By Salim Mansur
Our age is indeed the age of intellectual organization of political hatreds. It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity…
To come down specifically to the political passions—the “clerks” [Benda means in French by “clerks” what is meant in English by “intellectuals”] were in opposition to them in two ways. They were either entirely indifferent to these passions, and, like Leonardo da Vinci, Malebranche, Goethe, set an example of attachment to the purely disinterested activity of the mind and created a belief in the supreme value of this form of existence; or, gazing as moralists upon the conflict of human egotisms, like Erasmus, Kant, Renan, they preached, in the name of humanity or justice, the adoption of an abstract principle superior to and directly opposed to these passions… It may be said that, thanks to the “clerks,” humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world…
I cannot better bring out all the novelty of this attitude of the “clerk” than by quoting the remark of Renan, which would be signed by all men of thought from Socrates onwards: “Man belongs neither to his language nor to his race; he belongs only to himself, for he is a free being, that is, a moral being” (emphasis added).
— Julian Benda [1]
To our European friends, I never ever want to hear you lecture us on human rights or international law again, and I mean this. We are not white, I guess, it does not apply to us according to your own logic… I want you to look at the mirror and ask “where was I when Gaza was going through a genocide?”… In Gaza today God is under the rubble… Jesus is under the rubble…
— Rev. Munther Isaac, the Senior Pastor at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, Christmas Eve Sermon on December 24, 2023 [2]
________________________________________
i].
Jesus’s admonishment to take the beam out of one’s eye is so simple that any child may understand, and yet it is so layered with ethical meanings that it should have become the moral touchstone of a civilization yet to arise when Jesus was nailed to a cross by the machinations of the Jewish Sanhedrin in Jerusalem and on the order of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judaea. But by the time Christendom emerged in the 3rd – 4th century CE as successor of the Roman Empire in Europe, the message of Jesus had already been warped by the lure of power among those who sought ecclesiastical office. In subsequent centuries the ecclesiastical authorities overseeing an empire became corrupt as were the pagan rulers in Rome. The history of Christendom in ethical terms, as with all other civilizations past and present without exception, is one of going down the slippery slope of moral depravity with its rulers blinded by beams in their eyes while ever ready to berate others of faults and crimes that they are themselves deeply immersed in. Jesus’s admonishment first and foremost was against hypocrites and hypocrisy, which is reinforced in the Qur’an, Islam’s sacred text. Hypocrisy, that is beam in the eye, is not a minor transgression; it is the source of all transgressions and unless those, for instance, who sit as judges are unblemished and free of any such suspicion should be unfit to give judgment. When the pagan Pilate washed his hands after deciding against Jesus on the beginning of that Passover weekend two thousand years ago, his symbolic act was an admission it was not his fault, that he was not responsible since the fate of the accused before him was sealed by the charges of the High Priests of the Sanhedrin and the mob incited by them who demanded Jesus’s execution.
In the post-Christian secularized West, the spread of godlessness worsened the ethical situation. The twentieth century was ruinously affected by world wars, manmade famines and starvation, use of atomic and biochemical weapons, mass killings, genocide, and threats of more of the same carried over into the twenty-first century that indisputably confirm no lesson from our past follies and wickedness was learned or if we are capable of learning. This is where we are as a people in the collective West while memory has faded of what was once Christendom however morally flawed, and where once a mighty civilization was built in the name and glory of Jesus. In the contemporary age virtue is mocked, while hypocrites in office with their minions excreting veritable pile of filth given their gluttonous consumption of all things openly, support depopulation policies with unending wars and pandemics by as many methods their rich overlords, the Rothschild-Rockefeller cabal of globalist financial oligarchs, can devise as remedy for global problems of poverty and scarcity.
This is the moral breakdown of the collective West, or the Global North, and the story of our time in the first quarter of a new century at the beginning of a new millennium. It is also the story of the United States, which is inseparable from its ranking and its conduct in the hierarchy of global powers since July 1945 when President Truman decided to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki though America’s top military commanders knew Japan had lost the war. America’s reputation in the early years after the war remained high as a constitutional republic, but as an emergent imperium the effect of Lord Acton’s rule – “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” – came to illustrate America is no different than warmongering past empires given to readily trample the rights of others, extort their resources, and make a mockery of international norms, treaties and conventions that America had taken the lead and responsibility to draft and ratify. Nowhere in the post-1945 world the collision between international law and America’s exercise of raw power has been so naked and stark as in West Asia in support for Israel that it was instrumental in installing in 1948. The distinguishing feature of America given its moral decay makes it the Hypocrite-in-Chief in the global arena.
