RUTHFULLY YOURS

The liberal media and academic elite deride “Creationists”–those who deny the theory of evolution and believe that the world and all its creatures were created in six calendar days. However, they encourage Mideast “creationism”–namely, a belief that the Arab/Israel conflict occurred as the result of six calendar days in 1967 when a land grab by Israel established an unjust occupation of ancient Arab lands.

The combined attacks on Israel of five Arab states in 1948 are dismissed as ancient history. The Ottoman rule of Palestine, the geography of the Middle East, its divisions following World War 1 and the role of David Lloyd George and the Palestine Mandate are as irrelevant to these ignoramuses as the Peloponnesian wars.

Here are facts from the late Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial:

“In the twelve and a half centuries between the Arab conquest in the seventh century and the beginnings of the Jewish return in the 1880’s, Palestine was laid waste. Its ancient canal and irrigation systems were destroyed and the wondrous fertility of which the Bible spoke vanished into desert and desolation… Under the Ottoman empire of the Turks, the policy of defoliation continued; the hillsides were denuded of trees and the valleys robbed of their topsoil.”

In a “Report of the Commerce of Jerusalem During the Year 1863,” it says the population of the City of Jerusalem is computed at 15,000, of whom about 4,500 are Moslem, 8,000 Jews, and the rest Christians of various denominations.

And here is Mark Twain’s description of the Galilee in Innocents Abroad.

“… these unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness, that never, never do shake the glare from their harsh outlines, and fade and faint into vague perspective; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum: this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under its six funereal palms…. We reached Tabor safely….We never saw a human being on the whole route.”

This was the state of the land under the Ottomans until its conquest by the British in World War 1 under the leadership of then Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

Schooled as a devout evangelical, Lloyd George was familiar with Jewish history. Indeed in a speech to the Jewish historical society in 1925 he said:

“I was brought up in a school where I was taught far more history of the Jews than about my own land. I could tell you all the kings of Israel. But I doubt if I could have named half a dozen of the Kings of England, and not more of the Kings of Wales….We were thoroughly imbued with the history of your race in the days of its greatest glory.”

At the turn of the century Lloyd George met Theodore Herzl in Manchester, home to a growing Zionist movement. Initially impressed by the British Colonial Office’s offer of a Jewish colony in Uganda, Lloyd George was persuaded by Chaim Weizmann’s argument that Palestine was the only viable home for a reborn Jewish Nation.

Every Anglophone reader, Jew and non-Jew, owes it to him or herself to read Jews against Themselves. And every non-Anglophone country that aspires either to establish or maintain democracy owes itself a good translation. Rarely has a book so thoroughly and eloquently identified, analyzed, and rebuked a form of thinking that endangers the very democracy from which that thinking arose. In this case, one might call the problem “the tyranny of penitence” or “masochistic omnipotence syndrome”—the tendency to blame oneself for everything in the vain hope that in fixing oneself, one can fix everything.[1] Since, in the current world crisis of the early twenty-first century, this problem has struck the (post-) modern West with unusual force, and since the particular variant upon which Edward Alexander, professor of English at the University of Washington, focuses in this book is an especially powerful contributor to the phenomenon, his work deserves close attention. Alexander’s book is a collection of articles and op-eds written over the course of some three decades, from the mid-1980s to the present.

I have read many texts that try to explain why some Jews turn on their own people, from Sander Gillman’s Jewish Self-Hatred to the endless current Jeremiads by assertive Jews about how self-accusing Jews are a bane, not only on their own people, but on those who trust their pseudo-prophetic utterances. Never have I read one with such moral clarity, subtlety of thought, and, above all, such calm but righteous anger. The enormity of the deeds Alexander chronicles does not make him shrill in his indignation, but rather drives him to repeatedly point out, with a certain black humor and as little ad hominem as one could expect any human to muster, the exquisite and corrosive ironies that riddle the world of Jews who publicly attack their own people.

His case is a painful one, and meticulously chronicled. In a series of essays written between 1986 (chapter 1, discussion of Gilman’s book) and the present (essay on moral inversion at The New York Times), Alexander documents a phenomenon that Gilman had delineated as follows: “How Jews see the dominant society seeing them and how they project their anxiety about this manner of being seen onto other Jews as a means of externalizing their own status anxiety.” Unpacked, this sentence means that some Jews, seeing how negatively gentiles view them, turn on their own kind, holding them responsible for that hatred: “If only ‘they’ would behave the way ‘we good Jews’ do,” they tell themselves, “then non-Jews wouldn’t think so badly of us.”

For such Jews, antisemitism is not a gentile disease but rather a Jewish one. As Tuvia Tenenboim put it in his Catch the Jew:

To anyone paying attention it is obvious that the California university system has the dubious distinction of being the epicenter of the campus war against Israel, an unwelcomed situation that has reached such intolerable levels that the UC Regents were forced to take some action. That effort, which resulted in a study entitled the “Final Report of the Regents Working Group on Principles Against Intolerance,” attempts to establish guidelines by which any discrimination against any minority group on campus would be identified and censured, but the report specifically focused on the thorny issue of anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism as a prevalent and ugly reality throughout the California system.

The report examined a range of incidents occurring during the 2014-15 academic year, unfortunate transgressions that “included vandalism targeting property associated with Jewish people or Judaism; challenges to the candidacies of Jewish students seeking to assume representative positions within student government; political, intellectual and social dialogue that is anti-Semitic; and social exclusion and stereotyping.”

In fact, the problem on California campuses, and on campuses across the country, is that pro-Palestinian activists, in their zeal to seek self-affirmation, statehood, and “social justice” for the ever-aggrieved Palestinians, have waged a very caustic cognitive war against Israel and Jews as their tactic in achieving those ends—part of a larger, more invidious intellectual jihad against Israel led by some Western elites and those in the Muslim world who also wish to weaken, and eventually destroy, the Jewish state.

It turns out that being pro-Palestinian on campuses today does not necessarily mean that one is committed to helping the Palestinians productively nation-build or create a civil society with transparent government, a free press, human rights, and a representative government. Being pro-Palestinian on campuses involves very little which actually benefits or makes more likely the birth of a new Palestinian state, living side by side in peace with Israel. What being pro-Palestinian unfortunately has come to mean is continually denigrating and attacking Israel with a false historical narrative and the misused language of human rights.