What Avigdor Lieberman actually said (& When Amish met Heimish)

April 03, 2009

* The New York Times point out that one reason there is such a large discrepancy between the figures given by Israel (259 Palestinian civilian dead) and Palestinians groups (who say that most of the total 1,166 Palestinian dead were civilians), is that Palestinian groups have counted as civilians the 250 Hamas officer graduates who were killed by an Israeli airstrike on the first (and by far the bloodiest) day of Operation Cast Lead. The Palestinian groups argue that because they were not fighting at the time they should be included in the figures for non-combatants. And the Times points out that 400 people die through natural causes every month in Gaza and many of these names also appear to have been added on to the list of "Palestinian civilian dead" during the conflict.

* The Washington Post makes rare criticism of PA President Mahmoud Abbas for his particularly warm embrace of wanted Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

 

CONTENTS

1. 13-year-old dies in axe attack
2. More on the discrepancy in the figures for Gaza casualties
3. Sweden punished for Israel Davis cup lockout
4. The seven stages of anti-Semitism
5. BBC rejects “Seven Jewish Children” play
6. The next time Abbas talks of “double standards”…
7. Today, it is difficult to imagine Nathan Zuckerman lasting even eight days in England

8. Muslim leaders offer to guard Scottish synagogue
9. What Avigdor Lieberman actually said
10. First wheelchair-bound MK makes maiden Knesset speech
11. When Amish met Heimish

12. “An avant-garde play revives an ancient hatred” (By Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal)
13. “An Arab summit embraces the butcher of Darfur” (Washington Post, editorial)
14. “Pox Britannica: English anti-Semitism on the march” (By Howard Jacobson, New Republic)
15. “Avigdor Lieberman’s brilliant debut” (By Daniel Pipes, Front Page Magazine)
16. “NYC ultra-orthodox Jews give Amish walking tour” (Associated Press)


[All notes below by Tom Gross]

13-YEAR-OLD DIES IN AXE ATTACK

I attach five articles below from recent days, with a few brief notes first by myself. I suggest you read the articles in full if you have time.

The 13-year-old Israeli boy killed in an axe attack by a Palestinian in a settlement south of Jerusalem yesterday has been named as Shlomo Nativ. A 7-year-old Israeli boy was also seriously wounded. The Palestinian, shouting “Allah Akbar,” fled the scene after being chased by Israeli adults.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman called it a “senseless act of brutality against innocents.” The Israeli right have already blamed Netanyahu’s “conciliatory statements” towards the Palestinians the day before for encouraging the attack. “Bibi must understand that talk of appeasement and concessions just encourages more violence,” said one.

A murky group calling itself the Martyrs of Imad Mughniyeh claimed responsibility for the attack in an e-mail sent to the Associated Press. It has claimed responsibility for a number of other deadly attacks recently, including the murder of two Israeli traffic cops, but Israeli defense officials believe it is merely a name used by a Fatah-related group to avoid Israeli reprisals.

 

MORE ON THE DISCREPANCY IN THE FIGURES FOR GAZA CASUALTIES

There has been much misreporting about the numbers and nature of Palestinian civilian deaths during the Gaza conflict in January, misreporting to an extent that one doesn’t see in virtually any other conflict in the world. Some Western media have reported every rumor from left-wing Jewish anti-Zionist campaigners, or from Hamas spokesmen, as if they were fact.

For example, on one day I looked at The Guardian homepage last week (March 24), all six of the main stories on the home page concerned Israel rather than any other international or British issue. All six slandered Israel, and one article even compared the IDF to the war criminals of Darfur. The Guardian was partially basing its claims on allegations – now disproved – that a woman and her two children were killed by an Israeli sniper.

DEATHS FROM NATURAL CAUSES

Although it was buried inside a news report, unlike the European media, The New York Times has at least been honest enough to point out that one reason there is such a large discrepancy between the figures given by Israel (259 Palestinian civilian dead) and Palestinians groups (who say that most of the total 1,166 Palestinian dead were civilians), is that Palestinian groups have counted as civilians the 250 Hamas officer graduates who were killed by an Israeli airstrike on the first (and by far the bloodiest) day of Operation Cast Lead. The Palestinian groups argue that because they were not fighting at the time they should be included in the figures for non-combatants. And the Times points out that 400 people die through natural causes every month in Gaza and many of these names also appear to have been added on to the list of “Palestinian civilian dead” during the conflict.

Danny Zamir, the far-left Israeli activist who started the rumors, is no innocent bystander. His 2004 book attacking the state of Israel was, for example, endorsed by Noam Chomsky, the doyen of anti-Western academics.

 

SWEDEN PUNISHED FOR ISRAEL DAVIS CUP LOCKOUT

[This is an update to a dispatch last month.]

