I want to offer my response to the Feeling the Hate In Jerusalem on Eve of Obama’s Cairo Address video. Phil was in Gaza when the video came in and I was editing the site by myself. I’ll admit the first time I watched it I felt shock, revulsion and then panic. I didn’t want to post it. I found the language and attitude so disturbing that I hesitated before putting it out in the world (although admittedly it was already up on youtube). I paused and thought, why post it? Is it newsworthy? I then decided to post it after realizing one thing – the anxiety I felt was in part out of recognition. I knew those people in the video, I grew up with them. And like them I was steeped in the pervasive nationalism, entitlement, and chauvinism of the Jewish community. I realized this video stood as an exposed Jewish id, displaying it for the world.
For my response I feel a need to separate out the video itself, and the response it has received. Like Phil, I agree that the video “reveals an essential component of Israeli and Zionist society that has largely been covered up,” but I’d like to take it farther. There has been much debate as to whether the people in the video were Israeli or American, and to my thinking this misses the point – they were Jewish. I don’t say that to say that they shouldn’t have been saying those things as Jews, but to say that the incredible fear, entitlement, rage and aggression on display in the video is a large part of what it means to be Jewish today in the shadow of Israel and Zionism. The uproar over the video shows that there is currently a struggle within the community over whether this is still acceptable.
First, what the video shows. Jewish writers both in Israel and the US have responded to the video by saying they recognize what they see. One interesting response came from Joshua Frazer writing on a blog for the National Jewish Democratic Council. Frazer recognizes that “One young man in the video used further racial stereotypes when discussing the President, drawing on “fried chicken..and watermelon”, using the word, “n**ger” as well. This line may have gotten a laugh out of his friends in the video, but this is the type of racial insensitivity that has festered within the Jewish community.” Village Voice writer Allison Benedikt responded to the video by sharing her own experience visiting Israel on a teen tour and training with the IDF! (an experience many other people I know have shared). Benedikt writes, “But for the purposes of this blog, all I want to say is: Send a kid from Youngstown, Ohio to Israel for the summer to connect more with her Jewish identity and put a gun in her hand, and you know what you get? The Max Blumenthal video.” And finally, Ha’aretz writer Bradley Burston expands it a bit to place the video in a broader context. He wrote about it in a thoughtful column “Loving Israel by hating Obama.” Drawing from examples in Israel and the US Burston writes, “We live at a time when an avowed Kahanist is a serving MK, when overtly anti-Arab Knesset bills blacken Israel’s name the world over, and Jewish talkbackers and bloggers think nothing of denigrating Islam and African-Americans in the name of some cockeyed personal battle against world anti-Semitism.”
The video reminded me of Avraham Burg’s writing on the Holocaust. One of the most important parts of the video to me is when one guy recites the numbers in his grandmother’s Holocaust tattoo. This amazing response is simply in reaction to President Obama applying the most subtle oratorical pressure on Israel to simply freeze illegal settlement building. And yet, I don’t blame the guy for responding this way. This is the way the entire organized Jewish community responds to the slightest challenge. Iran has become Amalek, and Obama the new Pharoah. As I said earlier I recognized this response, because I had once felt it myself. Growing up in the suburbs outside Philadelphia, in a conservative Jewish synagogue, I learned of a Jewish community perpetually under attack and outnumbered. And the response to this was always militarism and brute force. Tony Karon wrote about a similar experience on his blog last year in the exceptional post “Healing Israel’s Birth Scar.” In it he recounts a story about the effect visiting Yad Vashem had on him:
I was no dignitary, but just as every politician visiting Israel is still taken first to the Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem, so do did my own official trip begin there in the winter of 1978 — as part of a Habonim leadership training program. The horrors memorialized at Yad Vashem pressed all the intended buttons in my 17-year-old mind, I realized a few months later, as a freshman student at the University of Cape Town, when I came very close to having the crap beaten out of me in a fight that I almost provoked when confronting Muslim students handing out leaflets marking Al-Quds day. I have had little appetite for physical confrontation since age 12, but I did not hestitate to grab the leaflets of a student named Ashraf, and throw them to the ground. He jumped at me, cursing. “You’re trying to deny my existence, you scum!” I screamed. “What about Dir Yassein?” he yelled, as he leaped towards me, restrained by his buddies as mine hustled me away, admonishing me for my provocative behavior. In truth, I hadn’t even recognized myself in that moment; it was all adrenal rage, a channeling of the “Never Again!” Warsaw Ghetto spirit unleashed in me by what I had seen at Yad Vashem.
I believe this is the spirit on display in the video, and people are shocked by what it looks like.
