The Jewish Experience - by Gilad Atzmon
By Gilad Atzmon • Jun 10th, 2008 at 19:38 • Category: Analysis, Gilad Atzmon, Gilad's Choice, Ideas and Projects, Israel, Newswire, Opinions and Letters, Our Authors, Palestine, Religion, War, Zionism
For more than half a century, those who have been trying to combat the forces that are behind the Israeli paradigm have been identifying Israeli policies and practice with Zionism and Zionist Ideology. I am afraid to say that they were wrong all the way along. Indeed, Zionism’s project dictates the plunder of Palestine in the name of Jewish national aspiration. It is also true to argue that Israel has been rather efficient in translating the Zionist philosophy into a devastating oppressive and murderous practice. Yet, Israelis, or more precisely, the vast majority of Israeli-born secular Jews, are not motivated or fuelled by Zionist ideology. Its spirit or symbols are virtually meaningless to them. As bizarre as it may sound to some, Zionism is either a foreign or just an archaic notion for most Israeli-born secular Jews.
Since the vast majority of Israelis are confused by the notion of Zionism, most forms of criticism that would label itself as anti-Zionist would have hardly any effect on Israel, Israeli politics or on the Israeli people. In other words, in the last sixty years, those who have been using the paradigm of Zionism and its antipode have been preaching to the converted.
A total review of the amalgam formed by Israel, Zionism and Jewishness is now overdue.
Intimate Departure
Once a year around Easter, my family leaves me behind for two weeks. My wife Tali and our two kids Mai (12) and Yann (7) make their way to Israel. My wife calls it a family visit, she insists that the kids must see their close relatives and my views on Israel, Jewish identity and global Zionism should never stand in the way or interfere with family matters. For the obvious reasons, I myself never go to Israel. I had decided ten years ago that unless Israel becomes a state of its citizens, I have nothing to do there.
In our first parental years in London Tali and I had some discussions about her favourite choice of Easter break. Initially I didn’t approve. I insisted that schlepping innocent youngsters to the apartheid ‘Jews only state’ would contribute little to their future well-being, and in fact, it may distort their ethical senses. In those early parental years Tali dismissed my fears, she argued that our kids should be treated as free human beings. They must be entitled to see their family and it is down to them to make up their minds when they are ready to do so.
When our kids were very young, I found it pretty difficult to sustain my argument. Mai and Yann didn’t have any interest in political or ethical complexities. However, as my kids grew up, their journey in and out of the Hebraic shtetl had become a major education chapter for myself more than for anyone else. Observing my kids transformed into light Israelophiles opened my eyes. I happened to grasp the impact of Israel and Zionism through the juvenile eyes of my British kids. I had learned to admit how easy it may be to fall in love with Israel.
My kids love it there. They adore the blue sky, they go on and on about the sea and the sandy beaches. I guess that they love humus and falafel. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that everything I have mentioned so far belongs to the land - i.e., Palestine rather than the state - i.e., Israel. However, it doesn’t end there. They also love to talk in Hebrew surrounded by Hebrew speakers, to laugh in Hebrew and even to get upset in Hebrew. They love the Hebraic Chutzpah that is inherently entangled with the Israeli openness. At the end of the day, Hebrew is their mother tongue.
When Tali and the kids land in cloudy London they happen to be confused and lost for a while. Tali becomes slightly nostalgic about the successful theatrical career she left behind. This obviously makes a lot of sense. The case of my kids is slightly more complicated. They are Brits. Though Hebrew is their mother tongue, English is their first language. In London they clearly miss some liberties they celebrated there: they want to keep on playing in the open fields, to bathe in the glorious Mediterranean sun overwhelmed by the dry spring blossoms. But far more noticeably, Israel resolves what seems as their inevitable emerging identity complex. While here in London they are troubled with their ethnic identity, they can never decide who they are, whether they are ex-Israelis, ex-Jews, Secular Jews, Christian by culture, the descendents of a Hebrew speaking Palestinian, the son and daughter of a notorious proud self-hater and so on. In Israel, and especially with their family around, none of those questions come into play. The Israelis tend to accept you as a qualified brother as long as you are not an Arab. While in multi-ethnic London my kids are often confronted with some obvious questions regarding their origin, questions they find hard to tackle a lot because of myself and my stand, in Israel those questions are non-existent.
When my kids come back to London, for a week or so they make me feel as if it is me and my lunacy which imposed these winter exilic conditions upon them. Deep inside I know that they are absolutely right. ‘Tough’, is all I can say in my defence.
For a week or so after their return my kids become light Zionists. It is not that they dispute what I say about Palestine, it is not that they develop any sense of Jewish national aspiration, it is not that my kids are blind to the suffering of the Palestinian people either. In fact my seven-year-old son is horrified by the gigantic wall and can’t stop asking about the people who live behind it. But, there is something they experience in Israel, something that makes Zionism into the biggest successful Jewish Diaspora narrative for over two millennia. It is not the ideology that makes Zionism successful, my kids do not care about ideology, they probably do not know what the word means. It is not the politics either, my kids do not know much about politics. It is all about belonging. Zionism is a symbolic identifier and it provides the Diaspora Jews with a symbolic order. It gives a signifier to every possible appearance, it creates a coherent and consistent world. It gives name to the sea, the sky, the sun, the land, brotherhood, yearning and friendship. But it also gives a name to the enemy, the goyim and even the self-haters. Zionism is a lucid world order, unfortunately it is merciless and murderous as well.
Through the eyes of my young kids I have an opportunity to study the meaning of Israel rather than its politics or practices. Through them I can see what Israel is there to offer and how forceful it may be. Analysing my children’s empathic relationship with Israel, I have now grasped that the contemporary Jewish experience is premised on two inherent sets of dialectics. One is set between Eretz Yisrael and the Diaspora, the other can be formulated as ‘love yourself as much as you hate anyone else’.
Eretz Yisrael and the Diaspora
“I am a human being, I am a Jew and I am an Israeli. Zionism was an instrument to move me from the Jewish state of being to the Israeli state of being. I think it was Ben-Gurion who said that the Zionist movement was the scaffolding to build the home, and that after the state’s establishment it should be dismantled.” (Avraham Burg, ‘Leaving the Zionist ghetto’ in an Interview with Ari Shavit, 25 July 2007)
As far as Israeli-born secular Jews are concerned, Zionism means very little. If Zionism is there to maintain that Jews are entitled to national home in Zion, the Israeli-born Jew lives this very realty to start with. For him/her, Zionism is a remote historical chapter associated with an old picture of a man with a big black beard (Herzl). For the Israelis, Zionism is not a transformation awaiting to happen, it is rather a boring, tedious, dated and dull historical chapter on the verge of bla bla. It is far less interesting than contemporary Olmert’s cash envelops or Obama turning into an Israeli Spokesman. Indeed, for the new Israelites, Galut (Diaspora) has some bad connotations. It is associated with ghettos, with shame and persecution, yet, this term doesn’t ascribe to downtown Manhattan or London’s Soho. In other words, Israelis do not tend to identify their migration out of Israel as a return to the Galut. Like other migrant populations, they just search for a better life. It must be mentioned that for most Israelis, Israel is far from being a heroic glorious location. Naturally, after 60 years with the same woman, one may fail to see her beauty anymore.
