Denial

This reminds me of your post about Doris Lessing, as she grew up in white rule Rhodesia, how she was hated by the whites. Most of them weren’t bad people. They were just used to British imperialism. It had been so for their fathers and grandfathers. It was the world that they were used to. And they knew that if they took her words seriously, their world would fall down.

Of course, in the Jewish context it’s much more painful. By the time she came about, Britain had ruled the seas for centuries. The British people did not know true suffering(in relative terms, compared to the vast majority of nations in the world). And those who did suffer, at least, did not wind up on large mansions in central Africa hunting and relaxing.

In the Jewish context, the powerlessness and chronic weakness is the backdrop. Jews don’t know power. We’ve never really tasted it. Sure, you have a Rothschild here and there. But what did that help? Most of them cared more about helping the British empire than their fellow Jew. Some even renounced their Jewishness in order to blend in.

A lot of Jews do not know this today, but at the onset of the French Revolution, the Sephardi Jews who were at that time the highest-ranking Jews and some of whom had made names for themselves viciously attacked the vast Ashkenazi Jewish masses for being ‘not like them’. In fact, when they sought Jewish emancipation, they insisted that Ashkenaz and Sepharad were two distinct races alltogether and any Jewishness is more illusion than fact.

The french came to their senses and decides to give all (formal) emancipation, regardless of skincolor or ethnicity. But this should be remembered, how Jew turned on Jew. This is the end result of centuries of humiliation. This is what the early Zionists detested when they spoke of the ‘Diaspora Jew’. He who crowered in the shadows and sold out his fellow Jews, poor and huddled, for approval to his Gentile masters at whose steps he danced like a clown.

What happened as a reaction to this was an overreaction, as we can all see. But unlike European peoples, Jews have never tasted power. We cannot comprehend ourselves as oppressors of another people. It’s a new role for us.

So I think it’s a generational issue. The price to pay for Jewish normalization is that you have an older generation which is incapable of thinking of themselves as regular humans. Many Jews still think, deep inside, that they are frankly incapable of being racists – as crazy as it may sound. This is all a legacy of Jewish collective history.

But among those my age, under the age of 30, things change. True, in every population you will have racists and chauvinists. And unlike a white European Gentile, there’s no punishment for a white Jew to be a bit of a racist, because, frankly, there is still deep anti-Semitism in the world(although the West). Just look at the TV in a lot of Arab countries(of course, Islamophobia is growing in the West, and totally exploding in Israel).

But as I’ve become convinced of now.. the Jewish transformation will take generations to complete. And there isn’t that kind of time. That’s why I think it will be Gentiles who will do what will be needed. Beinart’s book was easy to publish. The pioneers in the American discourse were Walt/Mearsheimer. They weren’t the first, but they were the most comprehensive. They had all the right credentials and the high-powered intellect. But most important of all; they had to courage to write of what they wrote without beings Jews. They broke the barrier, despite the enormous backlash.

The people who ended Jim Crow were a large mix, but most whites, even in the North, did not mobilize. Jews had a special role in that. Not that we were inherently more moral, like some people still think. But because we as outsiders of the power structure understood the hypocrises and the corruption in the system, and we exposed it. The most bizarre thing in Jewish modern life is that in a record short timespan, we’ve switched places and become part of the corrupted establishment.

Now it is we that hold another people under oppression, and silence all who wish to write about it truthfully(because they have to deal with our political and media power, the latter of whom which not even Walt/Mearsheimer dared to step into).
And this transformation is a revolt against all our history. So that we are even having this conversation is itself a small miracle. And we shouldn’t perhaps be too harsh against the likes of your friend, while not forgetting to remind her of her cowardice.