Zionism, Ms. Rose, Evolved From Gaza

I once worked with, or for, Jacqueline Rose. 

Not in the for-pay sense.  I read through a long review essay she composed on a novel Ze'ev Jabotinsky wrote, after we met and discussed matters at my first Limmud. Sorry, can't find that text now. I have also commented on her forays against Zionism.

In an interview with her now, I caught this

She has also written extensively – attracting some criticism – about the history and nature of Jewish nationalism, using the techniques of psychoanalysis to call for it to confront its fractured psyche. “You can feel her pain throbbing through these essays,” wrote the late Peter Preston in a review of her 2007 book The Last Resistance, which sought to track the evolution of Zionism to modern day Gaza.

Let me be concise reacting to this

the evolution of Zionism to modern day Gaza

Zionism, in part, evolved from ancient and pre-modern Gaza. 

In 2005, Israel destroyed Jewish post-1967 Gaza.

That brought us a continuous rain of rockets and mortars.And terror tunnels.

In 1948, the Jewish kibbutz Kfar Gaza was destroyed by invading Egyptian troops.

That brought us the fedayeen and constant, daily terror all throughout the 1950s.

In 1929, the small Jewish community in Gaza City was chased out by the Mufti's terror gangs in an act of ethnic cleansing.

In 1662, Shabbtai Tzvi had himself pronounced Messiah in the sizable and important Torah center that was Gaza.

In the late 16th century, Israel Najara composed the Shabbat hymns we sing at our table in Gaza.

Jews lived in Gaza in the Ottoman period, the Crusader period, the Early Arab period, Byzantine period and all the way back in time to the Talmudic and Biblical period

I  repeat: Zionism evolved from Gaza.

And from Judea.

And from Samaria.

^

Jacqueline Rose Disappoints on Marilyn Monroe

She purports to look into Marilyn Monroe's mind and writes:

At the very least it should suggest that, wherever Monroe belongs – and there is an argument for saying she never belonged anywhere – it isn’t in the expected place. If Monroe offers an image of American perfectibility, we shouldn’t be surprised to find behind that image, as its hidden companion, a host of other images through which that same – perfectible – America indicts itself

But not once mentions her conversion to Judaism although she comes close:

Miller himself made no secret or apology for the redemption he sought in her (that they sought in each other).

Odd for an academic who is  know for her work on psychoanalysis and feminism.

After all

the Spring 2010 issue of Reform Judaism magazine has published newly released letters from the rabbi who officiated at the conversion of Marilyn Monroe. The letters reveal that Monroe was not only a serious and heart-felt convert to Judaism, she continued to identify as Jewish after her divorce from Jewish playwright Arthur Miller...The letters show that Marilyn had rejected the fundamentalist Protestant upbringing of your youth many years earlier, and that her desire to become Jewish was self-motivated, although her relationship with Arthur was clearly an influential one. "She indicated that she was attracted to Judaism by being impressed with Jewish people that she knew, especially Mr. Miller," the rabbi writes. "She said that she was aware of the great characters that the Jewish people had produced and that she had read selections from Albert Einstein's Out of My Later Years ... She indicated that she was impressed with the rationalism of Judaism -- its ethical and prophetic ideals and its concept of close family life."

So, what does this tell us of...Prof. Rose and her Judaism?


^

Prof. Rose Is Wrong - Again

Professor Jacqueline Rose is at it again.

She has an op-ed in The Guardian defending that literary trash of a 'play', "Seven Jewish Children" - which I noted previously - and she attacks Harold Johnston.

However, in trying to prove how faithful the play's text is to classical Zionist sources, she writes:

Repeatedly, Jacobson selects lines from the play as if they self-evidently supported his case. But how can a line like this one – "Tell her it's the land God gave us" – be antisemitic, when David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, stated more than once, "The Bible is our Mandate"? Or, to take another example: "Tell her we're the iron fist now," when it was early Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky who coined the concept of the "iron wall" to convey the idea that the new Jewish nation should be invincible in order to force the Arabs into submission.

Ben-Gurion can fend for himself but Jabotinsky is in need of me and so I left this comment there on The Iron Wall:

My good friend Prof. Rose, who I had occasion to aid in her essay in The Nation on Jabotinsky's novel, "The Five", has made an error in writing this:

"Or, to take another example: "Tell her we're the iron fist now," when it was early Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky who coined the concept of the "iron wall" to convey the idea that the new Jewish nation should be invincible in order to force the Arabs into submission."

As she should know, and I am sure she does, Jabotinsky's 'iron wall' concept, presented in a 1923 essay in two parts, was not to force Arabs into submission but first, to protect Jews from Arab terror which already had struck at Jewish civilians in 1920 in Jerusalem and in 1921 in Jaffa, causing dead and wounded, among them, the author Haim Brener. Secondly, it was to convince the Arabs that they could not cause the Jews to submit and therefore, for the benefit of all, and in the name of justice, they should agree to the idea of a Jewish state.

Here are some extracts:

"...Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of “Palestine” into the “Land of Israel”...

...we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say “no” and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy."

Ms. Rose has twisted Jabotinsky's meaning and so, we are left with the conclusion
that she has also misportrayed the play's intention.

That is too bad, for us, for Ms. Rose and for the people who will be watching antisemitism defended by academics.

UPDATE


Go here, click on the "Listen" button (for the next 4 days) and go to minute 36 to listen to the debate between Rose and Geoffrey Alderman.

A Suggested Freudian Analysis of Jacqueline Rose

Jacqueline Rose has been treated at this blog before (here).

An antizionist, she teaches at Queen Mary, University of London. "A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity", edited with Anne Karpf, Brian Klug and Barbara Rosenbaum is one of her books and A Question of Zion is another.