The Swedish city of Malmo was banned from hosting Davis Cup tennis matches for five years yesterday after its decision to stage Sweden’s World Group clash with Israel behind closed doors. The Swedes will now be forced to guarantee to the International Tennis Federation that every Davis Cup series in the country will be open to fans.

 

THE SEVEN STAGES OF ANTI-SEMITISM

The first article below takes up the theme of Caryl Churchill’s play, Seven Jewish Children, which I wrote about in two dispatches in February when it debuted in London. Besides its bigotry and false facts, it is unprecedented for a play to be performed at one of London’s most prestigious theaters less than a month after it was written, it is unprecedented to be put on for free at such a theater, and it is unprecedented for a play to cross the Atlantic and be performed in New York and Washington only a month later. Even the best plays in the world are not awarded that honor. Many people have remarked that there is only one reason this play has done so: anti-Semitism.

The article, by Bret Stephens, in The Wall Street Journal, begins:

Here’s a sketch for a racist play about “moral decline” in black America since the civil rights era.

Act I: Heroic protestors gather at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965 to march in defiance of a segregationist state. Act II: The scene moves to San Francisco in the early 1970s, where the radical politics of the Black Panthers quickly give way to robbery and murder. Act III: A New York City crack house, circa 1985. Act IV: the trial of O.J. Simpson. Act V: The present, in which a black man on a prison furlough goes on a murder spree.

Appalled? I hope so.

Now substitute the word “Jewish” for “black” and change the scene to Europe and Israel and you have, roughly, the plot of celebrated British playwright Caryl Churchill’s “Seven Jewish Children” …

(Full article below.)

***

BBC REJECTS PLAY “SEVEN JEWISH CHILDREN”

The Guardian reports: The BBC has declined to broadcast a radio version of Caryl Churchill’s controversial new stage play about Israeli history, Seven Jewish Children, claiming it needed to remain impartial.

In an email seen by The Guardian, BBC Radio 4’s drama commissioning editor Jeremy Howe said that he and Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer thought Churchill’s play was a “brilliant piece”.

Howe wrote: “It is a no, I am afraid. Both Mark [Damazer, Radio 4 controller] and I think it is a brilliant piece, but after discussing it with editorial policy we have decided we cannot run with it on the grounds of impartiality – I think it would be nearly impossible to run a drama that counters Caryl Churchill’s view. Having debated long and hard we have decided we can’t do Seven Jewish Children.”

In a letter sent to The Daily Telegraph in February a number of prominent British Jews condemned the Royal Court Theatre for showing Churchill’s play which they said portrayed Israeli parents as “inhuman triumphalists.”

Christopher Hart in The Sunday Times attacked what he called “the play’s ludicrous and utterly predictable lack of even-handedness.”

 

THE NEXT TIME ABBAS TALKS OF “DOUBLE STANDARDS” …

In the second article below, The Washington Post takes up the themes I made in the dispatch earlier this week, titled “Israel’s Sudan strike targeted weapons capable of hitting Tel Aviv and Dimona.”

The Post’s editorial, titled “In Defense of Genocide: An Arab summit embraces the butcher of Darfur,” also makes criticism of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. It is extremely rare for the mainstream media, including the Post, who are constantly berating and chastising Israeli leaders in editorials and opeds, to criticize Abbas.

The Post writes:

“We must also take a decisive stance of solidarity alongside fraternal Sudan and President Omar al-Bashir,” said Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Mr. Abbas is hoping that the Obama administration will pressure Israel to stop building “illegal” settlements in the West Bank; the next time he utters the phrase “double standard” in the presence of a U.S. diplomat, we suggest a query about Mr. Bashir.

***

Tom Gross adds:

Sudanese President Bashir traveled on from the Arab Summit in Qatar to undertake a pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday. The hundreds of thousands of non-Arab Muslims Bashir has ordered to be slaughtered and raped in Darfur won’t have that opportunity. Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi Foreign Minister, said Bashir, who is wanted for murder by the International Criminal Court, was a welcome guest in his country.

Saudi Arabia also announced that it will not be contributing to the $750 billion fund agreed by members of the G-20 in London yesterday.

 

TODAY, IT IS DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE NATHAN ZUCKERMAN LASTING EVEN EIGHT DAYS IN ENGLAND

The third article below, By Howard Jacobson in the new issue of The New Republic, starts off by mentioning Philip Roth’s The Counterlife, which was written in 1987. By coincidence I have just re-read The Counterlife and was going to refer to it myself in a forthcoming article (though I won’t now).

Jacobson writes:

England’s made a Jew of me in only eight weeks,” says Nathan Zuckerman on the last page of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife. It is not meant to be a compliment. What makes a Jew of Zuckerman is the “strong sense of difference” the English induce in him, a “latent and pervasive” anti-Semitism, rarely rampantly expressed except for a “peculiarly immoderate, un-English-like Israel-loathing.”

