Max Hastings

Tuesday June 20, 2006

The Guardian

Whatever the outcome of the current Palestinian chaos, meaningful negotiations with Israel seem unlikely. The most plausible scenario is that Ehud Olmert will proceed unilaterally to draw new boundaries for his country, which will absorb significant Palestinian land, and institutionalise such dominance of the West Bank as to make a Palestinian state unworkable.

If this is the future, it is likely to yield fruits as bitter for Israelis as for Palestinians. The world, far from becoming more willing to acquiesce in Israel's expansion, is becoming less so. The generation of European non-Jews for whom the Holocaust is a seminal memory is dying. With them perishes much vicarious guilt.

Younger Europeans, not to mention the rest of the world, are more sceptical about Israel's territorial claims. They are less susceptible to moral arguments about redress for past horrors, which have underpinned Israeli actions for almost 60 years. We may hope that it will never become respectable to be anti-semitic. However, Israel is discovering that it can no longer frighten non-Jews out of opposing its policies merely by accusing them of anti-semitism.

There is also evidence of growing disenchantment with Israel in the Jewish diaspora. Feelings have changed since 1948 and the days when Jews around the world thought it a duty to support "their" nation in the promised land right or wrong, in good times or bad. David Goldberg, the former rabbi of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in London, has just published a book that will rouse plenty of wrath in Israel. Entitled The Divided Self, its theme is that in modern times the Jews of the diaspora have preserved the honour and heritage of the Jewish people far more convincingly than Israel's citizens.

Goldberg, whom I should acknowledge as a friend, rejects the Zionist conceit that the only proper place for Jews is in Israel. He discerns an unhealthy artificiality about the society constructed beside the Mediterranean since 1948: "to assert itself, it must be rigid and inflexible". He notes that while genealogy has become a popular enthusiasm of diaspora Jews, Israelis prefer archaeology, "pursuing the distant past to authenticate an ancient connection with the land" in the absence of any more recent claim.

He tells a good story of returning on a boat from Israel to Marseilles in 1958, after a stint on a kibbutz. His efforts to make headway with pretty blond American passengers were thwarted by the presence of a tanned, muscular Israeli paratrooper, who effortlessly cut him out. When the boat stopped at Naples, this hero of Sinai announced that he was off to buy a watch. Beware of fakes, advised Goldberg, magnanimous in sexual defeat. The soldier ignored him, and was later seen hurling a worthless purchase into the sea.

If we were talking about Christians here, it might be called a parable. Goldberg believes that Israel has allowed military prowess to blind it to wisdom: "the Jewish fox knows many things, the Jewish hedgehog only one big thing". Or you may prefer a Talmudic saying: "better a live dog than a dead lion".

Goldberg defines the virtues of diaspora Jews, "adapting to novel circumstances and responding to changing times", in terms that would rouse the contempt of many Israelis. "Two thousand years of powerlessness have honed the antennae to detect where self-interest lies, what is on or not on ... The experience ... of learning to live circumspectly among more numerous and powerful neighbours is a surer guarantee of survival than the triumphalist illusions of a mere 50-odd years of statehood."

Some Israelis would say that this is the language of the ghetto, reflecting a willingness to defer, even to cringe; of exactly the kind their state was created to remove from the Jewish psyche. Yet Goldberg's book reflects a declining willingness among many diaspora Jews to write blank cheques for Israel, either literally or figuratively.

It is a painful experience for some Jews who achieve good and even great things in their own societies to find themselves cast as sin-eaters for the Jewish state. Most are reluctant to speak out as frankly against Israel's West Bank policies as Goldberg has, and as did the late and great Rabbi John Rayner, who came here from Germany with the kindertransport. But with each generation the emotional distance between Israel and the diaspora is growing.

In some respects, this reflects a situation Amos Oz prophesied. "People like you," he said to me almost 30 years ago, "who want Israel to go on behaving like a European society, are heading for disappointment. Israel is becoming a Middle Eastern country. In future, I hope that it will not behave worse than other Middle Eastern countries, but I doubt that it will behave any better."

As long as Israel retains US support, its rulers may feel they can shrug off the alienation not only of non-Jewish Europeans, but also of growing numbers of European Jews. Yet if David Goldberg is right that diaspora Jews today contribute far more to the "universal values" of civilisation than the people of Israel, then the Jewish state has a far more profound problem than that of frontiers.

Israel never counted on them in the first place. It gets its billions from the United States.

Israel has maintained all sorts of outreach programs and communication channels open to European Jews. Does the Jewish Agency ring a bell?