For two years and counting Israelis, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister and his coalition government of religious extremist right-wing ethno-nationalists, have engaged in the mass slaughter of men, women, and children in Gaza and the occupied territories of Palestine with impunity and witnessed in real time by people around the world. This mass slaughter on the pretext of defending Israel from attack carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023, the liberation movement of Palestinians in Gaza under occupation by Israelis, took the form of a condensed and concentrated ethnic cleansing operation that had been on-going in the occupied territories for the past eight decades and meets the definition of genocide in international law, conventions and treaties, under the UN system. In the report, or legal analysis, of the UN Human Rights Council of September 16, 2025, we read the following in the introductory remarks:
In its previous reports to the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly, the Commission found that the Israeli security forces have committed crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, including extermination, torture, rape, sexual violence and other inhumane acts, inhuman treatment, forcible transfer, persecution based on gender and starvation as a method of warfare. Furthermore, the Commission found that the Israeli authorities have (i) destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group, including by imposing measures intended to prevent births; and (ii) deliberately inflicted conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians as a group, both of which are underlying acts of genocide in the Rome Statute and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (“Genocide Convention”).[3]
The people around the world represented in the UN by member-states have watched Israel’s egregiously horrific use of force in delivering starvation, death, and destruction to a civilian population and its physical environment (homes, schools and colleges, mosques and churches, hospitals and clinics, stores, water storage, electrical grids, etc.). The Zionist-Israeli propaganda amplified in the collective West is to hold Hamas entirely, flagrantly, and counter-factually responsible for the October 7th breakout of Gaza in assaulting Israel proper. This propaganda seeks to erase the history of occupation and the accompanying violence that preceded for years before October 7, and therewith suppress the history of cause and effect of events. Hamas exists because occupation and violence of Israel, the colonial-settler state, persist. This relentless indiscriminate assault on the living in Gaza, while remaining heedless of the eventual consequences as shown by the Israeli government and most of Israel’s population including Jews in the diaspora, especially in North America, raise questions about modern day Israelis as a people, a nation, their history, culture, religion, and what makes them so profoundly insular and lacking in critical self-awareness in the global village, which our world has become, to think that their documented crimes against humanity in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank will be glossed over unreckoned. The reckoning cannot be for long averted given the evidence that at the UN the State of Palestine as of September 2025 has been recognized by 157 of the 193 member-states, or over 80 per cent of all UN members; that Israel and Israelis have become one of the most reviled states and people among an overwhelming majority of the global population; and that the support for Israel among Americans is haemorrhaging, especially among the generation forty and younger, which is ominous for Israel given its dependency on the United States.
In recalling one of Israel’s most critical and penetrating analysts, Israel Shahak, is to make a beginning in comprehending the ethno-nationalism and ethno-supremacism of Israelis in terms of their history and culture described by Shahak as “the weight of three thousand years” in shaping their worldview. It will be useful here to take note, I believe, since most people are puzzled by the vile conduct of Israelis in Palestine, of what President Truman privately thought of Jews in having dealt with some of their leaders during WW2. In the personal diary of the president that was accidentally discovered in 2003 was found an entry dated July 21, 1947, in which he confided his thoughts about Jewish mentality despite his later affirmative decision against the advice of senior officials in his administration, such as that of Secretary of State General George C. Marshall, to recognize de facto Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948. Truman wrote,
The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgment on world affairs… The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced].P[ersons]. as long as the Jews get special treatment…Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the underdog(emphasis added).[4]
The documentation of Israel’s genocide and crimes against humanity is extensive, undeniable, indefensible, and in a Nuremberg 2 type of trial senior members of the government, leading politicians and military commanders down to the rank-and-file soldiers of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) in the occupied territories would be indicted, tried, found guilty, and duly punished. But in the depraved collective West headed by the United States, Israel’s crimes and genocide in Gaza are denied; the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague and its prosecutors and justices are sanctioned; international law, conventions and treaties, under the UN system are subverted and made inoperable so as to shield Israel from the consequences of its criminality; and the devoted effort of court historians and mainstream legacy media to whitewash Israel’s criminal record as a colonial-settler state is done to mislead the public that remains mostly misinformed regarding fact-based record of the Arab-Israeli conflict from before 1948.
ii].
