November/December 2006 Feature

Thirteen Essayists Take on Anti-Israel Media

Edward Alexander, emeritus professor of English at the University of Washington and one of the few dons who understands that the purpose of language is to enlighten rather than obfuscate and Paul Bogdanor, a London based scholar and analyst, have collaborated to produce a book of epoch-making importance.

Their work is a meticulously studied anthology of the most virulent anti-Israeli and antisemitic views which have been voiced, shouted and published in recent years by, mirabile dictu, a coalition of Jewish writers in North America, Europe, and Israel. Alexander and Bogdanor make it clear that they are not concerned with legitimate criticism of Israel as such but rather with the maniacal denunciations of Israel, the pronouncements of a death wish against the Jewish State and the attribution to Israel and Zionism of a Nazi ethos—the stock in trade of many of the Jewish writers targeted in this book . This coterie of Jewish intellectuals employ as their rallying cry “Down With Us,” in a kind of Monty Python refrain, but in this instance, a proclamation without humor or wit.

The thirteen essayists represented here exhibit a readiness to take on the leaders in the unholy alliance of those who have devoted so much misplaced intellectual vigor to denigrating the State of Israel, minimizing the Holocaust, resurrecting and advertising classic antisemitic canards, and damning the Jewish people as dupes of Zionist mythologizing. Some, though not all the members of this repugnant association, engage in the ultimate obscenity by denying Israel’s right to exist. They experience no embarrassment in aligning themselves with the kind of thinking to be found in Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah.

The Jewish purveyors of this new kind of political pornography have achieved prominent if controversial reputations in linguistics (Noam Chomsky), history (Tony Judt), the novel (David Grossman), chemistry (the late Israel Shahak), rabbinics (Daniel Boyarin), journalism (Thomas Friedman), literary criticism (George Steiner) and theology (Marc Ellis), to name but a few of the Jewish Israel-bashers that figure in the pages of this repertoire of gratuitous hatred. One of the merits of this book is that it will introduce readers to other members of the Jewish anti-Israel confederacy that have not as yet gained the prominence enjoyed by some of the above mentioned personalities.

To be fair, it must be noted that some of the most extreme Jewish critics quoted in the Alexander-Bogdanor audit have, in recent years and months, partially altered or moderated the spleen which they have been so quick to ventilate against Israel. One thinks immediately of Benny Morris whose first book on the Palestinian refugees (effectively demolished in this volume by Efraim Karsh) has been succeeded by a new edition and other writings in which the Beersheba historian executes a not ungracious mea culpa with regard to the mischief he has fostered about the alleged Israeli culpability in the exodus of Palestinian Arabs in 1947-48.

George Steiner, the most impressive stylist in the English language since McCauley, has also, in his later books and essays, backtracked and in several unexpected lapses into lucidity, has indicated that perhaps his original judgments about Israel were misguided. But it is Thomas Friedman’s recent transformation that is most startling. He is The New York Times journalist who once had the incredible bad taste to call Israel “Yad Vashem with an air force” and who is quite correctly described in this volume as the “Diplomat from Chelm.” During the July 2006 war with Hezbollah, some of Friedman’s Op-Ed pieces sounded as if they could have been issued by the Israeli foreign office.

One hopes that others who have earned the dubious distinction of appearing in this anthology of Jewish self-flagellation will, in the future, rescind, change or moderate the intensity of the fusillades they direct against Israel. However, given the jaundiced statements they have made, the outrageous accusations they have proffered, and the systematic mendaciousness of their advocacy, there is little hope that much will change in their invective. When Jews trot out the absurd charge that Israelis are the new Nazis, it becomes obvious that these critics do not inhabit the same world of discourse that a decent society promotes.

