maybe war is not imminent, page-46

re: jews on hc for duff646 That "wretchedly heretic and bastard member of the tribe" Hitchens certainly stirs the brain cells;



Jewish Power, Jewish Peril

By Christopher Hitchens

Vanity Fair [email protected] , p. 194-202, September 2002

With synagogues being burned in Europe, ancient anti-Semitic lies finding new currency in the Arab and Muslim worlds, and even American Jews feeling distinctly unnerved, the author explores the ironies behind Israel’s founding—and the seemingly ineradicable hatred of his "tribe"
Two old Jewish men are sitting on a park bench in Berlin in the early 1930s. Things are not yet so bad, but that doesn’t mean they won’t get worse. One of the two is solemnly reading a Jewish newspaper. The other is scanning a Nazi newspaper, and laughing out loud. Finally, the first man stops reading and says, "It’s bad enough that you read that pro-Hitler rag. But to laugh at it!"

The second responds with a shrug. "What if I read your paper? It tells me about Jewish windows being broken, Jewish shops boycotted, Jewish children beaten up in school. So... if I read the Hitler paper it tells me that we Jews control the whole world."

Like all jokes on this subject, the above story involves a dangerous flirtation with bad taste, with tragedy, and with irony. Irony has been an essential constituent of Jewish life ever since Maimonides wrote that, while the Messiah will one day come, "he may tarry." That shrug – half hopeful and half pessimistic—is present in Woody Allen and in Lenny Bruce. And the tragic element is so raw and so recent that there isn’t any need to go over it. American Jews may be the most successful minority in American history, which is as much to say that they are the most successful minority ever. But no other ethnicity has ever had to witness the physical destruction of perhaps one-third of its entire membership, carried out by a highly civilized European country that had been the model for assimilation, and involving the deliberate state murder of children. Still, no other American minority can also claim a stake in a local super-state of its very own, at the other end of the Mediterranean, where for the first time in history Jews can debate whether it would be proper to employ nuclear weapons on the Sabbath.

As I began to write this article, synagogues had been firebombed in several French towns and in one north London suburb, and a suicide assassin had massacred Jews who just minutes earlier had arrived from synagogues for a Passover dinner in the Israeli coastal town of Netanya. In response, American Jews in California had taken out an advertisement urging Woody Allen and others to boycott the Cannes Film Festival, on the grounds that the days of Vichy were back. Similar themes were being stressed by many Jewish and Israeli writers, who spoke darkly of the imminence of another Holocaust.

Very often recently, this "Never Again" note has been struck by liberal and even radical Jews who seem to regret their former softness. Nat Hentoff, civil libertarian and longtime friend of the civil-rights movement, told New York magazine that "if a loudspeaker goes off and a voice says, ‘All Jews gather in Times Square,’ it could never surprise me."

I have to say that if such a voice were ever raised or broadcast, I would be much more than surprised, and very much more than shocked. I also think I could count on a very large number of Jews failing to report to Times Square, and an even larger number of non-Jews willing to support this refusal. Perhaps I should say here that I am related on my mother’s side to this ancient argument and that, according to the Law of Moses, the Israeli Law of Return, and the Nuremberg laws, I can be counted as a member of the ancient tribe. This isn’t much use, either to the tribe or to myself, since I don’t believe there is a single word of truth in either Exodus or Genesis, would never consider asking a Palestinian to move out and make room for me, and do not believe that the human species is subdivided into races.

I maintain that I have the best evidence of Darwin and DNA on my side, as well as many recent anti-Biblical and anti-mythical discoveries made by Israeli archeologists. Ze’ev Herzog, professor of archeology at Tel Aviv University, has concluded that "the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a miliary campaign, and did not pass it on to the Twelve Tribes of Israel.
Furthermore, the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom." (Archeological myths are often the most toxic. The legend of Masada involves believing in a positive and noble aspect of the story that Jewish resistance to Rome culminated in a suicide-murder.)
Nonetheless, I like to think that I would be despised or hated by any movement defining itself as anti-Semitic. And on my shelf is an American Nazi pamphlet, denouncing the "Zionist Occupation Government" (or ‘ZOG’) that covertly rules these United States. This illiterate screed isn’t just a joke: it comes from the same swamp as those who murdered the Jewish radio host Alan Berg in Denver in 1984, and ultimately from the same mind-set that produced the atrocity in Oklahoma City.

In these hate-clotted page, I am—for the first and only time in my life—listed with both Henry Kissinger and Norman Podhoretz as a member of the Jewish/Zionist conspiracy. As in the case of the tale with which I began: who knew I had such power?