The so-called ‘Israeli’ i.e., an Israeli-born secular Jew, the successful product of post-revolutionary Zionism, is now so used to his existence in the region that he has lost his Jewish survival instinct. Instead, he adopts the most hedonistic interpretation of Western enlightened individualism that abolishes the last reminiscence of tribal collectivism. This may explain why Israel had been defeated in the last Lebanon war. The new Israeli doesn’t see any real reason to sacrifice himself on a collective Jewish altar. He is far more interested in exploring the pragmatic aspects of the philosophy of ‘good life’. This may explain as well why the Israeli military cannot tackle the growing threat of Qassam rockets. In order to do so, Israeli generals need to implement some courageous ground tactics. Seemingly, they learned their lesson in Lebanon: hedonistic societies do not produce Spartan warriors and without real warriors at your disposal you may better off fighting from afar. Instead of sending special infantry units into Gaza at dawn, it is apparently far easier to drop bombs on populated neighbourhoods or alternatively to starve its habitants to submission. Needless to say, the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Hezbollah, the Iranians and the entire Muslim world see it all. Day by day they review the Israeli cowardice tactics, they know that Israel’s days are numbered.
As interesting as it may sound, the Israelis are not that concerned with their fatal inevitable emerging reality, at least not consciously. Because their tribal survival instinct has been replaced by enlightened individualism, the young Israeli is concerned largely with personal survival rather than with any collective plan. The Israeli can go as far as asking, “how the hell can I get out of here?” The new secular Israeli Jew is an escapist. As soon as he/she finishes his/her compulsory duty, he or she would either rush to the airport or learn how to ’switch off’ all news channels. The amount of Israelis who leave their homeland is growing by the day. The rest, those who are doomed to stay, develop an apathetic culture of indifference.
Beaufort and Sderot
I recently watched Beaufort, an Israeli award winning war film. Though I wasn’t at all overwhelmed with the cinematic achievement, the film is an astonishing exposure of Israeli fatigue and defeatism. The film tells the story of an IDF special infantry unit (Golany) that is dug-in in a bunker within a Byzantine fortress on top of a mountain in southern Lebanon. The plot takes place days before the 1st Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon (2000). As it happens, the Israeli platoons are surrounded by Hezbollah warriors. Days and night they live in trenches, hide in concrete shelters and are subject to constant barrages of mortars and missiles. Though they all plan life after that hell they are caught into, they happen to die one after the other by an enemy they don’t even see.
The Israelis loved Beaufort, the world was slightly less convinced of its cinematic quality. If you ask yourself why the Israelis loved it so much, here is my answer. For the Israelis, the situation in the Beaufort is an allegory of a state that comes to realise its temporality and futile existence. As much as the Israeli soldiers are dreaming to run away as far as they can get, whether it is settling in NYC or ‘getting stoned’ in Goa, the Israeli society is coming to terms with its doomed fatality. Like the soldiers in the film, the Israelis want to become Americans, Parisians, Londoners and Berliners. The numbers of Israelis who are queuing for Polish passports are increasing by the day. Beaufort the film is a metaphor of a society that comes to terms with itself being in a siege. A society that comes to realise that there maybe no escape route whether it is a physical one or by the means of growing indifference. The film can be interpreted as a parable of a society that comes to terms with the gravest notion of its own temporality.
Interestingly enough, as much as the soldiers in the Beaufort and the people of Sderot or Ashkelon are confused by their will to leave everything behind and to run for their life, as much as they can’t see the point in clinging to where they are, for the Diaspora Jew, Israel is nothing less than a lucid model of glory. Israel is both the meaning and the meaning in its making. For the Diaspora Jew, Israel is the symbolic transformation aiming at liberation and even redemption of the Jewish misery. Israel is everything the Diaspora Jew is not. It is full of chutzpah, it is forceful, it is militant, it stands for what it believes in. Accordingly, for a young Jew from Golders Green or Brooklyn, making Aliyah or even just joining what he or she mistakenly regards as the heroic Israeli army, is far more glorious than joining dad’s law firm, dental studio, or accountant company.
Being horrified by the remote possibility that my kids may surprise me one day by suggesting that they may consider spending some time in Israel on their own without their mother’s parental guidance, I recently started to grasp that which Israel is there to offer world Jews. In fact, not many Jewish parents would stop their son or daughter from joining the IDF, why should they? The IDF is a very safe army to be in, it avoids ground battle, it kills from afar, it values its soldier as much as it loves inflicting the ultimate pain on others. Every Jewish father must accept that it may be useful for his youngster to learn how to drive a tank, fly a helicopter or shoot an MK 47. Unlike the shockingly under-equipped Palestinian warriors who die in vast quantities on a daily basis, the Israeli soldiers hardly risk their lives. Hence, the heroic Aliyah and even joining the IDF, seems to be a safe adventure, at least for the time being.
Though it is rather clear that most young Diaspora Jews choose to get on with their lives wherever they are and to avoid ‘taking advantage of’ the Zionist Aliyah challenge, Zionism still provides them with a symbolic identifier. Zionism and its Aliyah operators offer them the opportunity to either identify with the few who went that far or to themselves become soldiers in one of the strongest armies in the world.
Wandering Around
Zionism invented the Jewish nation and set its national home, Israel, into a devastating conflict that is now taking a global shape and has become a serious global threat. Yet, for the Israelis, those who happen to be in the eye of the storm, ‘Zionism’ means very little. Israelis join the IDF not because they are Zionists but because they are Jews (as opposed to the Muslims around them). This crucial realisation may convey a new meaning for the notion of the ‘wandering Jew’. The dialectic that is set between the Diaspora and Eretz Yisrael leads towards a counter flow of migration, aspiration and yearning. The Diaspora Jews are aspired by Israel in the light of the Zionist fantasy, the Israeli Jews, on the other hand, are determined to escape their emerging siege. The Diaspora is heading towards Eretz Yisrael, the Israeli Jews, at large, are desperate to get out.
This counter flow of migration/aspiration is far from being a matter of contingency, in fact it is the direct product of the holy Judaic scriptures. As I explored in my ‘Esther to AIPAC’ paper[1], more and more Bible scholars are now disputing the historicity of the Bible. Seemingly, the Bible is for most part “written after the Babylonian Exile and whose writings rework (and in large part invent) previous Israelite history so that it reflects and reiterates the experiences of those returning from the Babylonian exile.”
Consequently, the Bible, being an exilic text, leads to a fragmented reality in which the Diaspora Jew yearns for ‘homecoming’ yet once at home, the ideology loses its appeal. The case of Zionism is shockingly similar, it has managed to aspire some Jews about Zion, yet, once in Zion, the ideology fails to provide for the domestic adventure.
