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?
