Is Israel guilty for everything?
by Karl Pfeifer
In spite of all the lopsided and false explanations of historian Tony Judt, Israeli society is pluralistic and most of the Diaspora Jews - who - as he claims - sympathize with Israel - could overlook his advice in ”An ethnic Society. How should one define Israel?” published December 12th on the Sueddeutschen Zeitung .
Judt is not shy away from demagogy. He pretends to speak for “us Jews” and feels he is entitled to ask New York Jews the “most decisive question” : who are we”? As if they had nothing else to do. And as an answer he expects they would express a “presumably very strong racial and ethno deterministic interpretation”, contradicting Jewish history.
In Israel one can meet white, black, brown and yellow Jews. But for a tiny minority, nobody would define the Jews as a race neither in Israel nor in the Diaspora. The Jewish tradition is not racist. One glance at the Bible would confirm it. To prove it we have the long list of different names, covering all peoples of the world at the time, in the first book of Moses, chapter 10: and they are all offspring of Noah’s three sons, just one big family. we could quote plenty of excerpts from the Bible and the Talmud which are definitely against discrimination.
Very few Jewish thinkers interpreted the doctrine of ‘the chosen people’ in a racial way . Some Chasidim think that the Jewish soul is different from other souls, but these ideas are not part of the main stream.
Jewishness can neither be defined as a race nor as a homogenous ethnic group. The definition used in Israel: “A Jew is a person born from a Jewish mother or one who converted to Judaism” cannot be seen as a racial expression, in spite of Judt’s assertions.
There might be jewish genetic characteristics transmitted over many generations, but it’s the problem of geneticists and not of historians. When Judt talks of “the superiority of Jewish thought “and thinks that from the start “one has to ask this ethnically differentiating question”, he makes little reference to reality and much to his hallucinations.
When he fights against an hypothetical racial platform of Judaism, he obliges the thesis of the victim-turned perpetrator.
In 1945 Theodor W. Adorno (in his important work “ Mélange”) already demolished Judt’s current argumentation:
“The question of tolerance, meaning that all men and all races are equal, is a boomerang. Both by the simple refutation of the senses, or by the straight jacket of anthropological proofs, Jews are not a race - but it would not make any difference in a pogrom, because the totalitarians know best whom to kill”.
He continues: “A totally emancipated society would be no state, but a community created by conciling differences. Therefore politics, because that is what we are really speaking about, should not defend the abstract equality of people, not even as an idea.
By stating that a black person is exactly as a white one, we discriminate that person again in a hidden way. He is humiliated in a friendly way by criteria which do not help him fight the pressure of different conditions. Should he ask more than this, it would be questionable. Those who are in favour of one-sided tolerance usually have a bias against groups that do not adapt: with proper enthusiasm for the blacks, indignation about Jewish lack of manners can become acceptable”.
When Judt the historian states against all rational criteria that “the basic assumption of Zionism was that the Jews were a homogenous people”, he ignores the basic reality of the epidemic spread of anti-Semitism in Europe. He says that in order to contrast “the ethno- nationalistic movements in central and east Europe “, the Jews defined their own ethnic exclusivity. Which is not true. The German, Austrian and Hungarian Jews wanted to be recognized as Germans, Austrians and Hungarians of “mosaic faith” with equal rights.
The rising anti- Semitic movements were against this, and specifically rejected the assimilated Jews, hating most of all baptized ones.
Talking of the tangible anti Semitism of the 19th century, we cannot forget that Theodore Herzl experienced the fate of Captain Dreyfus in France, historically the land of Jewish emancipation: his transformation from a totally assimilated Jew belonging to officer ranks into a scapegoat. He saw how an anti Semitic mob used the trial as the occasion for a raging madness.
Karl Kraus, who reproached the Jews as responsible for anti Semitism already 110 years ago, as Judt does today, saw only one solution: Jews should disappear, assimilation is not enough. One can say that ”assimilation without psychological integration proved insufficient”.
Zionists were realistic people and did not see Jews as a community self-invented out of the blue. They recognized their powerless vulnerability (though not foreseeing anything like the Shoah) and created a state that is far from being perfect, but is the only Jewish state in this world. Such being the case, Semitism after Auschwitz evolved again. Israel as a state became the scapegoat and Judt contributes to it.
What can one say about a ‘scientist’ who reproaches Israelis for being Jewish and implicitly supports arab and muslim hegemony on the region?
