Jewish History, Jewish Religion:
The Weight of Three Thousand Years
By Professor Israel Shahak
FOREWORD
Sometime in the late 1950s, that world-class gossip and occasional
historian, John F. Kennedy, told me how, in 1948, Harry S. Truman had been
pretty much abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an
American Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase,
aboard his whistle-stop campaign train. 'That's why our recognition of Israel
was rushed through so fast.' As neither Jack nor I was an antisemite (unlike
his father and my grandfather) we took this to be just another funny story
about Truman and the serene corruption of American politics.
Unfortunately, the hurried recognition of Israel as a state
has resulted in forty-five years of murderous confusion, and the destruction
of what Zionist fellow travellers thought would be a pluralistic state - home
to its native population of Muslims, Christians and Jews, as well as a future
home to peaceful European and American Jewish immigrants, even the ones who
affected to believe that the great realtor in the sky had given them, in
perpetuity, the lands of Judea and Sameria. Since many of the immigrants were
good socialists in Europe, we assumed that they would not allow the new state
to become a theocracy, and that the native Palestinians could live with them
as equals. This was not meant to be. I shall not rehearse the wars and alarms
of that unhappy region. But I will say that the hasty invention of Israel has
poisoned the political and intellectual life of the USA, Israel's unlikely
patron.
Unlikely, because no other minority in American history has
ever hijacked so much money from the American taxpayers in order to invest in
a 'homeland'. It is as if the American taxpayer had been obliged to support
the Pope in his reconquest of the Papal States simply because one third of our
people are Roman Catholic. Had this been attempted, there would have been a
great uproar and Congress would have said no. But a religious minority of less
than two per cent has bought or intimidated seventy senators (the necessary
two thirds to overcome an unlikely presidential veto) while enjoying support
of the media.
In a sense, I rather admire the way that the Israel lobby
has gone about its business of seeing that billions of dollars, year after
year, go to make Israel a 'bulwark against communism'. Actually, neither the
USSR nor communism was ever much of a presence in the region. What America did
manage to do was to turn the once friendly Arab world against us. Meanwhile,
the misinformation about what is going on in the Middle East has got even
greater and the principal victim of these gaudy lies - the American taxpayer
to one side - is American Jewry, as it is constantly bullied by such
professional terrorists as Begin and Shamir. Worse, with a few honorable
exceptions, Jewish-American intellectuals abandoned liberalism for a series of
demented alliances with the Christian (antisemtic) right and with the
Pentagon-industrial complex. In 1985 one of them blithely wrote that when Jews
arrived on the American scene they 'found liberal opinion and liberal
politicians more congenial in their attitudes, more sensitive to Jewish
concerns' but now it is in the Jewish interest to ally with the Protestant
fundamentalists because, after all, "is there any point in Jews hanging
on dogmatically, hypocritically, to their opinions of yesteryear?' At this
point the American left split and those of us who criticised our onetime
Jewish allies for misguided opportunism, were promptly rewarded with the
ritual epithet 'antisemite' or 'self-hating Jew'.
Fortunately, the voice of reason is alive and well, and in
Israel, of all places. From Jerusalem, Israel Shahak never ceases to analyse
not only the dismal politics of Israel today but the Talmud itself, and the
effect of the entire rabbinical tradition on a small state that the right-wing
rabbinate means to turn into a theocracy for Jews only. I have been reading
Shahak for years. He has a satirist's eye for the confusions to be found in
any religion that tries to rationalise the irrational. He has a scholar's
sharp eye for textual contradictions. He is a joy to read on the great
Gentile-hating Dr Maimonides.
Needless to say, Israel's authorities deplore Shahak. But
there is not much to be done with a retired professor of chemistry who was
born in Warsaw in 1933 and spent his childhood in the concentration camp at
Belsen. In 1945, he came to Israel; served in the Israeli military; did not
become a Marxist in the years when it was fashionable. He was - and still is -
a humanist who detests imperialism whether in the names of the God of Abraham
or of George Bush. Equally, he opposes with great wit and learning the
totalitarian strain in Judaism. Like a highly learned Thomas Paine, Shahank
illustrates the prospect before us, as well as the long history behind us, and
thus he continues to reason, year after year. Those who heed him will
certainly be wiser and - dare I say? - better. He is the latest, if not the
last, of the great prophets.
- Gore Vidal
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