A few weeks back David Frum and other neocons attacked Barack Obama for suggesting in his Cairo speech that the predicate for Israel’s establishment in 1948 was the Holocaust. No! they said. Israel was created because of the ancient Jewish religious claim to Jerusalem, reaffirmed in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and related mythologies.
The problem with this argument is that as anyone who has visited Jerusalem can tell you, the first place You go, or They take you, is Yad Vashem, where Israel is explained as the necessary response to the Holocaust. Harry Truman made similar statements. And then last week Netanyahu went to Germany and accepted blueprints of Auschwitz amid pieties about Jerusalem! In Haaretz, scholar Josef Joffe (pictured) takes Netanyahu on:
Netanyahu has played into the hands of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his comrades-in-hate. Their line is: No Holocaust, no Israel. .. But by accepting the Auschwitz blueprints as an almost sacred gift, and doing so as the head of government, Netanyahu has actually scored one for Israel’s sworn enemies. He has walked into the Holocaust-equals-Israel trap, as if the state were indeed a posthumous gift of Adolf Hitler.
Joffe goes on to talk about all the positive things Israel stands for. The founding generation "strove relentlessly to build an Israeli identity rooted in the Hebrew language, the ethics of the Torah, the fruits of blood, sweat and tears – and the systematic transcendence of the past, as did the Israelites on Mount Sinai. The Shoah for them was a dreadful memory, not a nation-builder."
Joffe is a Lithuanian-born Jew, an editor of a leading German weekly, now an academic at Stanford and Harvard. Impressive guy. It doesn’t seem like he’s ever lived in Israel. Still he gets pretty inspired, banging the Zionist cymbals, and bashing Israel’s "foes" the Palestinians:
So we have earned this land; it is not a gift of the gentiles… Celebrating history’s "First War of National Liberation," [against the Pharaoh] the [Passover chapbook the] Haggadah has it right: Once we were slaves, now we are free men – and have been since 1948.
This diaspora Zionism reminds me of a joke my mother used to tell when I was a kid. The joke was surely told her by a Jewish friend; it is in the category of a schwartzer joke. I apologize for its racism ahead of time. In the joke, a black man is talking to God about his physical attributes, his black skin, his kinky hair, his broad nose, his fleet legs. In each instance (they dragged these jokes out endlessly) God tells him that the attribute is necessary to the hot sun of the Equator, or to escaping wild animals in the jungle, etc. etc. The punchline was: "Well God, tell me something else. What the hell am I doing in Cleveland?"
The joke contained some sympathy for blacks (we Jews had our fixed racial attributes too and we were also displaced here in our gilded ghettoes) but it was mostly told at the expense of black people. What the hell were they doing here?
I think of the joke today because I find it so absurd that a Jew who has made such a good life for himself in the west, as so many of us have, enjoying the greatest minority freedoms in the world, is invoking Zionist mythologies of liberation in Jerusalem (and overlooking the Palestinian experience there). If this is your national religious liberation, Joffe, what the hell are you doing in Palo Alto?
Israel invokes the ‘because of the Holocaust’ or the ‘we have a birthright to Palestine’ at will and according to political expediency.
Critics of Israel often get called anti-Semites because it reminds the critic he might be entering hot Holocaust waters (‘Remember what your ancestors and brethren did? Can you hear what you sound like?’)
Nowhere does this tactic pay off more than in post-war Germany of course… it would take a real brave German to mutter ‘Holocaust industry’ there…
I didn’t find that post to be all that inspiring, Phil. Surprised?
First, your attempt to attribute a single rationale to Israel’s formation is insulting. The attraction to the land has been permanent. The pogroms and the early Zionist formative speculating and organizing created the dream. The falling apart of the Turkish empire, resulting in the Balfour Declaration as a component of the Sykes/Picot agreement, created the possibility. The Holocaust created the momentum.
You’ve lived through history. Certainly, applying a single even as driver of Palestinian nationalist formation would be misrepresentative. Why do you choose to distort and them condemn others of your own cousins of cousins experience?