We can clearly detect a dialectic tension between Zionism, a Diaspora Jewish identity and Israeliness, which is largely related to the Hebraic project. Zionism and Israel are two diverse poles that together form the contemporary Jewish Experience.
Love Yourself as much as you Hate Everyone Else
Once we understand the dialectic opposition between Eretz Yisrael and the Diaspora, we are ready to move on and reflect upon the unique complimentarily relationships between the two.
As much as Eretz Yisrael and the Diaspora establish a counter flow of aspiration and migration, Israel is there to establish a coherent and consistent symbolic interpretation of Jewish tribal chauvinism and supremacy. Israel makes ‘love yourself as much as you hate everyone else’ into a devastating reality, in which the self-lover happens to be capable of inflicting the ultimate pain on his surrounding neighbours.
In order to understand the Jewish concept of self-loving, we may have to reflect first on the issue that makes this particular form of personal emotional consciousness take place: the issue of chosenness.
While the religious Judaic understanding of Jewish chosenness is realised as a moral burden in which Jews are ordered by God to stand as a model of ethical behaviour, the secular Jewish interpretation is reduced into a banal chauvinist form of racially orientated supremacy. It clearly encourages those who are lucky enough to have a Jewish mother to love themselves blindly. It is crucial to mention at this stage that in most cases Jewish supremacy would lead to a certain level of dismissal of the elementary rights of the other. In many cases it leads toward animosity and even hatred whether latent or manifest.
It is this supremacy which stands at the heart of the Zionist claim for Palestine at the expense of its indigenous inhabitants. But it obviously doesn’t end with Palestine, the radical manifestation of Jewish lobbying for extension of the “War Against Terror” as expressed, for instance, by the AJC is just another example. I would never dare say that this type of war mongering is inherent to Jews (as people), yet, unfortunately, it is rather symptomatic to Jewish tribal political thinking left, right and centre. Thus, it shouldn’t take us by surprise that at the forefront of the struggle for humanism and universal ethics we meet Jews such as Jesus, Spinoza and Marx. These people who went out of their way to introduce a notion of brotherhood stood primarily against the tribal supremacy they found in themselves and in their cultural heritage. They above all protested against what was familiar to them and suggested brotherhood and love instead.
However, we may note that Jesus, Spinoza and Marx, didn’t manage to transform the Jews (as a collective), though they had a bit of success with some of them. Seemingly, the move from hard-core dogmatic monotheistic tribalism towards tolerant pluralist universalism is on the verge of the impossible. Indeed, more than a few Jews have managed to leave God behind, as we know some had become Marxists but somehow even many of those remained loyal to their monotheistic tribally exclusive ‘Jews only’ philosophy (Bund, JAZ). Others moved as far as becoming a ‘nation like other nations’ (Zionism) except that they made sure they cleansed and killed those who didn’t fit ethnically to their vision of themselves (1948 Nakba). Some became so liberal and cosmopolitan that they managed to reduce contemporary global conflict into a simplistic take on ’soft drink’. “People who drink Coca Cola do not fight each other”, they informed us. This may be the truth, however, as it seems, the Coke drinkers have recently killed 1.5 million Iraqis all in the name of ‘democracy’.
It is extremely crucial to mention that many Jews have managed to assimilate and to leave their tribal traits behind, they operate as ordinary human beings. They have nothing to do with Bund, Neocons or Zionism. Seemingly, those truly liberated beings are not the subject of my study, and I can only wish them luck and success.
However, though Jews are divided between themselves on many things, they are united in fighting those who they collectively identify as their enemies. It took me a while to realise that those who operate under the exclusive Jewish banner within the Palestinian solidarity and the Anti-War movements are primarily concerned with fighting any references to Jewish lobbying or Jewish power.
One explanation was provided earlier on. Zionism per se, has little to do with Israel, it is an internal Diaspora Jewish discourse. Consequently, the debate between Zionists and Jewish anti-Zionists has no significance on Israel or the struggle against Israeli actions. It is there to keep the debate within the family while planting more confusion amongst the goyim. It allows the Jewish ethnic campaigner to maintain that “not all Jews are Zionists, in fact there are almost two dozen ‘Jewish Anti Zionists’ around the world”. As pathetic as it may sound, this dull argument has been good enough to effectively shatter any criticism of Jewish ethnocentric lobbying that may have been voiced the last four decades. Seemingly (and unfortunately), when it comes to ‘action’, the Zionists and the so-called Jewish ‘anti’-Zionists are acting as one people. Why are they acting as one people? Because they are one people. Are they really one people? It doesn’t matter as long as they themselves believe to be or act as if they are. And what is it that makes them into one people? They probably hate everyone else as much as they love themselves.
There is an old Jewish saying, “Tell me who your friends are and I will tell you who you are”, it would be most appropriate to amend it into a far more refined reading of Jewish contemporary tribal politics. “Just tell me who you hate and I’ll tell you who you are”. If, for instance, you hate Finkelstein, Atzmon, Blankfort, Mearsheimer & Walt and so on, you must be Jewish. If you just don’t agree with any of the above you can actually be anyone.
Hatred and even personal loathing is sadly symptomatic to Jewish tribal politics, probably something to do with Jewish politics being marginal and defined by negation. Noticeably, Israel has managed to perfect it and give it real new meaning. While the Diaspora Jew is entitled to love himself, his hatred to the other is largely suppressed. As much as some Jews may like to follow their religious calling and spit on churches[2] or just destroy the lives of prominent academics and artists, hatred and violence is not tolerated within the contemporary Western discourse. This is exactly where Israel comes into play. As much as the Israelis love themselves, they are capable of hating anyone else. They are capable of starving millions of Palestinians, they are capable of killing when they feel like it. Israel made ‘love yourself/ hate everyone else’ into a viable practice. It resolved the most inherent ambivalent tension having to do with self-loving while being amongst others. Israel doesn’t just hate Prof. Finkelstein, it is capable of detaining and deporting him as well. Israel doesn’t just hate the Palestinians, it is equally capable of starving them, locking them behind walls and barbed wire, bombing them and even nuking the hardliners when the time is ripe.
This is the most frightening aspect of complimentarily between Eretz Yisrael and the Diaspora. It is the materialisation of a hate-ridden society. After two millennia of wandering, the newly reformed national Jew is capable of not just hating but also of inflicting the ultimate pain on those he may hate.
Exploring the Jewish Question
Once a year, around Easter, my family leaves me behind for two weeks. My wife Tali and our two kids Mai and Yann make their way to Israel. I can clearly see how much they love it there. I can clearly understand what is it that they love there. Gladly, I can say that at least for the time being, my kids are not madly in love with themselves and do not see themselves as part of any tribal collective. Consequently, they do not hate anyone either.
