A Jew Presumes; I Respond

Here's a letter from April 9 in The Guardian:

Binyamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman (Report, 9 April) should realise that a fair proportion of the world's Jewry feel the same way as Günter Grass about the Israeli government's policies – which are in breach of Jewish law ("Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt", Exodus 22:21) and the Jewish tradition of support for the oppressed, especially at this time of Passover – and feel that it is they who are "sacrificing the Jewish people" in their militaristic and intransigent policies towards the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. Many of us who were supporters of Israel and the Zionist project have become disillusioned by the injustice of the present government, and their failure to take steps to achieve a lasting peace.

Michael Ellman
London

Here's my reaction:

Michael Ellman (Letter, April 10), asserts that "a fair proportion of the world's Jewry feel the same way as Günter Grass about the Israeli government's policies" of Binyamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman and that these two leaders failed "to take steps to achieve a lasting peace".  How to judge what is a "fair proportion" and if Ellman is correct on this point is beyond me, but on his second point, I can assure him that he is quite wrong.

Besides misusing a Biblical instruction which has no relevance to the Arabs of Mandate Palestine's 90-year terror campaign against Jews and Zionism, Mr Netanyahu in handing over Hebron at the 1999 Wye Agreement, which permitted Arabs to snipe at Jewish residents eventually killing an infant girl, his announcement in 2009, repeated, accepting the two-state principle and also his 2010 construction moratorium did, in the face of constant incitement, lawlessness as well as even internal Palestinian Authority corruption against its own residents, I would suggest, more than necessary in the face of Arab intransigence.  And surely no more than the Bible would demand in the situation, a Bible, incidentally, that views Judea, Samaria and Gaza as part of the historic Jewish homeland wherein Jews, like myself, should be able to reside and flourish.

Was it ever published?

What do you think?

This one though was.  And this, too.  But those were a while ago.

^

Words of Wisdom on Dumb Jews

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Years ago, someone told me that a Jew is a person too fair-minded to take his own side in a fight. Back then, it was meant as a joke. And back then the fight was not as consequential as the 21st century war against the Jews.

Clifford D. May,
President of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies

On the issue of Jews reinforcing anti-semitism as well as anti-Zionism -

In America, it’s still considered impolite to openly disparage Jews, Israelis or Israel. But speaking in a coded way is not unacceptable. So it’s fine to suggest that perhaps some Jews exercise too much power and insinuate themselves into positions where they place Israel’s interests above America’s. Efforts to delegitimize Israel and even dehumanize Israelis are permissible “free speech” rather than impermissible “hate speech.” It also is increasingly considered bold, even brave, to suggest that Israel may have been a mistake.

Anyone with a grasp of history or a grain of common sense should know where this road leads. Yet too many people—not least, too many American Jews—seem untroubled by such rhetoric. Some even reinforce it.

^

"Contempt is the snobbery of the cognitive elite"

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Jewish left-wing antipathy toward Israel poses a bit of a puzzle, but not a mystery. Guys like these are sometimes described as "self-hating Jews," but you understand everything if you realize that is a misnomer. They don't hate themselves at all. They have an inflated self-regard that leads them to disdain fellow Jews. It's simply the Jewish variant of oikophobia. (Perhaps someone will think to coin the portmanteau "joikophobia.")

James Taranto

_______
See this:-

The British philosopher Roger Scruton has coined a term to describe this attitude: oikophobia. Xenophobia is fear of the alien; oikophobia is fear of the familiar: "the disposition, in any conflict, to side with 'them' against 'us', and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably 'ours.' " What a perfect description of the pro-mosque left.

Scruton was writing in 2004, and his focus was on Britain and Europe, not America. But his warning about the danger of oikophobes--whom he amusingly dubs "oiks"--is very pertinent on this side of the Atlantic today, and it illuminates how what are sometimes dismissed as mere matters of "culture" tie in with economic and social policy:

The oik repudiates national loyalties and defines his goals and ideals against the nation, promoting transnational institutions over national governments, accepting and endorsing laws that are imposed on us from on high by the EU or the UN, though without troubling to consider Terence's question, and defining his political vision in terms of universal values that have been purified of all reference to the particular attachments of a real historical community.