Nativist and Christian though that 1989 pamphlet is, it was written partly in praise of the Ayatollah Khomeini. And the most horrifying recent development on the international scene is the emergence, in the Arab and Muslim world, of the debauched myths and falsifications of medieval Christianity. Saudi Arabian and Egyptian and Palestinian sources, some of them official, have been circulating The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and reviving the accusation that no Passover meal is complete without the blood of a non-Jewish child to thicken the dough for the matzos. It is degrading even to argue with this kind of thing: the Protocols have been repeatedly and conclusively shown to be a crass forgery, originating in the witch trials of the Middle Ages and updated for the modern world via the reactionary secret police of the Russian czars and the publishers of Mein Kampf. (In neither circle, incidentally, were Arabs or Muslims regarded very highly.)

Here again we find a version of the same sick joke: the Jews are supposed to be diabolical and clever enough to plot a secret world rule, and stupid enough to write the whole plan down. But please don’t let the title fool you. The hideous cunning of the whole thing is that, in the secret book of their private deliberations, the ‘Elders’ never mention Zionism or Palestine at all. The Jews’ plan is that, from being the most despised and reviled minority in history, they go straight to a worldwide takeover and surpreme power. Just like that. (The scary plot is hatched, according to this hoax, at midnight in the Jewish cemetery in Prague, near the later resting-place of Franz Kafka.)
Confronted with the re-appearance of this filthy libel, even Jews who inhabited global and regional superpowers such as the United States and Israel, can be pardoned for feeling edgy. Anti-Semitism is not like other prejudices. Many white people do not like other people with supposedly African genes, but they don’t accuse them, or even suspect them, of taking over Wall Street as a prelude to world domination. Nor do they accuse them of murdering Jesus Christ (one of the emptier accusations against the Jews, I have always thought, since if Christ hadn’t been killed there would be no Christianity, and presumably the Christians think that god had some say in the decision to offer his only son). Some Protestants think that Catholics form a secret society. Some Catholics think that Freemasons form an invisible government. Many secular crackpots believe that the Illuminati or the Trilateralists or the Knights Templar are really running the world.

But anti-Semitism is a kind of venomous distillation of all this conspiracy mania, and it is directed at a group which, when it can’t be attacked as a race, can be indicted as a religion. Or, when it can’t be attacked as a capitalist plutocracy, can be arraigned as the evil genius behind Communism. Or, and in each case, both. The Nazis portrayed Jews both as bloated profiteers and as gaunt, sinister Bolsheviks.
This infection occurs in almost all societies, and breaks out at the oddest times, and is derived from paranoia. It is completely evidence-proof. (The Protocols were endorsed by The Times of London in 1920 and later reprinted and distributed all over the United States by Henry Ford, though no increase in missing children at Passover-time had ever been reported.) Jew hatred has a special appeal to the quasi-educated and the pseudo-intellectual, as well as to the ignorant who fear modernity and the big city. It is more like a form of mental disorder, or collective hallucination, than a form of racism.

Though there are societies, such as India, where it has never been a problem, and the United States has seemingly been successfully inoculated against it, there are grounds for thinking that it is somehow ineradicable. Certainly this is what the Zionist movement believes.
To many others, also, it now seems self-evident that the presence of this sort of toxin is proof enough by itself that the state of Israel needs an unqualified defence. Most of the anxious propaganda about anti-Semitism earlier this summer was mobilized in favor of General Ariel Sharon, or by the supporters of Benjamin Netanyahu, who thinks that Sharon is a sissy. But how obvious is this connection when you come to examine it?

The Protocols were fabricated by hired anti-Jewish reactionaries in Paris, almost certainly in 1897 or 1898, according to Warrant for Genocide, Professor Norman Cohn’s magisterial 1966 study of the subject, and certainly between 1894 and 1899. What else was happening at that precise moment in history? France was being convulsed by the case of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer who had been framed for treason. In this, the mother of all French scandals, the issue of justice for a single Jew had split the army, the church, the press, the parliament, and the whole society.
A Viennese Jewish journalist named Theodor Herzl, covering the trial, was so appalled by French mobs yelling against the Jews that he decided to call for all Europe’s Jews to abandon the sick continent and seek their own national home. He founded the movement known as Zionism in 1897. His slogan was that "a land without a people" should be a national home for "a people without a land." In other words, he made the serious mistake of asserting that Palestine was effectively uninhabited.

