Kosovo Comparisons to Holocaust do Both a Disservice

Gerald L. Zelizer

Avi Pazner, who was the first Israeli ambassador to Albania and a Holocaust survivor, recently visited a refugee camp on the border with Kosovo. On his knees, he offered an apple to a child, then looked deeply into the eyes of the boy's grandfather, an old man.

"I feel like I am going back in time....I have the impression I visit my people here," Pazner told The New York Times. "I think all the time about these people as Jews."

Similarly, "I cannot tell you enough how close I feel to the children," Elie Wiesel, a Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor, said of the refugees in Monday's USA TODAY. "They are destroying their homes, they are destroying their past, they are destroying their lives. Why? Why?"

But Wiesel refused to do what so many others are doing today: liken the ethnic cleansing by Serbs to the Jewish Holocaust.

"The difference is, they are not going to gas chambers, as did my parents, my family, my community, when we were taken," he said.

A short line connects the victims who suffer at the hands of brutes, whether they be Slobodan Milosevic or Adolf Hitler. All religious folk are bound in such situations to act on the biblical verse, "Do not stand idly by the blood of thy brother," and to support NATO attempts to alleviate human suffering.

Once that commonality is acknowledged, however, there are few comparisons between what is occurring in 1999 and what happened in 1939.

Milosevic, as cruel as he is, does not want to blot out every Albanian on the planet. He covets their Kosovo territory and the historic sites Serbs prize within that region for himself and for Serbian nationalism. He has shown that he is even willing to negotiate with Ibrahim Rugova, an Albanian leader -- just a puppet, some say - who acknowledges Serbian hegemony in Kosovo.

Hitler did not dispute Jews over territory, but over their right to be part of the human race. He negotiated with no Jew. Auschwitz was not a relocation camp on a border. It was an extermination hole.

Moreover, the killing and routing of the Albanians are done by Serbs alone. In the decimation of the Jews, Germans utilized antisemitic henchmen of many other populations. In order to identify and locate Jews, Germans required the collaboration of local Latvians, Ukranians, Lithuanians and Estonians.

By contrast, suffering ethnic Albanians know that beyond tormentors are sympathizers. Jews had no such hope, because the club of torturers was composed of so many nationalities.

Tensions between the Albanians and Serbs have flared for centuries. Even though there were cultural and racial antecedents in Germany, Nazi hatred of the Jews exploded only in the 20th century, especially after World War I.

Prior to Hitler, Jews were integrated into the commercial and cultural life of Germany so thoroughly that many regarded themselves as Germans first and Jews last. No Albanian ever regarded himself as a Serb first and Albanian last. The deracination of Jews in the Holocaust was sudden and unanticipated. By contrast, previous ethnic-cleansing campaigns against Albanians in 1913 and 1920 made both civil conflict and more severe slaughters more predictable.

Fortunately, the most significant difference is that NATO, supported by the majority of Americans in opinion polls, is eager and willing to bomb to choke off the Serbian killing machines.

During Word War II, there was no such eagerness. When President Franklin Roosevelt was petitioned to bomb the railroads leading to the death camps, he refused, reasoning that nothing should divert human and material resources from winning the overall war effort. Ethnic Albanians can lean on the glimmer of hope that many governments, supported by their citizens, are willing to intervene. The Jews had no such assurance or possibility.

The sole major similarity between these events is that Serbian hatred for the Albanians is a fusion of ethnic and religious antagonism. The Albanians speak a different language and live a different culture from the host Serbs. They also practice a different religion, Islam, which has been resented and resisted by people of other religions since the Middle Ages. German hatred of the Jews, too, was native culture vs. alien ways. But the antisemitism of German socialism also incubated in a religious hatred of "perfidious Jews," which was preached and taught in churches of Christian Europe for over a millennium.

Rabbi Stephen Listfield of New Jersey has written that "people of faith do not require the Holocaust analogy to compel intervention in Kosovo. They need only the biblical passage, 'Thou shall not murder.'"

Comparisons to the Holocaust, which is remembered today in the Jewish calendar, not only trivialize the broader and deeper tragedy of that event. By equating two essentially dissimilar miseries, we muddle the unique aspects that may yield potential solutions to the Kosovo conflict. Territory can be negotiated. Membership in the human race cannot.

When the world wills stoppage, as now, a political accommodation will ensue. When the world did not care, as with the Holocaust, annihilation was encouraged. In understanding the differences between 1999 and 1939, not their similarity, we can focus more precisely on possible resolutions.

As Wiesel opined in another recent article, "Kosovo demands actions, not comparisons."