September/October 2005 Feature
Anniversaries
Leo Haber
There are anniversaries and there are anniversaries. September 11, 2005 marks the fourth anniversary of the most horrific suicide attack by terrorists against civilians in our time. October of 2005 commemorates the 40th anniversary of the publication by the Catholic Church of Nostra Aetate that repudiated 2000 years of antisemitic hatred and violence against Jews.
The fall of 2005 also recalls an event of little significance by comparison to the world-shaking news mentioned above—the publication of the very first edition of our magazine Midstream in 1955. This 50-year achievement of ours may be a mere momentary frisson for us compared to the enormity of the first two events. But whereas 9/11 conjured up oceans of shock and horror, and the Catholic document an amalgam of cautious hope and some trepidation, our little world of Midstream generates in a few of us a sense of unremitting joy in our jubilee year. To celebrate this jubilee, we have decided to reprint in this issue a short story that appeared in that inaugural issue fifty years ago this month. As mentioned in our January/February issue when we launched the jubilee celebration, it was nothing less than a work of fiction by the future Nobel laureate in literature, Isaac Bashevis Singer. That story, “The Wife Killer,” translated from the Yiddish by Midstream’s first editor, Shlomo Katz, was only Singer’s second short story to appear in English translation. The first one, “Gimpel the Fool,” had been translated from the Yiddish into English by Saul Bellow, and it appeared in Partisan Review. We are proud to reprint “The Wife Killer” in this issue exactly fifty years after Midstream’s birth as a quarterly journal in the fall of 1955.
But private anniversaries, however joyful, pale in comparison to those that impact on the lives of us all. Who can forget the horror of 9/11, the destruction of the twin towers in New York, the attack on the Pentagon, the foiled attack in Pennsylvania, the hijacked airplanes used as weapons of mass destruction and death traps themselves, the barbaric murder of some 3,000 civilians, police, firefighters, and other rescue workers? One would have thought that the world would rise up in righteous wrath against such atrocities, that the Muslim world would condemn as enemies of Islam and terrorists who distort the Koran all those Islamist criminals who carried out 9/11 and all the evil teachers of self-immolation and the targeted killing of civilians.
Instead, we got glorification of suicide bombers as martyrs to the faith in segments of the Islamic world and ridiculous conspiracy theories promulgated by Islamic media and even the cultural elite of Islam. Consider the following recent news. Egyptian Professor Abdal-Sabour Shahin, head of the Shari’a faculty at Al-Ahzar University in Cairo, told this to Saudi Channel 1 TV on August 8, 2005:
One day, we awoke to the crime of 9/11, which hit the tallest buildings in New York. There is no doubt that not a single Arab or Muslim had anything to do with these events. The incident was fabricated as a pretext to attack Islam and Muslims.... Allah knows that the Arabs and Muslims are innocent of it. All of a sudden, we were framed for an international crime, on the basis of lies. I believe a dirty Zionist hand carried out this act.
And Western apologists battered America with questions that were implied accusations: Why does the Islamic world hate you? Which policies of yours could account for such a destructive act? As if brainwashing young people and even children to aspire to killing themselves in order to kill other civilian young and old can have any sort of moral justification or even rational political explanation! I once wrote in these pages that this contemporary atrocity of suicide bombing perpetrated by Muslim men and women as young as teenagers is the modern counterpart of the ancient practice of murdering one’s children in service to the gods, in Biblical lore a practice of the despicable religious cult giving obeisance to the god Moloch. That the world and the United Nations did not condemn such acts and the planners of such suicide acts as perpetrators of crimes against humanity and the most egregious violators of human rights to be incarcerated and tried before an international tribunal is beyond belief.
We naively thought that 9/11, or even a pale duplicate of such a suicide attack could not happen again in a sane world. We were wrong. What the Western world and the responsible religious Muslim world did not categorically and universally condemn (not one imam of note issued a fatwa against Osama bin Laden or Hamas and its cohorts) has come to haunt a variety of Western and Muslim nations. The roll call? Not only the atrocities in Madrid in 2004 and recently in the London transport in July 2005, but also terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia and in Egypt.
To this we must add the battle of so-called Muslim insurgents (a euphemism for terrorists) in Iraq who daily send suicide bombers in cars to kill themselves and to kill American servicemen along with hundreds and hundreds of civilians—their own Muslim brothers and sisters and children. Has the world gone mad sixty years after the Nazi madness, after so many other subsequent crimes of genocide from Cambodia to Rwanda?
