Wednesday, November 02, 2022
From Ian:
The Stories She Never Told
Abbas’ advisor: Israel’s existence contradicts international law
The Stories She Never Told
My mother loved to talk politics, real estate, and cooking. She’d happily offer intelligent insights on nearly any subject except one: her own life. With stops in prewar Hungary, Auschwitz, the Sorbonne, Mexico, and finally Manhattan, my mother’s life was extraordinary, but she kept it to herself. I hated that, but I knew why. So tender-hearted that news of terrorist attacks or natural disasters brought her to tears, she needed to distance herself from the pain of her own past. Still, as her child, I needed to understand her and the world that created her.Daniel Greenfield: The Holocaust Is Not Your Metaphor
As a teenager and young adult, I plied her with questions, but I was only partly successful. I uncovered the scaffolding of her past but not its interiority. My mother is gone now, but my curiosity remains. I still search for her by immersing myself in stories of prewar Hungarian Jewry. Surprisingly, a new book about a Sephardic Holocaust survivor has opened a window into my mother’s inner life.
One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World, a Natan Award winner, is a Tuesdays with Morrie-style recollection of journalist Michael Frank’s conversations with nonagenarian Stella Levi, who grew up on the island of Rhodes. My mother was born thousands of miles and a universe away in the Romanian city of Satu Mare, the small Romanian city better known by its Yiddish name Satmar—the birthplace of the Satmar Hasidic sect—yet their lives seem to mirror each other.
They were born within two years of each other in the mid-1920s; both grew up in religiously observant but non-Hasidic families (prewar Satmar was home to many non-Hasidic Jews), and both belonged to the last generation of Jews to feel deeply rooted in their European birthplaces. My mother’s forebears had lived in or around Satmar for more than two centuries. Levi’s family had been part of the Juderia, Rhodes’ Jewish district, since the Spanish Inquisition. Both grew up in the embrace of aunts, uncles, and cousins in a world that moved to the eternal rhythms of the Jewish calendar.
Living within a 5-mile radius in Manhattan, both Levi and my mother viewed themselves as consummately modern women, yet both were intensely nostalgic for their childhood homes. Levi spoke of “a place where old women sat outside and told stories … took dishes to be baked in the communal oven … and where a granddaughter learned to prepare her grandmother’s sweet and savory dishes.” Unable to access the right words, my mother expressed her longing to recreate the flavors of her childhood and by carrying a crumpled photograph of her doomed aunts and cousins inside of her wallet.
"A production of Romeo and Juliet for non-binary performers"The Balfour bogeyman
This is what happens when the Holocaust becomes universalized, a free-floating metaphor and finally woke kitsch.
Yes, that’s the problem there.
This production, which has now been canceled, comes on the heels of things like the various Anne Frank revisions, including the Latino/ICE one. The underlying problem though is the use of the Holocaust and Hitler as a metaphor for everything bad.
The Holocaust is not a lens. It’s certainly not a lens for whatever woke nonsense is trying to appropriate Jewish history to make claims about the “rise of fascism” today.
There, is to a much lesser degree, similar objections to Netfix’s Dahmer movie which distorted and rewrote the history of the murders to score political points.
Treating real events, especially the murder of people, as a metaphor reduces the dead to the means of a political end while robbing them of their voice, their history and their identity.
The Holocaust is not slavery, slavery is not the Holocaust, whatever some sexual minority is upset by is not either one, and real events are not interchangeable. Neither are real people.
In the eyes of the Palestinian Authority, one historical act is attributed with all future Palestinian suffering. That act is the Balfour Declaration, issued today, Nov. 2, in 1917. The declaration was the first contemporary, internationally recognized expression of the right of the Jewish people to establish a national homeland in the geographical area known as “Palestine”.
“His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
As exposed by Palestinian Media Watch, the PA Ministry of Information called the Balfour declaration: “The greatest crime in the history of mankind,” and the official PA daily called it “The crime of the century.”
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Religious Affairs and Islamic Relations, Mahmoud Al-Habbash, who also serves as the PA’s Supreme Shari’ah Judge recently claimed that the Balfour declaration violated international law:
“Israel’s very existence contradicts international law. On what right do you bring people who have no connection to this land and plant them here and tell them: This is your national home? Who gave Britain a right to give a national home? Was Palestine the land of [former British Foreign Secretary Arthur] Balfour’s father?”
[Facebook page of the Fatah Commission of Information and Culture, Oct. 10, 2022]
So how then, can one answer the PA’s claim?
While the Balfour Declaration was an important statement of policy on the part of the UK government, it certainly did not have the ability to bring about the creation of the Jewish state without wide international consensus.
Historically, the declaration was issued as part of a new regional order that was born out of World War I and the demise of the Ottoman Empire, which, inter alia, had controlled most of the Middle East for centuries. As part of the new order, new borders were drawn and countries were, for the first time, carved out.
In the Ottoman Empire, “Palestine” as the separate national country and identity, as the PA claims, never existed. Rather, the region was merely just another region of the empire with no specific definition.
Abbas’ advisor: Israel’s existence contradicts international law
