Susie Kneedler shares my feeling that David Brooks is influential. Her take on his Israel column:
Now that I've read David Brooks's column, I think I see what festers about it.
Brooks tries to say something smart about Israel by, in his own phrase, ''— miracle of miracles —" telling the truth: "Israel is a country held together by argument." Brooks tries to account for his own sense of foreignness there, but is caught in the contradiction between the unpleasantness of his experience and his political preconceptions (prejudices). He can't even disentangle himself from the mutual exclusivity of the opposites--cohesion and discord--that he finds in Israel: "genuine national unity...[yet] Israel is the most diverse small country imaginable."
Brooks justifies his discomfort being pushed around in Israel with Israel's own self-image: "a tough, scrappy country, perpetually fighting for survival." Brooks bows to the ideology that Israel is under constant existential threat, and himself heightens the temperature of debate by painting critics as "Israel’s enemies."
Brooks calls his sojourn in Israel "here," not "there," but then blames the "Middle Eastern" culture of Israel, not "Western colonialism," for the Israeli-Arab dispute. "Israel is stuck in a period of frustrating stasis" of other people's making: "Iran poses an existential threat that is too big for Israel to deal with alone. Hamas and Hezbollah will frustrate peace plans, even if the Israelis magically do everything right." Brooks even tells us how he came to identify so fully with a foreign power, "As an American Jew, I was taught to go all gooey-eyed at the thought of Israel." He seems to assume that this childhood brain-washing is natural. However, when I was growing up, the nostalgia of, say, descendants of Irish Catholics for Ireland--that niether they nor even their grandparents had ever visited--was considered bizarre.
Brooks uses his culture-shock "here[not there]," as an image for the conflict caused American defenders of Israel's pugnacity: its "insufferable and necessary barrage of self-assertion." "Suffered" by whom? And why "necessary"? Hmm, I wonder why the "the peace process is always the same," in a country of "disputatiousness" not "peace"? But Brooks blinds himself to the dissonance between his facts and his ideology that is dramatized by his own climactic image.
He, a peaceful civilian, just trying to conduct his everyday business, is--apparently repeatedly--ousted from his rightful place, by "an Israeli shopper [who] sees a chance to butt in front of me." The idea! Brooks's territory, his right to the service he has queued for and wasted time waiting for, are stolen from him by a cheater who pushes into his place in the hierarchy "in line" "in front of an Israeli cash register." Brooks longs wisfully for "peace," a time when "she will not try to take it," that chance to horn in.
"Try"? Uh-oh. Does this mean that Brooks fought back? Is he an anti-Semite, depriving an Israeli of her sovereign, god-given land in the country of her ancestors? I wonder what would have happened to Brooks if he'd been an Arab Israeli, rather than a famous American commentator. We know what Israel does to peaceful American and Palestinian protesters in the West Bank, as well as to starving Palestinians in Gaza. Yes, David Brooks, let's all "still dream of peace." Let's hope for "the day when" the nation of "Israeli shoppers" will not "butt in" "— miracle of miracles —"will not try to take" more.
I think your making much too much of his article.
I liked it. Not because it confirmed anything that I had thought or didn't think, just that he wrote of his own experiences and well.
Brooks will never attain the editorial power of Ellsworth Toohey.
RE: "Is he (Brooks) an anti-Semite, depriving an Israeli of her sovereign, god-given land in the country of her ancestors?
EXCERPT FROM "Israeli Scholar Disputes Founding Myth" – By Morgan Strong, April 12, 2009
"The founding narrative of the modern State of Israel was born from the words of Moses in the Old Testament, that God granted the land of Israel to the Jewish people and that it was to be theirs for all time.
Then, there was the story of the Diaspora – that after Jewish uprisings against the Romans in the First and Second centuries A.D., the Jews were exiled from the land of Israel and dispersed throughout the Western world. They often were isolated from European populations, suffered persecution, and ultimately were marked for extermination in the Nazi Holocaust.
Finally after centuries of praying for a return to Israel, the Jews achieved this goal by defeating the Arab armies in Palestine and establishing Israel in 1948. This narrative – spanning more than three millennia – is the singular, elemental and sustaining claim of the State of Israel as a Jewish nation.
But a new book by Israeli scholar Shlomo Sand challenges this narrative, claiming that – beyond the religious question of whether God really spoke to Moses – the Roman-era Diaspora did not happen at all or at least not as commonly understood.
In When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?, Dr. Sand, an expert on European history at the University of Tel Aviv, says the Diaspora was largely a myth – that the Jews were never exiled en masse from the Holy Land and that many European Jewish populations converted to the faith centuries later…"
ENTIRE ARTICLE – link to consortiumnews.com
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I don't have any issues with calling Brooks influential…
Yes, that was the point I was trying to make: sorry if the sardonic tone wasn't clear enough.
