Historical parallels are messy matches -- Venn diagrams overlapping in the center whose leaves flap independently in their own unique breezes. And parallels made via notions held in common are iffier still, language and context shifting to alter color, shape and meaning. Still, catchwords held in common resonate, sometimes ominously so: “The enemy within” is one of them.

At the end of his blog, “Prussia on the Mediterranean?” (http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/438863?rel=hp_picks) Roane Carey describes an Israel which “increasingly sees its Palestinian citizens as a menace, as the enemy within...” Political dissidents, they are, untermenschlich voters reproducing themselves at non-Jewish rates, genetically scheming to become a voting majority. Guns they may not have, or F-16s, but sedition lies in their hearts. Better, safer without them.

At least two historical parallels force themselves to mind, weaving their themes in and out of the current situation in the middle east. The first is Germany in the later thirties until the Wannsee meeting in ‘41, with its Final Solution. The second is the early French Revolution, from the overthrow of the Bastille in ‘89 to the beginning of the Terror four years later.

National Socialist Strategy

Step 1.  Define the enemy.  Jewishness was clearly and legally defined as part of a problem.  Thus the Jews were made “other” to the rest of the population.

Step 2.  Eliminate the enemy from the economy.  Jews were not allowed to work in state-affiliated institutions.  Jewish stores were boycotted and vandalized.  “Otherness” was thereby increased, as the Jews were forced from the normal productive economy, and were now an ever-increasing problem -- and not just by definition.

Step 3. Ostracize by custom and law.  Many other discriminatory laws were put into place.

Step 4. Remove from view.  Ghettos were created to wall the problem off from the rest of the population. Jews thus became less visible.  When they began to disappear, there was often little to notice.  As intolerable conditions developed in the ghettos, inhuman measures were justified as humane.  Jews were killed in “acts of mercy” -- in order to “spare them the agony of famine”.   In deliberately intolerable conditions, the stage was set for even more radical steps.

Ostracism as a policy in Nazi Germany

In his hair-raising book, Nazi Justiz (Praeger 1995), Richard Miller describes the gradual, multifaceted ways in which Jews were turned from productive members of society into an kind of “living dead” who were permitted to wander through society, but forbidden to take part in it.  The mass killings in the camps was only a late development, the logical “final” successor of many incremental “solutions” inflicted along the way on an increasingly desperate people.  

Miller concentrates on Germany in the 30s, after the rise of Hitler, but before the war, when all changes affecting Jews were done “legally”, “democratically”, with support from the media and the German people.  In this “time of peace”, a variety of local and national laws were passed, with due deliberation, in no way a result of military desperation. Across the country , jot by innovative jot, legal and social restrictions fell into place which sealed the victims’ fate. 

The movement began with “unofficial” boycotting of Jewish businesses or professionals.  Boycotts spread to those who patronized Jews in any way, thus taking goods and wages away from good German citizens.  Such “unofficial” boycotts were peppered with equally “unofficial” violence, of which Kristallnacht was the most coordinated example.  Naturally, there was no police protection.

Having recognized a “mandate” from the people, governments began to act against “the enemy within”.  A pastiche of creatively sadistic local law and ever more inclusive national law took control of Jewish life, and eventually obviated the need for “unofficial” populist action.  Place by place, Jews were not allowed in parks, theaters, libraries, museums, sports stadia, beaches, athletic and social clubs.  They could not be guests in hotels, or get service at restaurants.   One profession after another banned Jews from being licensed.  Jews would no longer be granted permits to open retail stores, or be allowed into blue or white collar unions or the jobs they controlled.  They couldn’t be patent agents or lawyers, tax consultants or swimming instructors, lifeguards, jockeys, actors, lottery salesmen, stock brokers, antique dealers, archivists. They couldn’t rent out park chairs, or distribute motion pictures, or deal in art or literary works.  They were prevented from dealing in currency, engineering construction projects, selling guns.  No Jew could be a detective, private guard, accountant, or work in a credit agency.  No Jew could be a tourist guide, a pedlar, auctioneer, or real estate agent, or manage a factory, house, estate, or land.  Needless to say, all the new business and newly opened job opportunities went to Aryans, vastly increasing the popularity of the Nazi regime.

