Tag Archives: anti-Semitism

You Are Right, He Said

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As a fairly well known Israeli historian, I’ve visited some thirty-five different countries around the world and spent a not inconsiderable part of my life abroad. It may have been luck, it may have been naiveté; it may have been the fact that my last visit (to Germany) took place as long as three months ago. But never in all those years did I encounter antisemitism. At any rate not of the overt kind that is deliberately and unapologetically thrown into your face. Wherever we went my wife and I made gentile friends. Good friends.

More than once in Western Europe in particular we got into a conversation with people of Arabic nationality. Without exception, they asked my wife and me where we were from. Without exception, they were polite and welcoming. One, a kiosk owner in Metz, eastern France, told us how wonderful it was to meet Israelis in his nice, but remote and oh-so boring, town. Another, a young man from East Jerusalem who was studying medical technology in Berlin and working for Ikea to earn some money, went out of his way to get us a free meal ticket at the shop restaurant. The least pleasant encounter was one I had with a Palestinian taxi driver in Copenhagen. He gave me to understand, repeatedly, that he and his people would never-ever give up “their” right to “their” country. Yet even so we found common ground in denouncing those holier-than-thou Danes.

Still I want to tell you a story. Just one trivial story with no consequences and presumably long forgotten by everyone except myself. Yet one that, in view of recent events here in Israel, seems more relevant than ever. It took place back in the summer of 1981 when I was on sabbatical and living near Freiburg in southwestern Germany. One day my daughter, nine years old, needed her ear to be operated on. I fell into a conversation with the surgeon, Dr. Kuhn of the local university clinic.

These were the days immediately following the attack in which the Israeli Air Force demolished Iraq’s nuclear reactor, then under construction. The good doctor asked me why I was staying in Israel. So much trouble, he said; so many wars. Strange question, that, coming from a German! But that was not what I said. Instead I told him the story of the Jewish swine. Suppose, I said, I had the same operation done in Israel and then refused to pay my bill. In that case people would have called me a swine. However, had I done the same anywhere else, they would have called me a Jewish swine.

“You are right” he said.

Pilar Rahola Speaks: Jews with Six Arms

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by Pilar Rahola

Why do so many intelligent people, when talking about Israel, suddenly become idiots?

This speech was given December 16, 2009 at the Conference in the Global forum for Combating Anti-Semitism in Jerusalem. Pilar Rahola is a Spanish Catalan journalist, writer, and former politician and Member of Parliament, and member of the far left.

A meeting in Barcelona with a hundred lawyers and judges a month ago.

They have come together to hear my opinions on the Middle-Eastern conflict. They know that I am a heterodoxal vessel, in the shipwreck of “single thinking” regarding Israel, which rules in my country. They want to listen to me, because they ask themselves why, if Pilar is a serious journalist, does she risk losing her credibility by defending the bad guys, the guilty? I answer provocatively – You all believe that you are experts in international politics when you talk about Israel, but you really know nothing. Would you dare talk about the conflict in Rwanda, in Kashmir? In Chechnya? – No.

Cultured people, when they read about Israel, are ready to believe that Jews have six arms.

They are jurists, their turf is not geopolitics. But against Israel they dare, as does everybody else. Why? Because Israel is permanently under the media magnifying glass and the distorted image pollutes the world’s brains. And because it is part of what is politically correct, it seems part of solidarity, because talking against Israel is free. So cultured people, when they read about Israel, are ready to believe that Jews have six arms, in the same way that during the Middle Ages people believed all sorts of outrageous things.

Bottom of Form

The first question, then, is why so many intelligent people, when talking about Israel, suddenly become idiots. The problem that those of us who do not demonize Israel have, is that there exists no debate on the conflict. All that exists is the banner; there’s no exchange of ideas. We throw slogans at each other; we don’t have serious information, we suffer from the “burger journalism” syndrome, full of prejudices, propaganda and simplification. Intellectual thinkers and international journalists have given up on Israel. It doesn’t exist. That is why, when someone tries to go beyond the “single thought” of criticizing Israel, he becomes suspect and unfaithful, and is immediately segregated. Why?

I’ve been trying to answer this question for years: why?

Why, of all the conflicts in the world, only this one interests them?

