our history has somehow made us immune from the seductive powers of Pharaoh-ism.

We sit down to celebrate our survival as if survival were an end in itself. We forget that we were forged in the heat of the desert for a meaning and a purpose. Survival cannot be for survival’s sake, just as freedom was not given for freedom’s sake.

The encounter at Mount Sinai set for us a demanding (perhaps impossible) mission - to do right by God and right by each other. Wandering in the desert, without our own land or borders, we recorded the commandments that were meant to shape us as a people.

"You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt." Exodus 23:9

"You shall not stand idly by while your neighbour's blood is being shed." Leviticus 19:16

"Love your neighbour as yourself." Leviticus 19:18

"The strangers who resides with you, shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." Leviticus 19:34

And here's the showstopper!

"Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may live, and inherit the land which the Lord your God gives you" Deuteronomy 16:20

Limping back to Egypt

But when it comes to the most fundamental issue facing Judaism and Jewish identity in the 21st century, we have not just failed the mission, we have turned our back on it. We have limped back to the Red Sea and Pharaoh's chariots have caught up with us.

In spite of all we have experienced in our two millennium of wanderings, we prefer to keep ourselves ignorant of the meaning of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and the condition of Palestinian Israelis and refugees.

We choose not to see the house demolitions, collective punishments, land confiscations, water appropriations, the olive groves up-rooted, the wells blocked. The harassment, intimidation and murder of Palestinian men, women and children goes unnoticed. Settler violence and a brutalised army of occupation means nothing to us.

And on the other side of the wall, we insist we are the only democracy in the Middle-East despite a fifth of the population (the Israeli Palestinians) feeling like, and being treated as, unwanted strangers in their own land.

We choose to see another people’s displacement, another people’s exile, another people’s daily humiliation and discrimination as an acceptable price for our own national renewal.

One of Israel's finest writers, David Grossman, wrote the following words just a few weeks ago:

"I think about a people which has dumped a whole other nation on the side of the road and has backed the process to the hilt over 45 years, all the while having not a bad life at all, thank you. I think about a people which has been engaging in a brilliant genius-like denial of its own responsibility for the situation. I think of a people, which has managed to ignore the warping and distorting of its own society and the madness that the process has had on its own national values."

Are we incapable of tasting the bitterness of another people's oppression? On Seder night, we dip our food twice in salt water to symbolise our own tears of slavery. Should we dip a third time for the tears we have brought to the 'strangers' and 'neighbours' in the land we insist was promised to us?

Occupy the Haggadah!

It is time to reclaim our own story. We, the authors of the Exodus paradigm, must breathe new life into our scripture. We must return ourselves to the desert and re-learn the mission.

To use this year's favourite phrase of radicals, we need to 'Occupy' the Haggadah. We have to invest this medieval liturgy with the power to transform us into the people we were meant to be. We cannot let this text simply reinforce our identity as eternal victims (leaving no space in our hearts for any other victim). The Haggadah must haul us back to be the custodians of Justice we were called to be.

This year when my family sits down for the annual re-telling of the Exodus story, there will be some new additions to the evening's order of service.

We will include prayers for justice, thought-provoking reflections on the meaning of the Holocaust from Jews and Palestinians, and acknowledgement of our own complicity in taking freedom from others. We will dip into salt water three times to remember not only our tears but the tears of our neighbours too.

And alongside the salt water, Elijah's wine glass and Miriam's cup, we will make an addition to the Seder plate. Next to the bitter herbs, the horoset, the motzah, the shankbone, we will add some Palestinian olive oil to remember that the land has meaning to another people too. And when we break the motzah, we will do so as a symbol of sharing the land. And to soften our brittle 'bread of oppression' we will pour on some of the Palestinian olive oil.

This is no act of self-loathing criticism. On the contrary, this is taking Judaism back to its beginnings, reclaiming it from the narrow, extreme nationalism that has become our 21st century's golden calf.

As well as making us alive to the past and the miracle of our own survival, we will open our eyes to the present and to our own participation in Pharaoh's modern franchise.

On Seder night it is traditional to ask the question: Why is this night different from all other nights? This year let the difference be this: from this night on we will no longer allow our story to blot out another's.

And to paraphrase the last words of the Haggadah service:

This year - in slavery to the Pharaoh of our own making.
Next year - liberated to pursue our mission of justice.

Hag Sameach, Happy Passover, Occupy the Haggadah!

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