by Henryk M. BroderDer Spiegel International Online, 08/05/2008
Israel's right to exist is questioned on a daily basis -- not just by radical Palestinians, but also by prominent intellectuals. As the country celebrates its 60th anniversary, they are sending their case against Israel in messages disguised as birthday greetings. But their supposed concern about the Middle East is really just a cloak for their own guilt complexes.
If you drive north out of Tel Aviv for about 15 minutes you come across Herzliya, a settlement founded in 1924 by seven immigrant families and named after Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism. More than 80,000 people live there today, and countless tourists visit each year. Herzliya has a long seafront promenade with many hotels, a harbor for yachts and even a small airport.
And of course there's a monument to Theodor Herzl. It's a huge water tank next to the motorway, with a slim male figure standing on top of it with his arms crossed and looking down at "his" town in a pose in which Herzl is often portrayed -- the visionary.
The man who wrote "The Jewish State" died at the age of 44 in 1904, 44 years before the foundation of the state of Israel. Those who believe in Kabbalah and the mysticism of numbers may see a hidden message in those digits: It's hard not to ask oneself what Herzl would think were he to visit Herzliya today.
He'd probably think: "This isn't how I imagined it, but I like it." Because he would see a high-tech center with laboratories in which hundreds of experts work for Microsoft, Motorola and Nokia, surrounded by shopping malls and restaurants. Some 20 years ago this was an area of auto repair workshops and warehouses, and 40 years ago there was nothing but the wind whistling between the dunes.
The whole country has changed as rapidly as the small town of Herzliya. Other societies took 150 years to develop from agricultural economies to the post-industrial age, but Israel managed it in 60. Sometimes starting from scratch can be an advantage.
But there is something that hasn't changed, a strangely constant element in the turbulent, crisis-ridden life of the world's smallest major power. Something that not even the visionary Herzl could foresee. Israel's existence is called into question day after day -- not just by militant Palestinian organizations such as Fatah and Hezbollah and the president of Iran, but also by congenial European intellectuals who devote themselves to the "Middle East question" with the dedication of someone who has long since completed all his other homework.
Recently a group of German thinkers including the political scientist Johano Strasser, Green Party parliamentarian Claudia Roth and writer Gert Heidenreich published a paper to mark Israel's 60th birthday entitled "Congratulations and Concerns."
In it they praise Israel's "development, the cultural diversity, the scientific and technological successes, the intellectual productivity and the democratically organized pluralism." But they also voice doubt about whether the Israelis are really doing enough to settle the conflict with their neighbors.
Israel, the writers warn, is endangering "its own existence", "making a fool of the whole world," and "deceiving itself." The paper calls on German politicians "not to lose sight of the connection between the extremely difficult economic and political situation of the Palestinians on the one hand and the uncertainty and menace facing Israel on the other."
The entire paper is a collection of cheap platitudes concocted by hobby astronauts zooming through virtual space on their games consoles, convinced that everything hinges on their navigation skills.
The paper "Congratulations and Concerns" was preceded by another position statement: "Friendship and Criticism," written by 25 political scientists who accuse Israel of instrumentalizing the Holocaust for its own political ends and who call for a rethink of the "special relationship" between Germany and Israel in order to render the "internal German discourse" between "non-Jewish, Jewish and Muslim Germans" broader and more impartial.
Partea a doua a articolului: 'A Total Lack of Historical Substance'
3 comments:
Amica mea care m-a trimis la acest articol, imi scrie:
Dragule,
Toate's vechi si nou is toate, cum zicea bardul.
Orwel in timpul celui de-al doilea razboi mondial scria deja articole despre aceasi plaga in Anglia, i.e. ca intelectualli britanici ar fi dat mina cu nemtii ca sa nu faca razboi si au facut din patriotism un cuvint "murdar".
a mai aparut o carte edificatoare legat de tot felul de plagi vechi si noi de cind lumea ...
KLAUS GENSICKE,
Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten.