The foundational claim of establishing Jewish state in Palestine emerged in the hothouse of European politics of nationalism in the 19th century on the basis that Jews constitute a nation among nations by virtue of their religion as separate and apart from that of Christians in Europe. The political upheavals that shook Europe during the “springtime of nations” in 1848-49 were driven by liberal values of freedom, constitutionalism, and popular sovereignty against absolutist monarchies and feudalism. It was the population of Christian Europe or Christendom restlessly awakening to modernity and democracy, and the tremors of these upheavals were felt through the second half of the nineteenth century culminating in the outbreak of the Great War of 1914.
The answer to Jews of Europe claiming to be a nation had been given during the French revolution of 1789 by Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre, member of the National Assembly, stating that “Jews should be denied everything as a nation; granted everything as individuals… If they do not want this then they must inform us and we shall be compelled to expel them… [for] the existence of a nation within a nation is unacceptable to our patrie.”[5] Moses Hess, a relatively unknown Jewish thinker and writer residing in Cologne, published in 1862 a pamphlet Rome and Jerusalem in which he postulated Jews were a nation and needed returning to Palestine. Of this pamphlet David Goldberg, a British rabbi, wrote that none of the Jews who were contemporaries of Moses Hess advocated Jewish nationalism as an alternative. Hess, born in Bonn in 1812, was a few years older than Karl Marx and journeyed through the ranks of socialists to reclaim his Jewish inheritance that had become most important to him. He began his pamphlet, “Here I stand again in the midst of my people, after being estranged from it for twenty years.”[6] According to Goldberg,
And in 1862 the one man who did – who went furthest in his radical solution, who excoriated Jewish self-delusion most sardonically, who dissected inherent German anti-Semitism most prophetically, who grasped the significance of the east European Jewish masses most presciently – sold just 160 copies of the slim volume in which he summarized his ideas. A year later the publisher suggested that the author should buy his books back at a remaindered price.
Rome and Jerusalem by Moses Hess is nowadays regarded as the seminal work of Zionist literature. And it is with the life and career of Hess that any study of Zionist history usually commences.[7]
Moses Hess was a Zionist before the term Zionism was invented in 1892 by Nathan Birnbaum, another Jewish pamphleteer alternating between socialism and nationalism. Theodor Herzl, reputedly the founder of Zionism, made the term synonymous with Jewish nationalism in his manifesto The Jewish State published in Vienna in February 1896.[8] Herzl owed to Hess two central ideas in writing his manifesto, the first was that Jewish nationalism required establishing Jewish state in Palestine based on the claim that God of the Hebrew Bible (OT) in perpetuity bequeathed the land to the progeny of Abraham through Isaac, one of his sons, born of Sarah. And second, European Jews because of anti-Jewish bigotry could rely on Christians for assistance to secure a state for themselves in Palestine. Hess had hypothesized, “The Christian nations, you believe, would have less objection against the restoration of the Jewish State, since they would hope through this to be rid of an alien population which was always a thorn in their side.”[9]
Moses Hess discerned the intent of European Christians to assist in the transfer of Jews from their midst to their preferred destination. He wrote, “Not only Frenchmen, also Germans and Englishmen more than once have expressed themselves in favor of the return of the Jews to Palestine.”[10] Arthur Balfour, as British Foreign Secretary in November 1917, signed the letter addressed to Lord Rothschild known as the Balfour Declaration, indicating Britain favoured “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. Christopher Sykes in his book Crossroads to Israel 1917-1948 provided one of the finer accounts of British policy during this period in Palestine based on the official records made available to him, personal papers of key political figures in making and administering policies relating to Britain as the mandatory power, and his personal acquaintance with the area. Christopher Sykes was the son of Sir Mark Sykes, military officer and diplomat attached to the Arab Bureau in Cairo during WW1, who secretly negotiated with Georges-Picot of France the document known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement for the post-war divisions of Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire east of the Suez Canal. He wrote about the Balfour Declaration, “If Balfour incurs blame it is not because of culpable ignorance but rather on the grounds that he acted with full knowledge of the moral enormity of his deed. In August, 1919, less than two years after the Declaration, he wrote a memorandum on Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), in which he stressed with all his accustomed lucidity the contradictions in the various pledges given in the course of the war.”[11] Balfour’s memorandum of 1919 reads,
The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant [i.e., the Balfour Declaration of November 1917] and the policy of the Allies is even more flagrant in the case of the independent nation of Palestine than in that of the independent nation of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American Commission [i.e. the King-Crane Commission sent by President Woodrow Wilson to inquire about the wishes of people of the Middle East from which the British, French, and Italian governments withdrew] has been going through the form of asking what they are. The four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.