… Twenty years on, it is difficult to imagine Nathan Zuckerman lasting eight days in England, let alone eight weeks.

It is important not to exaggerate. Most English Jews walk safely through their streets, express themselves freely, enjoy the friendship of non-Jews... And yet, in the tone of the debate, in the spirit of the national conversation about Israel, in the slow seepage of familiar anti-Semitic calumnies into the conversation – there, it seems to me, one can find growing reason for English Jews to be concerned.

… Such allusions to a pro-Israel conspiracy of influence and wealth, usually accompanied by protestations of innocence in regard to Jews themselves--”I am sick of being accused of anti-Semitism,” Baroness Tonge has said, “when what I am doing is criticizing Israel”--have become the commonplaces of anti-Israel discourse.

… The distinguished British film director Ken Loach dismissed a report on the rise of anti-Semitism across Europe as designed merely to “distract attention” from Israel’s military crimes… Robert Fisk, writing in The Independent a few weeks ago, nonetheless argued that “a Palestinian woman and her child are as worthy of life as a Jewish woman and her child on the back of a lorry in Auschwitz”… The Daily Mirror has taken this imputation of callousness a stage further, writing of the “1,314 dead Palestinians temporarily sat[ing] Tel Aviv’s bloodlust”… Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children declares itself to be a fund-raiser for Gazans and finishes almost before it begins in a grotesque tableau of blood-soaked triumphalism… Let us no longer deny the Holocaust, let us rather redistribute the pity. If there is a victim of the Holocaust today, it is the people of Gaza.

(Full article below.)

***

Tom Gross adds: it is important to emphasize, once again, how British anti-Semitism has an effect on the rest of the world, especially through its media with a global reach. The BBC, The Guardian and The Financial Times have all been particularly irresponsible in spreading untruths about Israel, as have a number of individual British journalists living and working in the United States.

 

MUSLIM LEADERS OFFER TO GUARD SCOTTISH SYNAGOGUE

Tom Gross adds further: It should be pointed out that while there is increasing anti-Semitism among the (supposedly) liberal elites that dominate the British media, education and the arts, many millions of ordinary Britons are neither anti-Semitic nor hostile to Israel, nor do they necessarily believe the invective about Israel which the British media are trying to ram down their throats all the time.

For example, the leaders of a Scottish Muslim community in Edinburgh, last week offered to protect the town’s Jews following an anti-Semitic attack on an Edinburgh synagogue.

Ken Imrie, chairman of the Scottish Islamic Foundation, wrote to Edinburgh Hebrew Congregation’s Rabbi David Rose to express his group’s “revulsion and horror” at the attack, which two Muslim individuals have confessed to. Imrie added in his letter, “We trust you have adequate security arrangements in place, in line with places of worship across the country. If not, such is our strength of feeling on this matter, we would wish to physically guard the synagogue ourselves.”

The Edinburgh Jewish community can be traced back to 1691, and the present synagogue to 1825. Its numbers were boosted by Jews fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s.

 

WHAT AVIGDOR LIEBERMAN ACTUALLY SAID

I don’t agree with certain aspects of the style and policies of Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s new foreign minister. But then again, I don’t agree with certain aspects of most politicians, Israeli and otherwise.

However, the false information, caricatures, and selective reporting about Lieberman, may well break new records for slander by the international media.

For example, Lieberman did not (as reported by the BBC and other media) reject a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in his maiden address as foreign minister on Wednesday. On the contrary, he explicitly endorsed the Road Map, an internationally sanctioned document from 2003 that is designed to lead to a two-state solution. (The formal name of the Road Map is “A Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”)

I attach an article below by Daniel Pipes pointing this out, and the other actual beliefs of Lieberman rather than the misinformation reported in the Western media. Lieberman’s actual positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not “ultranationalist” or “Fascist”; they are actually closer to the center ground, and his statements are far less incendiary than statements regularly made by “moderate” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and even by some Israeli Labor party politicians. It is just that the Western press doesn’t bother to report those.

Headlines such as the one in The Los Angeles Times, “Foreign minister says Israel not bound to follow two-state path,” are misleading.

***

FIRST WHEELCHAIR-BOUND MK MAKES MAIDEN KNESSET SPEECH

Lieberman’s party also has one of the most diverse Knesset lists of any Israeli political party. It includes several women, Druze, converts to Judaism, former models, a former ambassador to Washington, and Israel’s first wheelchair-bound member of the Knesset, MK Moshe Matalon, who has now given his first speech to the Knesset plenum.

