Sidra Does Esther - and Netanyahu

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi identifies herself as Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Guggenheim Fellow. She's the wife of far-out Leftist Bernard Avishai who republished her and termed the Netanyahu speech as "conceived as a political stunt". She has written for the radical Tikkun, attacked Elie Weisel in the Int'l Herald Tribune and lied there or was woefully ignorant about Muslims residing in West Jerusalem.  I seem to recall some controversy about her first work but as I cannot now find the proper reference, I'll skip that.

She now has published an op-ed in - of course, Haaretz - which analyzes the Biblical reference of Binyamin Netanyahu to the Book of Esther and claims

By invoking Purim, Netanyahu calls for a preemptive strike on Iran
The Israeli prime minister conveniently ignores the first eight chapters of the Book of Esther, recruiting only the revenge tragedy part to justify his agenda.

She introduces her literary deconstruction so:

The Netanyahu approach ignores the first part of the Purim narrative, which is a comedy, and reflects only on the second part, a revenge tragedy, recruiting the popular version of the story to justify his militant position against Iran...Parody, masque, commedia dell‘arte: what this text reflects in its early chapters is the comic impulse...[of the Jews who lived in the Babylonian, Persian and even the Hellenistic diaspora]...the Book of Esther is a fantasy...

Then, she gets angry:

...comedy has turned into revenge tragedy, an explosion of blood-curdling violence — not by Persians against innocent Jews, but by Jews against innocent Persians.  Esther...is granted permission to preemptively slaughter all who have received the order to kill the Jews. There is no textual hint that these Persians ever took up arms – “no one dared to stand up against them, out of the fear that they instilled” [9:2]. Yet the Jews go ahead and slaughter 500 innocent people in the satrapies that belong to the King. Then sweet Esther, the beguiling descendant of Babylonian exiles, wife of the clueless Ahasverus – whom little girls will emulate in gauzy costumes for centuries to come – asks for, and is granted, another day of slaughter: in the capital city of Shushan alone, 300 people are slaughtered, and in the surrounding satrapies 75,000 are slaughtered 

Like, this is so wrong. 

First of all, she could have written that Bibi should send a female agent into someone's bed. That would have been at least commensurate with spy literature.

Secondly, there actually was excellent diplomacy until the taking up of arms. 

Third, the killing was indeed of "enemies".  Here's Chapter. 9. verses 5-6,

And the Jews smote all their enemies with the stroke of the sword, and with slaughter and destruction, and did what they would unto them that hated them. And in Shushan the castle the Jews slew and destroyed five hundred men.

Fourth, a preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear capabilities isn't really a bad idea.

Fifth, Secretary of State Kerry is, reportedly, willing to promise a nuclear umbrella so maybe he is willing to kill some innocents.

Six, to borrow a phrase from the Obama White House, does she present a viable alternative?

________________________

P.S.

After a night's rest and after a fourth reading of the Meggilah (here in Shiloh, as we are in doubt whether indeed a wall existed around the site of the Tel at the time of Joshua bin Nun, we celebrate two days - imagine how perverted our little girls must be), besides the throwaway reference to the King's sanctioning of the defensive attack on the enemies of the Jews, there are other aspects I think needs be stressed.

The obvious one is that no one had smartphones or Internet connection then and sending messages around on horseback was a communcations system that would assure that Jews would be killed if any Jew simply depended on some called either Esther or Hadassah told them they could safely walk the streets. That the Persians were afraid does not mean they weren't intending to kill the Jews and Ezrahi should know that fear is a great motivator to kill.


Moreover, the Hebrew text uses two terms "enemies" (אויבים) but also "haters" (שונאים) [see verse 1, 5 & 16 in that chapter 9].  That is an irrational and emotional state that cannot and, at that time, would not dissipate overnight and they'd probably disbelieve the retraction order.  These persons were surely proper targets.  Incidentally, the Leket Tov comments that the phrase that the Jews congregated in their cities indicated many had fled to the hills and distant villages from fear and I presume that they knew their neighbors better than Ezrahi (and Netanyahu knows the Iranians better than her, as well).

All in all, this is a corruption of the text and I will not pass judgment whether the story is historically true.

