Know Thy Enemy, 2

Yaacov Lozowick
Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
23 June '10

Shelby Steele, a professor at the Hoover Institute, tells it as it is:

This is something new in the world, this almost complete segregation of Israel in the community of nations. And if Helen Thomas's remarks were pathetic and ugly, didn't they also point to the end game of this isolation effort: the nullification of Israel's legitimacy as a nation? There is a chilling familiarity in all this. One of the world's oldest stories is playing out before our eyes: The Jews are being scapegoated again. (via Goldblog).

So which is it? New, or ancient? Both, actually. It's new, because back in 2005 as Israel was unilaterally leaving Gaza, people didn't talk this way for a moment; newish, because in the 1990s, as Israel seemed to be handing over control of the Palestinians to their own government, it wasn't the fad to talk this way; vaguely new, because in the 1950s and 1960s, when folks were occasionally mighty embarrassed about the poor Jews of Europe, it was really bad taste to talk this way.

Ancient, because the idea that the Jews are uniquely evil is at least 2,000 years old, and never went away throughout, though it did rise and subside from time to time. It was also a motivating force in Zionism, the understanding that sooner or later it was inevitable that things would get worse for the Jews, and the time had come for them to take care of themselves.

It is this sense of community, forged both by the negative parts of being derided by others, and the positive parts of pride in the community itself, that underlie much of Jewish identity and of course Zionism. Not jingoistic "we're right no matter what", rather the more basic "we are we, we've got the right to be we, and we're important enough to ourselves to commit further efforts to being we".

The enemies of Israel repudiate that: "you don't deserve to exist as a community unless you don't bother anyone, and we'll define what might be a bother according to whatever whim hits us at whatever moment" - that's basically what they've been saying these past 2,000 years, give or take a century. There were long periods when Jews had no choice but to bend with the whims and accommodate themselves as well as they could; Zionism is the decision to build a whim-resistant place.

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