And, why would you deny a sympathizer the choice to reside where he/she resides? Why would you invest in that “love it or leave it” trash talk yourself?
If this supposed “attraction to the land” of Israel is so “permanent,” how is it that you’ve been able to resist it so long? I sometimes think there is no argument you won’t use to further the Jewish state. As a side note, I might add that it is astonishing to me the number of people who without having any religion themselves still justify Israel’s seizure of Palestinian land on the grounds that it was given to us by God.
Forced isolation in some cases. Comfort and personal investment in diaspora communities in others, including Germany, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, France, Holland.
Witty did not answer your question, that is, given his love of Israel, why is he still in the USA and not in Israel? You raise another good question. Why do secular Gentiles
justify Israeli activities on the basis of the Jewish religious narrative?
Joffe writes frequently for the New Republic, iirc.
I did, surprised? Phil is not in the least attributing a single rationale to Israel’s formation.
What he says does not conflict at all with your attribution of multiple rationales. It does conflict with David Frum’s and ilk’s single attribution of religious myths. And BTW, the Balfour Declaration also states clearly any homeland the Jews get in what was then the Palestine Mandate could not come at the expense of the Palestinians–that part is always ignored in the West. God forbid official World Jewry, including of course Israel, should
accept that Israel was in any sense the gift of the Gentiles in the West and in the former USSR. And that Israel remains viable thanks to those same peoples and regimes. It was
all merely the result of a determined and heroic people with no help from the goyhim at all.
Look, they made the desert bloom, okay? Get over it!
This kind of snide remark contributes nothing to the dialogue.
You mean like when they took over the Palestinian fruit groves?
Richard, it’s not love it or leave it!
It’s an important issue: If you love it so much, why don’t you live there?
Maybe because you don’t really love it!
Why are 700,000 Israelis nwo living in the West.
Maybe cuz they don’t love it!
And so they invoke all this biblical hokum when the reality is far different. Look at Joel Kovel’s piece at the top of this site. He’s far more penetrating than I am on this score…
Phil
I read the Kovel piece thoroughly and responded.
Please read my response.
I think you have really digested some very bad nourishment in even considering any “love it or leave it” approach. It indicates to me that you’ve relatively dropped your rational skepticism as an intellectual mode.
I get that you are searching for an alternative, an answer. And, I more than get how frustrating Israeli policy and practice is now, and how adept Netanyahu is at stealth, inhibiting any ability at dependable judgment.
Relative to stealth, our predispositions play.
My own opinions, I love it like I love my cranky and sometimes emotionally trying uncle (the one you don’t know).
I like others’ comments hear that spoke of tough love as comprising more love than toughness. That is a component of all transformation. It underlies Gandhi’s thought, NOT the rationalization that the sum total of Gandhi’s approach was in tactic, as effective as it is.
“a racist joke of my youth”.
Does your said uncle shit all over people?
Not as much as you do, “citizen”.
Phil,
I know that there is no personal reason for you to take my advice here, but as someone who appreciates your interest in a just solution and your willingness to be self-critical and to question, I wonder why you even bother to listen to Richard. He is totally wrapped up in self-identification with Israel, and other than negatively criticizing every thing you post and pontificating on how truly just and wonderful he thinks he is compared to everyone else who posts here, he really adds nothing to the discussion and doesn’t even provide any helpful or insightful criticism for you. He has a right to comment here just like everyone else, but you do yourself a disservice to take anything he says to heart.
I think the point you make is a good one. The attraction to Israel for some American Jews is all about ego and identity, not a real love of Israel the state as it exists. They are more attached to their illusion of Israel , and thus the anger when anyone points out that the illusion is not the reality. If they went to Israel (and certainly if they went to the West Bank) they’d probably have to face their illusions head on and they don’t want to do that. They like their fantasy world and will fight anyone who tries to take that fantasy away from them.
Phil’s comment exceeded that insight Tree. He wasn’t making Burg’s point, but something further.
And, you entirely misrepresent my views.
