The decision to remove a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, did not cause the current rift in American society, but it certainly triggered what occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia last month, an incident likely to repeat itself in other places. Ironically, Lee was not at all a racist -- in a letter he wrote to The New York Times before the war, he admitted that he was about to free his own slaves. If he were alive today, he probably would be the first to repugnantly denounce the racist thugs that started the riots. What both the racist neo-Nazi thugs shouting anti-Semitic slogans and the Antifa -- anti-Fascist -- thugs on the other side apparently did not know is that thousands of Jews fought in the ranks of the Southern army during the American Civil War. They even earned the friendship and support of Lee, as opposed to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, the commander of the Northern army and later the 18th American president. Grant happened to be an anti-Semite who issued General Order No. 11, which expelled all Jews from the military district under his control in late 1862. Even though the American Civil War is usually presented as a righteous struggle to free the slaves, the reasons and motivations for the war were much more complicated, including an economic struggle between the agrarian South and the industrial North. As proof of this, anti-slavery Great Britain and France sided with the South -- not because they supported slavery, but because they needed Southern cotton for their textile industries. Moreover, the war was one of principles, a struggle between two basic political views: Is the U.S. a confederacy of sovereign states as the South maintained, or is it the union itself that is sovereign, with policy being formulated by the executive, legislative and judicial branches in Washington, D.C.- It is unclear why Charlottesville's mayor decided to remove the statue of Lee specifically now -- a move that, by the way, a national survey discovered most Americans oppose -- but if the intention was to quell the interracial and intercultural tensions that have gotten worse over the past decade, then it achieved the opposite: Both the Right and the Left have become more radicalized. Moreover, there is a wave of populism washing over America and other places around the world that demands removing statues of historical figures if their actions or opinions do not match the widespread, accepted notions of the day. To a certain extent, this is an attempt to rewrite history, as these statues and the people they commemorate indeed represent concepts that were once accepted or events that happened at a specific time and place long ago. What they represent is a fact, and these statues demand nothing of us in the present. This trend exists in Canada as well, for example, with some calling for the statue of Canadian Prime Minister John Alexander Macdonald, considered the country's founder, to be taken down because he ignored the rights of Canada's original inhabitants. In Australia, for the same reason, there are those who call for the statue of Capt. James Cooke, who discovered the continent, to be taken down. Not even statues of Christopher Columbus in America are safe. The phenomenon of historical revision exists also in England, although not to the same level: Some British blame Winston Churchill for being responsible for World War II. His statue, which proudly stands in all its glory in front of the British Parliament building, remains upright, but it is impossible to know what tomorrow will bring. Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome commemorated different figures in statues, and it is doubtful if we would have been able to identify them without the historical writings and books telling us about them. Maybe the lesson to be learned in the case of Lee is that the best way to make ensure the memory of a leader, or anyone else, remains alive is to write books and not erect statues -- even if the figure is controversial, straddling dissonant conceptualizations of morality between different time periods. The appearance of statues in Israel is thankfully quite limited. Statues of Theodor Herzl, David Ben-Gurion and Ze'ev Jabotinsky appear here and there, most of them quite ugly -- but usually in closed areas, not in city squares. It is better this way. That being said, one of the most ridiculous and tasteless artistic visions is the gallery of former Israeli presidents' heads that greets visitors to the Presidential Residence. The commandment "thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image" (Exodus 20:3) applies to us not only in the religious sense, apparently.