If Judt’s Ethno Myth had a universalistic basis, it might be understandable. But then he could not play the role of “the good Jew” defending Arabs against “foreign” Jews, and thus offer reasons for their aggressions. With no proof whatsoever, he states that ”in being ever more aggressive, Israel pretends to speak and to act not only in the name of the Jewish state but in the name of all Jews”.
And here comes out the simple explanation: “this leads the unwilling world Jewry to be accomplices of the Israeli policy. No wonder that anti Semitism is on the rise”. Judt also worries that “the young men of north African, near Eastern and south Asian origin watch on television how the Israelis shell the Palestinians in the Gaza strip”. Judt shows a prejudice against young Muslims – at least those he usually deals with - and sees them as mentally underdeveloped and lacking any morals, when he attributes them the impossibility of making a difference between a Jew living in the suburbs of Paris and one who does not accept to be shelled by rackets coming from Gaza.
As if he were not aware that traditional anti-Semites throw all the guilt for their own prejudice on the Jews, Judt offers the new anti Semites, who are no less murderous than their foregoers, an excuse for their misdeeds: ”powerless and full of rage, they identify with the land and faith of their parents”. It is now clear why hundreds of cars are burnt and shops are plundered – especially in France.
Judt adds: “This rage cannot be tamed neither in Paris nor in Amsterdam”. Which is obviously absurd, but not altogether surprising.
The old saying: “The Jew is guilty of everything” is unpopular to-day. “Israel is guilty of everything” can be freely used instead by the anti Zionist in their criticism of the Jewish state.
Judt not only forgives the unforgivable and bestows on murderous anti Semitism a distinctive sign of purity, but also pretends to be a specialist in near eastern affairs: “To insist that “Jewishness “ is limited to life on a small geographic territory is perverse and harms both Israel and the Jews. This is the main reason why the problem between Israel and Palestine cannot be solved”.
Judt has a hallucinated vision of how to solve the conflict: when the American Jews will stop linking their destiny (and maybe their guilt feelings) to Israel and spend their donations for better purposes, then something could happen in the near east, as it did in Ireland when the civil war ended”. As if Israel lived on donations, and as if Israel’s neighbors were eager to live in peace and harmony with Israel!
Israel certainly exists not thanks to some theory, nor on the basis of its Jewish character, but because, as a fact, upon its very foundation as a state Israel defended itself from the aggression of its neighbors. One can imagine what would happen to the Israeli Jews if they could not defend themselves. One has just to look at how other ethnic and religious minorities are treated in the middle east, with no hate campaigns fuelled for tens of years, to know what would await undefended Jews.
But this is Judt’s sweet dream. He would like that Israel’s powerful allies leave Israel in the mire: ”maybe Washington will one day realize how senseless it is to bind American foreign policy and international prestige to the madness of a small near eastern ethnic state.”
The knowledgeable historian, looking down from the Olympus of his New York academy, does not realize that powerful nations base their alliances on their own national interests, rather than on the “spleen” of some anti Zionist academic.
Judt also writes some utter nonsense: “Imagine a group of Tyrolese doctors and lawyers crossing to England and there announcing they came to take the land of their Saxon forbearers.” Saxons were not banished from England, on the contrary they conquered it and subdued the original population. And whatever one might say about Tyrolese doctors and lawyers, they do not pray a few times a day that God take them back to the south of England. Jews were the majority of the population of Jerusalem already in the middle of the 19th century. And from whatever angle the New York University might look at it , ties between Jews and the Holy Land were somewhat different than those of the Tyrolese with the south of England.
Shamelessly he repeats the lies of Arab propaganda about the alien Jews that have nothing to look for in the Holy Land and asks, posing as naïf :” Why in such a place as Canaan? Why not Canada?”
Judt accuses Israel of fabricating the denial of the Holocaust by the Iranian president. Other anti Zionists also regularly try to conceal this fact by attributing it to translation errors: “ When Israel’s best defense is Auschwitz, then one only has to say that the Holocaust never took place”. Judt also insists that Ahmadinedjad’s anti-Semitic variations on the theme:” could be from an Israeli perspective most “corroborating” and should not be looked upon as totally negative…
What once the baptism did, does now the anti Zionism for some Jewish academics. They are allowed to give verdicts on other Jews, for the joy of anti Semites who do not want to appear as such. They pretend just to criticize Israel, not the Jews, as if they needed encouragement to do it. Thus anti Zionism becomes the entrance ticket into some academic circles.
Tony Judt successfully uses with his usal valiance the whole range of stale stereotyped anti Zionistic and pre-minted expressions: from ‘the Jewish lobby’ to the alleged’ Israeli racism’, as if he were charge of propaganda for an Islamic movement.
He earned his entrance ticket all right.