However, through their experience I can see what Israel is there to offer, especially to those who do not dwell there. I can see how successful the Israeli adventure looks from afar. Through their experience I learn about the dialectic between the Israel/Hebraic domestic quest and the Zionist/Diaspora aspiration. The negation and complimentarily between the Hebraic and the Diaspora is the essence of contemporary Jewish experience.
If we want to tackle the crimes committed by Israel and the evil promoted by global Zionist lobbies, we better initiate a profound study of the Jewish question and the Jewish experience. It is not just Israel or Zionism but rather the unique devastating amalgam of complexity formed by both. Unless we question the Jewish experience, we are doomed to continue wasting our time employing irrelevant archaic 19th century terminology that has nothing to do with the conflict.
Once we are brave enough to explore the Jewish question and Jewish identity we may be able to understand that Israeli apartheid is not just political circumstances, it is actually a natural outcome of a particular racially orientated tribal philosophy. The Israeli wall is not a political measure but rather a manifestation of an exclusive racist attitude that stands at the core of the Jewish notion of segregation. Once we stand up and insist upon interpreting Israeli/Zionist scrutinising of the Jewish question we may as well grasp why Senator Obama rushed to the AIPAC conference three hours after his nomination for the Democratic Party was secured. The set of promises made by Obama, Clinton and McCain in AIPAC a few days ago is in fact a true reflection of the contemporary Jewish experience. The senators feed the Jewish American prominent lobbyists exactly with the food they want to swallow. At the expense of the Palestinians, Iraqis, Syrians, Iranians and billion Muslims, American politicians openly promise that America will keep being biased. Seemingly, America prefers to appease its tiny Jewish minority instead of being an international mediator and a true genuine negotiator.
I would strongly argue that in the light of the crimes committed by the Jewish state in the name of the Jewish people, we are perfectly entitled to question the philosophy and praxis involved with Jewish experience. We should never be intimidated by Jewish ethnic activists and Zionist smear campaigners.
Since Jews do not form a race but largely succumb to some different forms of collective, racially orientated politics, we shouldn’t be afraid of touching the matter. Once we take it as a given that Jews do not form a race, the study of Jewish identity and politics is neither racism nor essentialism. It is actually the very opposite, it is in fact a critical reading of racist ideology and its inherent supremacy.
Those of us who regard Israel and Zionism as the grave danger to world peace must pursue in this study. Rather than focusing separately on Zionism or Israel, we must learn the unique amalgam of complexity that is formed by both. This dialectic compound shapes the contemporary notion of Jewish Experience. Zionism in itself is no more than a decoy. It is there to grab our attention and divert our focus. Seemingly our attack on Zionism has no significance on Israel, its policies and its people. At the most, it disturbs some Zionist Jews.
As much as the study of the ‘Jewish Experience’ may help us to save millions of lives of Palestinians, Iraqis, Syrians and Iranians, it is also a Jewish collective interest to understand the true nature of the Jewish experience and politics. At the end of the day, it is Jewish politics (rather than religion) that may eventually demonise the entire Jewish collective for the next millennia to come. It is a Jewish collective interest to stop the political beast before it is too late.
I owe it to my Palestinian brothers and sisters, I owe it to myself, I owe it to Yann and Mai, I want to make sure that by the time they protest against my own ‘anti-Jewish experience’ I’ll be clever enough to discuss it all with them in an open and thoughtful manner.
[1] http://www.counterpunch.org/atzmon03032007.html
[2] According to Dr. Israel Shahak, in his book Jewish History, Jewish Religion, this practice has ancient roots and has become increasingly commonplace: Dishonoring Christian religious symbols is an old religious duty in Judaism. Spitting on the cross, and especially on the Crucifix, and spitting when a Jew passes a church, have been obligatory from around AD 200 for pious Jews. In the past, when the danger of anti-Semitic hostility was a real one, the pious Jews were commanded by their rabbis either to spit so that the reason for doing so would be unknown, or to spit onto their chests, not actually on the cross or openly before the church.
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Gilad Atzmon is a jazz musician, composer, producer and writer.
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Dear Gilad,
First, congrats on a very interesting, timely and important article (which I reposted on my own blog). You are raising all the core issues here, but I still am left with more questions than answers. For example, I wonder if you agree with the idea that much of the ‘love yourself as much as you hate anyone else’ comes from from Talmudic Judaism , the type of rabbinical Judaism which, itself, has its roots in the sect of the Pharisees and which later was expanded by Maimonides, Karo, Luria and others whose wordview was imbued with hostility to the societies which they lived in? If Zionism is the wrong target of critique, might Judaism not be a more pertinent one?
Then, you speak of a “hate ridden society” and in many ways it definitely is. Yet, there are also plenty of people in Israel consider themselves as liberal, enlightened and otherwise progressive and who cherish their common humanity with the rest of mankind and who do not buy into the racist worldview of the hate ridden majority. Still, they choose to live in that society. You chose to leave. Do you think that it is possible to be a progressive, live in Israel and not be a hypocrite? What do you tell your Palestinian friends: do they have real allies in Israel or are all Israelis their de-facto enemies?
Lastly, considering that Isarel is a hate-ridden society, which do you think of the One State vs. Two States solution has the most chances, however slim, to be either accepted by the Israelis or imposed on them (for example, following a major military defeat; something which Norman Finkelstein believes is a prerequisite for any change in the Israeli public opinion)?
Please keep writing on this issue, there is no exaggerating the importance of this topic (but save some time for your excellent music!).
Dear Vineyardsaker
Thanks so much for your attention,
The question you raise is very problematic,
It is not clear when (chronologically) Judaism had become a Tribal concept or a ‘national belief system’ and in fact this leads us to the the question we must address regarding the relationships between Jews, Judaism, Jewishness and Zionism. To reduce it all to ‘Zionism’ may serve a political cause but is also intellectually insufficient. I do understand that we love to reduce complexity into terminological clarity (colonialism, tribalism, Zionism bla bla). Unfortunately, it doesn’t work form me anymore. I can see tribalism , colonialism supremacy but actually I prefer to deal with Jewish experience that brings all those along.
Then, you speak of a “hate ridden society” and in many ways it definitely is. Yet, there are also plenty of people in Israel consider themselves as liberal enlightened and otherwise progressive and who cherish their common humanity with the rest of mankind and who do not buy into the racist worldview of the hate ridden majority. Still, they choose to live in that society.
G: I would argue that the fact that they consider themselves to be liberal means very little. Self -realisation better be approved by the ‘other’. And the notion of ‘Otherness’ is exactly what they lack. Hence they deport Finkelstein and lock the Pls in concentration camps.
Do you think that it is possible to be a progressive, live in Israel and not be a hypocrite?
G: One can always claim to be progressive…, in other words, i am with you here, i do not believe in Israelis being progressive, but i take it further, i do not believe in the notion of Jewish progressiveness. I think that you can’t be both progressive and tribal. While many progressive beings may be of Jewish origin, not a single person who regard oneself primarily as a Jew can be progressive. However, we always have to remember that one can be a humanist without being progressive. Torah Jews for instance, are ethically orientated yet orthodox and tribal. In spite of them being non progressive, they are the only true humanist Jewish collective i can think of.