Iata un citat dintr-o scrisoare a lui Hitler, care aduce mult cu unele comentarii de pe forumul Ziua:
"Germany stands for an uncompromising struggle against the Jews. It is self-evident that the struggle against the Jewish national homeland in Palestine forms part of this struggle, since such a national homeland would be nothing other than a political base for the destructive influence of Jewish interests. Germany also knows that the claim that Jewry plays the role of an economic pioneer in Palestine is a lie.
Only the Arabs work there, not the Jews. Germany is determined to call on the European nations one by one to solve the Jewish problem and, at the proper moment, to address the same appeal to non-European peoples."
—Adolf Hitler to Haj Amin Al-Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem, November 28, 1941
Iata o recenzie interesanta la aceasta carte, intitulata pe scurt: The Mufti and the Holocaust
(din Hoover Institution Policy Review)
dar ..., avem si falitii nostri, nu putem sa nu-i mentionam, mai ales ca sint de calitate ...
De exemplu, un reputat istoric, considerat un subtil ginditor si un elegant scriitor, Tony Judt, profesor universitar la New York University ... a venit cu o culegere de 24 esseuri sub titlul Europe, "Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century".
"The best of them (and they are very good indeed) deal with some of 20th century Europe's major intellectual figures -- Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt and Leszek Kolakowski, among others -- or with consequential historical phenomena such as the fall of France in 1940 and Romania's emblematic nationalism."(i-auzi !)
Acest Judt (60), nascut in Anglia, fiu de evrei refugiati din Rusia si Belgia, ... in timpul studentiei la Cambridge, era un mare suporter al sionismului, a trait in Israel, a voluntariat in razboiul din 1967, ...
a ajuns azi sa publice articole impotriva Israelului, impotriva suportului american pentru Israel, ... culminind cu un articol care lipseste din prezenta culegere, ...
dar care fusese publicat in 2003 in "the New York Review of Books in which he advocated abolition of the Jewish state in favor of a new, binational country of unspecific constitution."
Argumentul lui suprem pentru aceasta propunere radicala este de-a dreptul scandalos :
"Today, non-Israeli Jews feel themselves once again exposed to criticism and vulnerable to attack for things they didn't do. But this time it is a Jewish state, not a Christian one, which is holding them hostage for its own actions. Diaspora Jews cannot influence Israeli policies, but they are implicitly identified with them, not least by Israel's own insistent claims upon their allegiance. The behavior of a self-described Jewish state affects the way everyone else looks at Jews. The increased incidence of attacks on Jews in Europe and elsewhere is primarily attributable to misdirected efforts, often by young Muslims, to get back at Israel. . . . The depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for the Jews."
Articolul a stirnit o mare polemica in rindul presei.
Iata reactia lui Leon Wieseltier (The New Republic, ... ptiu-ptiu):
"Why must Israel pay for his uneasiness with its life?
The reason, I fear, is that Judt has misinterpreted the nature of the hostility that vexes him.
For the notion that all Jews are responsible for whatever any Jews do, that every deed that a Jew does is a Jewish deed, is not a Zionist notion.
It is an anti-Semitic notion.
But Judt prefers to regard it as an onerous corollary of Zionism ('not least by Israel's own insistent claims upon their allegiance').
He refuses to place the blame for this unwarranted judgment of himself upon those who make it. Instead he accepts the premise of the prejudice, and turns on Israel.
He makes a similar mistake in his evaluation of 'the increased incidence of attacks on Jews in Europe.' He knows that they are 'misdirected,' but still he describes them as 'efforts, often by young Muslims, to get back at Israel.' In what way, exactly, is the burning of a synagogue a method for getting back at Israel? In the anti-Semitic way, plainly. It is the essence of anti-Semitism, as it is the essence of all prejudice, to call its object its cause.
But if you explain anti-Semitism as a response to Jews, and racism as a response to blacks, and misogyny as a response to women, then you have not understood it. You have reproduced it."
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