It almost goes without saying that the unspeakable phenomenon of suicide bombing has continued unabated against Israeli cafes and buses and food markets these four years since the atrocity of 9/11 in America. The reoccupation of the West Bank, the road blocks, the fence being built—all came after March/April 2002, which saw an almost daily assault by suicide bombings of civilian venues in Israel culminating in the awful death and destruction of a hotel ballroom filled with Passover guests seated for the traditional Seder ceremony and meal. These suicide bombings were the new face of the second Intifada—let’s call it by its true name, a terrorist war—begun in the fall of 2000 by Arafat and the Palestinian terror apparatus when he refused to accept the Barak/Clinton peace proposals and broke off negotiations.
Had the Palestinian leadership accepted those generous terms that would have given them their sought-after state in all of Gaza and 95% of the West Bank, even with control of the Arab sections of East Jerusalem, there would have been no more occupation for the world to rail at. But much of the world, from the far left to the far right, from Noam Chomsky to Pat Buchanan, from the Presbyterian Church USA to almost every Muslim religious leader, has conveniently shown total amnesia about recent history. It is quite clear that the whole world has forgotten that Israel is in the West Bank as a consequence of a war in 1967 wherein the Arab world intended to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. This “occupation” continued until the Oslo Accords in the 1990s because on September 1, 1967, less than three months after the Six-Day War, the Arab states convened in the city of Khartoum in Sudan and announced the dogma of “No negotiations, no recognition of Israel, and no peace.” With the perpetual threat of almost a quarter of a billion Arabs poised ultimately to attack four or five or six million Israelis and destroy their nation post-Khartoum, the Jewish state began to build Jewish towns—“settlements” in common but unfortunate parlance—as security buffers on the coast in Gaza and on the high ground of the West Bank overlooking the narrow neck of Israel between Tel Aviv and Haifa, a coastal valley about eight miles in width in some places, that contained the brunt of Israeli population. If the world has forgotten how negotiations ended in 2000 and how the terrorist Palestinian war against Israeli civilians began soon after, why should the world remember way back to the period from 1948 to 1967 to 1990 when Arabs everywhere sought the military destruction of Israel, as Hamas and millions of other Arab movers and shakers undoubtedly still do?
One must mention that this editorial is being written in the first two weeks of August, just before the planned disengagement (hitnatkut in Hebrew) of Israeli forces from Gaza and the evacuation of all 9,000 Jewish residents. Whether we are in favor of this unilateral move by the Sharon government of Israel or we’re not, we hope and pray that all goes well and that the plan proceeds without serious incident. The first Gaza settlement or farming community was founded in 1970, three years after the Six-Day War and three years after the Arab proclamation in Khartoum of no negotiations, no recognition, no peace. Remember? And now, five years after the Palestinian initiation of war and suicide bombing, the Gaza Strip will be judenrein, just like Saudi Arabia. It ought not be one’s notion of an ideal moral solution (after all, there are more than a million Arab citizens living in Israel), but I suppose it will satisfy the Presbyterian Church that seeks to divest from American companies selling military equipment to Israel so long as Israel “occupies Palestinian land.”
I would go one step further in the condemnation of those who train and equip suicide bombers. The leaders of the world should have announced that the political groups who perpetrate such crimes would never gain their political ends; support for their causes would be equated with support for their barbaric means. No such challenge has ever taken place. Way back in 1972 after Arab terrorists murdered Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich, the world issued expressions of sympathy, the games continued, and world powers went on supporting the Arab cause as if nothing of consequence had happened. Is it any wonder that terrorism only grew in dimension and ambition and that suicide murder has reached the shores of Europe?
The expressions of sympathy continue—to Spain, to Great Britain—they won’t translate into effective action so long as other interests and compulsions rule—be it oil or resentment of American power or moral hypocrisy wrapped in self-righteousness or antisemitism. There is simply not enough revulsion in the world against blatant uncivilized acts. Islamic television persists in showing West Bank Muslim mothers of teenaged suicide bombers praising their children as martyrs to the religion for killing other children and even expressing the hope that younger siblings will commit suicide in the same way of martyrdom. (Such maternal reactions are simply incomprehensible to many of us.) And the same TV screens continue showing those glorious insurgents in Iraq beheading kidnapped civilian employees, murdering reporters and diplomats. Let us not forget the reporter Daniel Pearl who was brutally beheaded somewhere in Pakistan. This and subsequent unbearable acts of beheading shown with bravado on Arab television did not provoke a universal outcry against this barbaric practice from the so-called civilized world. But the occupation, forced upon Israel by a Muslim jihad in the Six-Day War and the three “no’s” of Khartoum in 1967, whose aim was to destroy the Jewish state, does.
