A friend justly took me to task for opening the door on the self-hatred issue, saying this is the blackmail that Israel's defenders often use. I'm reminded of something Noam Chomsky said, in a piece by painter Menachem Wecker, a year or two back:
self-hatred to a piece by the late Israeli foreign minister and United Nations
ambassador Abba Eban, who wrote in Congress Bi-Weekly in 1973, “One of
the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the
distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all.”
“That is a convenient stand,” Chomsky remarked to me. “It cuts off a mere 100
percent of critical comment!”
At the time I was often in the NY Public Library, and dug up Eban's typically high-flown accusation:
anti-Semitism says that the right to establish and maintain an independent
national sovereign state is the prerogative of all nations, so long as they
happen not to be Jewish. And when this right is exercised not by the Maldive Islands, not by the state of Gabon,not by Barbados…
but by the oldest and most authentic of all nationhoods, then this is said to
be exclusivism, particularism, and a flight of the Jewish people from its
universal mission.
I do not believe that any argument however sophisticated, can
probably change the convictions of Noam Chomsky or of I.F. Stone, whose basic
complex is one of guilt about Jewish survival. They feel themselves associated with our unpardonable audacity at not
having been destroyed or eclipsed or, more accurately, at not having been
merged into some homogenized universalist utopia.
Unfortunate that Eban never cared about Arabs' human rights. For my own part, I can't be as dismissive as NoCho (I'm working at that one). Unlike Chomsky, I do get into people's personal motivation all the time. I accuse the neocons of dual loyalty, of having an unspoken religious agenda. It only seems fair that when they challenge me about self-hatred/assimilation, that I be open with them about my Jewish heart and its many transgressions. Also, I think it is true that some of the things I say out of a "universalist" impulse reflect the fact that I was raised in a very tribal atmosphere and found it claustrophobic. I would like to be honest about all this, even if someone accuses me of bootlicking the goyim. Besides, I have confidence: All these cats is going out the window, tomorrow!