What do you tell your Palestinian friends: do they have real allies in Israel or are all Israelis their de-facto enemies?
G: I don’t have to tell our Palestinian friends a thing, by now they know who are their friends. However, they know as well that it is down to them to bring a change along. They have realised that Peace envoy Blair, Middle East Envoy (cash machine) Levy and Obama may not provide the good.
Lastly, considering that Isarel is a hate-ridden society, which do you think of the One State vs. Two States solution has the most chances, however slim, to be either accepted by the Israelis or imposed on them (for example, following a major military defeat; something which Norman Finkelstein believes is a prerequisite for any change in the Israeli public opinion)?
G: I have a rule. I do not interfere with issues to do with conflict resolution. I can obviously see that TSS doesn’t address the Pls cause. But I know as well that many Pls prefer to avoid the OSS.
Since I do not live in the region, I allow myself to say that I support Bishara’s ‘State of it Citizens’ solution. A state that respect citizen equality. This state would be Palestine.
Please keep writing on this issue, there is no exaggerating the importance of this topic (but save some time for your excellent music!).
G: You are wonderful
Peace
G
Bravo for a fine article. Douglas Reed’s book can be a useful source of information for the early history:
http://knud.eriksen.adr.dk/Controversybook/index.htm
How many jazz clubs and groups are there in Gaza? How many in what is presently called the West Bank? How many in countries where Muslims are in the majority?
Dear Gilad,
Thanks for your interesting and exhaustive answers. To tell you the truth, I came to my personal conclusion that any form of patriotism or nationalism is inherently, sinful, unethical and, last but not least, fundamentally mistaken. Since I was educated as a very loyal patriot and nationalist, it took me decades to come to that conclusion. Still, there came a point where I just did not see how somebody could be a nationalist and still cherish our common humanity over our ethno-tribal origins. Still, I cannot ignore the fact that while one should not judge others on the basis or their ethnicity certain *cultures* (which do not exactly overlap with ethnic groups) do coalesce and develop around specific moral/ethical values. In the case of Israel, I can only say that all my efforts to study and understand the “Jewish worldview” (for lack of a better term) over the past 2000 years have lead me to the conclusion that there is a unique, consistent and particularly virulent hostility of Jews towards non-Jews. When you speak of a ‘hate-ridden society” you speak about Israel as a country. When Shafarevich writes about a “culture of Jewish hate” he speaks about what he calls a “3000 year old mystery” (and Shahak seems to be leaning this way).
Do you believe that there is a different form of Jewish (as opposed to exclusively Israeli) xenophobia (in the double Greek meaning of phobia as fear and hatred) which is qualitatively different from the type of xenophobia found in other cultures? Are we dealing here with only the Jewish manifestation of a general human tendency to hate and fear the “other”, or is there something, whatever that may be, which can explain the ‘hate-ridden society” we observe in Israel today (and which I have seen with my own eyes)?
I was reading through this excellent article thinking to myself, ‘boy, this author is nailing it in ways that remind me of Gilad Atzmon. Then I scrolled back up and realized it was one of his/your pieces again.
I’ve got a ‘my two cents’ theory based on intuition, not historical knowledge in terms of the tribal/racial aspect, something which is hinted at in your piece but not spelled out the way I look at it, namely:
I was not surprised at all to learn the Bible may not be historically accurate. Clearly it is a collection of meaningful stories, some based on actual history, some a form of collective mythology, not unlike the way British and American citizens have a particular narrative of WW I and II that is self-serving, ‘believed’ to be essentially true and is actually mainly just propaganda of course, backed by show trials, documentary films, scholarly publications and all the rest of it. That’s the way collectives tell their stories, or rather: it is not whether or not it is true that matters, rather simply that the story IS the message and in fact tells the truth of the collective.
The Jewish story is one of alienation, persecution, superiority, talent and so forth. My intuitive sense of its roots, based simply on listening to the many different stories I have heard in my fifty odd years is this: the original Jewish people come from tribal times, probably the Middle East. They were nomadic, like many tribes in those times. At some point this nomadic existence involved developing extended trading networks in that various members of the tribe would stay in one city, others in another, i.e. they didn’t always travel around together in one single cluster. However, maintaining close clan networks was helpful for trade, commerce, political influence (on which the latter depended in order to grease bureaucratic, royal and despotic wheels) and so forth.
Learning how to function in alien societies means relating with internal power structures whilst maintaining one’s underlying loyalties to the extended original clan. The Chosen People mythology is very powerful, compelling. It is the ultimate Narcissistic Cult. It presupposes the union of an Ominipotent God - and there can be Only One - and this One has chosen only one Us, so we and I (members of this tribe) are One with the One and anyone outside is not, is an ‘other’, is divorced from the state of being ‘we the chosen’. There is nothing very mysterious about this; indeed, anyone who has spent time in tribal societies know that they all have this sense of themselves to one degree or another. But most tribal societies are insular meaning that each member of the collective is 24/7 engrossed in the collective experience.
What makes the Jewish tribal experience unique, I think, is that they have learned to maintain deep tribe/clan identity at the same time as living amongst other tribes and cultures.
It is because of this that I have ‘intuited’ that their origins have to do with a) being nomadic and b) emphasising trade and commerce which requires political as well as business acumen.
The religion is something that all cultures produce as a way to bind the society together into one overall narrative. We modern Westerners have dispensed with as shared religion turning it mainly into a cultish or individual experience, but we have replaced it with large ‘national’ narratives, so essentially it’s the same thing except not done with nearly so much art and intention than times of yore, as imperfect as they were.
I think some of Kevin Macdonald’s study on this is along the lines of this article. I agree with Gilad that getting hoodwinked by the Zionist versus Israel notions or even also being sidetracked overmuch by various solutions in the political sphere do not address the root dynamics and it is extremely important for both Jews and Goys to get a better understanding of what being a ‘Jew’ is, in essence and function, what ‘Israel’ is and so forth.
A young Jewish colleague of mine at work asked me what I thought of the Jews. I said: ‘they are a succesfully materialist tribe’. I agree they are not a race. Nor a religion. They are a modern tribe with a deeply ingrained sense of who is ‘us’ and who is ‘not us’, usually in the form of being able to recognise who is ‘us’ and cultivating business and other ties on that basis.
My grandfather was a Russian Jew who left Riga around 1910. He did what Gilad mentions in the article above, fully assimilated. Or as much as he could. We didn’t even find out that he was of Russian Jewish origins until after he died. We don’t know why he hid all this from us - perhaps for business reasons, perhaps he was ‘undercover’ (!) - but I like to think that just chose not to pass on that cultural ‘meme’, that tribal obsession or limitation because the open nature of American society made it no longer necessary to network in that way.
