The Irony of Israeli History. The Jewish Talmud tells of an ancient miracle in which seventy Rabbis are each put in seventy different rooms to translate the Torah from Hebrew into Greek. And lo and behold, when the task is complete, each of the translations turns out word-for-word exactly alike. But the real miracle, notes a contemporary Rabbi, lies in getting seventy Rabbis to agree on anything at all. Jews have long been known for their irony and tendency to debate. And the state they formed can often appear a maelstrom of conflicts and a comedy of errors. Israel may be the world’s most ironic state, because the justifications for its existence involve a constant obfuscation of reality. Early Zionist literature famously described what would later become Israel as “a land for a people for a people without a land.” The irony here lay in the fact that the land was already peopled with native Palestinians. But the deeper irony lay in the fact that the Palestinians were often living in ancient cities constantly referenced in the Jews own most holy book. Still, this merely set the stage for a series of ironies that build, like some Shakespearean masterwork, into a much greater tragedy. The Jews who came to Israel were scarcely “a people.” They were spread across Russian, European, Arab, and Persian civilizations. They were racially dissimilar. And they spoke a multitude of languages, turning what for all practical purposes was the dead language of Hebrew into their national tongue. It is ironic then that this multitude would go and create a state which premises citizenship on racial heritage. But it is even more ironic that Israel’s supporters would claim the much more homogeneous and settled, native Palestinians were not “a people.” Standard histories of the state describe it as being “invaded” by the native Palestinians and surrounding Arab states upon declaring independence in 1948. But the young state of Israel did not even consist of a majority of Jews, and of these about half were newly arrived refugees, making the formation of Israel itself look more like an imperial invasion backed by great powers. Nor were the Jews outgunned - far from it. The Palestinian leadership had been exiled and their population disarmed following an uprising against British rule in 1936. And according to Israel’s often conservative historian, Benny Morris, the “invading” Arab “armies” we hear so much about were merely poorly assembled militias, It is ironic the same people who claim the Palestinian people do not exist also claim they were not ethnically cleansed from Israel in 1948. There is now a strong consensus among Israeli historians that at least 650,000 of these non-peoples were then forcibly removed. But it is even more ironic that the same people who claim the Palestinians do not exist constantly worry they will destroy Israel. More ironic still, they suggest the non-existent Palestinians, who were not ethnically cleansed in 1948, will destroy Israel through Hamas, which governs a population a fifth the size of Israel’s and fires rockets that cannot hit their targets and rarely explode. Perhaps the greatest irony lay in the fact that Hamas was in many ways brought into being by Israel. Israel funded its pre-cursor Islamist organizations in the eighties, they assassinated Hamas’ PLO rivals so as to maintain a balance of power, and they destroyed Hamas’ competitor Fatah by failing to follow through with their agreement of creating a Palestinian state through the Oslo Peace Process of 1993. Supporters of Israel often complain of the barbarism of Palestinian terrorism, but Israelis were the first to use it against the British. They have even elected two former terrorists to Prime Minister, Menachem Begin and Yitzak Shamir. The future Prime Minister Shamir actually oversaw the assassination of the Swedish, Count Folke Bernadotte, who had negotiated the release of roughly 30,000 prisoners from Nazi concentration camps. Bernadotte may have been a hero of the Holocaust but he made the same mistake that President Carter would make of mediating Israel’s conflicts. It is ironic that the most conservative supporters of Israel regularly complain of the Hamas Charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel, when the Israeli Likud Charter makes the same demand for a maximalist Jewish state, which would destroy the Palestinians. It is ironic that Israelis would brag of having “made the desert bloom” when the first thing they had to plow under before cultivating their fields were the Palestinians villages left behind after the ethnic cleansing. Israel actually steals 80-90 percent of the water resources lying under the Palestinian West Bank, where they have made it virtually illegal to build new wells. The Israelis took the better land, stole the water from under the Palestinians, then told the world that they redeemed it. All of these ironies are like background melodies to a much greater ironic score. The Jews spent some of their most poignant history grappling with occupation under the Ancient Greeks and Romans then came back two thousand years later to replicate their occupation. Ancient Israelis even laced the countryside with so-called “terror tunnels” in their final Bar Kokhba Revolt in 132 C.E. If Palestinians often look a lot like some Jews, according to some historians like the Israeli Shlomo Sand, this is because they are ironically often descendants of Jews who stayed behind after Roman rule. But don’t say that or they may call you an anti-Semite. A clever thinker can often discover ironies every which way they turn. But something deeper seems to be happening here. Israel is like one of those characters in a film who thrusts himself into impossible circumstances and must then make a long series of moral compromises and lies just to survive. The most clever people somehow managed to maneuver itself into the most impossible circumstance. Sometimes the whole saga looks like one of those horror movies, say Nightmare on Elm Street, in which some poor family is being haunted by a murder that happened a generation ago but was carefully covered up. Israel is a land of ghosts, with which its supporters must constantly do battle. And this takes us back to the Jewish sense of irony. The genius of Judaism lay in the fact that it took an assemblage of ancient holy books and reinterpreted them through the Talmud, which is a collection of Biblical interpretations and debates, and through which Jews learn of their religion by debate. Jews value education and know how to debate. And this has produced many a great intellectual, like Einstein and Freud. But it has also allowed the Israelis to keep up what turns out to be one of the biggest charades in modern history. Israel’s supporters have an excuse for everything: perhaps the greatest irony of Israeli history is that anyone still listens.
Posted on: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 08:09:01 +0000
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