It probably has some kind of outreach program to Jews in India, too. That doesn't mean it is counting on them for cash, bombs and missles.

Official Israeli contacts with US Jewry add up to much more than reliance upon them to secure military and economic foreign aid. You still have lots to learn on the topic of intra-Jewish bonds.

BTW, what does "Dye lakibush" mean?

I'll shorty check to see if the post is still up there...

This phrase means "enough with the occupation".

Max Hastings of the Guardian, ignores that the Europeans are dependent on ARAB oil. The cartoon riots that spread across Europe from their resident Islamic population of lawless male youths, gives the Europeans pause.

Europeans have come under increasing pressure from anti-Israel Arab oil-producing countries (Israel has NO oil) to support the Palestinians cause and to join those critical of the Israelis. Appeasement is what is driving the distancing between Europe and Israel, not Israel's defensive actions.

It is certainly true that the years are passing since the Nazi holocaust and that fewer and fewer Europeans are alive who remember those days. But Hastings has over-stated the 'bump' Jews get for their victimhood under the Nazis.

While it is a compelling historical legacy, it doesn't drive the day to day actions of the Israelis or their interactions with the Europeans. Foreign investment in Israeli start-up companies, trading of medical technologies, academic development, and computer technologies have a lot more to do with daily interactions with Europeans than the holocaust of the 40's does.

The elephant in the living room that Max Hastings doesn't want to talk about is how the Europeans are being pressured to support divestment campaigns and boycotts against Israel in order to keep the oil supply they so desparately need coming in from Arab countries. Otherwise, they face bombings of their subways, more car burnings, and revolt from their own Muslim population.

Of course, these youths have nothing really to be angry or resentful about; they are simply "lawless." probably because left intellectuals have taught them that it is ok to see themselves as victims. Just because they got screwed over by Israel and other imperialist countries. Why don't they just get over it by reading Wayne Dyer or some great thinker like him?

QUESTION FOR MEYER LONDON:

Is Europe being pressured to disinvest, isolate, or boycott Israel by Arab countries in return for a steady supply of oil?

Yes or no?

And I don't care, either. I do know that much of the pressure to disinvest on US campuses is from student groups who support Palestinian rights; nearly all these groups include Jewish members, sometimes among their leadership.

Pretty much all social action groups will have Jewish members. The drive for justice is a very Jewish thing. However, Jews are not a monolithic group with a single prescribed set of opinions. . To presume otherwise is rather racist.

MEYER LONDON WRITES: I don't know. And I don't care, either.



BECKY: So if the Europeans are being blackmailed to withdraw support of Israel and the Jewish people, it wouldn't matter to you? And if it's the truth, that wouldn't matter either?

MEYER LONDON WRITES: "I do know that much of the pressure to disinvest on US campuses is from student groups who support Palestinian rights; nearly all these groups include Jewish members, sometimes among their leadership."

BECKY: Ignoring that divest and boycott campaigns against Israel are driven by Jew-hatred in the Arab world, London transports the reader a continent away to the ivory towers of pro-Palestinian solidarity---USA University campuses.

And trots the fact that many Jewish students have been taken in by the ubiquitous Arab propaganda disseminated there under the guise of peace and justice organizations as evidence that, due to some percentage of Jewish members, it CAN'T be based on Jew-hatred?

Tell me, Mr. London, could some of these Jew-hating Arab oil magnates possibly be funding some of these campaigns for divestment and boycotts on US campuses?

Is that a lot of filthy rich American oil interests (like the Bush family) are for Israel because "security for Israel" gives them an excuse to confront Arab nationalism and prevent the Arab peoples from getting full control of their own natural resources.

...t a lot of filthy rich American oil interests (like the Bush family) are for Israel because "security for Israel" gives them an excuse to confront Arab nationalism and prevent the Arab peoples from getting full control of their own natural resources.

Seems like that to me, too. As long as Israel exists as a scapegoat for the Arab worlds problems, the Saudis, for example, never have to confront the fact that 7% of their people control ALL of the oil money. This is why I, as an American Jew will never completely trust the dominant culture's commitment to aiding Israel. I think as long as its expedient they will, but who knows how long it will be expedient? As diaspora Jews we need to remain mindful of this fact.

I suspect that a true audit would reveal that alot of Arab Big Oil money has made its way into the various anti-Israel, "Peace groups" and Moslem Student Associations.

And who is going to conduct this audit? The FBI? Some McCarthyite Congressional committee? AIPAC? Alan Dershowitz? You?

I wonder what an audit of AIPAC would reveal.

The IRS usually does audits when money laundering is suspected. Aipac has open books. Its very different.