A Ray of Light on Jews who are “ashamed” of Israel

Daphne Anson
01 November '10

In his delicious prize-winning novel The Finkler Question the Anglo-Jewish novelist Howard Jacobson has an anti-Zionist group called ASHamed Jews:

“The logic that made it impossible for those who had never been Zionists to call themselves ASHamed Zionists did not extend to Jews who had never been Jews. To be an ASHamed Jew did not require that you had been knowingly Jewish all your life. Indeed, one among them only found out he was Jewish at all in the course of making a television programme in which he was confronted on camera with who he really was. In the final frame of the film he was disclosed weeping before a memorial in Auschwitz to dead ancestors who until that moment he had never known he’d had. ‘It could explain where I get my comic genius from,’ he told an interviewer for a newspaper, though by then he had renegotiated his new allegiance. Born a Jew on Monday, he had signed up to be an ASHamed Jew by Wednesday and was seen chanting ‘We are all Hezbollah’ outside the Israeli Embassy on the following Saturday.”

The group is fictional, but it’s got its real-life counterparts, and not only, alas, in Britain. Such Jews – who of course make demonising Israel a central part of their agenda if not their raison d’être – are often dubbed “self-hating Jews”. But as Adam Levick observed not so long ago in an essay on the phenomenon:

‘To be fair, I always found the term “self-hating Jew” to be at best misleading, at worst a complete misnomer. First, because we typically have no way of knowing these writers‘ inner-thoughts. But, more importantly, I never thought that it was an apt description of the anti-Zionist Jews I’ve met over the years. If anything, most seem to possess a belief that they are indeed “better Jews” for being hyper-critical of Israel, opposing their own community, and rejecting the very idea of a Jewish nation-state.

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The foolishness of a fantasy

Yisrael Medad
Green-Lined/JPost
08 August '10

Tony Judt has passed away. He was Jewish. He descended from Lithuanian Rabbis. He was British. He was relatively as brilliant a thinker as a writer. He once loved Israel. And for the past three decades, he hated it and despised Zionism.

"Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life," Judt told the Financial Times in 2007.

He was right. Not that Israel is not to be immune from criticism or that there is, perhaps, an ominous conspiratorial nature to the ability of Israel's supports to trump its opponents: witness Oliver Stone and even Barack Obama. But Judt went to the core of Jewish nationalism in seeking to rip out from the world's oldest cultural, ethnic and religion-based nationalism its actuality to all conditions of the Jewish people.

He once wrote:

Israel arrived too late. The very idea of a "Jewish state" is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism."

Eight years earlier he penned this:

[One of the] 'life-sustaining lies' is the fiction that "Israel and the Jews" form a single bloc and that to criticize any part of one is to perpetrate an unacceptable attack on both."

Judt was the product of his own fantasy which was the idealistic presumption that Israel was but a creation of and the continuing "creating a socialist, communitarian country through work" as he once said, further noting that this view was "remarkably unconscious of the people who had been kicked out of the country and were suffering in refugee camps to make this fantasy possible." Ignoring the question whether only a kibbutz-style Israel is acceptable, thus reflecting on Judt's own personal prejudices rather than an objective analysis of what indeed is the essence of Jewish nationalism, there is another stark fantasy that Judt promotes: Israel's responsibility for the condition of the Arabs of the Palestine Mandate post 1947 when they rejected the UN partition plan.

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Protesting Anti-Semitism is "Hardline"?

Scotland's Sunday Herald gives a platform to the fringe voice of an anti-Zionist Holocaust survivor while labeling Jewish opposition as "hardline".

Honest Reporting UK
Media Critiques
25 January '10

Scotland's Sunday Herald publishes a provocative article headlined "Auschwitz survivor: 'Israel acts like Nazis'". According to the article:

One of the last remaining Auschwitz survivors has launched a blistering attack on Israel over its occupation of Palestine as he began a lecture tour of Scotland. ...

His comments sparked a furious reaction from hardline Jewish lobby groups, with Dr Meyer branded an "anti-Semite" and accused of abusing his position as a Holocaust survivor. [Emphasis added]

The reason that this story is so sensationalist and able to garner publicity is simply because a figure such as Dr Hajo Meyer is very much on the radical fringes of the debate and is certainly not representative in any way of the mainstream Jewish community or Holocaust survivors.

Yet, those who protest Meyer's extreme views are themselves termed "hardline Jewish lobby groups" by the Sunday Herald.

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Thank You, Tony Judt

Emmanuel Navon
For The Sake of Zion
20 December 09

The understandable frustration with the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has led some people to suggest that, for the conflict to abate, one of the two protagonists must give up. But what if both sides prove relentless forever? A Freudian answer to that question has recently been devised by (you guessed it) Jews: explain to the Jews (but not to the Palestinians, Heaven forbid), that they don't actually exist, and they will stop fighting for their "imagined self."