Shlomo Sands's book came out over a year ago and immediately became a best-seller in Israel and in France–where it won an award–, but still hasn't been published in English. Can't wait till it is.
Shattering a 'national mythology'
By Ofri Ilani
21/03/2008
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/966952.html
'According to Sand, the description of the Jews as a wandering and self-isolating nation of exiles, "who wandered across seas and continents, reached the ends of the earth and finally, with the advent of Zionism, made a U-turn and returned en masse to their orphaned homeland," is nothing but "national mythology." Like other national movements in Europe, which sought out a splendid Golden Age, through which they invented a heroic past – for example, classical Greece or the Teutonic tribes – to prove they have existed since the beginnings of history, "so, too, the first buds of Jewish nationalism blossomed in the direction of the strong light that has its source in the mythical Kingdom of David."
So when, in fact, was the Jewish people invented, in Sand's view? At a certain stage in the 19th century, intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of inventing a people "retrospectively," out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people. From historian Heinrich Graetz on, Jewish historians began to draw the history of Judaism as the history of a nation that had been a kingdom, became a wandering people and ultimately turned around and went back to its birthplace.
Actually, most of your book does not deal with the invention of the Jewish people by modern Jewish nationalism, but rather with the question of where the Jews come from….
"The supreme paradigm of exile was needed in order to construct a long-range memory in which an imagined and exiled nation-race was posited as the direct continuation of 'the people of the Bible' that preceded it," Sand explains. Under the influence of other historians who have dealt with the same issue in recent years, he argues that the exile of the Jewish people is originally a Christian myth that depicted that event as divine punishment imposed on the Jews for having rejected the Christian gospel.
"I started looking in research studies about the exile from the land – a constitutive event in Jewish history, almost like the Holocaust. But to my astonishment I discovered that it has no literature. The reason is that no one exiled the people of the country. The Romans did not exile peoples and they could not have done so even if they had wanted to. They did not have trains and trucks to deport entire populations. That kind of logistics did not exist until the 20th century. From this, in effect, the whole book was born: in the realization that Judaic society was not dispersed and was not exiled."
If the people was not exiled, are you saying that in fact the real descendants of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah are the Palestinians?
"No population remains pure over a period of thousands of years. But the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendents. The first Zionists, up until the Arab Revolt [1936-9], knew that there had been no exiling, and that the Palestinians were descended from the inhabitants of the land. They knew that farmers don't leave until they are expelled. Even Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the State of Israel, wrote in 1929 that, 'the vast majority of the peasant farmers do not have their origins in the Arab conquerors, but rather, before then, in the Jewish farmers who were numerous and a majority in the building of the land.'"….
Sand argues that the most crucial demographic addition to the Jewish population of the world came in the wake of the conversion of the kingdom of Khazaria – a huge empire that arose in the Middle Ages on the steppes along the Volga River, which at its height ruled over an area that stretched from the Georgia of today to Kiev. In the eighth century, the kings of the Khazars adopted the Jewish religion and made Hebrew the written language of the kingdom. From the 10th century the kingdom weakened; in the 13th century is was utterly defeated by Mongol invaders, and the fate of its Jewish inhabitants remains unclear.
Sand revives the hypothesis, which was already suggested by historians in the 19th and 20th centuries, according to which the Judaized Khazars constituted the main origins of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe.'
Calling Israel "disputatious" is a little like calling Hannibal Lecter "cranky." It's true only as far as it goes.
"I wonder what would have happened to Brooks if he'd been an Arab Israeli …"
Wonderful. Thanks, Susie.
Shlomo Sand wrote about this proselytising judaism in Le Monde Diplo. There was a reaction in Haaretz claiming indignantly that the scholars never believed in that myth. And there was supposed to be hard genetic proof for common Jewish ancestry, then again not.. And there is the claim that it's an antisemitic theory – or at least aiding and abetting antisemitism.
Sand's book is forthcoming from Verso in October (according to Amazon: link to amazon.com
I've been debating with myself whether I can wait that long, but am not sure whether I relish the thought of adding another French academic book to the pile I'm working my way through…;)
Shlomo Sand is aiding and abbetting antisemitism? It's no surprise that such a claim would be made, it's more a situation that if the claim weren't made it would be surprising. I will wait, because I'm not into attempting to translate from a language I don't read. Not that there wasn't a time I was tempted to try (from the Hebrew), but then the article in English was published on line and it provided a good summary.
Thanks for the notice.