Why is a tiny country which struggles to survive criminalized?

Why does manipulated information triumph so easily?

Why are all the people of Israel, reduced to a simple mass of murderous imperialists?

Why is there no Palestinian guilt?

Why is Arafat a hero and Sharon a monster?

Finally, why when Israel is the only country in the World which is threatened with extinction, it is also the only one that nobody considers a victim?

I don’t believe that there is a single answer to these questions. Just as it is impossible to completely explain the historical evil of anti-Semitism, it is also not possible to totally explain the present-day imbecility of anti-Israelism. Both drink from the fountain of intolerance and lies. Also, if we accept that anti-Israelism is the new form of anti-Semitism, we conclude that circumstances may have changed, but the deepest myths, both of the Medieval Christian anti-Semitism and of the modern political anti-Semitism, are still intact. Those myths are part of the chronicle of Israel.

For example, the Medieval Jew accused of killing Christian children to drink their blood connects directly with the Israeli Jew who kills Palestinian children to steal their land. Always they are innocent children and dark Jews. Similarly, the Jewish bankers who wanted to dominate the world through the European banks, according to the myth of the Protocols, connect directly with the idea that the Wall Street Jews want to dominate the World through the White House. Control of the Press, control of Finances, the Universal Conspiracy, all that which has created the historical hatred against the Jews, is found today in hatred of the Israelis. In the subconscious, then, beats the DNA of the Western anti-Semite, which produces an efficient cultural medium.

But what beats in the conscious? Why does a renewed intolerance surge with such virulence, centered now, not against the Jewish people, but against the Jewish state? From my point of view, this has historical and geopolitical motives, among others, the decades long bloody Soviet role, the European Anti-Americanism, the West’s energy dependency and the growing Islamist phenomenon.

But it also emerges from a set of defeats which we suffer as free societies, leading to a strong ethical relativism.

The moral defeat of the left. For decades, the left raised the flag of freedom wherever there was injustice. It was the depositary of the utopian hopes of society. It was the great builder of the future. Despite the murderous evil of Stalinism’s sinking these utopias, the left has preserved intact its aura of struggle, and still pretends to point out good and evil in the world. Even those who would never vote for leftist options, grant great prestige to leftist intellectuals, and allow them to be the ones who monopolize the concept of solidarity. As they have always done. Thus, those who struggled against Pinochet were freedom-fighters, but Castro’s victims, are expelled from the heroes’ paradise, and converted into undercover fascists.

This historic treason to freedom is reproduced nowadays, with mathematical precision. For example, the leaders of Hezbollah are considered resistance heroes, while pacifists like the Israeli singer Noa, are insulted in the streets of Barcelona. Today too, as yesterday, the left is hawking totalitarian ideologies, falls in love with dictators and, in its offensive against Israel, ignores the destruction of fundamental rights. It hates rabbis, but falls in love with imams; shouts against the Israeli Defense Forces, but applauds Hamas’s terrorists; weeps for the Palestinian victims, but scorns the Jewish victims, and when it is touched by Palestinian children, it does it only if it can blame the Israelis.

It will never denounce the culture of hatred, or its preparation for murder. A year ago, at the AIPAC conference in Washington I asked the following questions:

Why don’t we see demonstrations in Europe against the Islamic dictatorships?

Why are there no demonstrations against the enslavement of millions of Muslim women?

Why are there no declarations against the use of bomb-carrying children in the conflicts in which Islam is involved?

Why is the left only obsessed with fighting against two of the most solid democracies of the planet, those which have suffered the bloodiest terrorist attacks, the United States and Israel?

Because the left no longer has any ideas, only slogans. It no longer defends rights, but prejudices. And the greatest prejudice of all is the one aimed against Israel. I accuse, then, in a formal manner that the main responsibility for the new anti-Semitic hatred disguised as anti-Zionism, comes from those who should have been there to defend freedom, solidarity and progress. Far from it, they defend despots, forget their victims and remain silent before medieval ideologies which aim at the destruction of free societies. The treason of the left is an authentic treason against modernity.

Israel is the world’s most watched place, but despite that, it is the world’s least understood place.