^

Puff Prof Avishai Covers for Pals.

Bernard Avishai, who "was Visiting Professor at the Fuqua School of Business and Senior Fellow at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, where he taught courses of the new economy and public policy...[and is] a consultant associated with Monitor Group, and has taught entrepreneurial business planning in Libya [??]", provides cover for the evil and the non-genuineness of the "Arab Palestinian" national historical narrative in writing

Israelis, and people in the West more generally, should take a close look at this impressive document from the Palestine Strategy Group, the closest thing there is in Palestine to an independent voice reflecting what the educated center is thinking.

Look, especially, at pp. 6 and 7 of the executive summary for the various strategic options open to the Palestinian leadership....To my mind, the key to the document can be found in the following passage from the document:

Strategic option (D): Smart resistance

Smart resistance means an intelligent, focused and flexible use of the various sub-components of the broad strategic option of national resistance in general. These include legal action against Israel in the world’s courts and boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaigns. But the main emphasis in the PSG is on non-violent popular resistance, as demonstrated so powerfully in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions so far, and elsewhere in the Arab world. Palestinians have been pioneers in this area as in the first intifada in 1987

He is echoing, uncritically, and fawningly, this type of tripe:

The truth is that there is a long, rich history of nonviolent Palestinian resistance dating back well before 1948, when the state of Israel was established atop a depopulated Palestine. It has just never captured the world's attention the way violent acts have....Resistance to Zionism during this period [in the early 1920s] was characterized by various efforts led by elite members of Arab society who raised awareness about the dangers Zionism posed....Diplomatic efforts to lobby the mandatory government ensued while concurrently peasants occasionally clashed [!!!] with the European newcomers, but violence was largely localized and communal and took place amid larger, more peaceful, and political efforts to resist Zionist aims.

In the early 1930s, numerous protests and demonstrations against the Zionist agenda were held, and the British mandatory government was swift to crack down...It wasn't until nonviolent protests were met with severe repression that Palestinian guerrilla movements began. After the 81-year-old Husseini died a few months after being beaten, a young imam living in Haifa named Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam (the namesake of Hamas's military wing) organized the first militant operation against the British mandatory government...

This is BS.

The Arabs of the Palestine Mandate territory not only engaged in numerous violence from the very start of the British regime in the country from 1919 on, and consistently and persistently pursued the deaths, rapes, injuries and thefts of and from Jews, but did so much earlier on.

And as for Sheikh Qassam, check this timeline:

The Black Hand (Arabic: الكف الاسود (transliteration) al-Kaff al-Aswad‎) was an armed organization in the British Mandate of Palestine. It was founded in 1930 and led by Syrian-born Shaykh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam...After the failure of the 1921 Syrian revolt that he led, al-Qassam escaped to Haifa and engaged in recruitment and training of Arab peasants. The clandestine cells had no more than five people...In various acts of violence they targeted Jewish targets in northern Palestine between 1930 and 1935 and killed at least eight Jews.[2] In one instance three members of kibbutz Yagur were killed, and in another a father and son were killed in Nahalal.

More:

...let us turn to Zionism: False Messiah, by historian Nathan Weinstock, who agrees with Shapira on the most important facts but not on the interpretation:

“...the Palestinian anti-colonialist movement was deformed by racism. The distorted national struggle expressed itself in anti-Jewish slogans (‘Palestine is our country and the Jews are our dogs’), followed up by attacks upon Jewish passers-by and store-owners, and eventually in mob violence akin to the all-too familiar pogrom [ = unprovoked racist attack against unarmed Jews, with the semi-unofficial assistance of the (in this case British) authorities[1a]]. These attacks cannot, however, in any way be assimilated to straightforward anti-Semitic outrages which had their source in classical European coordinates of the Jewish problem, but should be seen as a deformed expression of national consciousness, all the more understandable as the Zionist leaders clearly allied with the British while the latter encouraged this distraction from the anti-imperialist struggle.”[2 - Weinstock, N. 1979. Zionism: False Messiah. London: Ink Links Ltd. (pp.166-167)]

Notice first that the anti-Zionist historian -- Weinstock -- agrees that Arab mobs attacked civilian Jews in British Mandate ‘Palestine,’ and that these mobs were racist.

