How October 7 turned one man’s diary upside down – DNyuz

“What kind of diary would I most like to have?” Virginia Woolf asked in her diary in 1919 before attempting an answer: “Something loosely knitted, and yet not sloppy, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, small or beautiful that comes to my mind.” The immediacy of writing without much time for reflection provided a welcome form of non-thinking, Woolf noted. A diary, which she had written a few months earlier, “accidentally sweeps up a number of stray matters which if I hesitated I would have to exclude, but which are the diamonds from the dust heap.”

Historian Saul Friedländer began keeping his own diary in January 2023 to document the political turmoil in his adopted country as Benjamin Netanyahu’s government encroached on the country’s judicial independence. His almost daily entries are often no more than a few paragraphs long and begin right as Israel’s Justice Minister Yariv Levin unveils a plan to pass a series of laws that would effectively neutralize Israel’s Supreme Court and Netanyahu’s government unchecked power. and turning Israel into what political scientists call a hollow democracy.

Friedländer, who is in his 90s, was born into a Jewish family that emigrated from Prague to Paris during World War II. He arrived in Israel in 1948, just as the state was formally established. Although he has lived in the United States for the past several decades, teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles and writing a definitive Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Holocaust, Israel remains his spiritual home. It is a place he loves and one that – as a liberal peacemaker who invested in a two-state future – he increasingly despairs of. “Where have all the liberals disappeared to?” he wonders. “Why couldn’t their brand of human Judaism thrive in the Jewish state? Why the increasing rush to fanaticism?”

The diary he was writing now appears under the name ‘Diary of a Crisis’, as if there is only one to contend with, an irony that becomes even greater when October 7 arrives and splits his story in two. The first half of his book, full of sharp tsk-tsks, is devoted to that rush to fanaticism. Friedländer describes Netanyahu as a “cunning mafia type who is willing to burn down his own house to save his skin.” Levin is a ‘poisonous snake with glasses’. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right Minister of National Security, is an ‘evil clown’.

His tone as he parses the latest headlines is indignant, sad and angry. He states that the government’s ‘messianic urge’ must be combated ‘by all legal means’. As he closes this part of his diary in July 2023, the government’s first bill to hobble the Supreme Court is signed into law, leaving the future of Israeli democracy at stake. Still, he takes heart in the country’s new pro-democracy movement—the hundreds of thousands of Israelis protesting the government’s actions—and ends with a note of hope.

However, all this is disrupted when Friedländer takes up his writing again. It’s October 7. A Hamas-led force has just breached the security fence separating Israel from Gaza and began a massacre at the site of a music festival and nearby kibbutzim in what will be the most brutal attack on Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. . “Unbelievable! The country is under attack!” his entry begins from that day, as the book turns from a fairly simple synthesis of the news to something more anguished and raw. It is an attack of the kind that Friedländer himself seems to have predicted, when he wrote seven months earlier: ‘Israel’s. enemies are aware of the internal divide and are willing to exploit it. This could not be clearer.”

As the days turn into weeks, and then months, he also evokes a sense of moral outrage at the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza. For some in his life, that’s not enough. He mentions in passing a friendship that came under strain, apparently because of his perceived identification with “the oppressor,” as he puts it, but does not elaborate.

What purpose is a diary other than to reflect on crumbling friendships and ideological quarrels? The form should free the writer from wrestling with demons, from plundering what Woolf calls the “loose, drifting stuff of life.” Friedländer himself uses various diaries in his books about Nazi Germany with astonishing detail. But here the diary’s contracting, fragmentary format only seems to enclose him.

Too many issues raised by the specter of October 7 and the war in Gaza remain underexposed. “Why this hatred?” he writes about growing cases of anti-Semitism worldwide before raising the question. “I won’t start answering here: it requires more than a few sentences and a lot of thinking.”

That’s an understandable feeling for a historian used to sifting through material. But who other than a leading scholar of Jewish history – one who grew up in the shadow of its collective-defining trauma – is better equipped to think the matter seriously and report back his findings? His conclusions may be obscure or contradictory, and perhaps unflattering, but that is exactly the kind of intellectual exercise for which we turn to the clairvoyant Friedländer.

“Palestine as hope, and Israel as reality, are the justification for the existence of a Jewish state in the land of Israel,” writes Friedländer in “Diary of a Crisis” after describing the story of his parents, who never have saved. there. (Both were murdered in Auschwitz.) It is the only convincing justification, he adds, “provided we show justice to the people we robbed and share the land with them.”

Friedländer continues to endorse the need for a Palestinian state, with even greater urgency after October 7. But he fears there won’t be enough moderates on both sides to make it happen. He offers no way out of the quagmire of war, nor should he be expected to do so. The closing sentence of the book paraphrases Charles de Gaulle: “I approached the complicated Middle East with ideas that were (too) simple.” Friedländer writes modestly about his desire to continue working on the diary until the end of the war and the release of the hostages, but the entries end before winter. The book goes to the press. Months later, his book is out and the end is still not in sight. A question from one of his entries echoes through our bleeding region: “What happened to us?”

The post How October 7 Turned One Man’s Diary Upside Down first appeared in the New York Times.