The oik is, in his own eyes, a defender of enlightened universalism against local chauvinism. And it is the rise of the oik that has led to the growing crisis of legitimacy in the nation states of Europe. For we are seeing a massive expansion of the legislative burden on the people of Europe, and a relentless assault on the only loyalties that would enable them voluntarily to bear it. The explosive effect of this has already been felt in Holland and France. It will be felt soon everywhere, and the result may not be what the oiks expect.

^

Weiss - Wipe Yourself

Anti-Zionist and anti-Israel Philip Weiss of Mondeweiss illustrates the mindset of his ilk in this description of how he sneaks back into Israel from Ramallah at the Hizma crossing:

A soldier stood strangely bent over a semiautomatic weapon at the ready, the barrel gleaming in the streetlights. “Pure racial profiling,” said my Israeli friend. And of course a checkpoint on our side too, to keep the Palestinians on the West Bank. I didn’t even notice the soldier's wave, as we slid through. He did this with his hand, my friend mimed. "Because we look Israeli." Behind us a car with a woman wearing a hijab got pulled over for questioning.

This is not racial profiling.

It's is ratiomnal logic.

If you are at a security crosspoint looking for Arab terrorists do you look for Arabs or Jews? Do you stop and strip search everyone?

And, by-the-by, he throws this in:

The new electric tram to bring settlers into the city from the Jerusalem settlements.

But his geography is weak:

And let's be clear. I say Jerusalem, but the municipal border is miles east of those 1967 lines that President Obama mentioned back in May, and then had to eat. We passed through several gleaming Jewish neighborhoods built to encircle the city-- Givat Benjamin. French Hill. Pisgat Zeev.

a) "miles"? Not really.

b) Givat Benjamin? Where is that?

And then he returns to his hate and self-hate speech:

...when you are driving an hour out of your way past the hilltop settlements and the divided roads, and the barbed wire festooned with tattered plastic bags and the wall and the guard towers, you think of apartheid, and of ancient ghettoes in Europe...the architecture of East Jerusalem, of racial separation and colonization and cultural anxiety and persecution. Some day the American press will discover it.

Wheter its spittle or worse, Philip Weiss, wipe yourself.

^

Now It's The Fiddler Question - ASHamed Jews at Work

The following letter was published in the 30 August 2011 edition of The Independent, a major UK national daily newspaper:

Proms exploited for arts propaganda campaign

As musicians we are dismayed that the BBC has invited the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra to play at the Proms on 1 September. The IPO has a deep involvement with the Israeli state – not least its self-proclaimed “partnership” with the Israeli Defence Forces. This is the same state and army that impedes in every way it can the development of Palestinian culture, including the prevention of Palestinian musicians from travelling abroad to perform.

Our main concern is that Israel deliberately uses the arts as propaganda to promote a misleading image of Israel. Through this campaign, officially called “Brand Israel”, denials of human rights and violations of international law are hidden behind a cultural smokescreen. The IPO is perhaps Israel’s prime asset in this campaign.

The Director of the Proms, Roger Wright, was asked to cancel the concert in accordance with the call from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott (PACBI). He rejected this call, saying that the invitation is “purely musical”.

Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians fits the UN definition of apartheid. We call on the BBC to cancel this concert.

(k/t = DaphneAnson)

Seems there may have been some slight contretemps.  And they went choral, too.  And there's this piece.

All in all, from the signatories above, seems Jacobson's ASHamed Jews are still at work - an excerpt from The Finkler Question:

Born a Jew on Monday, he had signed up to be an ASHamed Jew by Wednesday and was seen chanting, 'We are all Hezbollah' outside the Israeli embassy on the following Saturday."...Every other Wednesday, except for festivals and High Holy-days, an anti-Zionist group called ASHamed Jews meets in an upstairs room in the Groucho Club in Soho to dissociate itself from Israel, urge the boycotting of Israeli goods, and otherwise demonstrate a humanity in which they consider Jews who are not ASHamed to be deficient. ASHamed Jews came about as a consequence of the famous Jewish media philosopher Sam Finkler’s avowal of his own shame on Desert Island Discs. “My Jewishness has always been a source of pride and solace to me,” he told Radio Four’s listeners, not quite candidly, “but in the matter of the dispossession of the Palestinians I am, as a Jew, profoundly ashamed.” “Profoundly self-regarding,” you mean, was his wife’s response. But then she wasn’t Jewish and so couldn’t understand just how ashamed in his Jewishness an ashamed Jew could be.