Defeat of Journalism. We have more information in the world than ever before, but we do not have a better informed world. Quite the contrary, the information superhighway connects us anywhere in the planet, but it does not connect us with the truth. Today’s journalists do not need maps, since they have Google Earth, they do not need to know History, since they have Wikipedia. The historical journalists, who knew the roots of a conflict, still exist, but they are an endangered species, devoured by that “fast food” journalism which offers hamburger news, to readers who want fast-food information. Israel is the world’s most watched place, but despite that, it is the world’s least understood place. Of course one must keep in mind the pressure of the great petrodollar lobbies, whose influence upon journalism is subtle but deep. Mass media knows that if it speaks against Israel, it will have no problems. But what would happen if it criticized an Islamic country? Without doubt, it would complicate its existence. Certainly part of the press that writes against Israel, would see themselves mirrored in Mark Twain’s ironical sentence: “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”

Defeat of critical thinking. To all this one must add the ethical relativism which defines the present times: it is based not on denying the values of civilization, but rather in their most extreme banality. What is modernity?

I explain it with this little tale: If I were lost in an uncharted island, and would want to found a democratic society, I would only need three written documents: The Ten Commandments (which established the first code of modernity. “Thou shalt not murder” founded modern civilization.); The Roman Penal Code; and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And with these three texts we would start again. These principles are relativized daily, even by those who claim to be defending them.

“Thou shalt not murder” … depending on who is the target, must think those who, like the demonstrators in Europe, shouted in support of Hamas.

“Hurray for Freedom of Speech!”…, or not. For example, several Spanish left-wing organizations tried to take me to court, accusing me of being a negationist, like the Nazis, because I deny the “Palestinian Holocaust”. They were attempting to prohibit me from writing articles and to send me to prison. And so on… The social critical mass has lost weight and, at the same time ideological dogmatism has gained weight. In this double turn of events, the strong values of modernity have been substituted by a “weak thinking,” vulnerable to manipulation and Manichaeism.

Defeat of the United Nations. And with it, a sound defeat of the international organizations which should protect Human Rights. Instead they have become broken puppets in the hands of despots. The United Nations is only useful to Islamofascists like Ahmadinejad, or dangerous demagogues like Hugo Chavez which offers them a planetary loudspeaker where they can spit their hatred. And, of course, to systematically attack Israel. The UN, too exists to fight Israel.

Finally, defeat of Islam. Tolerant and cultural Islam suffers today the violent attack of a totalitarian virus which tries to stop its ethical development. This virus uses the name of God to perpetrate the most terrible horrors: lapidate women, enslave them, use youths as human bombs. Let’s not forget: They kill us with cellular phones connected to the Middle Ages. If Stalinism destroyed the left, and Nazism destroyed Europe, Islamic fundamentalism is destroying Islam. And it also has an anti-Semitic DNA. Perhaps Islamic anti-Semitism is the most serious intolerant phenomenon of our times; indeed, it contaminates more than 1,400 million people, who are educated, massively, in hatred towards the Jew.

The Jews are the thermometer of the world’s health. Whenever the world has had totalitarian fever, they have suffered.

In the crossroads of these defeats, is Israel. Orphan and forgotten by a reasonable left, orphan and abandoned by serious journalism, orphan and rejected by a decent UN, and rejected by a tolerant Islam, Israel suffers the paradigm of the 21st Century: the lack of a solid commitment with the values of liberty. Nothing seems strange. Jewish culture represents, as no other does, the metaphor of a concept of civilization which suffers today attacks on all flanks. The Jews are the thermometer of the world’s health. Whenever the world has had totalitarian fever, they have suffered. In the Spanish Middle Ages, in Christian persecutions, in Russian pogroms, in European Fascism, in Islamic fundamentalism. Always, the first enemy of totalitarianism has been the Jew. And, in these times of energy dependency and social uncertainty, Israel embodies, in its own flesh, the eternal Jew.

A pariah nation among nations, for a pariah people among peoples. That is why the anti-Semitism of the 21st Century has dressed itself with the efficient disguise of anti-Israelism, or its synonym, anti-Zionism. Is all criticism of Israel anti-Semitism? NO. But all present-day anti-Semitism has turned into prejudice and the demonization of the Jewish State. New clothes for an old hatred.

