There is a piece in yesterday's Times that perfectly demonstrates why I believe that it is Essential that the Jewish family divide at last, openly, over Israel. Here it is, by Edward Rothstein. It is all about an exhibit at the Holocaust Memorial on Nazi propaganda, and how it lulled the western mind with antisemitic poison so as to gain wide complicity in the annihilation of Jews.
Rothstein: "The impact of these images is prerational or antirational; they short-circuit argument."
And who is heir to these sinister propaganda techniques… Arabs!!!
broadcasts by Haj Amin al-Husseini, “an Arab nationalist and prominent
Muslim religious leader.” Now no sponsorship seems needed. Major Middle
East media outlets have asserted that Jews use children’s blood to bake
matzos. In recent weeks we have heard that Jews are following the
nefarious plot outlined in the Protocols to exterminate all gentiles,
this from the poet and former member of the Lebanese Parliament Ghassan
Matar. An Egyptian cleric, Safwat Higazi, has described Jews being “as
smooth as a viper”: “Dispatch those son of apes and pigs to the
Hellfire.”
And an Egyptian cleric with strong ties to the West,
Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradhawi, has described Jews as “a profligate, cunning
arrogant band of people”: “Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill
them, down to the very last one.”
The extent of these visions
(chronicled by the Middle East Media Research Institute [MEMRI]), the
historical distortions they codify and the readiness with which they
are taught to children and are secularized into political action
suggest that the strongest contemporary analogy to Nazi propaganda may
be one the exhibition leaves unmentioned.
That's where the piece ends. Scary. Tendentious. There is of course no even-somewhat-evenhanded discussion of the fact that Israel just killed 410 Arab children and propagandized the United States to accept the slaughter as the necessary cost of living surrounded by terrorists who fire rockets at Ashkelon (which was named al-Majdal before Israel captured it and ethnically-cleansed it in 1948, forcing many of its residents into Gaza). And this propaganda is transmitted, even as Americans accept that terrorists are a necessary part of a government, in Iraq. Rothstein talks all about fascism's rise in Germany, and by implication, the Arab world, without a mention of Avigdor Lieberman's loyalty oaths and racist statements.
Notice also Rothstein's tip of the hat to the Zionist organization, MEMRI.
Now maybe Rothstein is a Zionist. I bet he is; for the baseline intellectual condition of Zionism is a Jewish belief that antisemitism in the west is a profound unending threat. There is nothing I can do about his ahistorical belief– I might as well preach Christianity to a grizzly bear, as the great Lincoln quipped–except to talk to others, who see reality differently.
But let's be clear: Roger Cohen in the Times is also a Jew and he is on a very different path. He confessed himself "shamed" by the Gaza slaughter. This seems to have led him to question a lot of his beliefs about Israeli exceptionalism. He has gone to Iran and seems to understand that In the eyes of its neighbors, Israel is a threatening and aggressive state! This has nothing to do with Jewishness, but everything to do with Zionism and invasion and the iron wall– and the Israel lobby, which ensures that Israeli nukes and disproportionate belligerence will not be questioned inside the superpower upon whom Israel depends.
Cohen and Rothstein differ, I imagine, on a fundamental Jewish question: Is the Jewish state necessary for the safety of Jews in the west? Many questions follow from that. Why don't you feel a need to move there yourself? Why are Jews in Israel trying to move here? Why is it so incumbent on Jews in the U.S. to support Israel as a sacred mission, as Dershowitz has said ? Doesn't that involve propagandizing Americans? Doesn't that burden Jews, as John Judis has said, with dual loyalty? And so on and so forth.
I'm just saying: We need to have this out. We need to have a few Jews who have thought about these things on a stage. Some will say, I'm a Zionist, and here's why, and others will say, I'm not a Zionist, and here's why. And let Jews hear. Let Americans hear too.