In my opinion that is right. What I have never been able to understand is how it can be harmonised with the [Anglo-French] declaration [i.e., the Sykes-Picot Agreement], the Covenant, or the instructions to the Commission of Enquiry.
In fact, so far as Palestine is concerned, the powers have made no statement of fact that is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.[12]
Balfour wrote and spoke on Palestine in keeping with Britain’s reputation as “perfidious Albion.” There were other imponderables that went into the Declaration, such as enabling President Wilson to bring America into WW1 on the side of the Allied powers, the promise of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which the Zionists led by Chaim Weizmann knew would be the stepping stone into statehood, and that the making of Jewish homeland would serve as a strategic satellite of Britain on the eastern boundaries of the Suez Canal. But Christopher Sykes did not fail to note that “Balfour had an uneasy conscience at the illiberal terms of the Aliens Act of 1905, passed when he was Prime Minister, and that he sought a contrary deed in the Declaration.”[13] The Aliens Act was directed in stopping Eastern European Jews from migrating to Britain following the Kishinev anti-Jewish pogroms of 1903 and 1905 in the Russian Empire. The Aliens Act’s intended or unintended effect aided the Zionist cause by directing the potential tide of Jewish migrants seeking to flee from Eastern Europe to head instead for Palestine, or as most had done in the period before 1914 to the United States.
The mitigation of the plight of Jews in Europe that Moses Hess and others felt deeply cannot be faulted, nor their aspiration as a nation for statehood in the dawning of the age of nationalism in Europe. But how it could be acquired without the assistance of European powers together or separately would be their dilemma, for European powers were colonial-imperial powers spread across four continents. A Jewish homeland or statehood installed by an imperial power would not be in and of itself a “gift” of Christian Zionist leaders as were the war time prime minister of Britain, David Lloyd George, his Secretary of State Balfour, and other members of his cabinet, as were Lord Curzon and Winston Churchill. The only Jewish member of the cabinet and Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, was vehemently opposed to the Balfour Declaration and stated his reasons in a memorandum to his colleagues.[14] Any of the European imperial power aiding the Jewish Zionist movement for statehood in Palestine, or alternatively in South America or East Africa, would be doing so, apart from the cover provided by the rhetoric of altruism and hypocrisy as Balfour did, for practical imperialist interests. This was ultimately the invariant motive of Britain in 1917, and of the United States moving in the slipstream of the British Empire in 1948 and thereafter stepping into Britain’s imperial role in West Asia.
In the high noon of European colonialism-imperialism the claim of statehood by Hess and Herzl for European Jews based on being descendants of the Bronze Age ancient “Hebrews” or “Israelites” could only be realized by the might of European powers, which is what occurred. But Zionist claim and its acquisition had as little credibility and legitimacy, as would be that of Polynesian Hindus if they claimed statehood because of descent from ancient Dravidians in the Indian subcontinent; or, by Rohingyas of Myanmar (Burma) faced with pogroms seeking separate statehood as Muslims on some portion of the lands inhabited from ancient times by Arabs. Eastern European Jews claiming descent from ancient Hebrews or Israelites was far-fetched and insupportable since it was imagined and false. This was the original sin perpetrated by Zionists from which all else followed.