Or, we’d have to reconcile conflicting REALITIES.
How to respect Zionism and real history, while respecting the real human beings that reside in the West Bank and elsewhere.
I wish that Phil were making Burg’s point. His extends beyond that.
“Why are you still in Palo Alto?” is love it or leave it.
You consistently misrepresent my posts. I get that you want to advocate for BDS, and my arguments conflict with that. But, that are substantive, mostly accurate, and very candidly represent the majority of good-seeking liberals in the world that advocate for peace, and not for retribution.
Your pallette of dissent only includes BDS, based on the fantasy that Israel/Palestine is like South Africa, when it just is not parallel.
The conflict is in the dehumanization, the dehumanization of Palestinians by ignorance, and the dehumanization of Israelis by ignorance.
There are ways to mutually humanize. But, that commitment to peace (mutual humanization) implies a rejection of “resistance”.
The system crashed in mid-posting twice, then recorded them anyway. Sorry for the repetition.
To Phil,
Do you think that energy/motivation or sensitivity is the more important characteristic that makes change in this case?
Richard,
You are constantly misrepresenting my posts and projecting. I don’t think any of your declarative statements or “arguments” are anything more than what you would call “self-talk”, used to make yourself feel more righteous and right and thus contributing little to others. That’s my opinion of your posts here. I support BDS but I also support the work of Taayush, Anarchists, ICAHD and others who are doing far, far and away more to promote mutual humanization than anyone else. And yet you have nothing but harsh criticism for them, which only highlights your insincerity on this subject.
No one that I know that seriously advocates for BDS is looking for retribution, and for you to claim so is just another reason why I find your arguments insincere. People are human and fallible but unless bad behavior has consequences there is little incentive to change. Unless it is challenge and resisted it is not likely to change. What you are advocating for Israelis (but clearly not for Palestinians) is that their bad behavior be ignored and not challenged. That will not change anything. That attitude has not changed anything for the good in Israel in the last 60 years And believe me, a non-racist Israel would be good for everyone, including the Jews.
Ah, wishing for an edit function again. In my above post, everything from “No it its not” and on is my comment. Only “Why are you still in Palo Alto?” is love it or leave it.” was intended to be displayed as a quote from Witty.
I’m not sure how referring the majority of Israelis (Zionists) as racists is a mutually humanizing approach.
It is a very good question, a critical question, as to the intention for BDS. I’ll take you at your word that you desire no retribution in any form, that you only desire some concise wrong to stop, or to hasten some just and peaceful resolution.
You are not the only person or group advocating or opportunistically participating in some form in the BDS movement.
It is by definition punitive, and in all currently stated formulations vague, and therefore ineffective as humane civil disobedience.
I’ve found that I have been able to convince congregations that Palestinians are human beings, and deserve a chance to be a self-governing people, and that we should use out intelligence and voice to actually invite that.
I’ve not met many that are convinced to change their views by browbeating, true or not, especially those like me that the best outcome you’ll achieve is mutual sympathy.
I will not become a partisan. Maybe if Lieberman was elected prime minister and actually undertook active and rapid ethnic cleansing.
Richard, this is a really amazing statement:
I’ve found that I have been able to convince congregations that Palestinians are human beings, and deserve a chance to be a self-governing people, and that we should use out intelligence and voice to actually invite that.
I respect your loyalty, but considering you define yourself as liberal, I admittedly find this a peculiar statement. That’s the core problem with your comments, occasionally really outrageous statements stand next to a simplistic love approach, a self-declared–I agree with tree a slightly holier-than-thou– humanist perspective. The humanists didn’t win on Palestinian ground, why should they now?
Its always been possible, and it still is, IF there is a path.
BDS closes that path. It permanently shifts the discussion from “how can we mutually meet our needs?” to “COMPLY with our vague and punitive demands”.
The rhetoric associated with BDS dehumanizes Israelis. It is by definition, an attempt to make that universal. It does not suggest, there are some asshole Israeli views and some willing and some unequivocally humane. It is a collective punishment in boycotting ALL. And, when the political leadership supporting BDS then state, “we won’t boycott those we approve of”, it becomes arbitrary and petty.