When all is said and done, in the modern context being ‘Jewish’ is a function of a sort of cultural networking that includes marriage, gene pool management and all the rest of it. Very successful materialist tribe whose foundations, unfortunately, rest overmuch on Narcissus.
imho, a major problem is that Zionism cannot be universalized. That is, if all persons who fancy themselves as members of some ‘imagined community’ decided to carve out a territorial nation-state for themselves, we’re probably looking at least another couple of thousand states in the international system (with enough bloodletting and ethnic cleansing to last another couple of thousand years or till the planet is nuked by somebody’s exercising of their ‘Samson option’). The reductio ad absurdum of this ideology was brought home to me by the advocacy of “Zionism for women” by a prominent feminist.
Vy:. Thanks for your interesting and exhaustive answers. To tell you the truth, I came to my personal conclusion that any form of patriotism or nationalism is inherently, sinful, unethical and, last but not least, fundamentally mistaken.
G: I wouldn’t go that far, I do support Pls nationalism and patriotism… indeed we have a serious problem with racially orientated patriotism..i.e. the Jewish type (left,right and centre) as well as the Nazi one.
VY: Since I was educated as a very loyal patriot and nationalist, it took me decades to come to that conclusion. Still, there came a point where I just did not see how somebody could be a nationalist and still cherish our common humanity over our ethno-tribal origins.
G: Good point, and this is indeed a big difference between J nationalism and other national movements. J nationalism has no respect to other nationalist movements, Even Nazis respected other national movement Zionism included.
VY: Still, I cannot ignore the fact that while one should not judge others on the basis or their ethnicity certain *cultures* (which do not exactly overlap with ethnic groups) do coalesce and develop around specific moral/ethical values. In the case of Israel, I can only say that all my efforts to study and understand the “Jewish worldview” (for lack of a better term) over the past 2000 years have lead me to the conclusion that there is a unique, consistent and particularly virulent hostility of Jews towards non-Jews.
G: This is indeed the case, yet, Zionism let the beast out of the bottle. Now Jews (Israelites) can kill those they hate and even nuke the ones they really hate (in case we take Mofaz seriously)
When you speak of a ‘hate-ridden society” you speak about Israel as a country. When Shafarevich writes about a “culture of Jewish hate” he speaks about what he calls a “3000 year old mystery” (and Shahak seems to be leaning this way).
G: I agree, Israel is the collective materialisation of Mimonidas’ Goy hatred
Do you believe that there is a different form of Jewish (as opposed to exclusively Israeli) xenophobia (in the double Greek meaning of phobia as fear and hatred) which is qualitatively different from the type of xenophobia found in other cultures?
G: This is an interesting question, i am not so sure xenophobia is really a ‘Jewish thing’, i actually think they love to live amongst others and to celebrate their differences (as we know they are defined by negation), Interestingly enough, many of them are sure that the people around them do not just hate them due to xenophobia but rather exercising a unique J hating namely ‘anti semitism’, this is actually very revealing…
VY: Are we dealing here with only the Jewish manifestation of a general human tendency to hate and fear the “other”, or is there something, whatever that may be, which can explain the ‘hate-ridden society” we observe in Israel today (and which I have seen with my own eyes)?
G: As we know the J condition is rather unique, racially orientated while not being a race. I would argue that the fantasy of anti Senitism is a product of some serious self loath. it is a form of a collective projection.
Vy:. To tell you the truth, I came to my personal conclusion that any form of patriotism or nationalism is inherently, sinful, unethical and, last but not least, fundamentally mistaken.
Sarah: I really dissagree with you. I have come to regard dispensing with patriotism as a privilege. While no one could possibly be more enamored with their own nation than the Yanks, enjoying a life of multi-ethnic gastronomy, relative wealth & high-speed broadband, makes it far easier to throw your flag away & fantasize about universal values. Pakistanis, Palestinians & even the long suffering Irish, who have fought tooth & nail for the right to dwell autonomously on their own patch of crudely-carved land, are far less likely to join in.
The liberal left should realize that not everybody on the planet is falling over themselves to be a cosmopolitan, even though, as Mary points out in her excellent repost to Gilad’s paper, cultural hybridity is becoming an increasingly common phenomenon as more & more of us are born in & raised in different lands to our parents.
But the Jewish occupation of Palestinian soil simply hijacks the idea of nationalism. It exploits nationalism as much as it exploits the Enlightenment & even God. If that were not enough, it also feeds off the Universalist delusion that we all somehow have access to one another’s realities. Gilad’s observation that Zionism is the preoccupation of the Diaspora is as enlightening as it is obvious. And it is something that only an Israeli in exile could notice. It is an observation about the human need for belonging but it is also an observation that could only be made in circumstances where belonging has failed. It’s actually pretty sad. It is testimony to both Israels nationalism & the fact that this nationalism is very young to be afflicted with a sell by date.
Sarah: “While no one could possibly be more enamored with their own nation than the Yanks, enjoying a life of multi-ethnic gastronomy, relative wealth & high-speed broadband, makes it far easier to throw your flag away & fantasize about universal values.”
Actually, this makes for a good caricature, but is in no way a fair representation of the motives or circumstances of those who reject nationalism or patriotism. For example, may I suggest to you that people can reject these concepts not because the opponents of these ideas are too fat and comfortable, but because they believe that the concepts such as “nation” are by definition abstract constructs which are unable to fit into the human reality of life. Think about it, nations, tribes, clans, ethnicities are all categories which we CREATE but which do not have an objective existence outside our minds. People exist, nations do not (at least not outside human intervention)
Then why should anyone have to accept them as real?! Only because some do (and act accordingly)?!
The ideas of nationalism and patriotism with which I was raised told me that while all humans are humans, some should be more important to me than others, that somehow I had a superior duty of loyalty to those of my ethnic group than to the rest. Why should I accept that? Only because I was raised within one culture? And what happens if “my culture” or my ethnic group is wrong to another group, am I supposed to just say “right or wrong - my country”?
Nationalism and patriotism are all very noble as long as they are theoretical. But once you look at them realistically you realize that they are always the basis for creating loyalties which otherwise most people would reject, for a discrimination between human beings.
There is no need to be a patriot to defend your land from aggression, not any more than there is a need for some special ideological basis to the natural instinct of self-defense.: you are attacked, you either run or defend yourself. No ideology needed here, even an amoeba “knows” that. Patriotism is needed only then when you want to rally people around a concept or action which they otherwise would not consider. A patriot acts in the name of a “higher principle” (the nation, the tribe, whatever) which for some reason he/she has to not only accept, but place higher than his/her ethics (again, if ethics alone were a sufficient motivator, patriotism would not have to be appealed to) or common sense (ditto).
Still dubious?
Please name me a single circumstances in which a moral/ethical person would actually *need* the value of patriotism or nationalism to do the right thing (history is so full of examples of otherwise moral/ethical people doing the *wrong* thing in the name of patriotism and nationalism that investigating that is really useless). Please show me an example of “good” patriotism.
