The Jewish/Israel Left in the Eyes of Efraim Kishon

"The overt and joyful instinct for self-destruction is the national trait that has accompanied the conflicted Jewish tribe since its exodus from Egypt. The tradition of self-hatred has been woven like as a thread throughout Jewish history with its horrific consequences, as if it were a pathological curse passed down from father to son and son to grandson until the end of time. These days, this Jewish tendency is expressed in the fashionable, overt and covert skepticism regarding our right to resettle in the Land of Israel. Many people ask themselves whether the Palestinians are not entitled to demand our departure from here, and those with a conscience are tormented by the injustice we did to the refugees at the end of the Arab war of extermination that turned into a Jewish war of liberation. The Russians have no scruples about having conquered vast territories after their last war, which never belonged to them or their ancestors, and they have no scruples about tormenting the Czech people for the organized deportation of three million Sudeten people. The Poles also have no noticeable pangs of conscience about their cheerful annexations, the Turks have no scruples about wholesale 'population transfers', the Greeks have none, the Bulgarians have none, the Indians have none, the Pakistanis have none, and the Americans have none. Only the Israelis possess them.

The intellectual of conscience among us sees the expulsion of the million Jews from Arab countries as a historical process that cannot be reversed, while the flight of the Arabs, due to their campaign of killing along the lines of the Gush Etzion bloc, he sees as a terrible crime. The conscientious man believes that the twelve million square kilometers of Arab countries, an area larger than that of Europe, are not enough to absorb the refugees. The conscientious man finds that the residents of Bir'am and Ikrit were uprooted from their homes and transferred to another place in stealth and deceit, while the Jews of Hebron were massacred in a brutal manner, and therefore the people of Bir'am must be returned, but the residents of Hebron are forbidden. 

The Israeli-with-a-conscience understands the spirit of Yasser Arafat; is remarkably matter-of-fact and realistic about the national motives of this mass murderer; about our cruel and vile enemy and he is impressed by the legitimate right of the Palestinian liberation movements to chop off the heads of our children in schools with axes...

The Israeli-with-a-conscience is full of universal understanding. He hates only one thing: hate.

The Israeli-with-a-conscience is mentally ill."

From "A Smile Amidst a Drought", 1978

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