When that changes, there will be paths to reconcile.
That is the real work, to humanize the other.
On dissent in Palestine.
There has been no (or very very little) truly non-violent demonstration that I’m aware of.
Even the film clips in Beilin showed demonstraters throwing rocks. During the first intifada, I saw films of what was characterized as non-violent with demonstrators throwing rocks and even some with automatic weapons in the back of demonstrations. I’m sorry I don’t have a citation, and just my memory. Maybe it was just one occassion, and opportunistically filmed. It made an impression in my mind.
Israel does not need more territory. The message itself that Palestinian farmers are separated from their livelihoods, and that expropriation of land near East Jerusalem threatens to permanently severe East Jerusalem from Palestine is real.
Maybe real non-violent demonstration wouldn’t be successful. I have more faith in the sensitivity of Americans and of Israelis though.
The need to change hearts and minds in Israel is critical. External force, even boycott, will likely not accomplish the desired ends.
Non-violence is more than a tactic, more than a choice of weapon.
Yeah, Richard, if you love it so much, why don’t you live there?
You’re like a US congress person who advocates for Obamacare so long as the federal employee health care options and benefits are not dissolved into Obamacare.
You seem an old limosine liberal, only in the case of Israel , you’re a right-winger all the way. Every excuse you make for Israeli activity is old hat, all copied from fascist regimes’
propaganda of the past.
In your binary world view that is true. In reality, entirely untrue.
I oppose punitive approaches in favor of mutual humanization, education, empathy and sympathy (for traumas, but more importantly for living people).
My metaphor to more right-wing Zionists is that I’ve met my Abrahamic 50, that by the standard of Abraham arguing with God, “if there are 50 righteous men, will you spare the city?” “Yes” “How about 40?” “Yes”, “How about 30″ “Yes”, “How about 20″ “Yes”, “How about 10?” “Yes”.
I promise you that that has changed more Jewish minds than your advocacy of BDS, or contemptuous references.
Yeah, I saw how much it changed in Gaza at the turn of the year last. How about 300 innocent children, just for starters? How were they spared?
The difference is important. The recognition of 1948 Israel came out of Holocaust guilt on the part of the western nations in the UN. The Zionist rationale was that Jews needed a state of their own where they would be safe from persecutions. This was a secular Zionism, not really friendly to religion. This brand of Zionism took pride in taking the land by force of arms, by their own strength, and making it a new land. They deliberately did not colonize the old Israelite homeland on the WB; they preferred the land of the Philistines to the land of Israel.
The conquest of the WB came as the result of Israeli aggression, out of strength, not weakness and persecution. There was no security justification for seizing this land – except that the Israelis decided they wanted it. So, like the woman with the hotel towels, they took it. And as an excuse, they fastened on the religious tradition.
Israel came to be a state by intentional institution building. By political WORK.
The holocaust definitely was a tipping event, and definitely added urgency to the formation of a haven for the hundreds of thousands of refugees, and for the sympathy for the Jewish people for a safe haven (as NO state offered safe haven to European post-holocaust refugees).
It is WRONG to revise history to conclude nefarious motives. (Certainly there were some that bore zealous approaches, like a car screaming downhill is only concerned with moving forwards). But, the movement as a whole was a popular nationalist one, of a people without a land to someplace to settle.
To settle on land belonging to other people.
So how to justify such a crime?
1948: the world owes us a state because of the Holocaust. Our suffering is more important than the suffering we have caused to the Arab population.
1967: we finally have seized the land promised to the Jews by God, and we’re not giving it back. Suffering doesn’t come into the equation, so the excuse is now to repeat the Biblical genocide.
You really attribute a national ownership of land.
Most of the land was unoccupied, and even unused by nomadics. There was open land to settle.
The only explanation that would prohibit that early settlement would be some national or pan-Islamic ownership, that I frankly consider partially a fascist formula.