This huge miscalculation was overlooked by some Jews because of the terrible pogroms in the late 1880s, which had driven millions of refugees out of czarist Russia. A handful of the religious among them wanted to go to Jerusalem, where Jews were scarce, but the majority opted for exile in the ‘Christian’ world. Not everybody in Western Europe or America was pleased to see these new arrivals. In Britain, for example, in the first years of the 20th century, a Conservative politician named Arthur Balfour made a political reputation by opposing "alien" Jewish immigration.

Meanwhile, in 1899, Dreyfus had been pardoned, which meant that for the first time a Christian European nation had decided that the right of single Jew under the law was worth a national climb-down. But Herzl’s petitioning and campaigning continued, through the energy of his disciple (and Israel’s first president), Chaim Weizmann, and extended itself through the First World War. In 1917 it culminated in the anti-Semite Balfour issuing ‘the Balfour Declaration’, which is the effective founding document of the state of Israel. Balfour was not the first or last anti-Semite to urge Jews, in effect, to clear off to Palestine or to Uganda or Cyprus or Madagascar or other remote isolated places briefly considered by Herzl himself as alternative "homelands." An old slogan of anti-Zionist and leftist Jews was that, "when Jew-baiters say ‘Jews get out,’ the Zionists offer to be the travel agents."

And this does not exhaust the irony. The British Cabinet at the time contained only one Jewish member, Edwin Montagu, and he was passionately opposed to the declaration on the grounds that (a) it was a capitulation to anti-Semitic bigotry, with its suggestion that Palestine was a natural destination of the Jews, and that (b) it would be a grave cause of alarm to the Muslim world.

Balfour’s wording had included the proviso that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine," but not even the most committed Zionist will claim that that part of the promise has been kept. The fact must be faced: even if the Protocols had never been confected, and even if the settlers in Palestine were Dutch or British, there would still be an Arab nationalist resistance to the loss of their land.

Much of this history has been forgotten, because of unimaginable disaster which later overwhelmed European civilization and very nearly annihilated European Jewry. However, a respect for truth requires one to remember that for the first three decades of the argument the only serious anti-Zionists were Jewish. There were leftist Jews who thought that the Arabs of Palestine were being done an injustice. There were Orthodox Jews who thought Zionism was a blasphemy, because no return to Jerusalem was possible before the arrival of the Messiah.
And there were liberal assimilationist Jews who thought that the future of the Jewish people lay in the Diaspora throughout the Western world, the scene of all its triumphs from Spinoza to Einstein. (Those Jews who today boycott The New York Times for being bleeding-heart about the Palestinians would smack their brows if they could see how Arthur Hays Sulzberger kept the whole American Zionist movement at arm’s length before and even during the Second World War.)

Between about 1942 and 1948, the American Council for Judaism enjoyed wide support for its anti-Zionist arguments (it is still worth reading Thomas Kolsky’s scholarly history of the period, Jews Against Zionism). Be serious and ask what is more likely: that Nat Hentoff is right and America will intern and exterminate its Jewish population, or that Israel will succeed forever in governing resentful Arabs? The first outcome is to the very highest imaginable degree improbable. The second is simply impossible.

In a recent essay for the Jewish weekly Forward in New York, for which I ought to say I have been an occasional book reviewer, the liberal pro-Israeli critic Paul Berman detected a certain coarsening among those who take the Palestinian side. He was able to cite some disgusting examples of euphemism, concerning the vile tactic of suicide-murder, among Western intellectuals who were ready to explain the murder of children as a symptom of "despair."

He even detected concessions to anti-Semitism in the pages of The New York Review of Books—which might be described as the flagship of secular liberal Judaism—particularly in the anti-Sharon essays it had published from Professor Tony Judt of New York University. Yet when it came to it, Berman was unable to cite any explicitly anti-Jewish propaganda in such sources. "It is unintended inferences," he concluded somewhat lamely, "that seem to me the most frightening of all."

Well, let’s agree by all means that there are reasons enough for hypersensitivity. I, for example, always think I can tell something from the mere way that a person pronounces the word ‘Jew’. (The longer he takes to pronounce it, the more on guard one should be.) Harold Abrahams in Chariots of Fire says memorably of prejudice that you "catch it on the edge of a remark."

Nonetheless, there is a danger is overprescribing, as well as underdiagnosing.

If everything is anti-Semitic, then the term loses its vital distinction. In a recent debate with a rabbi from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, I ridiculed the idea that Vichy and Kristallnacht have resurfaced in France.

First, it’s probably not true. But second, and hardly less important—what would be left to say if these horrible phenomena really did occur? I care enough about the issue to keep my hatred pure, and to reserve it for those who truly merit it.

