There are no Self-Hating Jews

As protests and opposition groups against Israel have become more prevalent in recent years so too has the presence of Jews within them. Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein are too of the world’s most famous anti-Israel academics while in Britain the Politician Gerald Kaufman, the Comedian Alexi Sale and the activists of ‘Jews for Justice’ and ‘Independent Jewish’ voices are all Jewish figures committed to condemning Israel. And Israel itself has produced several key academics who at the very least denounce the Zionist project. Bewildered by these individuals the Jewish community tends to label them ‘self-haters’, yet in reality they are anything but.

In there own defence these people insist that as human beings and specifically as Jews (observing the high level of morality Judaism demands of them) they must speak out in defence of the venerable and oppressed. And indeed they should. Yet the latest independent population estimates suggest that there are less than three million Palestinian Arabs living in the Gaza strip and West Bank. This relatively small group of people has countless international NGOs, U.N bodies and foreign governments that champion their cause and send significantly large amounts of money to assist them, unfortunately much of it never benefits the people its intended for because of Palestinian Authority corruption, mismanagement and the tendency to funnel finances into terror. With all of these people concentrating on assisting this relatively small group of people along with the international media’s heavy criticism of Israel, are Jews really needed to join in? And if they really do feel so very heavily moved by their conscience to help the worlds needy then what of the people of Darfur, Tibet, Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe as well as countless other oppressed groups across the Middle East, not to mention its minority Jewish populations? Why of all the oppressed people of the world have these Jews decided that first and foremost it is the cause of the Palestinians that they should champion against their own fellow Jews living in Israel?

It quickly becomes apparent that these people are clearly disinterested in the plight of other Jews and more concerned with the cause of a group that are attacking their coreligionists. In doing so they essentially set themselves apart from their Jewish brethren who are under attack from the world and side with these very same critics. They undertake an act that dissociates themselves from the attacked group and places them amidst the dominant group, safely out of harms way they hope. So it is possible to see how far from hating themselves for being Jewish their act is one of self cherishing, they become applauded and seemingly accepted by the non-Jewish anti-Israel host populations, who are only too pleased to wheel them out at their protests and functions to demonstrate that being anti-Israel can’t possibly be anti-Semitic because there are Jews that are also anti-Israel.

Anti-Zionist Jews reject claims that they are betraying their own people, rather they retort that Zionism is a threat to all Jews because of how it increases anti-Semitism (as they see it) and so are always eager to use every opportunity to voice the fact that they are Jewish (albeit often openly ashamed of being so) but still opposed to Israel. This they hope will break the connection non-Jewish society sees between Israel and their Diaspora communities, so they hope sparing them the hatred Israeli Jews face. From the very beginning of anti-Zionist Jewish thought fears of anti-Semitism were the driving force. When the British government made its Balfour declaration in 1917, giving its support to the creation of a Jewish national home as a haven for East European Jews fleeing bloody pogroms, the assimilated and socially ambitious British Jewish elites wrote a letter condemning this, fearing that it would threaten their privileged position by calling into question their loyalty to Britain. Indeed their first thought was not the well being of the East European Jewish masses. Similarly the Reform Jews of Germany were also initially strongly opposed to Zionism as the Reform movement there had the primary aim of achieving social acceptance by becoming as German as possible. Nothing has really changed since then, anti-Zionist Jews still claim Israel stirs up anti-Semitism and fear that being Jewish and therefore associated with Israel will jeopardise their own ambitious assent into non-Jewish society. These Jews are after all on the whole very much estranged from Judaism, attending the major anti-Israel rallies always held on the Jewish Sabbath and so while they eagerly claim to speak as Jews they are in reality simply the descendents of Jewish ancestors.

To this some may point to the loudly anti-Zionist Ultra-Orthodox groups, who are not assimilated or divorced from Jewish practice and culture. Yet they represent a tiny radical fringe, often presented as official Orthodox voices by Israel’s opponents. Their radical anti-Secular ideology and obscure reading of certain Jewish texts has made them aggressively anti-Israel, but they too focus a great deal on how Israel represents a rebellion against non-Jewish rulers, so antagonising hatred against the Jewish people, which they argue is forbidden by Jewish law. While anti-Israel groups may place a great deal of emphasis on these people they represent such a minor radical sect that they can’t really be taken into overall consideration.

Ironically assimilated and secular Jews who have little relationship or sense of connection to the land of Israel and the Jewish people actually regain part of that strong relationship by attacking those very things. Reading up on Israeli history, obsessing over Zionist ideology and sometimes reading up on relevant sections of Jewish theology becomes one of the few Jewish things they do. And it’s as though if they can’t have a positive relationship with these things then they can’t simply accept them, they must instead work to destroy them, so re-justifying their own lack of involvement and adherence to them. So the assimilated Jewish critic of Israel can say ‘no I’m not religiously observant, no I don’t make the effort to visit Israel or help its people, but that’s not because I’m a bad Jew, it’s because I categorically reject these things on moral grounds’.