Instead, the Eastern European Jews were ethnically an off shoot of the Turkic nomadic tribes, the Khazars, moving west past the Urals into the lands around 6th century CE between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, or the North Caucasus, and at present times part of the Russian Federation. This was known to Arab and Muslim historians of the early Middle Ages and Sebeos, the 7th century Armenian bishop and author of History of Heraclius, mentioned the Khazars in his writing.[15] What came to be known as the “Khazar thesis” was popularized by Arthur Koestler (1905-83) in The Thirteenth Tribe published in 1976. Koestler was of Jewish origin born in Budapest, Hungary. Koestler’s book was a bombshell; it was, however, trashed routinely and predictably by the Zionist “lobby” and its supporters in the West as fictitious since it could fatally undermine Moses Hess’s thesis, borrowed by Herzl, for the Zionist claim of the return of European Jews to Palestine as descendants of ancient Israelites, and the all-purpose smear of “antisemitism” was employed by Zionists to censor and intimidate Jews and non-Jews from questioning the deceitful premise behind the installation of Israel in Palestine.
But according to Koestler,
[T]he large majority of surviving Jews in the world is of Eastern European – and thus perhaps mainly of Khazar – origin. If so, this would mean that their ancestors came not from the Jordan but from the Volga, not from Canaan but from the Caucasus, once believed to be the cradle of the Aryan race; and that genetically they are more closely related to the Hun, Uigar and Magyar tribes than to the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Should this turn out to be the case, then the term “anti-Semitism” would become void of meaning, based on a misapprehension shared by both the killers and their victims. The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the cruelest hoax which history has ever perpetrated.[16]
Shlomo Sand, professor emeritus of history in Tel Aviv university, researched the “Khazar thesis” rigorously in his book The Invention of the Jewish People published in 2009.[17]
About Koestler and the suppression of the “Khazar thesis” in Israel, Sand wrote,
In 1982 the book by Norman Golb and Omeljan Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century, laid the critical foundations for the subject. The popular work by Kevin A. Brook, The Jews of Khazaria, appeared in 1999. This non-academic writer also started an extensive Web site dedicated to the subject of Khazaria. Other works appeared in Spanish, French and German, and in recent years many of the books mentioned have been translated into Russian, Turkish and Persian. None of them appeared in Hebrew, except Koestler’s Thirteenth Tribe, which was issued in Jerusalem by a private publisher, who did not risk distributing it to the bookshops…
But while the Khazars scared off the Israeli historians, not one of whom has published a single paper on the subject, Koestler’s Thirteenth Tribe annoyed them and provoked angry responses. Hebrew readers had no access to the book itself for many years, learning about it only through the venomous denunciations.[18]
About the “original sin” Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, professor in clinical psychology at Haifa University, Israel, observed,
There is clearly no need to justify the Zionist dream, the desire for relief from Jewish suffering. Nobody can fault the idea of improving the lot of oppressed Jews in Europe of the nineteenth century. Zionism, at the level of an abstract idea of Jewish sovereignty and territorial concentration, cannot be faulted. We can ask whether it is practical but we cannot fault its morality. The trouble with Zionism starts when it lands, so to speak, in Palestine. What has to be justified is the injustice to the Palestinians caused by Zionism, the dispossession and victimization of a whole people. There is clearly a wrong here, a wrong which creates the need for justification.[19]
The “wrong” or original sin that was and remains unjustifiable began with Balfour dismissing outright in his 1919 memorandum “the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.” They would have to be forcibly removed or eliminated, in making room for European Jews in Palestine. The beams were deeply embedded in the eyes of Balfour and his peers across Europe, blinding them to their own prejudices against a religious minority in their midst and, as Hess wrote, they wanted “to be rid of an alien population” being a thorn among them at the expense of another people who were of even less consideration. The forcible removal, eventually genocide, of Palestine’s indigenous population was held in check feebly between the two world wars of the last century by Britain as the mandatory power. But once the post-1945 government took office in London under the Labour leader Clement Atlee and handed over to the UN its mandatory power in February 1947 with the Mandate itself officially to end on May 15, 1948, the political-financial-military machinery of European Jewish settlers (the Yishuv) before 1948 was revved up for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians (Christians and Muslims) ahead of the making of Israel on the basis of the UN Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947, partitioning Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish. Ilan Pappe is one among other Israeli historians referred to as “new historians”. They are, to mention a few, Avi Shlaim, Shlomo Sand, Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Benny Morris, who have come forward since 1980s by drawing upon Israeli archives to challenge the official and traditional narrative of Israel’s history. Ilan Pappe in his groundbreaking book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine writes,
…on a cold Wednesday afternoon, 10 March 1948, a group of eleven men, veteran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches to a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine… Codenamed Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew), this was the fourth and final version of less substantial plans that outlined the fate the Zionists had in store for Palestine and consequently for its native population…
Clashes with local Palestinian militias provided the perfect context and pretext for implementing the ideological vision of an ethnically cleansed Palestine. The Zionist policy was first based on retaliation against Palestinian attacks in February 1947, and it transformed into an initiative to ethnically cleanse the country as a whole in March 1948.