In April there was a huge demonstration in Washington, D.C., in favor of the Palestinians. To the astonishment of many bystanders, in the front rank of this demonstration stood a phalanx of bearded and hatted ultra-Orthodox Jews.

They carried the flag of the P.L.O. and waved placards denouncing Zionism root and branch. They were not for a two-state solution: they were for a Palestinian state from the Jordan to the Mediterranean. These are the members of Neturei Karta. For them, the Messiah will indeed tarry, in fact won’t even bother to call in advance, until the bogus atheist state of Israel has disappeared. (You can read about anti-Zionist Hasidim in Chaim Potok’s 1967 novel The Chosen, or view them in the movie of the same name.)

I have seen these people before, in Brooklyn and in the Mea Shearim quarter of Jerusalem, where they spit on the Israeli flag. I hung around with them at the demonstration for a while, collected some of their arcane literature, and noticed the more usual contingents of left and liberal and secular Jews who oppose the occupation, some of them wincing as hoarse and furious young Arabs shouted "takbir!," invoking Islam and jihad. I realized again why this long story has no neat or tidy resolution: maybe no resolution at all.

If the insane sickness of Fascism were to strike the "Christian" world again, and all the Jews had to flee—the six million or so American Jews, the 600,000 in France, the large populations in Argentina, Russia, Canada, Ukraine, and Britain—there would be no room in Palestine unless the state of Israel were to approximately double its size as well as to evict many if not all of the three million Muslim and Christian Palestinians. (A repellent option, with whose advocates Sharon himself has flirted.)

One could hardly expect this to be tolerated even by the most moderate Arabs, who are in enough of a rage as it is (and not entirely because of the circulation of the Protocols, either). This would not be the only assimilation problem: Israeli writer David Grossman points out that, as it is, more Israeli Arabs speak Hebrew than American Jews.
If, on the other hand, there were to be a peace agreement which led to the dismantling of the settlements, and the settlers had to be ‘assimilated’ within a smaller Israel, an even more Zionist movement would spring up among the former colonists, who would start to dream—and not just to dream—of a ‘return’ to the lost West Bank homeland of Hebron and Nablus.

This would be the perfect counterpart to the scheme in Philip Roth’s 1993 novel, Operation Shylock, where Israeli-born Jews dream of liberation and escape by rejoining the Diaspora.

Meanwhile, having promised safety to the Jews by means of a state in Palestine, the Israeli government issues almost daily warnings of the imminent destruction of the whole community. Having proposed Zionism as a means of declaring proud independence from fluctuations in Gentile goodwill, Israel has become utterly reliant upon foreign aid – especially an annual American subsidy of $3 billion—in endless battle with its neighbors.

And, having proposed Zionism as a cure for anti-Semitism, Israel recruits the support of anti-Semitic fundamentalists such as Pat Robertson and Billy Graham, who see the Jewish state as a prelude to the conversion of the Jews, to be followed happily enough by Armageddon and the consigning of the nonconverts to hell.

Some of these ironies are in Israel’s favor: the kids who burned those French synagogues this past spring were lumpen Arab immigrants trying to make a crude and violent point about Palestine, and at least France’s leading anti-Semite, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has promised to deport all of them.

But some of the ironies were not helpful: there is no decent way to compare destitute Arab refugees in Gaza to the members of the SS, as Menachem Begin used to do. One sign of modern anti-Semitism is the obsessive, nasty need of some people to compare Israel to Nazi Germany. It would actually be good if all sides dropped this outrageous analogy, which is designed to cheapen something, namely the Shoah, or Final Solution, the memory of which must not be abused.

The survival of the Jewish people has for centuries been a means of taking the moral temperature of a society. Those who take that temperature are quite rightly conditioned to notice even a slight elevation. It is sometimes said that all Jews must have a bag mentally packed, ready to flee. To the extent that this is true it will, alas, always be true. The creation of a Jewish state, it can now be argued, merely restates an old dilemma in fresh terms. Neither Israel nor messianism can cure the irrational.

Myself, even as a wretchedly heretic and bastard member of the tribe, I perhaps conceitedly think that there may be something to the cliché about Jews’ being inherently and intuitively smart. Smart enough to see that if ethno-religious nationalism isn’t good for other people, it may not even be good for the Jews. Smart enough to doubt the divinity of antique man-made scrolls. Smart enough even to see that the Promised Land may be a secular multi-ethnic democracy, none the worse for being a second home to many other wanderers and victims, too. America, in a word. The best hope and, yes, perhaps the last one.