And he explained:

That I know of, there is no Jewish media philosopher named Sam Finkler nor any anti-Zionist group meeting regularly at the Groucho Club. They exist only in the pages of my new novel, The Finkler Question, and any relation between them and real people or organisations is of course coincidental.  Though the ASHamed Jews are a satiric invention, my novel is not primarily a satire...For many Jews and non-Jews in this country Israel has become a figure of speech, the occasion for wild and whirling words, a pretext for bottling up or setting loose emotions which originate somewhere else entirely.

I began writing the The Finkler Question in 2008 but it came to the boil for me in the early months of 2009 at the time of Operation Cast Lead, as a consequence of which, or as a consequence of the reporting of which – for it, too, like everything else to do with Israel outside Israel, was figmentary – England turned into an uncustomarily frightening place for Jews. I am not speaking only of the physical threats and even damage that some Jews endured, attacks on persons, synagogues, cemeteries, the Jew-hatred expressed by primary school children etc, but of that anti-Zionist rhetoric which, in its inflatedness and fervour – a rhapsodic hyperbole growing more and more detached from any conceivable reality – was so upsetting in itself. You do not have to be punched in the face to feel you’ve been assaulted: intellectual violence is its own affront.

And let's present more satire:

Why I’m an ashamed Jew -

Yep, you read right.
I’ve had to admit it.
I can’t live a lie any longer.
I’m deeply, deeply ashamed.

Ashamed of being Jewish?

No way. I’m very proud to be Jewish and a member of the Jewish people.

Ashamed of Israel? Wrong again. I’m proud of Israel’s achievements. I worry about its policies, sometimes; I’m concerned, sometimes, about some of its actions and those of some of its citizens, but I could say the same for Britain and I’m still proud to be British.

So why am I ashamed?

I’ll tell you.

I’m ashamed of Jews who say they are ashamed to be Jews or Jewish.
I don’t hear Palestinians coming out to declare they are ashamed to be Palestinian and denounce suicide bombs or missiles.
I don’t hear Arabs writing they are ashamed to be Arabs because of Al Qaeda or Sudan or Yemen.
I don’t hear Muslims forming groups of shame because of what Sunni does to Shia, or 9/11, or 7/7, or Madrid, or Mumbai.
I don’t know of any Ashamed Catholic groups forming because of the paedophilia apparently rife in Catholic clergy.

In fact I know of no other group of people who so often announce their ashamedness to be who they are as Jews do.

And you know what?

It makes me ashamed.

I’m an ashamed Jew who is ashamed of ashamed Jews. If that’s a paradox, so be it. And I’m not ashamed to declare my shame...

Are we the only people on earth to suffer so from our own?

^

You Ashamed of Being Jewish?

Or of Jews who are ashamed they are Jewish?

In either case, read this.

^

He Wants to Scream? I've Been Screaming For Years

Howard Jacobson ponders his situation:

“To me, being a comic novelist is obviously to be serious, too — what else is there to be comic about?” Mr. Jacobson said. “But when I hear people call me a comic novelist, I want to scream, because they mean something different. I can call myself a comic novelist, though, because I know what I mean when I say it.”

He, however, unlike me, has won the prestigious Booker Prize:

...The winning book, “The Finkler Question,” is Mr. Jacobson’s 11th novel...It is an unusual Booker choice, both because it delves into the heart of the British Jewish experience, something that few contemporary British novels try to do, and because it is, on its surface at least, so ebulliently comic. It tells the story of three friends, two Jewish and one, Julian Treslove, who longs to be.

When Treslove is attacked by a mugger who mutters something like, “You’re Jules,” or possibly, “You Jew!,” the experience sends him on a long exploration of the nature of Jewishness, culturally, socially and politically. He grapples with questions like, What makes someone Jewish? Is it anti-Semitic to make generalizations about what makes someone Jewish? Why are British Jews so much more open and warm than British non-Jews?