Once the decision was taken, it took six months to complete the mission. When it was over, more than half of Palestine’s native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed, and eleven urban neighbourhoods emptied of their inhabitants. The plan decided upon on 10 March 1948, and above all its systematic implementation in the following months, was a clear-cut case of an ethnic cleansing operation, regarded under international law as a crime against humanity.[20]
The logic of settling in “a land without a people for a people without a land”, that was the Zionist slogan, required forceful eviction of the indigenous population. This continues as colonial-settlers mostly of Eastern European origin began their migration between the two world wars, and forceful occupation of territories that were designated by the UN in 1947 for an Arab state in the partitioned Palestine Mandate. And, therefore, the need to know what sort of people motivated by what sort of religious ideology and ethno-nationalism have remained engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide in the present age, as Ilan Pappe documented, when after “the Holocaust, it has become almost impossible to conceal large-scale crimes against humanity.”[21] Israel Shahak was one Israeli whose life’s work was singularly revelatory about his country and its people providing an inside view of Israel and Jewish fundamentalism made largely verboten in the mainstream media and academia of the collective West.
iii].
Israel Shahak (1933-2001) taught organic chemistry and was a respected and popular professor for a quarter-century at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was born in Warsaw, Poland, to a highly cultured and prosperous Jewish-Zionist family and suffered the fate of Polish Jews during WW2 under wartime Nazi occupation. When barely ten years old, Shahak family was forced into the Warsaw Ghetto and then torn apart; his father disappeared, his older brother escaped to join the Royal Air Force and was shot down in combat, and Israel sent into hiding with a poor Catholic family until his mother could no longer financially support his refuge. In 1943 Israel with his mother were sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp from where they were liberated and sent to British Mandate Palestine. After his service in the Israeli army, he joined Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission as an assistant to its chief Ernest Bergmann.
According to Elfie Pallis in her obituary on Israel Shahak published in Britain, “Shahak underwent two major conversions in his life. Aged 13, he scientifically examined the evidence for the existence of God and found it wanting. Then, shortly after the 1967 six-day war, he concluded from observation that Israel was not yet a democracy; it was treating the newly occupied Palestinians with shocking brutality.”[22]
In seeking to mitigate the “shocking brutality” he was observing, Shahak became in his spare time a one-man tribune for justice and human rights of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. From his spare office in a West Jerusalem flat he worked translating into English news reports in Israeli press about collective punishment and torture of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, which became a significant source of information in the West of Israeli human rights violations. Again, from Elfie Pallis’s obituary notice,
Shahak came to believe that these human rights incidents stemmed from Israel’s religious interpretation of Jewish history, which led it to ignore centuries of Arab life in the country, and to disregard non-Jewish rights. Confiscation, every schoolchild was told, was “the redemption of the land” from those who did not belong there. To Shahak, this was straightforward racism, damaging both sides. It was a minority view, but after the 1982 war, when the Israeli liberal sector grew, Shahak was able to put it forward in the reputable daily Ha’aretz. After retiring in 1991, he could also turn his ideas into books.[23]
The books Shahak published were not merely records of what he witnessed about Israeli society within an apartheid state, but contextualization of his observations within the larger setting of Jewish history in terms of religion and culture that he was privy to as an insider. By the sheer dint of his devotion to universal values of human rights, peace, and justice codified in the UN Charter, treaties and conventions, as international law under the UN system Shahak became for many within and outside Israel a modern-day Jeremiah. He lamented the spread of religion-based bigotry of his compatriots and condemned unequivocally the drift of Israeli society and politics into the closed circle of pre-modern culture that in his words was “the weight of three thousand years” prevalent in the shtetl (small Jewish town or village) of Eastern Europe. In the foreword to Shahak’s most well-known book Jewish History, Jewish Religion, the American novelist and essayist Gore Vidal wrote,
Fortunately, the voice or 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.[24]
What Shahak never did was write his memoir, which many of his admirers requested him to do. But he gave a glimpse of his childhood in an exchange with the British historian Timothy Garton Ash published in the New York Review of Books. Here I quote Shahak from that exchange to learn what sort of a boy he was during the Holocaust to become the sort of man in Israel admired around the world for his humanity and his devotion to the cause of defending human rights of everyone regardless of their race, ethnicity, and religion. Shahak wrote,
I am myself a survivor of the Holocaust: I was born in Warsaw (…) and was in the Warsaw Ghetto almost till the end; then after various adventures that included a period of time “on the Aryan side,” as it was called then (that is, being hidden by a Polish Catholic family and helped by other Poles). I finished in Bergen-Belsen where I spent nearly two years. I think that being a child of nine to twelve years old during the crucial part of those experiences (1942-1945) helped me to understand them afterward better than could those who were fully grown up; and of course children under such experiences grow up and mature beyond their formal age, without however losing a part of the openness to strange things which is one of the advantages of youth. In numerous talks in Israel with many survivors of similar experiences, of more or less the same age, I have found a confirmation of my opinions.