Ah. Atzmon is another boring Jewish cosmopolitan renegade bolshevik so typical of so many Jewish dystopian leftists of the past, constantly seeking to get rid of nationalism and religion and everything that else that makes human life vibrant and interesting, but always wanting to start the experiment with the Jew first. Such people never learn from history and never change, unfortunately. This rigid bolshevik mentality led to the murder of millions in the former USSR, which of course inevitably broke back up into a myriad of nationalities, as has every other empire or multinational state from Rome to Yugoslavia. Every creature has and seeks its roots, from the trout that persistently swims upstream to find its spawning ground, to the Jewish nation-in-exile, which after 2 millennium of dispersal and humiliation, finally made its way back to its own spawning ground. But, since the time of Moses there were always misfits and miscreants who have tried to misdirect the nation into all kinds of misadventures, with communism probably being the bloodiest of the lot. But in the end, mother nature wins out, and the kibbutzim fold, and the natural order of things prevails. Pseudointellectuals can never and will never change reality for the better. Only for the worse.
Jews-as-trout? Flailing about, struggling upstream against (humanist) currents? Revealing imagery.
Humans needs families, and families need communities which identify degrees of expected closeness by means of criteria of closer or more distant common descent. This is quite natural and universal human behaviour, and no sane religion or politique would try to interfere with it.
Typical ad hominem rant. Not one single word of substance. Not a single word on topic. (And, for the record: Jewish Bolsheviks were very much (secular) nationalists - this is why they executed people who dared to criticize them, even in the past. Ditto for their Neocon crazies ex-Trotskyites offsprings running the USA nowadays).
vineyardsaker: “Jewish Bolsheviks were very much (secular) nationalists - this is why they executed people who dared to criticize them, even in the past. Ditto for their Neocon crazies ex-Trotskyites offsprings running the USA nowadays”
Let me try to untangle this mishmash:
1) Which Jewish Bolsheviks were nationalists? And nationalists of what nation?
2) Who did they execute for daring to criticize them, and what did it have to do with their alleged nationalism?
3) Name a single prominent Neocon who was ever a Trotskyist — understanding that one of the principal tenets of Trotskyism was the defense or the Soviet Union against capitalist restoration. Some of them may have been Schachtmanites, but Schachtman (along with most of the Jewish members of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party) broke with Trotsky over his defense of the Soviet Union while Trotsky was still alive.
Please name me a single circumstances in which a moral/ethical person would actually *need* the value of patriotism or nationalism to do the right thing (history is so full of examples of otherwise moral/ethical people doing the *wrong* thing in the name of patriotism and nationalism that investigating that is really useless). Please show me an example of “good” patriotism.
Sarah: I don’t say that nationalism is good or bad. I say it exists in the imaginations of men. Note the Irish rejection of the Lisbon Treaty last Friday. Human beings crave sovereignty, community & identity through difference. We may wish the world were a hemoginized land-mass in which we join hands & swap recipes, but this would be fruitless. There is no such thing as universalism.
Plus - globalizing mechanisms like budget air travel & the internet, mean the modern westerner is no longer anchored to the land in the same way as, say a Kashmiri Hindu who has spent decades fighting over the line that Lord Mountbatten pulled out of his arce in 1947. Westerners are more able than ever to cultivate this universalist fantasy which is, at best a Guardian reader’s wet dream, & at worst a pernicious ideology aimed at legitimising the mass slaughter of Muslims & preserving the world order.
@Aaron: ok. let me try to answer your questions.
1 and 2) Jewish Bolsheviks where an interesting mix. Their rhetoric was all about internationalism and anti-nationalism (which their ideology considers as fundamentally reactionary) but their actual actions were clearly based on an acute sense of thier *Jewish* Russophobia. To fully make this case, one would need to use a lot of original materials and write a major book, so all I can do is refer you to Solzhenitsyn’s “300 years together” and Shafarevich’s “3000 year riddle” (both books are exclusively based on original sources, the vast majority of them Jewish, and are written by two absolutely brilliant authors). I am sorry to say that neither book has, so far, been published in English though (no wonder why…).
Keeping in mind that the vast majority of Russian Jews before the Revolution had Yiddish (and not Russian) as their first language and that they were raised in very enclosed Jewish societies it is not hard to imagine that they nationalism was Jewish, rather than Russian. Add to this the anti-Jewish discrimination practiced in pre-Revolutionary Russia and the immense hostility against Jews in the areas where the mostly lived (today’s Ukraine) and you will see that their hostility to their host nation was not really a surprise. What kind of impact would that have on a ChK (Soviet Secret Police) which was at least 75% Jewish and had a total and limitless power to execute anyone as “class enemy”, “reactionary” etc. is quite easy to imagine.
If you look at any historical material detailing the circumstances of the murders of literally millions of Orthodox Christians, the Russian intelligentsia and nobility, the Orthodox clergy you will see that the vast majority of them report the preeminent role Jews played in their murders. If you cannot read Russian, I can refer you to the Gulag Archipelago of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and, in particular, at his chapter about Naftalin Frenkel, Rappoport and the rest of the creators of the Soviet Gulag. Call in revenge for past injustices or call it hatred of the Russian idolaters, but the immense hate Jewish Bolsheviks had for anything Russian is hardly in dispute (at least not in Russia).
Following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution any forms of anti-Semitism were considered a *capital crime* and, in fact, the first Orthodox priest to be murdered by the Bolsheviks, Fr. John Kochurov, was killed because he served a liturgy to a past saint killed by Jews. A large amount of other Russian intellectuals were executed on charges of “anti-Semitism” by the ChK three-men tribunals.
I realize that the above goes totally against the carefully crafted narrative about Jews in pre-1917 Russia but then that should surprise nobody who knows how other such narratives (”a land without people for a people without land”) have been created and, alas, fully accepted - hook, line and sinker - in the West (thankfully not in the East where all this mythology is being totally wiped out by researchers and historians)
3) Necons and their Trotskyite roots. Please see:
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j061303.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dmccarthy/dmccarthy23.html
And of course, there are the words of Billy Krystal, the founder of Neoconservatism, who said :” “I regard myself to have been a young Trostkyite and I have not a single bitter memory. (see 2nd article above).
@Sarah: I agree that universalism can be used as an excuse for imperialism and oppression and I am in no way trying to suggest that this type of internationalism is good (heck, the Soviets when they invaded Afghanistan spoke of their “internationalist duty” to intervene there). No, all I am saying that I am no longer able to see a moral or ethical way to be a patriot or a nationalist. But the fact that I oppose patriotism and nationalism does not make me endorse internationalism either. These are all ideologies aimed at overlooking our human nature and our common humanity, as are, I think, *all* ideologies.
