Seemingly New Message, Old Story

There is a renewed campaign to undermine not only the presence of Jews as residents in the heartland of the national home, Judea and Samaria, but to cause, as it were, a dissipation of the Zionist vision.

The easiest way too do that is to define Zionism, the idea of Israel and the century-old conflict with the Arabs in a more conducive frame of reference which, by the way, presents a false picture.

Here's an example culled from Britain's New Statesman from Sigrid Rausing's "Children of Abraham v sons of Ibrahim". Rausing is publisher of Granta and founder of the Sigrid Rausing Trust. I am not sure Sigrid is Jewish herself but her current second husband is film producer Eric Abraham, South African and a BBC journalist, and Robert Bernstein, founding chair of New York-based Human Rights Watch (who has parted ways with HRW over Israel), was a consultant of hers. The Abrahams live in a house in Holland Park, with the biggest private garden in London after Buckingham Palace and Sigrid owns a 40,000-acre estate in Scotland, near Inverness.



Current trustees are: Sigrid Rausing (chair), Joshua Mailman, Susan Hitch, Andrew Puddephatt and Geoffrey Budlender.

First, a fear is raised in Rausing's essay (or whoever wrote it - her husband?):-

many Palestinians in Israel fear that, in the eventual peace deal, their villages will be traded for land in the West Bank with Jewish settlements, depriving them of Israeli citizenship.

Now, as my readers well know, I have dealt with this issue thoroughly if only in connection to the parallel first Arab demand that Jews must be expelled from their homes, must be ethnically cleansed from "Palestinian territory", their homes dismantled and destroyed as in Gaza. Only then can peace be achieved.

If you refer to the issue without that background, claiming that Avigdor Lieberman is a fascist because he wants to redraw the boundary and place major Arab residential location in this new state of Palestine - but without moving them an inch, then the example is perverted. At worst, the Arab of Um El-Fahm receives a new passport but doesn't lose his fields, his cows, his home or factory.

But we Jews? We lose it all. Not to mention our security even in Israel after "peace" is in place, but that's another related matter.

Next, Zionism is presented as it isn't, simply twisting its ideology of nationalism:

Persecution, the tragedy of exile and the wish to return to the land of the forefathers are part of the DNA of Jewish culture. These are now clashing with another strand of the culture which is about social revolution, human rights, equality and secularism. The conflict is no longer simply about Palestinians v Jews, nor about the ultra-Orthodox v the secular; it is also a bitter cultural civil war between beleaguered human rights organisations - the remnants of the Israeli left - and the secular right.

This is not about Zionism. If you are a Jew living in Israel you are, for better or worse, a Zionist. But human rights activists, along with many Israelis, remember the original dream of Israel as a refuge for all Jews and a democracy where no one is discriminated against on the grounds of race or religion.

First of all, Israel is not a "refuge". It is a state. Uganda could have been a refuge. And even if there were no antisemitism, no pogroms and certainly no Holocaust, we still deserve and will claim our state, no less than any other national grouping and surely more than the Arabs who are occupiers and conquerors in our territory since 638.

Second, those three DNA elements she recounts are not a part of Jewish culture. They are the result of lack of political sovereignty. They have been ingrained from an external experience. They are part of our exilic experience. We would not have required a right of return to Zion if we hadn't been expelled, twice, in the first place. The English, French and Russian weren't expelled from their countries as a result of military loses. The population stayed in place. The three elements are part of a warped Jewish psyche, to borrow Jabotinsky's phrase, which was a healthy reaction, but temporary, to the abnormal situation of Jews deprived of a homeland.

The reestablishment and reconstitution of the Jewish state would alter the necessity for some of the elements, and others, but that the emergency response should be eternalized, as if the exile is a permanent subconscious underpinning of the Jewish character, soul and culture is all wrong.

And here Sigrid is quite open about the simple problem she has - for it is all a matter of outlook:-

People on the right are concerned with security, listen to the anti-Semitism of the Muslim world and take seriously the openly anti-Semitic charter of Hamas. Liberals, by contrast, listen to Palestinian narratives of oppression and discrimination. Conservatives believe that the forces that want to destroy Israel and drive the Jews into the sea may prevail; liberals believe that peaceful coexistence is possible. Conservatives believe that liberals co-operate with the forces that conspire to bring about Israel's destruction; liberals believe that conservatives exploit Israel's exceptionalism, particularly the memory of the Holocaust, in the name of security. Liberals abhor racism and oppression, while many conservatives, especially supporters of Avigdor Lieberman, now believe in permanent separation.

Now, why shouldn't we take seriously the Hamas hatred of Jews and the complete and total denial of our right to anywhere in the land of Israel? But more to the/her point, it's as if we have two equal camps that are interfering instead of one, at the very most which could and should be more considerate and the other death-dealing and venomous and final in its solutions and policies.

Sigrid, who is fabulously wealthy and will distribute twenty (20) million pounds sterling this year, and who has a PhD in anthropology, could do much good with a different approach to and a better understanding of Zionism and Jews. She needs to break out of the old bonds of assimilationists, members of the League of Trembling Israelites, and other anti-Zionist culturalists which appear to color her grasp of what is the conflict and its essence especially vis-a-vis the Arab residents of the Jewish state.

There is a democratic, liberal and visionary attitude amongst nationalists. Even Jacqueline Rose had to acknowledge it (see this book review of, among others, her Last Resistance, and that review pre-echoes Rausing's piece and in the same magazine incidentally, as well as my blog post). Rausing would do well to investigate, learn and perhaps fund some initiatives of coexistence, democratization and human rights in addition to education and economic advancement here, across the Green Line.

Until then, her thinking is the old style of criticism of Jewish nationalism with faint praise thrown in. Rausing can do better, much better. She'd be surprised.



P.S. I also found this:

Later, we visit the mayor of a Palestinian village on the sea.

On the sea? There is no border of anything called "Palestine" on the sea.


- - -