Tuesday, November 26, 2024
From Ian:
Israel is treated like Shylock by the world
Israel is treated like Shylock by the world
To satisfy its friends such as the US and the UK, Israel has to fulfill a fantasy straight out of a comic book. To have the right to self-defense, Israel has to be like Batman and never kill those who come to kill its children, a standard the nations who demand it of Israel know they are incapable of reaching themselves because it is impossible. Israel’s right to self-defense is conditional on it achieving the impossible.Melanie Phillips: Mr Sammler's prescience
To satisfy the antisemitic United Nations, even perfection is not enough, as that moral travesty of a Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, proved when he accused Israel of disproportionate force in an operation in 2023 in which not a single civilian was killed. Guterres is in the camp of Francesca Albanese in that the only thing Israelis are legally allowed to do is die.
The truth is that Israel is not Shylock, and should not be treated as such. Those attacking Israel are not merely spitting on Jews, calling them names and encouraging their children to leave the fold, like Antonio did They are seeking to butcher, to slaughter, to murder every Jew, down to the last child. To fight back is not a crime or a sin. It is not seeking a pound of flesh. It is the preservation of life. This is not the 16th Century or the 1930s. Jews have the right to live and can defend themselves if need be.
In their quest to treat Israel like Shylock, Israel’s critics and haters are in fact treating Israel like Antonio by telling Israel its only option, the only thing it is legally allowed to do under international law, is to commit suicide, to lie down and die, to be beheaded, burned in ovens, kidnapped, raped, and slaughtered in the millions. It is these haters of Israel who seek the real pounds of flesh and gallons of blood from innocent Jews.
Peace will come when that right to live and the right to defend Jewish lives is finally acknowledged, when the UN, the ICC, and the Arab and Muslim worlds stop pretending this is the time of Shakespeare, barely a century after the expulsion from Spain and hundreds of years before the concept of emancipation and giving Jews the rights of citizenship. There is no right to kill Jews with impunity as Antonio Guterres, Francesca Albanese, and Karim Khan are attempting to recreate.
Peace will come a lot sooner when Israel’s friends and allies stop treating it with condescension and stop saying “but” every time they acknowledge Israel’s right to defend itself.
Peace will come when the world is a place where Jews have rights with no “buts” or lawfare to strip those rights in practice, when the right to live is sanctified over the right of Nazis to kill, when friends and enemies alike stop acting like the world is a stage where the Jews are the eternal villains.
Peace will come when the real Shylocks at the ICC and the UN stop seeking their tons of flesh and oceans of blood from the Jews who they condemn for refusing to be slaughtered again.
In 1970 the novelist Saul Bellow, a titan of American letters, published his masterpiece Mr Sammler’s Planet.Ta-Nehisi Coates: the dangers of black-and-white moralising
Its eponymous hero is a Holocaust survivor who, in a decaying New York City, sees into the heart of things. A calculated attack on a range of liberal pieties, the novel caused intense controversy. Sammler, and thus Bellow himself, was accused of being misanthropic, racist, sexist, and reactionary.
Not surprisingly, liberal literary America was outraged and affronted. Equally unsurprisingly, the book was brandished as proof that Bellow had “moved to the right”. This is, of course, the standard denunciation of irredeemable evil that has sunk countless reputations and careers on the jagged rocks of elite disgust — but is so often instead proof positive of the denounced individual’s clarity of vision and moral purpose.
So it was with Saul Bellow. Sammler is a latter-day prophet, seeing with his one functioning eye straight through liberal hypocrisy to call out civilisational decay.
What now seems all too familiar was all there in the novel — racial prejudice, sexual violence, civil disobedience and a no-holds-barred capacity to give offence, it seemed, to as many hyper-sensitive groups as possible. The premonition of today’s culture wars is striking.
Now Bellow’s son Adam has written in Sapir journal a reflection on the novel and the reputational charges levelled against his father. The result is an insightful, wry, luminous article (full disclosure: Adam is my publisher at Wicked Son — but it’s still a truly wonderful read).
The longest chapter is the book’s most controversial. It is about Coates’s visit to Israel and the West Bank, when he attended the Palestine Festival of Literature. Here, he also received a tour from Israeli progressives associated with an anti-occupation group called Breaking the Silence.
This chapter is a one-sided diatribe against Israel. Consistent with his Manichaean view of the world, Coates casts Israelis as white colonisers and Palestinians as the oppressed enslaved, drawing a parallel between Jim Crow in the United States and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. The terms ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ (which are not regarded as being part of Jim Crow in the US) appear frequently, as do comparisons between Israel and the Nazis. In a heated exchange after the book was published, a CBS interviewer – perhaps justifiably – said Coates’s book ‘would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist’.
French author and social critic Georges Bernanos once said that ‘the worst, the most corrupting lies are problems poorly stated’. So it is in The Message. Israel’s harassment of the West Bank Palestinians must certainly be addressed and ultimately ended. But an easy solution is not obvious, especially because so many Palestinians deny Israel’s right to exist (Coates appears to feel that way, too). Some even publicly celebrate every murderous attack on Israelis. Assuming Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state, the problem with the two-state solution advanced by many is how to guarantee the nascent Palestinian state would not become another terror proxy on Israel’s border, should it be taken over by radical Islamists, as happened with Hamas in Gaza.
Coates seems deliberately incurious about this dilemma. He writes: ‘The second half of my trip… was not an empty declaration to “hear both sides”. I had no interest in hearing defences of the occupation and what struck me then as segregation.’ This lack of concern is certainly his right, but it is reasonable to expect more from a MacArthur ‘genius grant’ recipient and award-winning author – especially one who writes and presents himself as a moral arbiter.
Some cursory research would reveal that Coates’s take on the conflict being between ‘black’ Palestinians and ‘white’ Israelis is demonstrably in error. Israel is not a ‘white country’. Half its citizens are from North Africa or the Middle East, or are black. Nor is there an Israeli ‘apartheid’ regime. Despite being a Jewish state, Israel’s population is roughly one-fifth Arab, which is well-represented in government and the justice system. Conversely, there are 49 predominantly Muslim countries with very few Jews living in any of them. This is because most Jewish communities were forced to flee these countries for Israel. This is one of the reasons Israel must exist.
Far from being colonialists, as Coates suggests, much of the territory Israel has acquired since its founding in 1948 was not due to colonisation, but the result of four wars that aimed to eradicate Israel. These were wars that Arab countries started and lost.
Israel is certainly not ‘genocidal’, either. There is no genocide in Gaza or the West Bank – the population growth rate in both areas is among the highest in the world.
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