...his friends argue endlessly about Israel, forever “examining and shredding each other’s evidence,” Mr. Jacobson writes. One of them, Sam Finkler, who writes pop-philosophy books, joins an anti-Zionist group called the ASHamed Jews — mercilessly lampooned by Mr. Jacobson — that meets regularly at the fashionable Groucho Club to denounce Israel’s foreign policy.

Some readers have misunderstood. “People think they’re parodies of Jews who happen to disapprove of Israel,” Mr. Jacobson said of the ASHamed, sitting in his apartment in the Soho neighborhood here, his new Man Booker statuette gleaming behind him. “But they’re not. They’re parodies of Jews who parade their disapproval of Israel.”

...there is an ominous undercurrent in the book in the form of a growing number of anti-Semitic attacks, mostly offstage, that shatter the complacency of characters who resist the notion of Jews as perpetual victims. Mr. Jacobson says that such incidents worry him too, and that some of the views in the cacophony of arguments and counterarguments in the book reflect his own opinions. But mostly, he said, he adheres to the notion, as one of his characters says, that “as a Jew, I believe that every argument has a counterargument.”

As BDL has written:

So now we a have a book which has won Britain's highest literary award - and it makes fun of anti-Israeli lefties! What is going to happen in Israel when it is translated into Hebrew? Will Haaretz carry articles explaining how the British literary establishment has suffered temporary insanity?

- - -

Chomping Chomsky

In the headline above, it's Chomsky who is doing the chomping.

His entrance into Judea and Samaria banned, the Lede Blog of the NYTimes carried this bit of information:

In an interview with Deborah Solomon of The New York Times Magazine in 2003, Mr. Chomsky said, “I objected to the founding of Israel as a Jewish state. I don’t think a Jewish or Christian or Islamic state is a proper concept. I would object to the United States as a Christian state.” When Ms. Solomon pressed Mr. Chomsky on his opposition to Israel, saying, “Your father was a respected Hebraic scholar, and sometimes you sound like a self-hating Jew,” he replied:

It is a shame that critics of Israeli policies are seen as either anti-Semites or self-hating Jews. It’s grotesque. If an Italian criticized Italian policies, would he be seen as a self-hating Italian?

Even me, not really a world-class philosopher can see a fault in Chomsky's logic. If an Italian denied the existence of Italy, or its right to be established as a political framework for the Italian people (who could be of all religions), yes, he would be a self-hating Italian - just like Chomsky who objects to Israel's very founding is a self-hating Jew.


_ _ _

The Not-That-Funny Sarah Silverman

As the waiter clears her glass of mint tea (repairing to the kitchen, presumably to lick the rim), I ask Ms. Silverman if there’s anything I’ve missed — any point in particular she’d like to make.

“Yes,” she says, giving me a warm hug. “Jews run the media.”

On Irene Nemirovsky Again

Once more - a great line:

In the end, the biography and the stories leave one feeling both sad and intensely conscious of the disparity between Irène Némirovksy’s literary offenses and the fate that awaited her at Auschwitz. What we’re left with are the paradoxes...A woman obsessed with defining her own identity learned how little her opinion mattered to authorities with their own criteria for determining who she was.

This Is A "Beware of Blumenthal" Message

This man below is Max Blumenthal:

Remember his face.

If you looks at you and asks you a question with his video camera crew, ignore him.

That's right, simply ignore him.

No ugly faces, no ugly remarks.

Anything you do, no matter how innocent it may seems to you, he will use against us.

Proof.

Back to the Theme of Jewish Self-Hatred

I have dealt with Irene Nemirovsky previously and now in the Times Literary Supplement, Frederic Raphael has a review essay.

The issue, for me, is insanely attracting in that elements of her outlook and behavior seem to keep repeating themselves. In Israel, the theme of self-hatred is not simply a polemical shout of political antagonism but a very real and threatening development among our elite, as self-crowned as they are.