The response to the video, and what this rage looks like, should be separated from the video itself. While the video might display the fear and aggression of the community, the response shows that things may be changing. In his second post on the video, the JTA’s Ron Kampeas points to the “separate and unequal” nature of Israeli society and admits that the response to the video is a reflection of a move within a younger generation of Jews who reject Israeli apartheid out of a belief for equal rights for all. The fact that Kampeas wrote a second post on the video is a sign in and of itself. His first simply tried to dismiss it but the second shows that he had to give it more serious consideration after seeing the debate it spawned. He writes:
Just as the TV crews made their way to the obscenely racist old Boer in covering the old South Africa, and abjured the thoughtful Wits professor; just as Radovan Karadzic’s insane musings about the non-Serbian psyche preoccupied some journalists more than the privations of ethnic Serbs in Krajina; the Max Blumenthals of the world are going to seek out the neanderthals, and this will become Israel’s image.
The obscene rantings of a few drunken frat boys, however unfair and unrepresentative, would not be getting this oxygen without the reality of unequal treatment. And the fact that Max is Jewish, I think, is also significant, just as it has been with Jon Stewart’s satirical treatment of Israel. The cognitive dissonance is not going to play with a younger generation of Jews that expects equality for all, that spends time and money calling for protections of minorities in Sudan and China.
This is a tide, and one that won’t be turned away by better Hasbara.
Whether in Israel or the US, the Jewish community has become absorbed by the militaristic mission to sustain a Jewish state by any means necessary. In the past, even recently, this mission has short circuited almost all critical thinking – whether it means defending the indefensible in Gaza, getting apoplectic when Obama suggests the settlements are not feasible, or defending the fact of special and exclusive rights for Jews in a Jewish state. The revulsion to the video may signal that our critical responses are returning to us, and not only is this mission not worth dehumanizing others to accomplish, it is not worth dehumanizing ourselves in order to carry it out.
Related posts:
- Max Blumenthal: Feeling the Hate In Jerusalem on Eve of Obama’s Cairo Address
- Max Blumenthal: Feeling the hate in Tel Aviv (Huffington Post pulls the plug, again)
- Max Blumenthal: Israelis to Obama – “Save Us From Ourselves!”
- Blumenthal’s video is a reflection of Lieberman’s Israel
- Al Jazeera show on Jerusalem shows the future of the Israel/Palestine debate
{ 19 comments }
Wow. Thanks Adam for a really thoughtful and insightful post.
Well written, Adam!
I was tempted to agree that it was just frat boys being dicks, but when you see the disproportionate response given to Mel Gibson's drunken tirade or how the media would be all over the video if it were neo-nazi skinheads mouthing off instead (sorry, but there is an equivalence in ALL forms of supremacy) then I'm gald the video's being aired, its always uncomfortable when a mirror is held up of our own psyches, is it not?
A "better hasbara"? How revealing.
"…I learned of a Jewish community perpetually under attack and outnumbered." I'm not doubting your description of Jewish perceptions, but the perception seems far from the reality (over-represented in the professions, arts, rich list, middle class etc., compare to demoralized indigenous communities, stateless people and so on) to me. How is this message conveyed?
I think you give yourself and Max too much credit. The statements made by the "students" are not thoughtful, and don't deserve the attention that you've given them. I personally think it is opportunistic. A cheap shot at "Jewish attitudes". The key word implied (not stated, so deniable) is that the kids are "typical". It took listening to the Dana interview, 3 minutes in, to realize that they aren't "typical", but are present certainly. The cheap shot is implication of generalization. To quote nazi propaganda (sorry), the propaganda often included ill or dirty individual Jews, portrayed as typical. They existed. And, in the restrictions of the ghettos there were more than a few that were dirty, or bargaining. So, to me, the impact of the film was shock and similar reactions to yours. How could they have allowed themselves to get so callous and ignorant? (Not everyone is an intellectual.) But, it also conveyed to me, "How base are journalists (not just you and Phil) willing to get in their ends to drive a message home?" Truth, sure. A rock in the water. Burston did you guys a favor, improving on your work. Its always hard to know what a journalist will do with a conversation, an interview. Maybe you convinced people to shut up, more than the value of the piece.
My first thought when seeing the video was of Sasha Baron Cohen's "Borat" and it's implication that if you scratch the surface of gentile society you'll find a deep well of antisemitic bigotry. When Blumenthal examines Israeli society and finds … a deep well of violent anti-gentile bigotry, well that's a different story according to our media gatekeepers.
I remember early on at this site, quite a few Jews would regularly post comments basically complaining that Weiss was airing dirty Jewish laundry. The rationale was more or less that he was contributing to anti-Semitism or the potential to spark it. Well, airing dirty laundry is how the corruption and criminalism that leads to anti-Semitism gets exposed. The beloved concept of freedom of the press is a testament to airing dirty laundry. Anyone who objects to airing dirty laundry — that of any group, system or ideology — simply doesn’t understand journalism.