It is logically undisputable that there would be no Israeli-Palestinian conflict if there were no Israelis or no Palestinians (or both); that there would be no anti-Semitism if Jews didn't exist (though even that is debatable); and that there would be no car accidents if cars hadn't been invented. There is also no point in making such a point –except, that is, if you manage to prove that what you believe to be real is just an illusion. Pull the fighting Jews out of Plato's cave, make them realize that what they thought to be true and real is just a fiction and a sham, and you've solved the Arab-Israeli conflict.

This is the underlying argument that Shlomo Sand is promoting in his book The Invention of the Jewish People. A historian of modern French and European history at Tel-Aviv University, Sand is no expert in the Ancient Middle East and in Jewish history. His book has been dismissed and ridiculed by scholars of Jewish history as a cheap and embarrassing piece of falsifications and propaganda. Even Tony Judt (also an expert on modern European history, and also an anti-Zionist Jew), had to admit that Sand's contribution to the knowledge of Jewish history "is at best redundant" ("Israel must unpick its ethnic myth," Financial Times, 7 December 2009). Judt does not dispute that Sand's book is academically sloppy, but he argues that this sloppiness is irrelevant (if not forgivable): What counts, according to Judt, is the point that Sand is trying to make.

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Anti-Zionist Lobby Bullies the Beeb Into Changing a Story

Honest Reporting/Backspin
22 December 09

Harry's Place slams the BBC for being bullied into changing this story.

You wouldn't know from reading it now, but the anti-Semitic atmosphere was worse than the Beeb would now have you believe.Jonathan Hoffman blogged the BBC's explanation. I added the video link for background.

After publication it quickly became clear that there was more to what had happened in the meeting than was apparent from the video and Mr Hoffman’s allegations. As soon as that became clear the story was amended to reflect the differing views of those who had been at the meeting.

It is regrettable that the original story did not reflect a wider range of views and the journalist concerned has been made well aware of the requirement to do so in the future.

Do you think Peter Oborne -- who accused HonestReporting of bullying the BBC -- will investigate this?

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Whither American Jewry and Berkeley’s Hillel?

The campus Jewish organization makes common cause with Israel's enemies while rejecting Jewish values.

Abraham H. Miller
PajamasMedia.com
07 December 09

When the Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick engaged the topic of “divergence” — the parting of ways between Israelis and the American Jewish left — she culled appropriate examples from Berkeley’s Hillel, a liberal Jewish campus organization. Even in Berkeley, Hillel’s antics are more than a source of embarrassment to the activist, pro-Zionist component of the Jewish community.

However, Hillel’s repeated bad behaviors of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist activities are absent opposition from Jewish community leaders. Their tactic is to deny every episode that reaches the public agenda, while giving a wink and a nod to what happens on campus. Caroline Glick is sure to be bombarded with denials, either from here or from the national organization. She should be comforted as to the accuracy of her renditions in direct portion to the intensity of these denials.

The current mantra concerning Hillel from those doing damage control is that Hillel has now changed. But the reality is that Glick’s description of a Hillel that is both anti-Jewish and anti-Israel is as true today as it ever was.

Yes, Hillel did finally celebrate Passover, after two years absence. And much is made of this as a harbinger of change. We are showcasing to the world that an organization committed to the preservation of Jewish values is actually celebrating Passover.

But what we would prefer not to publicize is that Hillel’s students were involved in this years’ Zionist-bashing, Israel Apartheid Week, sponsored by the virulent, anti-Israel Students for Justice in Palestine. Hillel’s Valentine’s Day invitation took an insensitive and provocative swipe at orthodox Jews, calling them “scary,” perhaps suggesting that they were somehow the equivalent of Islamist suicide bombers.

All of this came in the absence of a learning curve from past bad behavior that included celebrating Cinco de Mayo with a barbeque party on Yom Hazikoron, the day of remembrance for fallen Israeli soldiers, and holding a dance party on Yom Hashoah, the solemn day of mourning for the Holocaust.

While Hillel students have been cautioned by Hillel leadership not to demonstrate on behalf of Israel and have been told that the Israeli flag is an offensive, militaristic symbol, there has been no such cautions when it comes to Hillel-sponsoredKesher Enoshi working with Students for Justice in Palestine and bringing in Israeli John Kerrys to discuss war crimes in Gaza in an event known as “Breaking the Silence.”

Even the name itself is a misnomer. Israeli soldiers are free to speak their minds and to put up what they want on the Internet. There is no silence to break. There is no incarceration that awaits them for taking their ideas to the public. And among all soldiers, there is always the fringe of the fringe, the John Kerrys of the world, whose ego can only be sated by turning the deviant to the commonplace.

What of programs that will extol the behavior of the Israeli military as a professional and moral army, as former British Army Colonel Richard Kemp described them? Such programs are as likely to be held at Hillel as a program on the value of covert operations is likely to be held on the Berkeley campus.

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Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science and a former head of the Intelligence Studies Section of the International Studies Association.

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