I have selected passages from the essay that deal with the question of the author's Jewishness, self-hatred and reaction to antisemitism:-

...Did Némirovsky satirize Jews simply in order to ingratiate herself with an alien audience? Anti-Semitism was a stylish conceit in the Parisian circles to which she so diligently sought entry, but the émigrés’ world of conspicuous insecurity was also the one she knew best...

Like Proust, only more so, she at once acknowledged and derided the Jewishness she could never shuck (although females are never quite “Jews”, even to themselves, to the degree to which the anti-Semite takes males to be). Literary “self-hatred” can combine self-advertisement with a play for exemption. Karl Marx’s early polemic against the “huckster race” is an example; Harold Pinter’s bully boy Goldstein, in The Birthday Party, just might be another. Self-criticism is, however, fundamental to Judaism: it metastasized into both Communist and psychoanalytic confessional modes.

Némirovsky said later that she would never have written David Golder (and other stories) in so scathing a tone, if she had known that Hitler was imminent. In fact, the dormant bacilli of the Dreyfus affair, and its vocabulary, were always, like shingles, ripe for resuscitation in the Right as it itched for revenge. Meanwhile, the young Robert Brasillach, although already an acolyte of Charles Maurras’s right-wing Action française, stepped out of the ranks of Tuscany to cheer Irène’s early work: “this young woman of both Russian and Jewish origin . . . [grasps] the secrets of our race better than French writers”.

Only with the rise of Fascism, and then of Nazism, was Brasillach engorged by the prospect of power and happily perverted by the genocidal malice which, some say, has to be excused in Céline’s lethal frivolity. In the same spirit, after the defeat of 1940, Henri Béraud – a “friend” of Némirovsky who had won the Prix Goncourt in 1922 – chose to associate Jews with the English and with Freemasons and conclude, “In all conscience, yes, one should be anti-Semitic”. Anti-Semitism is often less a recondite sentiment than a social contagion; opportunism in its Sunday best. Under the Occupation, it could be worn, with profit, all week. Brasillach then advocated giving “serious thought to the deportation of little Jewish children”...

...Suite française occupies a place in Némirovsky’s oeuvre not unlike that of the last section of À la Recherche du temps perdu, in which Proust’s narrator perceives that the gratin to which he has deferred so sedulously, and so long, is a decadent crust. Redemption is recovered personality. Némirovsky’s last work mentions the word Jew only twice. All the vices which had seemed specific to Jews she now realized to be pandemic: her fastidious Parisian aesthete, Langelet, in his flight, cares more for his porcelain collection than for France itself. He scorns the Jewish fugitives hoping to reach Portugal or South America, but all his refinement cannot save him from being run over in the common panic. In the margin of her manuscript, describing his end, Némirovsky scribbled “the end of the liberal bourgeoisie”. Similarly, Hugo Grayer, in the short story “Le Spectateur”, presumes himself too fine for the doomed Europe which he abandons, only to find that he has taken flight on a literally sinking ship...

...As for Némirovsky’s “self-hatred”, a single intelligence might have guessed that the mercilessness directed at “her own people” concealed a much wider scorn. Her underlying topic was the interplay of emotion and callousness, the alternations of vanity and despair, in all the players of the world’s game. Imaginative impersonation is the mark of the natural novelist; fiction is where the truth can be found; documentary is too often where it is confected. Némirovsky could play male or female, be villain or dupe, candid or duplicitous. She moved the black and the white pieces with equal versatility. The insolence of her impostures was a function of an isolation from which neither success nor marriage dispensed her...

What do you say?

I Was Mentioned - And Edited Out

Do you remember this post of mine on that panel at the London Jewish Book Week?

I claimed it was unbalanced and promoted self-hating Jews.

Well, here's the video and I am mentioned at 4 minutes in.


Seems, though, something about me was cut.

- - -

The Fair Play (Not) of the Jewish Book Week in London

You want balance?

The Brits, and especially Jewish Brits, know how. Here are two examples from their Jewish Book Week confab:

Human rights activist Prof. Francesca Klug, J Street advisor Daniel Levy and Ben-Gurion University's Prof. David Newman will discuss the debate between those labeled as "self-hating Jews" and ardent supporters of Israel who give unconditional support to Israel

.