We at Midstream, proud of our fifty-year Zionist commitment to the survival of the Jewish state of Israel on its ancient soil and to peace with pacific neighbors, along with the survival and welfare of all Jews throughout the world, welcome every sign of Christian support. It accounts for our publishing in this issue a symposium on the Catholic Church’s Nostra Aetate issued forty years ago that called for a new and positive relationship between Catholics and Jews and an end to two thousands years of demonizing the Jewish people and murdering them. We do not believe that the unfortunate stand taken by the Presbyterian Church USA is shared by all other Christians. We hope, in fact, that the Presbyterian leadership will reconsider both the morality and the wisdom of the position they’ve taken.
After mentioning our symposium on the praiseworthy Catholic document, I would have preferred to avoid ending this editorial meditation on a negative note. The writings of the Christian and Jewish scholars in our symposium live up to the highest ideals of true religion and humanist thought. Their words should be fit ending to the not-so-happy thoughts I’ve expressed earlier in this essay. But the world out there, even the Catholic world, sometimes refuses to go along with unblemished reasonableness. In the midst of our joyful preparation for press of the symposium on the landmark 40-year-old Catholic doctrine, we came across the following item in The New York Times of Friday, July 29, 2005, written by Ian Fisher of The Times. The headline read: VATICAN DENOUNCES ISRAELI REPRISALS. Here is the complete item from the “World Briefing” section on page A4 of that issue:
Escalating a public war of words, the Vatican accused Israel of retaliating against Palestinian attacks at times in ways “not always compatible with the rules of international law.” The unusually strong Vatican statement followed a formal Israeli complaint this week that Pope Benedict XVI had “deliberately” left out of a sermon against terrorism on Sunday any mention of a suicide attack in Israel this month while citing recent strikes in Britain, Egypt, Iraq and Turkey. In its statement yesterday, the Vatican said it could not protest every Palestinian attack if Israel did not follow international law in its response. It also scolded Israel for questioning the pope. “The Holy See cannot take lessons or instructions from any other authority on the tone and content of its own statements,” the Vatican said.
If this report is accurate, and I have no reason to doubt its validity, I can only cry out again in anguish and despair. That the newly elected pope, in whom so much hope is invested by all men and women of good will, most assuredly including Jews, has joined those who withhold strong condemnation of Palestinian suicide bombing in Israel and center instead on Israel’s retaliation is simply discouraging. Even if one finds fault with Israel’s re-entry into Palestinian cities to arrest the terrorist gunmen and to target the infamous leaders who mastermind the suicide atrocities, one must make a moral distinction between the initial evil act and the consequent response by the victim of the act. And to top it all off with the defiant claim that the Holy See (read the pope) cannot take instruction from others on “the tone and content of its statements” only brings up to Jewish minds the sixty-year silence through the withholding of relevant documents by the Catholic hierarchy that might explain the silence of a previous pope during the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews. We had hoped that documents like Nostra Aetate, celebrated here in this issue, were harbingers of better days to come in Catholic/Jewish relations, that the unprecedented gestures taken by Pope John Paul II would replicate in the pontificate of his closest aide and successor. We still hope so. We pray that the response by the Vatican somehow does not really represent the current pope’s “tone” or the moral “content” of his analysis of Israel’s existential dilemma.
Perhaps the word “deliberately” attributed to the Israeli spokesperson was what provoked the uncalled-for Vatican response. That word should not have been used; there is no proof to justify its use. But in no way did it justify papal silence on suicide bombing or claiming a moral equivalence between a barbaric attack and a measured though strong military response in defense.
That this Vatican statement came a mere few weeks before the disengagement of Israel from Gaza, perhaps the most daring unilateral initiative for peace in our time and possible a most dangerous one for Israel, is another reason for our despair. But we must take comfort from the words of Eugene Fisher, a persuasive and honored spokesman for the Catholic Church—words that appear in his gratifying essay in our pages: “And, given Pope Benedict XVI’s record on Jewish-Christian relations, we have every reason to expect that progress will continue in future years.” Our response in this anniversary issue of Midstream is: Amen. My mother would have said in Yiddish: “From his mouth to God’s ears.” •
About the author
Leo Haber is editor of Midstream. His novel, The Red Heifer (Syracuse University Press) has now been reissued in paperback.