Matalon expressed the hope that just as the Knesset adapted its facilities (including installing new wheelchair ramps) to accommodate a disabled member, all Israeli public institutions would do so. “It is a historic privilege to be here today and to tell hundreds of thousands of disabled people that the sky is the limit,” Matalon said.

Addressing the disabled community, he added, “Don’t give up, clench your teeth and ignore the pain. That is the only way you could achieve your goals.”

 

WHEN AMISH MET HEIMISH

The final article below, from The Associated Press, describes the walking tour given by New York City’s ultra-orthodox Jews to Amish from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania this week.

Ultra-orthodox leaders at the Chassidic Discovery Center in Brooklyn said the two communities are naturally drawn to each other with a commitment to simpler lifestyles. “The Amish are also living their lives as the Bible speaks to them,” said one rabbi.

While ultra-Orthodox Lubavitchers refrain from turning on electricity or driving cars on the Sabbath, the Amish often travel around in a horse and buggy, living off the land.

Some of the words used by the Amish speaking Pennsylvania Dutch, a dialect of the German of their ancestors, were understood by the Yiddish-speaking Jews in Brooklyn.

[All notes above by Tom Gross]


FULL ARTICLES

ANTI-SEMITISM ON STAGE

The Stages of Anti-Semitism: An avant-garde play revives an ancient hatred
By Bret Stephens
The Wall Street Journal
April 1, 2009 (European edition)

Here’s a sketch for a racist play about “moral decline” in black America since the civil rights era.

Act I: Heroic protestors gather at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965 to march in defiance of a segregationist state. Act II: The scene moves to San Francisco in the early 1970s, where the radical politics of the Black Panthers quickly give way to robbery and murder. Act III: A New York City crack house, circa 1985. Act IV: the trial of O.J. Simpson. Act V: The present, in which a black man on a prison furlough goes on a murder spree.

Appalled? I hope so.

Now substitute the word “Jewish” for “black” and change the scene to Europe and Israel and you have, roughly, the plot of celebrated British playwright Caryl Churchill’s “Seven Jewish Children,” which debuted last month to some controversy and much acclaim at London’s Royal Court Theater. It is now in the U.S., playing in small but respectable venues to sophisticated audiences that – judging from the performance I attended in New York last Thursday – are overwhelmingly disposed to like it.

Ms. Churchill’s short play unfolds over seven scenes, beginning, dimly, sometime during the Holocaust and concluding, sharply, with Israel’s war with Hamas. Characters appear as parents or older relatives of an offstage child, and the dialogue revolves around what the girl should or should not know about her political circumstances as they unfold over the decades.

So, for the first scene we have the line, “Don’t tell her they’ll kill her” – the “they” presumably referring to Nazis. Yet by the final scene the tables have turned. Now it’s the Jews who behave like Nazis: “Tell her,” says one of the play’s Zionist elders, “I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out … tell her we’re BETTER HATERS, tell her we’re CHOSEN PEOPLE, tell her I look at one of their CHILDREN COVERED IN BLOOD and what do I feel? Tell her all I feel is happy it’s not her.” (My emphases.)

Just what is this supposed to mean? Michael Billington of the Guardian grasped Ms. Churchill’s point when he wrote that the play captured “the transition that has overtaken Israel, to the point where security has become the pretext for indiscriminate slaughter.” Ms. Churchill herself has written that she “wanted [the play] in some small way to reflect the shock and enormity of what happened in Gaza. I think it does that RELATIVELY MILDLY.” (My emphasis again.)

All this makes perfect sense – provided you’re willing to reduce the Arab-Israeli conflict to caricature, magnify it to the exclusion of all others, assign blame (and moral agency) wholly to one side, and suppose that Israelis use the memory of the Holocaust cynically or neurotically as an alibi for gratuitous and wanton bloodletting.

In other words, if you’re prepared to manipulate history as dishonestly as our vile little “play” about black America does, then it’s easy to draw a damning moral. And if you’re clever enough to cast the indictment as a story about SOME blacks or SOME Jews, or as one of generational decadence, then you might also acquit yourself of charges of racism or anti-Semitism, since you can point to a few Jews or blacks worthy of your considered respect.

Of course Ms. Churchill does just that, even as she mocks Jewish claims to statehood (“Tell her her great great great great lots of greats grandad lived there”). Of course she cites the authority of Israel’s many internal dissenters and Jewish critics as another method of self-justification, thereby using Israel’s own openness as a club with which to bludgeon it. Yet if you say, for instance, that Israel is a fascist state and cite the testimony of Israelis who freely argue as much, then you have done nothing except instantly disprove your own premise.