To defend Israel, to adopt greater Jewish observances becomes the more difficult thing to do when these people who enjoy all the benefits of assimilation realise it might set them apart from their much admired fellow non-Jews, from whom they desire ultimate acceptance. Instead the easier thing to do is to abandon and attack their own in the hope that it will demonstrate the full extent of their loyalty to non-Jewish society’s beliefs, opinions and values.

This isn’t about Self-Hatred but a self love that is so all consuming that individuals are prepared to put from mind the suffering of what are essentially their own people so as to advance their personal standing and sense of moral superiority and justification. Their worst fear is that they will be recognised as Jews, associated with Israel and suffer the same fierce criticism Israel receives from non-Jews.
They are like the slightly different child in the school playground that fears being picked on by bullies so ensures that they’re at the forefront of the gang, beating up another child that’s different so as to ensure that they’re not the one on the receiving end.

Reactions to Netanyahu’s Speech - Avoiding Peace at all Costs

Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians have been going on for nearly two decades now, ever since the start of the 1990s, and yet any permanent final status agreement still seems extremely far off. Worse still; at the moment what’s being argued about is not the conditions under which peace would be finalised but the conditions under which negotiations would resume. So what has been going on for twenty years that means no agreement has been reached?

Often negotiations have looked extremely promising, particularly with Oslo which set up a system where by territory was gradually transferred into Palestinian control with a timetable for final status agreements. There had been some disagreements over partitioning Jerusalem, but in 2000 Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was prepared to make the painful and unpopular concession in the hope of achieving peace. Perhaps Arafat had never really expected the Israeli’s to accept this demand because during the Camp David summit a new even more seemingly unmeetable demand was made by the Palestinians. After having never previously mentioned the demand at any earlier negotiation, including Oslo, the Palestinian delegation now insisted that in return for the end of hostilities Israel must accept into its midst millions of Arabs who claimed to either have once lived in what is now Israel or to be their many descendants. Such a move would have turned the country’s demographic upside down ending Israel’s existence as the world’s only Jewish state and haven for Jewish refugees fleeing persecution. The demand took the Israeli and American negotiators totally by surprise and while they agreed to dividing Jerusalem and giving the Palestinians Israel’s disputed territories for a sovereign state the Israeli’s couldn’t agree to their own destruction.

As is now known the Intifada that raged in the first years of the new millennium, in which over 1000 Israelis were killed in terror attacks, was initially preconceived by Arafat as a means by which to put pressure on the Israelis to make ever greater concessions. Finally as Ehud Barak’s time in power approached its end and in desperation to try and stop the escalating violence in the series of negotiations around 2000/2001 Barak agreed to turning over the equivalent of 100% of the disputed territories to the Palestinians and crucially to gradually over a number of years absorbing the Palestinians claiming refugee status back into Israel. This was not what Arafat had expected, indeed he had made the demand because he’d assumed the Israelis would never agree to it. Realising that he was now in a position where he had to accept Israel’s offer and make peace he abruptly called an end to the conference and on his way out famously told the press that the Israeli’s could ‘go to hell’. There was nothing more that could be done and Israel entered its bloodiest and most threatening period since its war of independence.

For Arafat acceptance of a peace deal would have meant an end to his very reason for being; using terror to fight Israel, it was from this activity that he derived his power. A final agreement would have meant an end to Palestinian grievance, an end to terror, an end to world sympathy and an end to the large donations from supporters around the world. It would have meant the beginning of the far more serious and difficult activity of state building. For the Palestinian leadership and terrorist operatives there was never any question over which of the two scenarios they preferred.

Little has changed since then, actually hurrying into bringing the creation of a Palestinian state into being seems extremely low down the list of the Palestinian Authorities set of priorities right now. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas insisted he would not enter into any final status negotiations unless Netanyahu first accepted the creation of a Palestinian state, something he reckoned Netanyahu would never do. But with pressure from Obama and much to Abbas’ horror, a few days ago in his major policy address that’s exactly what Netanyahu did. The Palestinian spokes people quickly went into reaction and went ahead and delivered exactly the same speeches they’d prepared in the event of the Israeli Prime Minister not accepting a Palestinian state. They claimed that Netanyahu had ‘slammed shut the door’ to any peace negotiations, when clearly in reality he had fulfilled the very pre-conditions the Palestinians had laid down for such talks to begin.