And still more:

"From late 1919, Arab attacks on Jewish settlements became more frequent and relentless, particularly in the Jordan Valley and the Galilee."2

"As early as 1920, Palestine Arab opposition to Zionism and desire for self-government led to a threat to public security. ... three days of rioting in Jerusalem, in which Arab mobs fell upon Jews with sticks, stones and knives...As a result of these disturbances, five Jews and four Arabs were killed and 211 Jews and 21 Arabs were wounded."3

On May 1st, 1921 “Arabs of Jaffa murderously attacked Jewish inhabitants of the town and Arab raids were made on five Jewish rural settlements; the disorders were suppressed by the police and military forces. Forty-seven Jews were killed and 146 wounded, mostly by Arabs…”5

...On the 3rd May Hebrew colonies at Kafr Saba and Ain Hal were looted. On the 5th May the village of Petah Tiqvah was attacked by several thousand armed Arabs in semi-military formation, and was saved from destruction only by the arrival of several squadrons of cavalry. On the 6th May Arabs besieged Haderah and attempted an attack on Rehovoth..."6

In 1929 general anti-Jewish riots spread throughout Palestine. From August 23rd to the 29th, “murderous attacks were made on the Jews in various parts of the country. The most violent attacks were those against the old established Jewish communities at Hebron and Safed; there were also attacks in Jerusalem and Jaffa and against several Jewish rural settlements. There was little retaliation by Jews, of whom 133 were killed and 339 wounded.”7

..."The period between 1929 and 1936 was marked by periodic violence. In August 1930, there was a minor Arab outbreak at Nablus. The years 1930 and 1931 saw a series of terrorist murders of Jews. Agrarian crime was endemic and the Arabs attempted to take into their own hands the prevention of illegal Jewish immigration. In October 1931, Arab demonstrations and riots directed against the Government, as well as against the Jews, took place in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa and Babes.

Avishai's figleaf posturing in favor of the Arabs will assist them to kill more Jews. And provide justification of those killings.

Sick thinking in pursuit of that fantasy "state of Palestine".

^

Looking Into Bernard's Head

Bernard Avishai, professor who teaches business at the Hebrew University, writer, author, etc., star of New York Review of Books, The Nation and other left-of-trendy-center platforms and periodicals, who sometimes lives in his home in the German Colony in Jerusalem, doesn't like what I and others like me do - and stand for.

Here are some of his expressions:

Occupation is advanced by zealots of Jewish law, or that rightist, neoconservative ideas are particularly strong (so polls show) among the quarter of American Jews who attend synagogue at least once a month?

and

So what is the tradition? The law commanded by Torah? Is it the prophet’s gloss on the law? Or another prophet’s sublime lesson in humility? (or the Talmud’s commentaries on the limits to humility?) The point is: the texts are not monolithic and mere humans have made choices about what commandments to perform, in what spirit: what interpretations to bring, and what texts or melodies to juxtapose

and

The phrase “Jewish values”, you see, makes sense only to people who assume a world of free will. You have to believe that, generally, people have intellectual personality, individual sovereignty, and moral erudition—that more sacred than the Book is the right to interpret books. Incidentally, this enlightenment insight not only marked Jews for successful acculturation into America, but arguably launched Zionism, too. If every Jew was going to be his own rabbi, then Jewish civilization had best be held together by a common language and territory.

and, finally,

J Street says, “No more.” Occupation and settlements justified by isolated passages of scripture debase the way Jews justify anything. Jews are not, or not only, an interest group. It is now Palestinians who have a “yoke” to “untie”. In his 1934 preface to the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo, Freud asked: when you eliminate Hebrew, the “religion of one’s fathers”, and “nationalist ideals”, what “is left that is Jewish”? He answered: “A very great deal, and probably its very essence.” Perhaps.

I could cry.

This is so infantile. It is so "I-know-better". It is so "above history".

He uses "history", tradition, "religion", nationalism" and twists their meanings, perverting their essence and thwarting their purpose.

Who does he think will protect Israel better? J Street?

Who does he think will secure a Jewish future better? J Street?

