“In Israel, it seems the Shoah must be viewed as unique; it is yoked to the narrative of redemptive Zionism.”
From article by Daniella Peled, Does Yad Vashem Have a Problem with the Bosnian Genocide? Managing Editor of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Haaretz English Edition, August 16, 2019.”
It was our intention to provide a link here to the original article followed by the proposed Op Ed reply by Israel W. Charny that will follow shortly. However, all our efforts to recover the Haaretz article from the internet, in order to provide such a link, have been unsuccessful. Apparently Haaretz has removed the article from their website. Under these circumstances, we are going to quote here a few key statements from the article that was published in the newspaper which will then to be followed by the unpublished Op Ed statement.
Excerpted Quotes from Peled Article:
A former factory complex, Potocari, was where the UN’s Dutch battalion was stationed in 1995 and to where local Muslims fled in the vain hope of protection when Bosnian Serb forces moved on the Bosnian Muslim enclave:
The ensuing days saw the systematic murder of over 8,000 men and boys in several locations, an atrocity the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia found to be an act of genocide.
For those whom, as Avraham Burg once put it, the Holocaust forever buzzes in their ear like a mosquito, it seems familiar – the ghettoization; the piles of lost possessions; the cowed, emaciated victims.
There was a “selection” in Potocari, too, when the men and boys were separated from the women and girls and led away to almost certain death. That also took place in front of the UN, and no one intervened.
At Potocari, I ask about visitors from Israel, whom I perhaps expected might be interested in solidarity with other victims of a 20th century European genocide. But I am told there is no relationship or interest. I find this strange because the Jewish Diaspora with its Holocaust memorial institutions and museums, has a much more universalist outlook. I asked about collaboration with Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Authority, Yad Vashem, naively assuming that the intersection of the rarefied world of genocide studies and the small club of nations that have experienced such events would have produced some form of relationship… Their work is to memorialize but also to warn, educate and prevent.
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Proposed Op Ed reply to the above article by Israel Charny that was not accepted for publication by Haaretz:
INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF GENOCIDE SCHOLARS RECOGNIZED AND PARTICIPATED IN MEMORIAL AT BOSNIAN CEMETERY FOR SREBRENICA VICTIMS
In an article in Haaretz (August 16, 2019) Daniella Peled asks, “Does Yad Vashem have a problem with the Bosnian genocide?” I was saddened as always by the report of our Israel ignoring the genocide of another people.
I was all the more upset by her reports that Israeli scholars and former Yad Vashem employees were now aiding Republika SRPSKA Serbian revisionists who are denying the genocide of the Bosnians, or in the case of Professor Yehuda Bauer denying that the mass murders at Srebrenica constituted genocide.
The brutal calculated murder of 8000 Bosnian men at Srebrenica in itself is a human-sensibility shattering event of genocidal murder. Many called it the worst genocidal massacre that had occurred in Europe since the end of World War II, the International Criminal Court ruled unambiguously that it was an event of genocide, and any plain thinking decent human being knows that when you line up 8000 men to kill them in cold blood you are doing —— something, and that something is clearly what Raphael Lemkin and the United Nations Convention on Genocide brilliantly named “genocide.”
However, I am happy to offer a small correction about Israeli presence in Bosnia. As then president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), of which I was a co-founder, I convened our international conference in July 2007 in Srebrenica, and we purposely coordinated the conference dates so that we could be collectively present at the cemetery where the remains of Srebrenica victims were being re-buried at the annual ceremony Peled describes. At the ceremony I was invited to speak on Bosnian national media on behalf of IAGS, but I also made a point of conveying my identity as an Israeli and allowed myself to say that we in Israel, who have tragically known the genocide of our Jewish people, join the Bosnian people fully in their grief and outrage.
Prof. Israel W. Charny, Director, Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide Jerusalem, is the author of the recent book, The Genocide Contagion: How We Commit and Confront Holocaust and Genocide which includes exercises for the readers to see themselves in a future genocide scenario.