RE: "…the incredible fear, entitlement, rage and aggression on display in the video…" MY COMMENT – I think there is also an element of: "The Ugly American" – From Wikipedia (EXCERPT) The Ugly American is the title of a 1958 political novel… …The book takes place in a fictional nation known as Sarkhan. In the novel, a Burmese journalist says "For some reason, the people I meet in my country are not the same as the ones I knew in the United States. A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land. They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They're loud and ostentatious." The phrase "ugly Americans" came to be applied to Americans behaving in this manner. SOURCE – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_American
If you look into the origins of the Boer War in S Africa, one very significant thing you will find is a key player, the Jewish ownership of all the mineral and mines, gold, silver, diamonds, etc. Similar realities as the video shows were splashed across the pages of MSM (by mostly Jewish Americans) to enchance the Civil Rights movement in the USA in the mid-last century; goy whites eventually got the picture. Now, we've had Carter, M & W, Obama, etc; will the Jews get the mirror image?
Hey, Adam, this is a stunningly great post, super-eloquent and an encapsulation of what this website is about: "The revulsion to the video may signal that our critical responses are returning to us, and not only is this mission not worth dehumanizing others to accomplish, it is not worth dehumanizing ourselves in order to carry it out." Isn't that the entire point here? To dehumanize others is to dehumanize yourself. If relegating Palestinians to a subhuman status is synonymous with the Zionist identity, how can tax-paying Americans (and especially American Jews) identify with the atrocities being inflicted in Gaza in the name of a "Jewish state"? We can't. There's a lot more happening behind the scenes in the Israeli-American backchannel dialogue, but the caterwauling of the Knesset suggests that they are unaccustomed to having an American president hold Israel up to obligations it has agreed to under the Road Map.
The more frantic and extremist the responses, the more we see the "special relationship" simply dry up and fade away. "Feeling the Hate" exposes the dual loyalty problem in explicit detail. . . and those of us who don't have dual loyalty don't get why our tax dollars are being diverted to a corrupt war on people we have empathy for.
Yes. This is precisely the issue: libidinal attachment to a warrior state. The racism is what attracts attention, but it's a secondary issue, it marks the specific enemy, Obama, for what he's done, which is deviate a hair from the position espoused by Zionist, fanatic jingoes.
I applaud both your courage and optimism. The haters will make their hay with the video, but it's not as if their minds are either likely to be changed or play a role in breaking the current impasse. The potential progress towards a stable peace that the discomfort and reflection upon fear and prejudice it may force upon well-meaning people far outweighs its short-term negative impact. Thus far, moral timidity by all involved parties has yielded failure. If the political trajectory is not redirected, Israel will soon cease to be both a Jewish and a democratic state. It is for those interested in its preservation in that form that time is running out. before it's too late
History does repeat itself, over and over again, apparently—worldwide. Native America has been decimated and now they, apparently, depend on money from wasichu casinos. I suppose 'empire' is not racist after all…or is it? Do you think this has no bearing on the subject? Think again. It's the same, exact, thing.
"And like them I was steeped in the pervasive nationalism, entitlement, and chauvinism of the Jewish community." Speak for yourself, Adam. Don't blame "the Jewish community". That's anti-semitic. Many Jews are not like that at all, and it's not their fault if you don't know them. If I thought that "pervasive nationalism, entitlement, and chauvinism" was what you got from Judaism, I would leave. Not all Jews are shitty people, Adam, and Judaism does not make you shitty. Zionism does, that's a given.
Burston prayed for the children of Gaza after high-fiving the death of Nizar Ghayan's children, because dead Palestinians don't dream of returning home. http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/2009/01/af... (nb: the Ha'aretz links are mixed up) http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/2009/01/af... So yes, I'd say the whole two-states-for-two-peoples but keep killing radical Islam schtick ought to show Dana, Max, Phil, Adam what not to do.
"The pervasive nationalism, entitlement, and chauvinism of the Jewish community . . ." The overwhelming majority of whom support a two-state solution and vote Democratic. Grow up, Adam, and get the college idea out of your head that American Jews must apologize for being successful in American society by self-flagellating.
Yes, and this is why the likes of right wing republicans try to subvert foreign policy some openly, and others using underhanded means like this Canadian extremist Brad Kostynuik, AKA "Wharold", a kahanist likudnik from Calgary he runs this with his wife Brandi Dickman, http://doosmdayclockradio.wordpress.com Kostynuik creates anti Obama posters and art which he distributes to his bloggers, like other right wing extremists in the hope of turning public opinion. This is Brad Kostynuik’s professional life website in his official persona http://doosmdayclockradio.wordpress.com resume of “Wharold” AKA Brad Kostynuik http://doosmdayclockradio.wordpress.com This is his smear site, at Wordpress where he smears Obama, and Palestinians, and his xenophobia and racism http://doosmdayclockradio.wordpress.com
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