The Palestinians have claimed that their grievance is over Netanyahu insisting any future Palestinian state could not be heavily militarised and that the Palestinians must accept Israel will be the Jewish state and theirs the Palestinian state. There is nothing new in this, Arafat was supposed to have recognised Israel’s right to exist before negotiations back in the early 1990s and as an obligation of Oslo was supposed to have amended the PLO charter so that it no longer called for Israel’s destruction, something they have still failed to comply with. As far as demilitarisation of the Palestinian state goes this was made clear as part of Israel’s acceptance of George Bush’s U.N backed Road Map back in 2003. Indeed there is nothing new about the games Abbas is playing, when he first became Palestinian Prime Minister during the time of the Sharon government he would often respond to Israel’s release of Palestinian prisoners by cancelling his meetings with Sharon, claiming they’d expected larger numbers of terrorists to be released.

This is a reminder that Israeli good will gestures have more often than not been met by even more outrageous demands, protest and refusal to cooperate. While time and time again Israel has made difficult and dangerous concessions, offering just about everything in their power for peace, the Palestinians seem to have worked equally as tirelessly to avoid making peace at all costs. For the moment it seems that just as Israeli’s fear a Palestinian state will threaten their country’s existence the Palestinians fear a final peace agreement will weaken their campaign to destroy Israel.

Blaming the Jews – from the Black Death to Iran

The claim that Jews have been persecuted throughout history because down the ages they have been easy scapegoats is just about the most commonly heard explanation going, no doubt most of us first heard it from our history teachers when studying the rise of Nazis or similar. And most of us soon dismissed this view just as soon as we had read on enough to suspect that the matter is far more complex than that. Yet at the same time, whether we’ve found a more satisfactory explanation or not, isn’t it simply the case that the Jews always have been and always do get blamed? Indeed if we look at the international political scene in our own time the Jews really are still occupying that same blame position they always seem to have.

From being blamed for killing Christ to being accused of polluting the racial purity of European blood, or from being blamed for causing the black death by poisoning wells to being accused of inciting internal communism and revolution, or from being blamed for keeping the poor poor as money lenders to being accused of starting world wars and then specifically ensuring Germany lost them, or from being blamed for causing economic crisis through their control of the money markets to being accused of derogating wholesome Christian culture through their control of entertainment and mass media. The list is extensive as societies throughout history have rushed to blame the Jews for which ever particular crisis of the moment it happens to be. And this is still not yet a habit that the world has kicked.

In just the last few decades we have seen western politicians, journalists and academics accuse the Jews and their state (Israel) of antagonising and radicalising Islamic terrorism both world wide and in their own countries, the claim being that brutal Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people has fanned the flames of fundamentalist hate against the west. The latest strain of this particular trend of Jew blaming is being championed and lead by the American President who in recent weeks has essentially argued that it is Israel’s Jewish communities in its disputed territories that are pushing Iran to nuclear armament.

Most reasonable people don’t have much trouble dismissing the many illogical accusations historically made against Jews as outlined in the paragraph above, yet when it comes to Israeli settlements and Iranian nukes they seem to abandon logic just as rapidly as the blood libellers and Aryan racial theorists did before them. What after all do a few small Jewish villages on hilltops set in the heart of the Jewish peoples spiritual and historical homeland have to do with Iran needing nuclear weapons? Just what a false issue created by Israel’s opponents this is becomes clear when it’s considered that barely sixty thousand Jews live on the other side of Israel’s security fence, hardly enough to alter the demographic there, unlike the Palestinian Authorities insistence that several million Arabs must be transferred into the Jewish state before they think about making peace with it. And yet the American President insists that only once Israel has resolved its conflict, specifically by ethnically cleansing all Jews from those areas of the greatest importance to Israel historically, militarily and religiously, only then will Iran abandon its pursuit for nuclear weapons.
Such a claim barely holds little more logic than arguing that Jews should light fewer candles at Chanukah because they cause global warming.

And so given the record it’s probably only a matter of time before the Jews are blamed for the melting of the polar icecaps. But the scapegoating that is observable throughout history is actually the opposite of what it is usually presented as. That is to say usually the argument goes that people need someone to blame and the Jews are an easy target. However what is really the case is that people need to blame the Jews and so find something to pin on them, usually whatever they see as the worst and most serious problem of their times. And so if hatred of the Jews isn’t motivated by the mistaken belief that they are behind which ever particular calamity is closest at hand then the only conclusion can be that the Jews are not hated for what people arbitrarily decide they have done but for who they are on the most fundamental inescapable level, that is the values they stand for and the truths and the notions that they have brought to the world.

However my purpose here is not to carry out a detailed or indepth exploration of Judeophobia and its causes but rather to demonstrate that westerners are repeating the very same prejudices against the Jews that they always have done in the past, however much they claim this isn’t about Jews but about bringing in a new era of harmonious world peace; just as so many 19th century theorists believed that if only they could remove the deviant influence Jews were having over gentiles then a new glorious Christendom would blossom.
‘The horrifying threat of a nuclear Iran could be avoided if only Israel would back down a little’ becomes ‘All our problems would be over if the Jews were gone’.