I don’t subscribe to the view that the land from river to sea is “Jewish”, nor do I subscribe to the view that it is “Muslim” or “Palestinian”.
The communities are Jewish, or Muslim, or integrated (very few, Haifa and Beersheba are the only two places I know of).
Hmm? Scholar Josef Joffe? He may well be, admittedly I haven’t read any one of his books. Neither his articles in DIE ZEIT nor his appearances in all kind of TV talk show circles are a good advertisement. Joffe feels much more like an ideologue than a scholar.
RE: ” So we have earned this land; it is not a gift of the gentiles… Celebrating history’s “First War of National Liberation,” [against the Pharaoh] the [Passover chapbook the] Haggadah has it right: Once we were slaves…” – Josef Joffe
MY COMMENT: To borrow from Barney Frank, what planet does Mr. Joffe live on?
SEE: “Zionist nationalist myth of enforced exile: Israel deliberately forgets its history”, by Schlomo Sand
An Israeli historian suggests the diaspora was the consequence, not of the expulsion of the Hebrews from Palestine, but of proselytising across north Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East
(EXCERPT)…But during the 1980s an earthquake shook these founding myths. The discoveries made by the “new archaeology” discredited a great exodus in the 13th century BC. Moses could not have led the Hebrews out of Egypt into the Promised Land, for the good reason that the latter was Egyptian territory at the time. And there is no trace of either a slave revolt against the pharaonic empire or of a sudden conquest of Canaan by outsiders.
Nor is there any trace or memory of the magnificent kingdom of David and Solomon. Recent discoveries point to the existence, at the time, of two small kingdoms: Israel, the more powerful, and Judah, the future Judea. The general population of Judah did not go into 6th century BC exile: only its political and intellectual elite were forced to settle in Babylon. This decisive encounter with Persian religion gave birth to Jewish monotheism.
Then there is the question of the exile of 70 AD. There has been no real research into this turning point in Jewish history, the cause of the diaspora. And for a simple reason: the Romans never exiled any nation from anywhere on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. Apart from enslaved prisoners, the population of Judea continued to live on their lands, even after the destruction of the second temple. Some converted to Christianity in the 4th century, while the majority embraced Islam during the 7th century Arab conquest….
[Shlomo Sand is professor of history at Tel Aviv university and the author of Comment le people juif fut inventé (Fayard, Paris, 2008)]
ENTIRE ARTICLE – link to mondediplo.com
Perhaps I should explain that I am an über-devout practitioner of Greco-Roman mythology. As my grand pappy used to say, the more the merrier when it comes to gods!
Oh hell, now it seems the boys upstairs have begun bowling. I had better run close the windows of my car.
Sand’s theories are both supported and not supported by modern genetic research. There is something that is called haplotype mapping — which basically shows that certain ethnic groups share certain genetic identifyers. The Ashkenazi Jews have an interesting mix of haplotypes (as do all Europeans, BTW). It appears that a significant fraction carry markers that they share with today’s Palestinians. These are markers that are rare or nonexistant among Arabs from the Arabian pennisula and North Africa. This supports the theory that Eupean Jews are descended from a people that lived in Palestine (i.e. consistant with the migration story). In addition, there are also many Ashkenazi Jews that share haplotypes with a people currently living in Central Asia is the are where the Khazars used to live 1000 years ago. This supports Koestler’s and Sand’s conjecture that the Khazars converted to Judaism and eventually migrated to the Baltic region. Jews from North Africa appear more like their North African neighbors.
In any case these studies support multiple hypotheses — Israelis are a mix of people that resulted from multiple migrations and religious conversions.
RE: ” Israelis are a mix of people that resulted from multiple migrations and religious conversions”
MY COMMENT: I wonder how many of them have forebears who were ‘enslaved by the pharaohs’ and fought in history’s “First War of National Liberation” (not that I really give a flying you know what). I realize that it is not nearly as prestigious, but I’ll have the high and mighty Mr. Joffe know that that one of my great-great grand mamas was in the DAR!