But logic is not the issue here, nor, really, are the facts: Try arguing either with someone determined to ignore them. The issue is about taboo – a word easy to mock until you realize it often upholds what is best in society. Racism has become taboo in American society, and that’s a very good thing. Anti-Semitism used to be taboo, but that’s been eroded by an obsessive criticism of Israel that seems to borrow freely from the classic anti-Semitic repertoire (“tell her they’re filth”) while adopting the brilliant trick of treating Jewish victimization as a moral ideal from which modern Israel has sadly deviated.

Readers may wonder why Ms. Churchill’s trite agitprop, a cultural blip on the vast American stage, deserves a column. Maybe it doesn’t; maybe it’s best ignored. But I’m reminded of what a better Churchill – Winston – wrote about the German decision in 1917 to put V.I. Lenin on a sealed train to Petersburg, “in the same way you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city.” Something foul has now gotten into our water, too.

 

IN DEFENSE OF GENOCIDE

In Defense of Genocide: An Arab summit embraces the butcher of Darfur
Washington Post, editorial
April 1, 2009

FOR DECADES, summit meetings of the Arab League have resounded with rhetoric about the alleged “double standards” of the West in enforcing U.N. resolutions or respecting international law. No communique of the group – including the one issued from its summit this week in Doha, Qatar – has been complete without a demand that conflicts be resolved “within the framework of international legitimacy.”

So it was interesting to see what else was in the latest statement issued by the kings, princes and authoritarian presidents of the Middle East and North Africa. First there was a call on “the international community to prosecute those responsible” for alleged “war crimes” committed by Israel in its recent offensive in Gaza. Then came an ardent defense of Sudanese dictator Omar Hassan al-Bashir – who was welcomed to the Doha summit despite an outstanding arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court on multiple war crimes charges.

“We stress our solidarity with Sudan and our rejection of the decision” of the ICC, said the communique, which Mr. Bashir welcomed in a bombastic address to the summit plenary. Leader after leader declared fealty. “We must also take a decisive stance of solidarity alongside fraternal Sudan and President Omar al-Bashir,” said Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Mr. Abbas is hoping that the Obama administration will pressure Israel to stop building “illegal” settlements in the West Bank; the next time he utters the phrase “double standard” in the presence of a U.S. diplomat, we suggest a query about Mr. Bashir.

To be sure, some human rights groups have alleged crimes by Israeli forces in Gaza. But, according to Palestinian accounts, 1,409 people were killed during the offensive, of whom a substantial number were armed Hamas fighters. In contrast, the United Nations has reported more than 300,000 civilian deaths in Darfur as a result of the genocidal campaign sponsored by Mr. Bashir. Scores of villages have been systematically burned, and thousands of women systematically raped. Mr. Bashir responded to the ICC’s arrest warrant last month by expelling international aid groups from Darfur. The result has been growing food and water shortages and new epidemics, according to the Enough Project.

To their credit, a coalition of Middle East human rights groups urged the summit leaders not to protect Mr. Bashir. “There should be no immunity for those who have committed crimes,” said the Arab Coalition for Darfur. Predictably, the unelected rulers – several of whom could themselves be vulnerable to charges of crimes against humanity – ignored the appeal. If the Obama administration and the rest of the civilized world needed further demonstration of why the promotion of democracy and human rights must be central to any policy for the Middle East, Omar Bashir’s reception in Doha ought to suffice.

 

ENGLISH ANTI-SEMITISM ON THE MARCH

Pox Britannica: English anti-Semitism on the march
By Howard Jacobson
The New Republic
April 15, 2009 edition

“England’s made a Jew of me in only eight weeks,” says Nathan Zuckerman on the last page of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife. It is not meant to be a compliment. What makes a Jew of Zuckerman is the “strong sense of difference” the English induce in him, a “latent and pervasive” anti-Semitism, rarely rampantly expressed except for a “peculiarly immoderate, un-English-like Israel-loathing.”

At the time – The Counterlife was published in England in 1987 – Zuckerman’s account of Anglo-Jewish relations struck an English-born Jew like me as a mite thin-skinned. It was possible that an American Jew detected what we did not, but more likely that he detected what was not there. Whatever the truth of it, a comfortable existence was better served by assuming the latter. We all had our own tales of anti-Semitism to tell – my grandmother’s headstone, for example, had just been defaced with a swastika in a skinhead raid on a Jewish cemetery in Manchester – but mainly they were isolated, low-level acts of idle vandalism or reflexes of minor intolerance, more comic than alarming, and not personal, however you viewed them. Apart, that is, from the Israel-loathing, but then that wasn’t – was it? – to be confused with anti-Semitism.

