Ralph Seliger is disturbed with me for linking to Joachim Martillo, whom he describes as an antisemite. He says that I am risking my credibility and soul.
I take those ideas seriously. Seliger: "I have felt creeped out by the vituperation and exaggeration in Martillo's comments and at his website." Myself, I don't know that Joachim is any such thing, I regard him as creative and scholarly and yes a little out there. I don't have time to study his blog, let alone my own, I'm unpaid, this can't last. Everyone who reads this blog knows that I'm interested in issues of Jews and power, as I was fascinated by WASPs and power back when I was at Harvard banging my puny fist against the doors of the "finals clubs". (O wicked wicked clubs!) If Joachim called for quotas on Jews or violence against Jews, I would like to know that. I'm against that. Creeped out? I don't care. Can he say something nice about Jews? That's important to me. Joachim?
Who should I listen to? Who should I bar from the conversation?
Heinrich Heine said: Be careful of who you listen to. He's right. (Ask George Bush).
Just
today an Israeli friend who is a progressive Zionist–let's call him A– offered a kind
of answer to this important question. Here was the situation: A and I had learned that B, a
progressive Zionist with mainstream connections, had declined to endorse the work of
C, a guy A and I both like. And this was justly galling to C, who had given B support. Got
all that? And A said: "[There] is the old question of supporting
people who don't want to be
associated with you — or rather, don't want to be known as associating
with you. We all grit our teeth and do it for the cause. At Peace Now
demonstrations, Uri Avnery's Gush
Shalom people were requested not to show up with their own signs. They
gritted their teeth and caved in."
I'm not imprisoned by the Israeli discourse. I am an American, a Jew, not a Zionist. It is horrifying to me that Gush Shalom and
the great great great Avnery were ever blacklisted by the progressive
Zionists. As it strikes me as a horrifying thing that Peace Now stayed on
the board of AIPAC, which is a true prisoner of the Israeli discourse, when AIPAC was supporting settlements. Because I have my own litmus test: rejection of the occupation.
More on antisemitism. We look back at Kristallnacht in '38 as a great warning. Many Jews saw that night as the writing on the wall, and they were right. They didn't even know about a Holocaust, they knew to get out, and god bless them, I wish they'd all gotten out. Soviet Jews wanted to get out because–and I met some beautiful Soviet Jewish Refuseniks the other night–their horizons were limited. They even had jobs, middle class jobs. But there was anti-Jewish discrimination in Russia. Not genocide. I honor that movement. I've heard that there are Syrian intellectuals who are dying to get out to enjoy the freedoms that we have in the west. I've been to Damascus and seen the book stores. I know how those intellectuals are suffering, god bless them. And Palestinians are fearful in the occupied territories, or angry, and their futures are sharply limited, much more than those refuseniks. I blogged recently about the destruction by the Israeli army of a shopping mall in Nablus that reminded me of Kristallnacht. Some will call me antisemitic for saying that. I don't care.