On the question of the etiology of the mental state which animates the Jewish abusers of Israel, the Alexander-Bogdanor work does provide some measured analysis. Several of the anti-Israel critics quoted here are so embarrassed by Israel’s conduct as a sovereign state, that they seek a personal solution to their discomfort by joining in the rhetorical gang rape of the Jewish State to salve their conscience. Still others invest themselves and their arguments in a sanctimonious veil and argue that Israel is not living up to Judaism’s high standards and prophetic insights—as if their own personal lives are inspired exclusively by those high principles. One participant in the war against Israel who has a rabbinic pedigree, threatens to go over to Christianity in the wake of the unique violence he has observed in Israel’s battles against the Palestinians and what he perceives as the consequent destruction of Judaism as a result of that horrible Israeli tendency to defend their country. As Mrs. Astor is reputed to have said on the Titanic: “I asked for ice but this is too much.”

Another element in the loose coalition of Jewish anti-Israel club members engages in that subtle “psychological defense mechanism by embracing the indictments of their abusers.” Finally there is one section of the Jewish Israel denigrators who are simply cowards. This should not come as a surprise to those who know German history and remember that there was a group of would-be Jewish Nazis, the Naumannists, who beseeched the Party to admit them. These pathetic individuals suffered the same unfortunate fate as their fellow Jews.

A cautionary note: implicit in many of the critiques of the Jewish Israel bashers found in this volume is the assertion that they suffer from that noxious syndrome called self-hate. That may or may not be true depending on the individual in question. It would take a convention of psychiatrists to test that theory. In this context, The Jewish Divide Over Israel contains three separate references to Sander Gilman, author of a now classic text on Jewish self-hate. Gilman is used as a source in the diagnosis of the self-hate that has been attributed to some of the current purveyors of anti-Israel detritus. However, Gilman’s formidable treatise deals with a phenomenon which began when Jews emerged from the European ghettoes and found themselves confronted by modernity. The encounter engendered a serious malaise as many newly enfranchised Jews measured the gap between ghetto life and modernity.

Speaking in Toronto to a public forum on Jewish self-hate in April 2006, Gilman moreover, urged his audience not to fling the charge of self-hate against Jewish critics of Israel. This ad hominem argument approach, he asserted, foreclosed any rational discussion of the issue: Jewish critics of Israel, no matter how extreme, had to be confronted with counter argument, logic, and facts. It is also to be noted that there are punctiliously observant Jews such as the late Yeshayahu Leibowitz (quoted in this book) and members of the ultra Orthodox segregationist Neturei Karta who have compared Israel to the Nazis and who have marched with anti-Israel protesters in New York and elsewhere—without indulging in the miasma of self-hate. There may be other unpleasant motives behind their conduct, but self-hate is not one of them.

It is to the credit, therefore, of co-editors Alexander and Bogdanor that the essays in their volume focus on the stupidity, ignorance, bias, distortion, and extremism of the Jewish Israel-bashers, rather than on the supposed mental and emotional status that has propelled them to endorse their preposterous statements. In this context, Efraim Karsh’s dissection of Benny Morris’s work shows how the latter presumed to write about the origin of the Palestine refugee problem without having access to the archives of the Israel Defense Forces. Nor did Morris consult the archival records of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon, anent the flight of the Palestinians. Martin Kroessel, in his take on Thomas Friedman, “The Diplomat from Chelm,” (this is a misleading title because the people of Chelm did not harm others outside their community) shows that the Pulitzer prize winner has had access to Israelis who support Israel’s firm position on Gaza and the West Bank but in his published diatribes against Israeli government policy, he simply ignores views which are contrary to his.

Edward Alexander’s introduction to this volume and his chapter on “The Berkeley School,” evidence a deep knowledge of views and opinions that he does not share but that he does not hesitate to present and then counter with a wealth of information and keen analytical tools of great precision. He has borrowed a phrase from Commentary’s Gabriel Schoenfeld, “Antisemitism-denial,” to characterize a group of Jews (including part of the cousinhood among Israeli intellectuals) who are so blinkered in their vision that they either refuse to recognize it when their noses are rubbed in it or who perversely endorse it as a legitimate desideratum. Alexander’s focus on a group of Berkeley professors who are behind the divestment in Israel campaign is especially noteworthy for the way he examines the subtleties of language used by these intellectuals to mask their insensate hatred of the Jewish State.