Who does he think will assure Jewish values persevere better? J Street?

Who does he think will be more Jewish in twenty years from now? J Street?

How valid is his morality when he accepts the Pals. as partners in peace, in security, in humanity after the experience of the last century?

Who has extended the hand of cooperation? Who has sought to placate? Who has actually compromised?

And who exclusively used terror to advance political goals with no need to defend? Who always wants more? Who hides the final goals?

Ans, who bases himself on fools like Avishai and J Street?

The Facism of the Left

My mentor, Dr. Israel Eldad, once told me on one of those Fridays we spent together for an hour or two, "The left considers me a fascist for my staunch positions of the Land of Israel and the need to be strong in face of Arab hostility. I admit that my orientation outwards is harsh but towards all my fellow Jews I am soft. The Left, on the other hand, is the opposite. They are weak and soft towards the external enemy and harsh towards their fellow Jews."

I recalled those words when reading Bernard Avishai, here, who wrote:

But insisting on a total freeze today, when settlements have turned into substantial towns full of mobilized youth--towns whose residents should be understood as on a scale somewhere between Pat Robertson and David Koresh--seems false.

This is ridiculous, false, malicious and hatefully spiteful.

It is the type of metaphoric imagery one uses when one has no real argument.

What Avishai does desire is American interventionism (only in Israel, God forbid anywhere else in the world):

Obama should use the dispute over a settlements freeze as an occasion to rally the world community to drawing up a permanent border, something along the lines of the one offered in the Geneva Initiative...Obama should make clear that a border is not Israel's internal affair. That, for example, the world will never recognize the town of Ariel as part of a future Israel...A strong sense of where America wants the border would be an early win for the peace process, which could unlock many other possibilities.

And here's the fascism:

...to get these people [the revenants] out eventually, you have to 1) politically marginalize them, that is, create a conflict of interest between settlers who fall within an agreed border and those more fanatic types falling outside it; 2) induce them to return to agreed settlements or to within the Green Line with time-limited financial compensation; 3) threaten them with power and water cuts on this or that date; and, these measures failing, 4) remove them by siege and, if necessary, force.

Avishai vs. The Temple Mount

Bernard Avishai has a post over a TPM entitled Holy Jerusalem.

Some excerpts:

Imagine that both the Islamic world and the Palestinian nation suddenly agreed that the mosques on the Noble Sanctuary in Jerusalem's old city were not that holy after all; that the Jews were welcome to take them down and build a temple if they wanted to. Could Jews really want this? Okay, forget the animal sacrifices. I mean a temple that, whatever its rites, purports to be ground zero of divinity, the building of buildings on the spot of spots--the here and now of a holy of holies. If Jews believed in such things would they be practicing Judaism at all?

and

Similarly, the Wailing Wall (whose sovereignty is not in dispute) is "holy" in for most every Jew. The night my son was born, in June 1973, I myself cradled my head in its stones and shared my joy with my deceased parents. But I did not do so because I thought I was close to the destroyed ancient arc of the covenant. Rather, I thought I was close to the ghosts of the many Jews who had wept there before me, nursing their losses and mysterious hopes.

Anyway, Jews who claim the Temple Mount today mean holy in a more muscular sense than this. Their Psalmist's Hebrew often sounds like a mental straight-jacket. They imply that the soil of the mount carries traces of God's existence, like basements carry radon. They mean holy in the take-off-your-sandals sense of the word: objectively dangerous, not subjectively poignant. They mean something they are prepared to take on the whole world for, fight and die (and kill) for. Is this Judaism?

and

The wall suggests the supersession of a form of worship which has been long abandoned, and was challenged by Pharisees even in its time--abandoned for good (Hegel might say cunning) reasons that Roman centurions could hardly understand when they tore the temple down: a self-perpetuating priesthood, a hierarchy of fetishists, a sacrificial cult, a comic understanding of sin.