Debate?

Between whom? Between what opposing views?

All three are far-left with Klug an Independent Jewish Voice, Newman attacking in classic McVarthy-style the NGO-Monitor group and Levy, well, he's been at the Geneva Initative and is going left.


For sure, though, a good collection of self-hating Jews.


and this, too:

JBW has been criticised for hosting on Sunday the critical of Israel editor of the London Review of Books (LRB), Mary-Kay Wilmers. Last year Wilmers told The Sunday Times: "I'm unambiguously hostile to Israel because it¹s a mendacious state. They do things that are just so immoral and counterproductive and, as a Jew, especially as a Jew, you can't justify that." LRB did the first review of Walt and Mearsheimer's 'Israel Lobby' book in 2006 and LRB writer Ed Harriman produced the documentary earlier this year that implied there was a powerful and influential Israeli lobby at work in the UK.

D'Amico told the Jewish Chronicle this week that Wilmers has been invited to discuss her latest book and not her views on Israel.

But, of course. What else would she discuss?

Oh, here's a review of that book and I am confident that Mary-Kay will easily slip Israel into her family's history retelling.

Aloni Baloney

Shulamit Aloni is such a lover of Zion.

And to think we once cheek-pecked each other before a Pesach break when I worked in the Knesset.

She now is of the opinion that we Israelis "are a nefarious people".

From the story:

Former Meretz leader tells Ynet on 81st birthday that 'what we do in West Bank is worse than all pogroms'

Former Meretz leader Shulamit Aloni told Ynet on her 81st birthday Sunday that she was dissatisfied with the condition of the State of Israel.

"It's hard for me to say a kind word about the state today," she said. "We are in great distress morally and socially, as well as in the realms of politics and law."

..."No one should be speaking this nonsense about 'blood on the hands'. Since 2000, with the launching of the second intifada, we have murdered thousands. We too have blood on our hands," she remarked.

..."We are a nefarious people. What we are doing in the West Bank is worse than all the pogroms done to the Jews." But she qualified her statement by saying she was "not referring to the Nazis, but the Cossacks".

So, terrorists kill us, we defend ourselves and so we are all equal?

We're Russian antisemites in disguise?

There's been no violent campaign of Jew-killing since 1920 by Arabs?

Aloni lives in a warped ideological world of make-believe.

On Self-Hating Jews

Vilification of Israel by Jews is not a new phenomenon. As early as May 1, 1936 Labor Zionist leader Berl Katznelson asked: “Is there another people on earth whose sons are so emotionally twisted that they consider everything their nation does despicable and hateful, while every murder, rape and robbery committed by their enemies fills their hearts with admiration and awe? As long as a Jewish child…can come to the land of Israel, and here catch the virus of self-hate…let not our conscience be still.”2

For Katznelson this was aberrant behavior, not the norm. Today, criticism of Israel has become ubiquitous among a significant portion of Israeli intellectuals.3

In the 1950s, psychologist Gordon Allport explained that Jewish self-hate is the process in which the victim identifies with his aggressor and “sees his own group through their eyes.” The Jew “may hate his historic religion…or he may blame some one class of Jews…or he may hate the Yiddish language. Since he cannot escape his own group, he does in a real sense hate himself—or at least the part of himself that is Jewish.”4

Self-hating Jews play a significant role in anti-Israel campaigns of the Western media. Historian Robert Wistrich noted that Jews highly critical of Israel are featured in the British media.5

2. Edward Alexander, “Israelis Against Themselves.” In The Jewish Divide Over Israel: Accusers and Defenders. Edward Alexander and Paul Bogdanor, Eds. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2006), 35.

3. Ibid., 35-36.

4. Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Jews Against Israel,” Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs No.30 (March 1, 2005).

5. Ibid.

From an email "When Israelis Denounce Israel: Legitimate Criticism of Israel or Arrogant Self-Delusion", by Dr. Alex Grobman.

So Jewish

“I felt oddly guilty for not feeling guilty enough.”

Doriel Waldman

protagonist character in Elie Weisel's A Mad Desire To Dance

and I can think of many more real persons who think like that.

Commenting on Jacqueline Rose

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