In areas where Jews were not yet banned, other ways were found to shut them down.  Before real estate licenses were outlawed for Jews, tax authorities refused to deal with Jewish agents, leaving few property owners interested in hiring them.  Sugar was cut off to Jewish bakers and candy-makers, effectively destroying their businesses. Legal Jewish newsstands would be refused newspapers; Jewish textile managers could no longer get raw materials.  Jewish businesses could not put ads in commercial directories, newspapers, on billboards or the radio.  Eventually all employment was restricted except particularly loathsome tasks: cleaning public toilets and sewage plants, jobs at rag and bone works were considered possibly “suitable” for Jews.  Outside of such work, Jews had to somehow fend for themselves.

How could even that be made more difficult?   Travel bans and invalidation of passports were obvious.   But how about no parking for Jews?  Special license plates to identify Jewish cars for special harassment.  Soon enough, prohibition of drivers licenses, and then restriction from public transportation.  Impoverished Jews could not rent their homes, sublet, or sell.  Retirement benefits and contracted pensions were cancelled, as were all insurance policies.  Jewish students were not allowed to take finals, and so couldn’t complete their schooling.  All student loans had to be repaid within 2 weeks, regardless of contractual payment schedules; those in default were subject to police action.   Jewish streets were not cleaned, nor were other municipal services available.  German police, when present at all, were an occupying army, and beatings and attacks were common.  Many main sections of towns became off-limits to Jews, and any remnants of Jewish culture came under attack:  Jewish art and music were censored as “decadent”, and even jazz was attacked as “a barbarian invasion supported by Jews.”

Because Jews were to be restricted from so many areas, they needed to be easily identified. Rush-hour passengers would not tolerate checking IDs of every boarding passenger, so eventually the yellow star was required, with strict punishment for any Jew who did not wear one in public.  Germany had long been known as a land of “law and order”.  But Jews could not use the justice system to thwart clearly illegal onslaughts.  All courts were packed with government appointees to enforce, not judge, official policy.  The object of the law was to protect the state, not the individual citizen. If Jews were a menace to the state, then all laws oppressing them, were both legal and just.  Furthermore, laws were seen as implying “direction”,  and were not confined to their original settings. For instance the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service spoke only of dismissing Jewish government employees.  Martin Heidegger however, as rector of the University of Freiburg, ended fellowship payments to Jewish students under the guiding spirit of that decree. 

Courts built rulings on Nazi party resolutions, and took their philosophical guidance from Hitler speeches.  Naturally, Jewish defendants were at an extreme disadvantage.  Jewish lawyers were barred from court; Aryan lawyers could not serve Jews.  Consequently, Jews had to represent themselves against highly trained adversaries.  Judges were instructed to view Jewish witnesses “with extreme caution”, and no verdict was to be passed when a sentence would have to be based entirely on Jewish testimony.

Just in case there were any legislative objection to these judicial proceedings, Hitler pushed through the “Enabling Act” which allowed his handpicked cabinet to make laws having the same validity as any passed by the Reichstag, even ones disregarding the Constitution.  The circle was closed, complete and tight.  The living dead would soon become the dead -- period.

The Enemy Within, variation 1. Variation 2: shorter, sharper, if not sweeter:

            France’s Great Fear

La Grand Peur normally refers to a period in the French countryside shortly after the storming of the Bastille in Paris.

“They’re coming, they’re coming!” “Who’s coming?” “They!”

Out in the boonies, in the apprehensive weeks following the taking of the Bastille, “they” might have been anybody: British marines already landed; the Swedes gathered in the northeast led by Artois, or the thirty thousand Spanish troops gathered, perhaps, outside Bordeaux.

But the “they” most often feared were the enemy within -- putative gangs of frightening “brigands,” relishing rape, dismemberment, and the wholesale burning of houses, farms, and crops, starving peasant bands gathered to devour their own, financed by Artois and other aristocrats to take revenge on the French people for their theft of the National Assembly. “The brigands are coming!”