Twenty years on, it is difficult to imagine Nathan Zuckerman lasting eight days in England, let alone eight weeks. There is something in the air here, something you can smell, but also, in a number of cases, something more immediately affronting to Jews. It is important not to exaggerate. Most English Jews walk safely through their streets, express themselves freely, enjoy the friendship of non-Jews, and feel no less confidently a part of English life than they ever have. Organizations monitoring anti-Jewish incidents in England have reported a dramatic increase after Gaza: the daubing of slogans such as “kill the jews” on walls and bus shelters in Jewish neighborhoods, abuse of Jewish children on school playgrounds, arson attacks on synagogues, physical assaults on Jews conspicuous by their yarmulkes or shtreimels. But, while these incidents ought not to be treated blithely, they are still exceptional occurrences.

And yet, in the tone of the debate, in the spirit of the national conversation about Israel, in the slow seepage of familiar anti-Semitic calumnies into the conversation – there, it seems to me, one can find growing reason for English Jews to be concerned. Mindless acts of vandalism come and go; but what takes root in the intellectual life of a nation is harder to identify and remove. Was it anti-Semitic of the Labour politician Tam Dalyell to talk of Jewish advisers excessively influencing Tony Blair’s foreign policy? Was it anti-Semitic of the Liberal Democrat Baroness Tonge to refer to the “financial grips” that the pro-Israel lobby exerts on the world? Such allusions to a pro-Israel conspiracy of influence and wealth, usually accompanied by protestations of innocence in regard to Jews themselves – ”I am sick of being accused of anti-Semitism,” Baroness Tonge has said, “when what I am doing is criticizing Israel” – have become the commonplaces of anti-Israel discourse in the years since Philip Roth wrote The Counterlife. And, whatever their intention, their gradual effect has been to normalize, under cover of criticism of Israel, assumptions that 50 years ago would have been exclusively the property of overt Jew-haters. The peculiarly immoderate Israel-loathing that Roth remarked upon in 1987 is now a deranged revulsion, intemperate and unconcealed, which nothing Israel itself has done could justify or explain were it ten times the barbaric apartheid state it figures as in the English imagination.

Demonstrators against Israel’s operation in Gaza carried placards demanding an end to the “massacre” and the “slaughter.” There was no contesting this rhetoric of wanton destruction versus helpless innocence. Hamas rockets counted for nothing, Hamas’s record of endangering its own civilian population counted for nothing, Amnesty reports were cited when they incriminated Israel but ignored when they incriminated others. Whatever was not massacre was not news, nor was it germane. The distinguished British film director Ken Loach dismissed a report on the rise of anti-Semitism across Europe as designed merely to “distract attention” from Israel’s military crimes. An increase in anti-Semitism is “perfectly understandable,” Loach said, “because Israel feeds feelings of anti-Semitism.” Scrupulously refusing the Holocaust-Gaza analogy, Robert Fisk, writing in The Independent a few weeks ago, nonetheless argued that “a Palestinian woman and her child are as worthy of life as a Jewish woman and her child on the back of a lorry in Auschwitz” – at a stroke reinstating the analogy while implying that Jews need to be reminded that not only Jewish lives are precious. And a columnist for the populist newspaper The Daily Mirror has taken this imputation of callousness a stage further, writing of the “1,314 dead Palestinians temporarily sat[ing] Tel Aviv’s bloodlust.”

Coincidentally, or not, a ten-minute play by Caryl Churchill – accusing Jews of the same addiction to blood-spilling – has recently enjoyed a two-week run at the Royal Court Theatre in London and three performances at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Seven Jewish Children declares itself to be a fund-raiser for Gazans. Anyone can produce it without paying its author a fee, so long as the seats are free and there is a collection for the beleaguered population of Gaza after the performance.

Think of it as 1960s agitprop – the buckets await you in the foyer and you make your contribution or you don’t – and it is no more than the persuaded speaking to the persuaded. But propaganda turns sinister when it pretends to be art. Offering insight into how Jews have got to this murderous pass – the answer is the Holocaust: we do to others what others did to us – Seven Jewish Children finishes almost before it begins in a grotesque tableau of blood-soaked triumphalism: Jews reveling in the deaths of Palestinians, laughing at dying Palestinian policemen, rejoicing in the slaughter of Palestinian babies.

Churchill has expressed surprise that anyone should accuse her of invoking the blood libel, but, even if one takes her surprise at face value, it only demonstrates how unquestioningly integral to English leftist thinking the bloodlust of the Israeli has become. Add to this Churchill’s decision to have her murder-mad Israelis justify their actions in the name of “the chosen people” – as though any Jew ever yet interpreted the burden of “chosenness” as an injunction to kill – and we are back on old and terrifying territory. And this not in the brute hinterland of English life, where swastikas are drawn the wrong way round and “Jew” is not always spelled correctly, but at the highest level of English culture.