…
The observation of Garton Ash that the Nazi oppression in Poland was greater than in other countries and the argument of the Poles who debated [Claude] Lanzmann [French filmmaker, and director of the documentary on the Holocaust, “Shoah”] in Oxford that Polish Warsaw was in a state of terror is no doubt correct (as I saw myself) but is only of secondary importance in comparison with the fact that Jews, Poles, and everybody else so far as we can know when we wish to know, behave in about the same way in this respect, and that such behavior is a part of something that we may call “human nature,” common to most of us. The last Passover Seder celebration (of 1943) which I celebrated with my parents was held amid the noises of shooting of the Jewish Revolt and its suppression in another part of the Ghetto, not so far away. It was a poor and hurried celebration but most accessories of the occasion were there and all the ceremonies were carried out, including the prescribed singing… Yet the extermination of Jews had already begun months ago and was much advanced.
…
Lanzmann simply heard what he wanted to hear, that Poles are such and such and that Jews are chosen people whose behavior should not be investigated. He did not want to hear the real truth, that both of them, and of course all other peoples too, are human beings who behave more or less in the same way in similar circumstances.
…
But who of the Jewish survivors does not know (and certainly Garton Ash should know) that there were also Jewish blackmailers, some of them even quite famous by name, outside the Ghetto, who were neither better nor worse than the Polish ones, and also Jewish policemen in the Ghetto whose duty in the first weeks of the extermination of summer 1942 was to deliver, each of them a specified number, Jewish victims to “be sent” to extermination. Now, I hold that both kinds of murderers or accessories to murder are fully equal and that the abhorrence in which one should hold them does not depend on nationality, but my memories (and memories of all the survivors who are honestly “talking among themselves”) tell me that at the time we Jews hated the Jewish policemen, or the Jewish spies for the Nazis in the Ghetto, much more than we hated anybody else. Maybe two actual “stories” which I witnessed myself, but which I believe to be very typical, will illustrate this attitude. During the first weeks of the great extermination in the summer of 1942, the Jews who worked in the big factories supplying the German Army were not molested, while other Jews were being rounded up. They were supposed to be in the factories till five o’clock in the afternoon, when they were allowed to go out, and at that time the catching of other Jews was supposed to stop. One such afternoon at quarter past five I was looking out a window of “Tebens,” one of those privileged factories, and saw a Jewish policeman dragging a boy (naturally the Jewish policemen, having no guns, preferred the weaker victims). The boy was shouting at the top of his voice that now the Jewish policeman had no right to catch him and resisting as well as he could, when suddenly the Nazi vice-commander of the factory, a vicious brute by the name of Bach, came out of the gate, hit the policeman with the horsewhip which he always carried, and shouted to him: “Cursed Jew! An order is an order!”