That hatred exhibited in dramatic terms by the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis (a non Jew) is the subject of a superb essay by Alvin Rosenfeld, whose focus, while primarily on the wild, one could say, Wagnerian lucubrations of the Greek musician, shifts importantly to the Israeli journalist who interviewed him and who performs incredible feats of journalistic legerdemain in order to deny Theodorakis’s zoological antisemtism, the expression of which the journalist in question deems “reasonable”—a thesis only Julius Streicher and his ilk could endorse. Tony Judt, the New York historian, can certainly recognize antisemtism when he sees it, but that has not prevented him, according to Benjamin Balint, from gross inconsistencies in his grotesque characterization of Israel as an “anachronism.” Balint finds Judt’s thinking especially disappointing because in some of his other published works Judt has deplored the intellectual “double entry moral book-keeping” in which certain French intellectuals engaged in excusing “progressive” excesses. The faults that Judt sees in others, he cannot see in himself.

Paul Bogdanor’s eighty pages of commentary on Noam Chomsky’s divagations on the so-called cosmological sinfulness of Israel are the boldest and most powerful refutations of the MIT thinker known to this writer, and his essay should be placed on the shelf next to Chomsky’s several anti-Israel screeds. Bogdanor wastes no time in diagnosing Chomsky’s personal history but proceeds directly to examining in seriatim the ludicrous accusations he has hurled against Israel. Bogdanor refers to the Chomsky method as “selective morality.” Thus it is permissible for Armenia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine (Bogdanor could have added Germany to his list) to offer citizenship to those with roots in those lands but Chomsky singles out Israel for condemnation because of its Law of Return. But as Bogdanor points out, Chomsky’s targeting this Law, (which was promulgated in the wake of Europe’s refusal to help Jews during the Holocaust) is really one of his minor sins. Chomsky’s real aim is the destruction of Israel, a position he has endorsed latterly by affirming, for strategic purposes, the possibility of a two state solution and then admitting that “two states in cis-Jordan [Palestine] makes little sense.” The inference is clear; there is no room for a Jewish State.

Co-editor Bogdanor has had the requisite patience to read Chomsky’s most offensive anti-Israel statements and the footnotes he has supplied with them. That in itself must have been an exercise in masochism. But the result is instructive. Chomsky, in Bogdanor’s view is an “intellectual crook” who not only mutilates historical fact but engages in deliberate misquotation. This is clearly seen in Chomsky’s incredible falsification of Ben Gurion’s words to make it appear that Israel’s first prime minister was an imperialist monster. Having studied the same documents, Bogdanor shows that Chomsky has deliberately manipulated the text to show a Ben Gurion not as the idealist he was but as the architect of Zionist diabolism. In the chapter called “Chomsky’s Ayatollahs” Bogdanor uses his keen analytical insights to highlight the role played by the late Israel Shahak, an Israeli professor of chemistry who perverted the paradigm of the periodic table—which Primo Levi once described as the ideal charter to decompose and reconstruct truth in chemistry as in life—to construct a version of Israel so at variance with the actuality of the State that it would be an obscenity and an insult to good taste to even discuss it. Those who have the stomach for this exercise can consult Bogdanor’s study of Shahak.

There is little chance, as noted previously in this review, that the current crop of Jewish Israel haters, will do penance for the sins they have committed. In fact, one doubts if there is a Yom Kippur large enough to encompass the atonement that they require. But the Alexander-Bogdanor book will at least furnish the rest of us with the ammunition to expose their indecencies. •

About the author
Arnold Ages is “Distinguished Emeritus Professor,” University of Waterloo (Ontario), and the “Scholar-in-Residence” at the Beth Tzedec Synagogue, Toronto, Canada