Again it is important not to exaggerate. Seven Jewish Children has not by any means received universal acclaim. Parodies of it seem to turn up on the Internet almost every day. But there is no postulate so far-fetched that it can’t smuggle itself into even the best newspapers as truth. The eminent Guardian theater critic Michael Billington, for example, took Churchill’s words in the spirit in which they were uttered, believing that she “shows us how Jewish children are bred to believe in the ‘otherness’ of Palestinians.” Jewish children, note. But then it’s Jewish children whom Caryl Churchill paints as brainwashed into barbarity. Without, I believe, any intention to speak ill of Jews, and innocently deaf to the odiousness of the word “bred” in this context, Billington demonstrates how easily language can sleepwalk us into bigotry.

The premise of Seven Jewish Children is a fine piece of fashionable psychobabble that understands Zionism as the collective nervous breakdown of the Jewish people; instead of learning the humanizing lesson of the Holocaust – whatever that might be, and whatever the even greater obligation on non-Jews to learn it too – Jews vent their instability on the Palestinians in imitation of what the Nazis vented on them. This is a theory that assumes what it offers to prove, namely how like Nazis Israelis have become. Furthermore, it dispossesses Jews of their own history, turning the Holocaust into a sort of retrospective retribution, Jews being made to pay the price then for what Israelis are doing now. Clearly, this exists at a more extreme end of the continuum of willed forgetting than Holocaust denial itself, its ultimate object being to break the Jew-Holocaust nexus altogether. Let us no longer deny the Holocaust, let us rather redistribute the pity. If there is a victim of the Holocaust today, it is the people of Gaza.

Given how hard it is to distinguish Jew from Israeli in all this, the mantra “It is not anti-Semitic to be critical of Israel” looks increasingly disingenuous. But there is no challenging it, not even with such eminently reasonable responses as, “That surely depends on the criticism,” or “Calling into question an entire nation’s right to exist is not exactly ‘criticism.’“ Nor is the distinction between Israeli and Jew much respected where the graffitists and the baby bullies of the schoolyard do their work. But, in the end, it is frankly immaterial how much of this is Jewhating or not. The inordinacy of English Israel-loathing – ascribing to a country the same disproportionate responsibility for the world’s ills that was once ascribed to a people – is toxic enough in itself. The language of extremism has a malarious dynamic of its own, passing effortlessly from the mischievous to the unwary, and from there into the bloodstream of society. And that’s what one can smell here. Infection.

 

AVIGDOR LIEBERMAN’S BRILLIANT DEBUT

Avigdor Lieberman’s brilliant debut
By Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com
April 2, 2009

Avigdor Lieberman became foreign minister of Israel yesterday. He celebrated his inauguration with a maiden speech that news reports indicate left his listeners grimacing, squirming, and aghast. The BBC, for example, informs us that his words prompted “his predecessor Tzipi Livni to interrupt and diplomats to shift uncomfortably.”

Too bad for them – the speech leaves me elated. Here are some of the topics Lieberman covered in his 1,100-word stem-winder:

The World Order: The Westphalia order of states is dead, replaced by a modern system that includes states, semi-states, and irrational international players (e.g., Al-Qaeda, perhaps Iran).

World priorities: These must change. The free world must focus on defeating the countries, forces, and extremist entities “that are trying to violate it.” The real problems are coming from “the direction of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq” – and not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Egypt: Lieberman praises Cairo as “a stabilizing factor in the regional system and perhaps even beyond that” but puts the Mubarak government on notice that he will only go there if his counterpart comes to Jerusalem.

Repeating the word “peace”: Lieberman poured scorn on prior Israeli governments: “The fact that we say the word 'peace’ twenty times a day will not bring peace any closer.”

The burden of peace: “I have seen all the proposals made so generously by Ehud Olmert, but I have not seen any result.” Now, things have changed: “the other side also bears responsibility” for peace and must ante up.

The Road Map: The speech's most surprising piece of news is Lieberman's focus on and endorsement of the Road Map, a 2003 diplomatic initiative he voted against at the time but which is, as he puts it, “the only document approved by the cabinet and by the Security Council.” He calls it "a binding resolution” that the new government must implement. In contrast, he specifically notes that the government is not bound by the Annapolis accord of 2007 (“Neither the cabinet nor the Knesset ever ratified it”).

Implementing The Road Map: Lieberman intends to “act exactly” according to the letter of the Road Map, including its Tenet and Zinni sub-documents. Then comes one of his two central statements of the speech:

“I will never agree to our waiving all the clauses – I believe there are 48 of them – and going directly to the last clause, negotiations on a permanent settlement. No. These concessions do not achieve anything. We will adhere to it to the letter, exactly as written. Clauses one, two, three, four – dismantling terrorist organizations, establishing an effective government, making a profound constitutional change in the Palestinian Authority. We will proceed exactly according to the clauses. We are also obligated to implement what is required of us in each clause, but so is the other side. They must implement the document in full.”

