
Burg's insights are not only poignant in light of current events – the invasion of Gaza dominating the news every night for over a week, as of this writing – but also because he addresses the psychic impact that Israel's fixation on the Holocaust has on its ubiquitous victim complex. And, by extension, the disservice done when modern threats are contextualized in this historical mold.
Burg tells Time: "The Holocaust is a very real trauma for many people in Israel, and nobody can argue with that. But ... when I hear someone like Benjamin Netanyahu, who is a very intelligent person, say of [Iran's President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, 'It's 1938 all over again,' I say, is it?! Is this the reality? Did we have such an omnipotent army in 1938? Did we have an independent state in 1938? Did we have the unequivocal support in 1938 of all the important superpowers in the world? No, we did not. And when you compare Ahmadinejad to Hitler, don't you diminish Hitler's significance?"
Burg's comments set my mind back to the fallacious comparison of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan – an comparison of axes that infamously over inflated the perceived threat of the former while trivializing the later. I do not mean to suggest that such modern menaces are unimportant, only that there is a distinct difference between gangsters and devils that must not be obfuscated through rhetoric.
But Burg's interview with Time also reminded me of a 2005 Frontline piece about the place of the Holocaust in modern German identity. I was especially struck, in this regard, by Burg's laments over damage done to Israeli culture by this fixation on trauma: "Look where we were 100 years ago and look where we are today — no other people made this transformation. Imagine we did not keep the shadow of the trauma looming over ourselves daily, what could we have been? How come 25% of the Nobel laureates in certain fields are of Jewish origins, and 10% of the arms deals around the world are done by Israelis? Why is my brother or sister in America a great poet or composer or physician whose achievements raise up all of humanity, and I who live here on my sword became a world expert on arms and swords? Is that really my mission, or is that an outcome of the black water with which I water my flowers? To make our contribution to humanity, we have to free ourselves of the obsession with the trauma."

The issue that Burg appears to be driving at is how can a modern nation creative a positive, forward-looking future for itself in the shadow of such pain – and its associated guilt. This is a question that PBS's Frontline tacked from the other side back in 2005 with their documentary "A Jew Among the Germans." Only, where Burg argues that the Holocaust's centrality in Israeli identity creates a dysfunctional society, Frontline explores how the German Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe impacts German identity.
Dr. James Young, a scholar of Holocaust memorials worldwide and a judge for the second memorial competition in Berlin, tells Frontline, "Countries don't build monuments to their crimes. In America, we have not built monuments to ... how do you reunite a divided country, in this case a divided city, on the bedrock memory of national crimes?"

The issue of how we choose to remember the past – especially the tragic and ignoble episodes in our own national stories – is one of the core problems of national identity as well as history. Is it possible for an Israeli to contextualize their state without identifying with the Holocaust or the Arab-Israeli conflict? Is it possible for a German to contextualize their reunited nation without acknowledging the sins of their ancestors? The trick is to build a future without guilt, be it imposed or embraced.
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