Christopher Hitchens has a great column at Slate describing the “national humiliation” of the United States by Israel in the latest deal that Netanyahu has extracted. Hitchens’s language is colorful, and is a reminder that generally when a writer writes with literary freedom about gentile-Jewish relations, in a critical manner, he/she gets smacked down for anti-Semitism. I wonder whether this will happen to Hitchens. He says Netanyahu has made a Shabbos goy of Obama (a servant who can perform duties a Jew can’t on the Sabbath) and links the U.S. treatment with extreme Jewish religious attitudes– with the idea that gentiles must serve Jews, as articulated by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.
Hitchens predicts that the talks will fail, and then says the mystery is why the U.S. submits to such treatment. It’s not a mystery. The answer is obvious and was denied by Hitchens himself when Walt and Mearsheimer put it forward, the Israel lobby. Hitch, what is missing from your column is Netanyahu’s statement, “the U.S. is something that can be easily moved.” Hitchens:
Last month, [Rabbi Yosef] announced that the sole reason for the existence of gentiles was to perform menial services for Jews: After that, he opined, their usefulness was at an end.
Lieberman has another distinction that I believe is unique. He does not live in the country whose foreign ministry he heads. He chooses, rather, to make his home in the West Bank settlement of Nokdim, a tenaciously held outcrop with a population of fewer than 1,000 people…
This is a national humiliation. Regardless of whether that bunch of clowns and thugs and racists “approve” of the Obama/Clinton grovel offer, there should be a unanimous demand that it be withdrawn.
The mathematics of the situation must be evident even to the meanest intelligence. In order for any talk of a two-state outcome to be even slightly realistic, there needs to be territory on which the second state can be built, or on which the other nation living in Palestine can govern itself. The aim of the extreme Israeli theocratic and chauvinist parties is plain and undisguised: Annex enough land to make this solution impossible, and either expel or repress the unwanted people. The policy of Netanyahu is likewise easy to read: Run out the clock by demanding concessions for something he has already agreed to in principle, appease the ultras he has appointed to his own government, and wait for a chance to blame Palestinian reaction for the inevitable failure.
The only mystery is this: Why does the United States acquiesce so wretchedly in its own disgrace at the hands of a virtual client state? A soft version of Rabbi Yosef’s contemptuous view of the gentiles is the old concept of the shabbos goy: the non-Jew who is paid a trifling fee to turn out the lights or turn on the stove, or whatever else is needful to get around the more annoying regulations of the Sabbath. How the old buzzard must cackle when he sees the gentiles actually volunteering a bribe to do the lowly work! And lowly it is, involving the tearing-up of international law and U.N. resolutions and election promises, and the further dispossession and eviction of a people to whom we gave our word. This craven impotence will be noticed elsewhere, and by some very undesirable persons, and we will most certainly be made to regret it.