The mistake of making concessions: He notes the “dramatic steps and made far-reaching proposals” of the Sharon and Olmert governments and then concludes, “But I do not see that [they] brought peace. To the contrary … It is precisely when we made all the concessions” that Israel became more isolated, such as at the Durban Conference in 2001. Then follows his other central statement:

“We are also losing ground every day in public opinion. Does anyone think that concessions, and constantly saying ‘I am prepared to concede,’ and using the word ‘peace’ will lead to anything? No, that will just invite pressure, and more and more wars. ‘Si vis pacem, para bellum’ – if you want peace, prepare for war, be strong.”

Israeli strength: Lieberman concludes with a rousing call to fortitude: “When was Israel at its strongest in terms of public opinion around the world? After the victory of the Six Day War, not after all the concessions in Oslo Accords I, II, III and IV.”

Comments:

(1) I have had reservations about Lieberman and still do, but this speech has him off to a great start. Put as briefly as possible, he announced that “Israel is back.”

(2) Given that the formal name of the Road Map is “A Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” I confess myself puzzled by the news reports (such as the one headlined in the Los Angeles Times, “Foreign minister says Israel not bound to follow two-state path”) declaring that Lieberman has pronounced the end of the two-state solution.

(3) There is much irony in Lieberman now championing the Road Map, an initiative he and many others of his outlook condemned at the time. For an authoritative discussion at the time of its origins, flaws, and implications, see the analysis by Daniel Mandel, “Four-Part Disharmony: The Quartet Maps Peace.”

 

NYC ULTRA-ORTHODOX JEWS GIVE AMISH A WALKING TOUR

NYC ultra-orthodox Jews give Amish walking tour
By Verena Dobnik
The Associated Press
April 1, 2009

NEW YORK (AP) – The city’s ultra-Orthodox Jews took the Pennsylvania Amish on a walking tour of their world Tuesday, saying their communities are naturally drawn to each other with a commitment to simpler lifestyles.

“It’s reinforcing to the Amish community to see us Jews living the way the Bible says Jews are supposed to live, and have lived since the time of Moses and Abraham,” said Yisroel Ber Kaplan, program director for the Chassidic Discovery Center in Brooklyn. “The Amish are also living their lives as the Bible speaks to them.”

Dozens of Amish residents from Lancaster County, Pa., toured a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights to learn more about their culture. Rabbi Beryl Epstein called the experience “living Judaism.”

The neighborhood is home to an ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher sect born about 200 years ago in Russia. Today’s Lubavitchers wear the black hats and beards of their 18th-century forebears, speak Yiddish and refrain from turning on electricity or driving cars on the Sabbath.

The Amish get around in a horse and buggy, living off the land.

However, both groups use one modern amenity – cell phones that kept ringing as they wandered through Crown Heights. And Hasids ironically operate the famed B&H electronics retail store in Manhattan that serves customers from around the world.

At a workshop where a young man was touching up a Torah, a scroll of the holiest Jewish writings, Epstein told the group how a Jew in wartime Germany had rescued the sacred scroll by wrapping it around his midriff under his clothes as he fled to safety.

The Amish listened, commenting to one another in Pennsylvania Dutch, a dialect of the German of their ancestors.

When Epstein, a native of Chattanooga, Tenn., had first greeted the Amish with the Yiddish “Zei gazunt!” – “be healthy” – they understood. After all, the expression is derived from the German word “sei gesund.”

As the two groups walked side by side on Brooklyn streets, Crown Heights residents did double-takes; the Amish could be mistaken for Lubavitchers at a quick glance. But their hats are more square and their ruddy complexions from working outdoors contrast with the pale faces of the studious, urban Lubavitchers.

Hasidic children in Crown Heights begin their formal schooling at age 3, and by age 5 are studying many hours a day. At the headquarters on Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway each day, dozens of men gather to pore over religious books, with little boys dashing around as their fathers fervently debate fine points of the texts – sometimes sounding more like spirited poker players than religious faithful.

John Lapp and his wife, Priscilla, brought their three children on the tour. John Lapp said the ties to the communities might be more surface than substance.

“In some things we are alike, like our clothing and our traditional beliefs,” he said. Priscilla Lapp added, “And in some things we are not. The biggest thing is that Jesus is our savior.”

The groups also toured a Jewish library and a “matzo factory,” where round, unleavened bread was being made for the Passover holiday.

There, a cross-cultural misunderstanding caused one of the Jewish men to look at the Amish, and ask, repeatedly, “Are you from Uzbekistan?”

An Amish man, also confused, asked, “Afghanistan?”

Finally, as they were leaving, another Amish man announced to the matzo-makers: “We’re from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania!”


All notes and summaries copyright © Tom Gross. All rights reserved.