As far as I am concerned, “Scholar” Josef Joffe and “Pastor” John Hagee are “kissin’ cousins” (two peas in a pod).
Phil,
I’ve been confused by your editorial approach. I can’t tell if when you post an article by another person, that that indicates advocacy of their position, opposition, or are just putting it out to the public.
As this site is your editorial statement, I assume/conclude that you do advocate for articles that you publish. I do this on the basis of your parallel criticism of mass media, say the New York Times, as their editorial action. “Do unto others…”
Am I wrong in that assumption?
“Celebrating history’s “First War of National Liberation,” [against the Pharaoh] ”
You…. they…. cannot be serious.
This is parody.
Certainly one can object to Mister Joffe’s sentiments of identification with Israel, given the suffering of the Palestinians. But Mister Weiss seems to object to the identification also on the basis of Mister Joffe’s positive experiences in America and post war Germany. This is bogus. Mister Joffe, born in Lithuania at the end of WWII, raised in Germany, the land of the extermination of his people, is allowed as a human being to feel pride in the rebirth of the Jewish people as an independent entity, even if he chooses not to live there. (Maybe I am taking Mister Weiss’s parentheses too literally and it is only the suffering of the Palestinians that invalidates Mister Joffe’s identification while wandering the world.)
Maybe I am taking Mister Weiss’s parentheses too literally
I think you are taking them too literally and you aren’t. Paradoxically.
If this is your national religious liberation, Joffe, what the hell are you doing in Palo Alto?
A) You recognize the standard pattern? If you love it so much or prefer it to our system, why don’t you move there. You never heard this before?
B) On the other hand Joffe dances in power elite circles, and that is one of Phil’s main subjects. Over here Joffe is one of the most efficient enforcer of the standard conventions surrounding Israel and related politics. Thus his political columns in DIE ZEIT are standard fare, from my limited, basically non-political point of view. In a nutshell Joffe is a Machiavellian, I am suspicious of them.
He uses a platitude to visualize what feels to him as a deceptive pattern.
Regarding the Exodus from Egypt, certainly Christian liberation theologians viewed it as a paradigm for the liberations they advocated.
Yes, and historians and archaelogists consider it a myth not based on fact.
And, you live only by fact?
Wait a minute here: Essentially the issue Phil raised here isn’t whether Joffe’s historical perspective about Israel’s founding is right or wrong, but the genuine-ness and maybe validity elsewise of his feelings of affection for Israel given that he lives in the U.S. And I don’t see any problem with that given what Joffe wrote.
That is, maybe he’s right or maybe he’s wrong in terms of his history. (Seems to me it’s a matter of degree anyway.) But regardless of whether he’s right or whether he’s deluded why can’t he validly love Israel from Palo Alto? Who knows what personal situation washed him up there and by now may bind him to it? And who is to say that it has to have been X or Y for him to validly want to stay even? Isn’t he an American and thus has the right to live anywhere he wants here and feel whatever he wants about whatever other country he want so long as he remains principally loyal to America?
Assuming he is in fact a U.S. citizen, there’s not a word in his piece that indicates any feeling on his part that he puts his love of Israel ahead of his loyalty to the U.S., and that it seems to me ought be the sole criteria. We are Americans and we ought to be free to love or hate what we want so long as in the end we are true to America. I know Phil didn’t mean it, but his closing comment does come a bit close to the idea that nobody can express any affection or admiration for another country without being suspected of being disloyal to this one.
Or, put it this way: There’s lots of Palestinians who don’t live in either Gaza or the West Bank. Edward Said lived in NYC if I’m not mistaken. And lots live in Michigan now I understand. Under the standard that one might perceive Phil using on Joffe, are we to dismiss any claims of theirs to feeling strongly about a Palestinian state? That they don’t really mean it? Or, if they so express such a feeling and yet are American citizens, is this alone cause to question their loyalty to the U.S.?
I think if there’s not a bright line drawn here those who are against Americans who put the interests of other countries ahead of America’s are going to be seen as going too far, and in the process lose the fight over that bright line even.