I participated in a question-and-answer session with her and we collaborated, sort of, on a book review she published in The Nation on Jabotinsky.

She has published a novel about was written:-

One of the central tenets of the feminist literary theory that has proliferated in recent years - "gynocriticism", as Elaine Showalter terms it - is the recuperation of female characters buried within fictional texts. Encompassing aspects of deconstruction and psychoanalytic theory, this was a project with many and various aims. By no means the least significant was to attempt a rereading - and, potentially, a re-inscription - of "textual women", which took into account previous misreadings, and explored the assumptions and difficulties inherent in their creation and their reception.

As a critic, Jacqueline Rose's work falls clearly into this corrective tradition; her studies reflect an interest, in her own words, in "the interface between literature, psychoanalysis, politics and culture". Now, as a first-time novelist, she has diverted these interests into a fictional production of her own, taking as her starting point one of the most famous heroines and one of the most famous novels in literary history.

Notice that word "deconstruction"?

Well, look at what Ms. Rose herself has written now about another novel:-

But by the time the novel has returned to this enigma several times, I was starting to feel uncomfortable, as if the aftermath of the war were being made to depend on how we decipher the sexual transgression of a woman (most of Schlink’s narrators, with the exception of the narrator of The Reader, seem to be more or less happy to admit their chauvinism if not misogyny).

But there is more, or rather worse, to come. The narrator will never find out how the story ends, but he does find its author: his own father, whom he believed to have been shot early in the war. Instead he turns out to have been a member of the SS, a devoted Nazi ideologue called Volker Vonlanden, who faked his own death and escaped to the US, where he is now John de Baur, a successful academic who teaches deconstruction and its relation to the law and who delights in experimenting on the mental and physical endurance of his students under the cover of scholarly retreats: ‘He had studied under Leo Strauss and Paul de Man and was the founder of the deconstructionist school of legal theory.’ It isn’t clear which is his greatest crime: having been a member of the SS, faking his identity, abandoning his son, or following the principles of deconstruction.

Hmmm. Is there something Freudian in this? Is Rose a bit uncomforatble with her savage attacks on Israel, discovering, perhaps, herself being deconstructed?

Picture credits I, II

A Rose By Any Other Name Might Smell Differently

Since the suicide bombing phenonemom has begun, yet again, I think we should review again selections from this apologia for it by Jacqueline Rose who teaches at Queen Mary, University of London. Her books include On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World and, most recently, The Question of Zion. This is from a few years back:-

All suicides kill other people. However isolated the moment, suicide is also always an act of cruelty. Anyone left behind after someone close to them commits, or even attempts, suicide is likely to spend much of the rest of their life wondering whether they themselves have, or should have, survived. Suicide is rarely the singular, definitive act it appears to be. The ego, Freud tells us, turns onto itself the hatred it feels towards the object. But the object is never spared. No one commits suicide, the psychoanalyst Karl Menninger wrote in 1933, unless they experience at once ‘the wish to die, the wish to kill, the wish to be killed’. You can die, but you can’t commit suicide, on your own.

Suicide bombing is most often considered a peculiarly monstrous, indeed inhuman aberration that cannot – or must not – be understood. When the Lib Dem MP Jenny Tonge observed, ‘If I had to live in that situation – and I say that advisedly – I might just consider becoming one myself,’ the Israeli Embassy responded with this statement: ‘We would not expect any human being – and surely not a British MP – to express an understanding of such atrocities.’

Tonge was sacked from her party’s front bench. We can be fairly sure that had she expressed similar understanding of the policy of targeted assassination, or extra-judicial killing, in response to suicide bombings, she would not today be out of a job. The wording she used – ‘If I had to’ – is crucial. She was not sympathising: she was trying to imagine what it was like to be a Palestinian in the Occupied Territories. (She condemned the bombings.)...But perhaps there is a logic here. If the case for war is weak – or non-existent – then the ugliness and guilt of war rise perilously close to the surface of the public mind: war, in Levin’s words, as murder and revenge. In which case, it helps to be able to point to something far worse, preferably from another culture or world, with which no reasonable human being could possibly identify...

Suicide bombing kills far fewer people than conventional warfare; the reactions it provokes must, therefore, reside somewhere other than in the number of the dead. It is, of course, feared as a weapon against which there appears to be no protection, and to which there is no viable response: targeted assassinations simply provoke further retaliation (and Israel’s security wall is already proving incapable of deterring attacks). The horror it inspires cannot, however, be explained in terms of the deliberate targeting of civilians: according to McNamara, 100,000 people were burnt to death at the end of the war in the Allied attack on Tokyo, and in On the Natural History of Destruction, W.G. Sebald describes the ten thousand tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs dropped on the densely populated residential areas of Hamburg in the summer of 1943.

The horror would appear to be associated with the fact that the attacker also dies. Dropping cluster bombs from the air is not only less repugnant: it is somehow deemed, by Western leaders at least, to be morally superior. Why dying with your victim should be seen as a greater sin than saving yourself is unclear. Perhaps, then, the revulsion stems partly from the unbearable intimacy shared in their final moments by the suicide bomber and her or his victims. Suicide bombing is an act of passionate identification – you take the enemy with you in a deadly embrace. As Israel becomes a fortress state and the Palestinians are shut into their enclaves, and there is less and less possibility of contact between the two sides, suicide bombing might be the closest they can get...

...There is one thing that nobody will disagree with: the story of suicide bombing is a story of people driven to extremes. ‘Children who have seen so much inhumanity,’ El-Sarraj states, ‘inevitably come out with inhuman responses.’ We need to find a language that will allow us to recognise why, in a world of inequality and injustice, people are driven to do things that we hate. Without claiming to know too much. Without condescension.

Commenting on Jacqueline Rose

You can view my comment at Jacqueline Rose's discussion thread here.