I don’t read Russian, despite studying it for over a year in college many decades ago, so I can’t read Solzhenitsyn’s or Shafarevich’s works even if it turns out they are worth reading.*
To say that Russian Jewish hatred of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Tsarist nobility represented some kind of Jewish nationalism or Russophobia is absurd, since that hatred was shared not only by members of other non-Russian nationalities but by probably the great majority of the ethnic-Russian urban working class and at least a large minority of the Russian peasantry. Of course, the role of ethnic Russians in the revolution — without their participation the civil war would have been quickly lost — is inconvenient to those, like Solzhenitsyn and Shafarevich, who want to hide their reactionary politics behind some kind of classless Russian nationalism.)
As for the Jewish Bolsheviks, a large proportion of them (both men and women) married ethnic Russians after the revolution, if not before. This certainly goes against Jewish tribalism, or at least the version of Jewish tribalism that I was raised with!
There are other claims that vineyardsaker makes that i believe to be false, but I don’t have the time or energy right now to research the necessary information. (Certainly, his claim that the Cheka was 75% Jewish is absurd, even if you regard anybody who had even one Jewish grandparent as a Jew.
For a useful commentary on the supposed relationship of Irving Kristol (not “Billy Krystal”), and the neocons in general, to Trotskyism, see (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/may2003/shac-m23.shtml).
* (For me, what’s worth reading is what will help me do my small part in liberating humanity from the over-500-year-old cancer of capitalist imperialism — a cancer that is killing tens of millions of people around the world every year and that is rapidly destroying the biosphere we all depend on. That certainly doesn’t mean I only read what I agree with; I’ve even read a fair chunk of the writings of Kevin MacDonald, for example, and, although my politics are fairly close to Trotskyism, I still read quite a lot by Stalinists, Anarchists, and many others. And I obviously read a lot of utter crap on the Web, including even the rants of Jack Garbage on this site.)
Jack Garbage writes: “Atzmon is another boring Jewish cosmopolitan renegade bolshevik … constantly seeking to get rid of nationalism and religion and everything that else that makes human life vibrant and interesting.”
Is J.G. (falsely) accusing us Jewish cosmopolitan renegade (???) bolsheviks of wanting to get rid of sex, good food, the arts, chess, etc.? Or does he only (truthfully) accuse us of wanting to get rid of nationalism and religion? The latter certainly did make life “interesting” in places like the Yugoslavia of the 1990’s — interesting as in the famous curse, “May you live in interesting times”.
It’s pretty clear that J.G.’s hostility to “pseudointellectuals” is really a hostility to anybody who affirms the value of, or even shows any signs of having, intellect.
oh Aaron, that is so lame. You can’t read Solzhenitsyn or Shafaravich, but you know that they want to “hide their reactionary politics behind some kind of classless Russian nationalism”. It is always amazing when somebody has an insight into the *desires* (”wants”) of somebody else, a kind of telepathy I suppose, but when that applies to remote (overseas) telepathic insight that is quite a feat.
That a self-confessed neo-Trotskyite would deliberately overlook the fact that the Red Army forcibly recruited into its ranks by *literally* decimating (in the original sense of the word, killing every 10th person) the villages who dared to turned down to defend the glorious Revolution does not surprise me (in contrast, Whites were volunteers).
Neither am I shocked by the fact that you seem to overlook the role played by the ChK in making sure that all the thus recruited Russians would remain loyal. After all, since all of these “innovations” were Trotsky’s main contribution to the Civil War I would not imagine that you would be too inclined to acknowledge them either.
However, when you overlook the facts that the Reds had the control of most cities where the ammo dumps were located (and by 1917 Russia had, after much delay, produced more ammo than what was used during the entire First World War) and that they thus had a huge advantage not only in personnel (courtesy of Trotsky’s use of terror as a “forced recruitment” tool) but also in firepower, I attribute this to simple ignorance rather than ideology.
Equally predictable is your claim that no, the ChK was not mostly Jewish (I suppose you would deny that about the Neocons too, just as you deny their Trotskyite roots). I suppose that you see all this as “fabrications” of Russian and Ukrainian “anti-Semites” hell bend on blaming the Jews for everything and anything.
“Reactionaries and anti-Semites”. Just two words, but oh how convenient to dismiss any dissent.
Seriously, if this was all about the past, it would be basically irrelevant. The sad and scary thing is that this Trotskyite/Neocon mindset is still very active today and is creating an extremely dangerous situation in Europe now. Rather than repeat it all, I will refer you to an article on this topic on my blog entitled “How a medieval concept of ethnicity makes NATO commit yet another blunder”. You can find it here.
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2008/04/acting-as-one-which-of-course-they-are.html
That the same ideology (Trotskyism & Neoconservatism) rooted in *a medieval concept of ethnicity carefully concealed under an public front of universalism* is now pushing the USA into a war with Iran is, I think, something which everybody here understands and does not require any further substantiation.
There are only two things in the wake of this ideology: blood and lies. This was true in 1917 as it is today.
I can deal with vineyardsaker’s other arguments later, but here’s what Yuri Slezkine has to say about the composition of the Cheka:
“The proportion of Jews in the Cheka as a whole was not very high (compared to what White propaganda often alleged): 3.7 percent of the Moscow apparatus, 4.3 percent of Cheka commissars, and 8.6 percent of senior (”responsible”) officials in 1918, and 9.1 percent of all members of provincial Cheka offices (Gubcheka) in 1920. As in the Party, the majority of Cheka members were Russians, and by far the most overrepresented group were the Latvians, consistently and successfully cultivated by Lenin as the Praetorian Guards of the Revolution (35.6 percent of the Moscow Cheka apparatus, 52.7 percent of all Cheka senior officials, and 54.3 percent of all Cheka commissars, as compared to about 0.09 percent in the country as a whole and about 0.5 percent in Moscow). But even in the Cheka, Bolsheviks of Jewish origin combined ideological commitment with literacy in ways that set them apart and propelled them upward. In 1918, 65.5 percent of all Jewish Cheka employees were “responsible officials.” Jews made up 19.1 percent of all central apparatus investigators and 50 percent (6 out of 12) of the investigators employed in the department for combating counterrevolution. In 1923, at the time of the creation of the OGPU (the Cheka’s successor), Jews made up 15.5 percent of all “leading” officials and 50 percent of the top brass (4 out of 8 members of the Collegium’s Secretariat). “Socially alien” Jews were well represented among the Cheka-OGPU prisoners, too, but Leonard Schapiro is probably justified in generalizing (especially about the territory of the former Pale) that “anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with and possibly shot by a Jewish investigator.” (The Jewish Century, pg.177. The main source he cites in the footnotes is in Russian.)
There were undoubtedly excesses and atrocities committed, as there are in every revolution and, especially, every counterrevolution. And some of them may have been motivated by Jewish revenge against their own perceived oppression by Tsarist Russians. But I will take my stand on the side of revolution, while the neocons and the anti-neocon right both take theirs on the side of (different variants of) counterrevolution. (It’s good for the world that these two forces of reaction are divided!) As Trotsky did, I will also take the side of even reactionary-ruled oppressed nations against even “democratic” imperialist states like the U.S. and Israel.