The tocsin is rung, village militias are gathered, armed with pitchforks and scythes. People are sent to warn the next village.

The children are hidden in haylofts and given bread, cheese, and milk for a multi day siege. The brigands, so they say, have already murdered all the men and boys two towns over. The mayhem never arrives. But the breathless band sent out to warn is seen itself as evidence of the approach of the brigands.

And then again: Nobles out to attack us? Let’s fire the castles. The nobles, the landlords, the judges—they’re always preying on us. Do they know what we’re thinking? Do they think us incapable of thought? Do they even know we’re here? We’ll show them.

All over France, estate owners were attacked, their cellars and larders looted, their legal documents—those mysterious orders written by lawyers and enforced by the police—destroyed, and their chateaux burnt.

In fear of retribution, they, too, were coming, the landlords and their armies. They’ve been meeting. Soldiers have been seen. Cottagers drove their cattle in from the fields, shuttered their windows, and barred their doors. Townspeople armed themselves, locked the gates, manned their walls. Rumor was cheap—but decisive. “La grande peur.”: the enemy within. As the illiterate and unpropertied majority rose up, paranoia reigned, and the countryside feared even itself in collective psychosis.

After a while, as reality failed to correspond with imagination, “the great fear” waned, and slept, until its grand, better-than-ever awakening.

The Terror

Historians call it The Terror, or The Reign of Terror, and generally date that period from the fall of 1793 to the late summer of the following year. But, for me, The Terror was yet another statement of La Grand Peur -- of the Enemy Within.

With the formation of the Committee on Public Safety on September 6th, ‘73, the stage  was set for the elimination of the enemies of the revolution. Vernichtung. And that stage became the scaffold, the viewing platform of Dr. Guillotin’s humanitarian device for painless, instantaneous execution and intimidation of the enemy within -- the scheming nobility wanting the return of their privileges, the avaricious clergy wanting the return of their domain, and above all, the vast sea of unidentified people who might want to keep (as Peter Weiss so admirably describes) a painting, a mistress, a horse, a garden, an estate, their factories, their shipyards...their king.

Dissenting political parties were closed down, and their leaders arrested: the Revolutionary Tribunal became a Revolutionary dictatorship, and the guillotines were fully booked. Robespierre called the shots: “The Terror is nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice.”

An arresting detail: back in December of 1792, Robespierre had given a long and passionate speech to the National Assembly against capital punishment as a policy for an enlightened new world. What happened to this “incorruptible” lawyer, who as a child rescued baby birds, and had dedicated his law practice to the poor?

What had happened was the Great Fear of the Enemy Within, an “existential fear” that the world-shaking project of revolutionary France would be suffocated in its cradle, pushed into the sea of human fallenness and greed. Robespierre and France turned from savior to mass murderer, as the new world sunk deep into old blood-threaded mud.

Prussia on the Mediterranean

Palestinians the problem. Ostracism. Ghettos. Walls. Removal from view. Work limitations. Economic strangulation. Travel restrictions. Legal justifications. Imprisonment of opposition lawmakers. Sadistic local regulations. Enabling acts. Mass arrests. Secret prisons. Torture.

Even given the looseness of  historical parallels, that Israelis are so worried about “the enemy within” is a cause of great concern. We have already seen full-blown Israeli terror against innocent populations in Lebanon and Gaza. Who needs guillotines when one has F-16s, Merkavas, and white phosphorus? We continue to see Israeli terrorist behavior in the West Bank -- settler violence against people, land, crops, animals; bulldozer violence against homes; checkpoint violence day in and day out; IDF shooting at children and peaceful demonstrators. The Great Fear of the anger of Untermenschen grows along with that anger in a devil’s circle of violence and potential violence. 

The world is witnessing a saber dance on very thin ice. If history provides at least a warning guide, Israel is dangerously close to falling into an cold Reign of Terror, even within its ‘67 borders.

A broken-jawed Robespierre ended up screaming in pain and horror under the falling blade he so embraced. Germans have still not recovered psychically from the Third Reich.

The Enemy Within was themselves.