Zionist Self Love. How To Combat Anti-Semite Slurs, Part One

by Richard Morris

Sunday, May 6th, 2012 I intend to write a series of articles examining the sometimes profound and intricate thought processes of Zionists and supporters of Israel that lead them to defend the indefensible; ordinary men and women, writers, journalists, novelists, historians, the widest spectrum I can cope with.

Searching for an opening statement I came across Jonathan Freedland in The Jewish Chronicle commenting on Peter Beinhart who has written a book called The Crisis Of Zionism.

Mr Beinhart is a Zionist, an advocate for Israel well known on the AIPAC lecture circuit.

His children go to Jewish schools, call him Abba, the Hebrew word for father. He goes regularly to an Orthodox shul, keeps an Israeli flag in his room.

Freedland appears to find it astonishing that Beinhart argues that the leadership of American Jewry is making a fateful mistake in its indulgence of Israel’s forty five years of occupation, a situation that makes impossible Israel’s station as both a Jewish and democratic state.

Freedland writes about Beinhart:

He is a concerned Jew raising a truly profound question: can Jews, powerless for so long, now exercise power and stay true to their highest ethical ideals? Pesach is all about questions and Beinart has asked the most important one of our age. In my book, that makes him one of our people’s wise sons

One should note here a good example of Zionist Self Love. “the most important question of our age”
A typical self love statement and an ignoring of the manifold problems across the world and more pertinently of The Other, in the Israeli case the invisible Palestinians.

“Look at us we are important and clever. We are Europeans, love Beethoven and Mozart even though they weren’t Jewish. Help us bomb Iran and all will be well”

Aren’t we constantly being urged by Zionists to leave them alone and concentrate on Sri Lanka or China?

Where has Beinhart been for so many years ?

Does he think that no-one else has noticed the despicable actions of his countrymen and women.

Has he not read Peter Novick’s The Holocaust and Collective Memory published in 1999. Sacred Landscape by Meron Benevenisti published in 2000 or Ilan Pappes’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine published in 2006 to name but three books out of hundreds?

I confess I have problems with Jonathan Freedland. I think he is Janus faced. It is understandable up to a point.

Anyone who writes for the Guardian and The (rabid) Jewish Chronicle is bound to have the Janus problem. Witness the sinister and smug Nick Cohen and compare his Observer articles and his Jewish Chronicle ones. But where was Freedland when Jenny Tonge was sacked by Nick Clegg and why is it okay for a practising Jew to say what Beinhart did but not a non-Jew ?

Let’s remind you of the words that caused her sacking by the supine Clegg.

Israel is acting against international law ,the Geneva Convention and Human Rights….Beware Israel.
It is not going to be there for ever in its present form.

We also have no record of the self professed liberal Freedland standing up for free speech for his colleague Deborah Orr whose words shouldn’t disturb any sane thinker on the subject of Chosen People. Miss Orr allowed herself to be intimidated and hustled, to their shame by the Guardian to declare that her words were “badly chosen and poorly used”.

Anyone who follows the history of Israel and Palestine will recognise that there is nothing startling about an acceptance of the shortcomings of Israel. Freedland knows as well as any that the illegal and atrocious acts of the Israelis are not newly minted. Jews have claimed in the past that Judaism is an ethics of law and justice. We who study the history know that whatever the ramifications and arguments of pre -1967, that Yeshayahou Leibowitz is correct in his assessment:

From 1967 on, the Israelis are responsible for all that has followed and thus for our impossible situation as occupiers.

Martin Buber the theologian and philosopher wrote “there will obviously be no legitimacy for the Hebrew state unless it makes itself accepted by all its neighbours”.

The settlers who claim biblical authority for their gross rape of Palestinian lands and water do not bother to quote Deuteronomy when challenged on their usurpations:

If thou wilt not observe to do all the words of this law (concerning the lands of Canaan)…so the Lord will rejoice over you to destroy you and to bring you to nought and ye shall be plucked from off the land whither thou goest to possess it.

The frustration I feel with Mr Freedland is that he understands all this and the expected attacks from the neo-fascist Zionists though of course he doesn’t call them that.

And sadly once again he slithers into Jewish Chronicle treacly prose, perhaps frightened he won’t get any more commissions.

The book is written entirely from within and not without the Jewish people..it springs from deep concern for us, the Jewish people

Yet again we are confronted with Self Love and self promotion. Let me ask Mr Freedland one more time. Are you British first and foremost ? Why evoke your Jewishness again and again as and when it suits you to do so?

Some Jewish writers have asked why so many Jews like Freud, Einstein, Barenboim, Jonathan Miller and the Jewish man in the street do not feel the need to indentify themselves as Jews, members of a closed milieu, wanting to live in a self imposed ghetto feeding off the related memories of the shtetls of Easten Europe.

Freedland recently wrote that “As a Jew”… he couldn’t support Ken Livingstone for Mayor because he had referred to London Jews as all being rich. What on earth is offensive about that ?

Who cares if it’s true or not ? Who cares if Freedland is Jewish?

We Londoners care about fares and child care not Freedland’s whining special pleading on Jewishness. Reading the Jewish Chronicle is like one long wail of persecution by Londoners and others who stalk the Jews through the streets of our cities and towns and fail to recognise the iniquities of The Palestinians who dare to fight for their land.

All the Aaronovitches, Jacobsens, Aldermans, Finklesteins, Berkoffs and Lipmans ignore the people of Palestine. The self love of the Zionists and camp followers leads them into the denial of decency and truth.

It was a Jew who wrote the seminal song about race, Strange Fruit.
When asked why he wrote it Abe Meeropol said:

I wrote it because I hated lynching and I hate injustice and I hate the people who perpetuate it.

I will be continuing Zionist Self Love shortly


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