Benjamin Franklin said: “Where liberty is, there is my country.” And Albert Einstein added: “The World is a dangerous place. Not because of the people who are evil; but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” This is the double commitment, here and now; never remain inactive in front of evil in action and defend the countries of liberty.

Thank you.

For Anyone Interested… It Is a Must

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Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, Kindle edition, 2019.

Great books, like great teachers, are those which make you reexamine your assumptions. By that standard, there can be little doubt that Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century is a very great book. To help you understand why, let me start with a brief description of the way we in Israel have been taught Jewish history for so long.

Once upon a time—no one knows just when—there was a man called Abraham. Born in Ur, modern Mesopotamia, he was 75 years old when God revealed Himself to him and told him to move to Canaan, aka the Land of Israel, aka (much later) Palestine. Which country, He solemnly promised, would forever belong to him and his offspring. A relative handful of converts apart, it was from Abraham’s loins that all subsequent Jews were and are descended. Their history is like that of no other people; after many twists and turns, they were finally driven (almost all of them) from Canaan by the wicked Romans. Scattered in all directions, but held together by their unique religion, for close to two thousand years they lived without a homeland of their own. Now tolerated and exploited, now subject to pogroms and/or driven away from one country into another, always at the mercy of their non-Jewish neighbors, they somehow succeeded in retaining their identity like no other people on earth. Something not even Adolf Hitler, who set out to exterminate them and killed one third of their number, was able to change.

In comes Yuri Slezkine, a Russian born (1956- ) Jew who currently lives in the United States. The Jews, he explains in the first chapter of the book, are not unique at all. Instead they are one among a great many nations whom he groups together under the rubric, “Mercurian.” Including, to mention but a few, the Gypsies of Europe, the Persians and the Jain of India, the Copts of Egypt, the Fuga of southern Ethiopia, the Ibo of modern Nigeria, the Eta of traditional Japan, the Armenians and Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, the Nestorians in the Middle East, the Mormons in the U.S—an example Slezkine does not mention–and, above all, the overseas Chinese.

“Mercurian” peoples were and are distinguished from the rest—Apollonians, is what Slezkine calls them—in two principal ways. First, they regard themselves as a people chosen by God. Not just any God, but specifically their own tribal one. To retain that status they develop and maintain a different religion, a different language, a different culture, different mores—as, for example, in wearing turbans (the Sikh community of India) and eating only kosher food—as well as an often strictly enforced endogamy. Second, whether out of their own will or because of the restrictions under which they live, they tend to avoid production—first agriculture, later industry—in favor of other, specifically urban, professions. Including money changers, bankers, peddlers, traders, physicians, pharmacists (both in my family and that of my wife there were several of those), scribes, writers, musicians, actors, fortune tellers, matchmakers, agents, lawyers, and middlemen of every kind. The sort of people who, compared with their mostly rural neighbors, tended to be well ahead in terms of literacy and modernity in general.

Thus, contrary to what I and countless Israelis have been taught, we Jews are not unique. True, Jews have tended to be more successful, were often persecuted more intensively, and survived longer than practically any other “Mercurians.” But that does not mean they are, in principle, different; let alone that their continued existence and the elevated socio-economic status they have achieved in many countries cannot be explained by history but is due to some special kind of divine favor.

That essential point having been made, Slezkine goes on to trace the history of his own “Mercurian” ancestors in Russia. Under the Czars Jews were discriminated against in any number of ways, though arguably not much more so than a great many other non-Russian peoples such as Poles, Greeks, Tatars, Armenians, and Turks. Their response was to leave, which was what between 1883 and 1924 well over a million of them did. Starting with Marx, who though not a Russian was the son of a converted Jew, others joined the forces that were even then preparing to launch the Revolution. Jews were attracted to socialism/communism because it promised them something the existing Russian state did not; namely, a life based on equality and brotherhood in which Jews could find their place without any regard to their ethnicity or religion.

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Yet Jewish vulnerability, due to their minority status over centuries on end, did not automatically vanish just because the change in regime. That is probably one reason why first Lenin—whose own paternal grandfather was Jewish—and then Stalin recruited many of their henchmen from among them. I use the term “henchmen” advisedly; in both the GPU and the NKVD between 1917 and 1945 it was often assimilated Jewish officers, completed with black cars, leather coats, and handguns, who arrested, interrogated, tortured, prosecuted, and executed the state’s prisoners by shooting them in the back of the neck. Jewish commissars also took a prominent part in some of the greatest atrocities of all, such as the destruction of the kulaks and causing millions of Ukrainians to die by starvation.

