[Bennett Muraskin is on the faculty of the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism, wrote Let Justice Well Up Like Water: Progressive Jews from Hillel to Helen Suzman, and is a columnist at Jewish Currents.]

Avraham Burg has a fascinating biography. His father Joseph Burg, was a German Jew who arrived in Palestine in 1939 as a refugee from Nazism. For many years, he led Israel’s National Religious Party and served as a government minister. His mother’s family lived in Hebron for generations before she was driven out in the 1929 anti-Jewish riots that killed over 100 Jews including half her family.

Born in 1955 in Jerusalem, Avraham Burg is an observant Jew, yet has always been identified with the Israeli left. He joined Peace Now and participated in the movement against the Israel’s first Lebanon War in 1983. He was injured in the same grenade attack by an Israeli right-winger on a Peace Now demonstration that killed another protester. Entering the political mainstream, he was elected to the Knesset as a Labor Party candidate in 1988, became Speaker of the Knesset in the 1990s and mounted a serious challenge for leadership of the Labor Party in 2001. Along the way, he served as president of the two pillars of the Zionist establishment---the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization.

First published in Hebrew in 2007, as Defeating Hitler: The Holocaust is Over it caused a storm of controversy. For too long, Burg argues, Israel has been obsessed with the Holocaust. The slaughter of the 6 million Jews in Europe has become internalized to the extent that Israelis view themselves as a nation of victims. Although armed with a powerful military, including nuclear weapons and allied with the sole super power, Israel acts as if it is threatened with annihilation. Its political discourse is laden analogies to the plight of Jews in pre-war Europe and with the Holocaust itself. “We have pulled the Shoah out of its historical context”, writes Burg, “and turned it into a plea and generator for every deed. All is compared to the Shoah, dwarfed by the Shoah and therefore all is allowed—be it fences, sieges… curfews, food and water deprivation or unexplained killings. All is permitted because we have been through the Shoah and you will not tell us how to behave.”

Burg uses the language of psychology to describe the mentality of the majority of Israeli Jews. Abused as a “child,” it has become an abusive “parent.” The suffering of Jews in Nazi Europe becomes the rationale to show no mercy to the Palestinians and other Arabs. First Nasser, then Arafat and Saddam Hussein and now Hamas and Iranian president Ahmanidejad are equated with Hitler. Displacing their anger from Nazis to Arabs, right wing settlers and ultra -orthodox fundamentalists have fostered a “Jewish racist doctrine” shared to various degrees by mainstream Israelis that consider Arabs as inferior beings who do not deserve equal rights.

Ironically, Burg reminds us, the initial reaction to the Holocaust in Israel was one of shame. Jews supposedly went like sheep to the slaughter because they were mired in the slavish habits of the “galut” or exile. Holocaust survivors in Israel were discouraged from telling their stories. The turning point was the Eichmann trial in 1961, where testimony from Jewish victims broadcast live on the radio struck a powerful chord with the Israeli populace. This should have been a catharsis. Instead, according to Burg, it became “a theological pillar of modern Jewish identity” exploited by Zionist leaders to convince Jews that “the whole world is against us.” Or as he calls it, “a boundless paranoia that is no longer able to distinguish between friend a predator, a primitive suspicion of every one, all the time about every issue.” Zionism promised to purge Jews of their “ghetto mentality.” Instead Israel has reproduced it on a larger scale, continuing to believe “the entire world is against us.”

Questioning Zionism is a cardinal sin throughout the Jewish world, although it has a long history among Jews including Vladimir Medem, Elmer Burger, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Judah Magnes, Isaac Deutscher, Noam Chomsky and many others. Burg would like to see Israel become “a state of all its Jews and all its citizens with the majority determining its character.” This would entail repealing the Law of Return that grants preferential immigration rights to Jews and all laws that discriminate between Jews and non-Jews. An ethno-religious state would give way to one based on humanistic Jewish values.

The best traditions in Judaism, Burg avers, are now honored more in the Diaspora than in the Jewish state. In order to return to them, mixed groups of Jewish and Arab youth should be taken on a grand tour of Europe from Spain to Germany and Poland to explore both the Jewish and Muslim experience in Europe, past and present. Auschwitz should not be on the itinerary. Another trip should bring Israeli Jewish students to the US to learn “how life with national meaning can be lived without an external enemy, and with full trust between Jews and the non-Jewish environment.”

Burg’s arguments are not entirely new. Israel journalist Tom Segev explored the tortured relationship between Israelis and the Holocaust in his book The Seventh Million, published in Hebrew in 1991 and in a 1993 English-language edition, and which came to the same conclusions. Neither proposes that Israelis forget the Holocaust. Rather they need to draw different lessons. As Burg has said, “There are two kinds of people coming out of Auschwitz. Those who said never again for the Jews and those like me who say never again for any human beings.”

If Burg set out to provoke, he succeeded. The danger is that this book is too provocative, debunking too many Zionist sacred cows at once to earn a fair hearing. The Jewish establishment in Israel and elsewhere consider Burg persona non grata. A minority on the left, mainly youth, consider him a prophet. Let’s hope that unlike so many others, he is appreciated in his own time.