Sidra insists that, after the temple was destroyed, Jews were left, not with divine places or stuff, but only metaphor (God is like this, God is like that). This invitation to poetic innovation engendered our talent for freedom. The Wailing Wall's holiness depends on the Temple Mount being bare of anything meaningful to Jews except for the reminder of the immensity of absence itself. The wall is the evocative symbol (in a religion of symbols) of what is no longer there and, by itself, no longer evocative.

and finally

In any case, something new is happening in this city, and it isn't either the Judaism I knew as a child or a return to an ancient practice. It is a hybrid politicized religion, if that's the word; a new a claim of return, much like Mussolini's claim to return to Rome; a claim carried by ward-of-the-state orthodox families averaging seven children each, reinforced by neo-Zionist devotion to settlement, and a deep sense of grievance over a more recent destruction of European life, what Sidra calls Judaism's new "ruined shrines."

Make no mistake: the people who wish this new Jerusalem to rise will not be talked out of their goals, certainly not by speeches or editorials (or bloggers). The only hope is that what's left of Israel's secular majority will be pushed, and supported, by what's left of the West to stop them.

So, I left this comment there:

Allow me to pick up on one point of fact rather than dispute Avishai's ideological points. He writes: "Similarly, the Wailing Wall (whose sovereignty is not in dispute)". Really?

Let's ignore Arafat's refusal to recognize the past existence of a Temple at Moriah - which would mean the Kotel is bereft of any significance. But Arafat did orient himself not only on Islamic exclusivism of any Jewish link to "Palestine" but on this document: REPORT of the Commission appointed by His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, with the approval of the Council of the League of Nations, to determine the rights and claims of Moslems and Jews in connection with the Western or Wailing Wall at Jerusalem, December, 1930

As I have explained (here), not only do the Pals. reject any Jewishness in a religious sense, but the Jewish nationalism that extends from that. Avishai could not only cradle his head in the Wall's stones, he could even bang it against them for all it would help his approach to the hostility, antagonism and outright negation the Pals. possess towards any form of Zionism and anything to do with non-Islamic sovereignty over the Kotel.

And that's a fact.

Who Is Really Anachronistic?

Sarah Honig has a piece in the Jerusalem Post Magazine (not yet online) on anti-Jewish Jews, as part of their anti-Zionism and recalls Theodor Lessing who popularized the phrase "Jewish self-hatred" which originated in his book, Der Judische Selbsthass, a classic on the phenomena of Jewish self-hatred.

Jules Carlebach summarizes Lessing's basic thesis like this:

"There is a fundamental principle in the Old Testament that the fate of the Jewish people is always a consequence of their own behavior. Suffering therefore implies sin and guilt. Logically, the greater the suffering, the greater the guilt. Here, for Lessing, is the root of self-hatred. Other people have interpreted their misfortunes by pointing to those who brought misfortune to them, whereas the Jews enmeshed in their conviction that they have brought misfortune on themselves, can see their tormentors only as instruments of God. The tormentor in turn can use the Jews' own view of his guilt to explain why he ill-treats Jews. Hence anti-Semitism is not a product of ill will, national egoism or hate and jealousy in international competition. It is the Jewish conception of meaning in history."

I was reminded of all this psychological stuff in reading (here) Bernard Avishai:

And since 1967, its anachronistic “Zionist” settlement policies, and laws privileging orthodoxy, have engendered a huge Judean state-within-a-state, centered on Jerusalem, largely theocratic, and deeply implicated in West Bank settlements. Judea is less educated than the rest of Israel and instinctively more tribalist. “Judeans” are largely wards of the state: most disdain peace (that is, a return of a couple of million of Palestinian refugees to Greater Jerusalem) as the end of their way of life. Diaspora Jewish big-shots are mostly smitten by Judeans, whose religious and survivalist rhetoric they understand much better Tel-Aviv’s eclectic Hebrew culture.

How can Jewish renewal of national existence in its historic homeland while advancing agriculture, environmental issues, economy, education, culture and also trying to aid the Arabs be anachronistic?

Perhaps Avishai is selbsthass anachronistic?

Will Bernard Avishai Permit Nazi Imagery at His Blog?

See the comments section at this post at the personal blog of Bernard Avishai,

like

...seditionist, disruptive and anti-establishment elements such as foreign-born haredi and kahanist terrorists. They would have to be accomodated, while at the sametime quarantining them like a plague bacillus from mainstream Israel