Outside Siedlce a German plane appeared... and we threw ourselves into an adjacent potato field, face down...I heard the bullets whistling over my head and...turning on my side, I saw a solider aiming his rifle at the airplane...It was a bizarre sight.
In his memoirs, my father recounts his and my grandparents' harrowing escape from Poland following the Nazi invasion on September 1, 1939. In the following days, they would see other bizarre and terrible sights, not least of which was a man "with a nearly severed arm dangling bloodily from his side."
My father's abhorrence of war was probably born at that moment. Not that he was a pacifist. After making it to the U.S. and finishing high school, my father was drafted, only to miss going overseas. He regretted this, especially after learning that 300+ boys and girls who lived at the sanatorium that my grandfather directed had been gassed at Treblinka.
Still, my father had no illusions about what it means to kill another man. The terrible fact of the Holocaust instilled in him an enduring disgust for jingoism of every kind, for the stupidity of every romantic notion of battle and a soldier's heroism. My father had zero patience for anyone who made self-deluding excuses for military adventurism, be it in Central and South America, East Asia or the Middle East.
When it came to the Middle East, his intense convictions led him to evaluate the actions of Arab and Israeli leaders with a unforgiving objectivity. If he blamed Arab leaders for the folly of 1967, he was harsher towards those Israelis who countenanced a settlement policy that—he believed—could only be defied at great political and even human cost. Prime Minister Rabin's assassination confirmed his worst fears while nearly destroying his hopes for Palestinian-Israeli peace.
In recent weeks I have often thought how my father would react to events in Gaza. He would have been disgusted by the loss of innocent civilian life among Palestinians, and he would have assailed the strategic folly of equating the fight with Hamas with the struggle against Iran. But as he had few illusions about the ultimate objectives of Hamas. Moreover, he would not have absolved the organization for lobbing its primitive missiles at Israeli civilian targets—even if those attacks usually missed their mark.
My father died a year ago this week. I miss his critical eye, as well as his unrelenting sense of humor. He did not suffer fools or foolishness easily. But had he survived, he would have celebrated the extraordinary political transformation unfolding in his adopted country, and marveled at the capacity of Americans to transcend their own history.
Daniel Brumberg is an associate professor of government and director of democracy and governance studies at Georgetown University. He is also a senior nonresident fellow at the Project on Middle East Democracy. His work focuses on political, social and economic change in the Middle East and wider Muslim World.