As the establishment of the “autonomous” Jewish province (oblast) in Birobidzhan shows, starting at the time he was serving as “Commissar for Nationalities” Stalin himself took an interest in the problem. The common fight against the invading Germans further reinforced the Russian Jews’ willingness, even eagerness, to assimilate, by which they meant abandoning circumcision and yarmulkes in favor of Pushkin on one hand and communism on the other.

When the time came for the state of Israel to be established it found looked for, and found, support in the Kremlin. Almost to a man, Israel’s founders were immigrants from Russia whose views on society and the economy were not too different from Stalin’s own—one Mandatory British police officer who interrogated Yitzhak Ben Tzvi, later Israel’s second president, called him “a perfect Bolshevik.” For that reason, but also because the dictator saw Israel as a lever with which to force the British to evacuate the Middle East, he supported it. By way of Czechoslovakia he even supplied it with arms; but for which the nascent Jewish State, laboring as it did under a U.N embargo, might not have survived.

What finally terminated Soviet support for Israel was the outbreak of the Korean War. As Slezkine does not say, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion worried least it might lead to a world war and thus to the severance of the country’s lifeline in the Mediterranean. This caused him to put his support, for whatever it was worth, firmly on the American/Western side. Much worse from Stalin’s point of view, Israel provided the Jews of the Soviet Union with an alternative homeland such as they had never had before. When Israel’s ambassador to Moscow, subsequent Prime Minister Golda Meir, took up her post she was absolutely mobbed by hysterically happy local Jews. No wonder the dictator changed course.

After Stalin died in 1953 his successors did not repeat anything as extreme as the notorious “doctors’ plot.” They did, however, put pressure on the Jews, subjecting them to various forms of discrimination in education and appointments to leading positions. The Jews on their part started resisting. Assisted by their co-religionists in the US, especially from 1967 on they demanded the right to leave. Once their demands were granted the newly-arrived Jews in the U.S quickly became as successful as their parents in Russia had been during the interwar years in particular. Such were their achievements in education, business, the law, the sciences, and the arts that they were even able to enter politics and make their mark there. It would be too much to say that “let my people go” (the Biblical slogan under which the fight for free emigration was waged) played the cardinal role in the success of that fight, let alone in causing the Soviet Union’s collapse; but a certain role it definitely did.

America’s gain was Russia’s loss; today fewer than a million Jews still live in the latter, as opposed to three million at the turn of the twentieth century. The other country which, following the collapse in question, became the goal of Russian-Jewish emigrants was Israel itself. In pointing out that many if not most of those Jews did not really want to go there and only started doing so in any numbers after no other option was left to them Slezkine is perfectly correct. He errs, however, in underestimating both the contribution that newly arriving Russian Jews made to Israel and the exceptional dynamism of Israel itself. Not knowing the country nearly as well as he knows Russia and the U.S, he has missed its amazing development into a military and high-tech powerhouse. Not to mention its proud ownership of the shekel, currently the strongest currency on earth. The root of the problem is found in the fact that the book was written in the early 2000s. Or else surely Slezkine would have provided a better explanation as to why so many Russian Jews did reach Israel after all than he actually does.

The period in which the book was written also explains why, in describing the U.S (and the West in general) as the new Jewish paradise, Slezkine has totally missed the new Moslem-led, (often right- but sometimes left wing), kind of anti-Semitism that seems to be gaining force on both sides of the Atlantic. Still I must confess that, to me with my Israeli education, his insistence that the Jewish nation was not nearly as unique as I had been made to believe came as a revelation. Only a little less impressive were his endless lists of successful Russian Jews, the kind that would never have been possible if Stalin had been as consistently anti-Semitic as he is often supposed to have been. Those lists in turn form but one part of an enormous body of research that has gone into this formidable, but on the whole quite readable and occasionally witty, volume. For anyone with the slightest interest in the Jewish nation, its recent past, its present and its future, it is a must.