Naturally this became the talk of the next day, and as much as Bach was hated (and he was one of the most vicious Nazis I ever saw), he was much praised for what he had done. Everyone rejoiced in the discomfiture of the Jewish policeman and exclaimed that no matter how much Bach was a monster the policeman “must be worse” (of course now I see that they both, together with the Polish policemen, etc., were perfectly equal in their wickedness). Much later, in late winter 1943, a well-known Jewish spy for the Nazis was killed by the Jewish resistance in one of the entrances of the double block of flats (in Leszno Street) which we then inhabited. This was a necessary part of the preparations for the Jewish Revolt which followed not long afterward. I witnessed the killing, done by a very young man with a revolver from a short distance, and then together with a few children and teenagers present danced for joy round the dead body and then ran as quickly as I could to carry the glad tidings to my mother. She was as glad as I was, and only after a short time returned to normality enough to rebuke me for dancing around the corpse, saying that a polite boy does not behave so, however justified was the act…[25]
The wartime atrocities Shahak witnessed as a young boy were etched in his mind and, as he recalled much later, helped him to discern that wicked individuals, just as good individuals, were found among all people. This discernment transported the adult Shahak out of the close circle of tribalism of “the chosen people” into the wider world of universally shared humanity. And this set him apart among Israelis to the extent he was abused in public by fundamentalist Jews and threatened with physical harm by them. Christopher Hitchens, the Anglo-American author and essayist, in thinking about Shahak wrote of him “as a descendent of Spinoza; of free thinking more or less for its own sake and of the consolations of philosophy for the isolated individual.”[26]
The two books by Israel Shahak that should be considered required reading to learn about the colonial-settler state in West Asia are Jewish History, Jewish Religion and, co-authored with Norton Mezvinsky, professor of history at Central Connecticut State University, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. Both books were published in the 1990s when I first read them. As the Gaza genocide unfolded, I went back to re-reading Shahak to refresh once again his contextual explanation of the mindset of Israelis.
In Jewish History, Jewish Religion Shahak’s opening chapter is titled “A Closed Utopia?” It begins with the story Shahak witnessed when an ultra-religious Jew denied the use of his phone on the Sabbath to call for an ambulance for a non-Jew who had collapsed in his neighbourhood. Shahak reported the story to the daily Ha’aretz and its publication caused a media scandal. But the rabbinical authorities in Israel and in the diaspora maintained their ruling that “a Jew should not violate the Sabbath in order to save the life of a Gentile.” According to Shahak,
They added much sanctimonious twaddle to the effect that if the consequences of such an act puts Jews in danger, the violation of the Sabbath is permitted, for their sake. It became apparent to me, as drawing on knowledge acquired in my youth, I began to study the Talmudic laws governing the relations between Jews and non-Jews, that neither Zionism, including its seemingly secular part, nor Israeli politics since the inception of the State of Israel, nor particularly the policies of the Jewish supporters of Israel in the diaspora, could be understood unless the deeper influence of those laws, and the worldview which they both create and express is taken into account. The actual policies Israel pursued after the Six Day War, and in particular the apartheid character of the Israeli regime in the Occupied Territories and the attitude of the majority of Jews to the issue of the rights of the Palestinians, even in the abstract, have merely strengthened this conviction (emphasis added).[27]
The Talmud provides for the abiding structure of Jewish religiously based communal life and informs every aspect of Israeli politics. The features of Israeli apartheid are derived from and sanctioned by the Talmud enabling discrimination by the State of Israel in favour of Jews and against non-Jews (the Gentile population, Arabs and non-Arabs), as in the domain of residency rights, the right to work, and the right to equality before the law. “It should therefore be clearly understood that the source of authority for all the practises of classical (and present-day Orthodox) Judaism, the determining base of its legal structure,” explained Shahak, “is the Talmud, or, to be precise, the so-called Babylonian Talmud; while the rest of the talmudic literature (including the so-called Jerusalem or Palestinian Talmud) acts as a supplementary authority.”[28]
Since every aspect of Jewish personal and public life is legally governed by the Talmud, the closed utopia of a Jewish state is totalitarian, or, as Shahak citing Moses Hadas (1900-66), a Jewish-American scholar of classics and trained as a rabbi, wrote: “According to Hadas, a crucial feature of the Platonic political system, adopted by Judaism as early as the Maccabean period (142-63 BC), was ‘that every phase of human conduct be subjected to religious sanctions which are in fact to be manipulated by the ruler’. There can be no better definition of ‘classical Judaism’ and of the ways in which the rabbis manipulated it than this Platonic definition.” [29] What this meant Shahak referred to with the following quote from Plato’s Laws,
The principal thing is that no one, man or woman, should ever be without an officer set over him, and that none should get the mental habit of taking any step, whether in earnest or in jest, on his individual responsibility. In peace as in war he must live always with his eyes on his superior officer… In a word, we must train the mind not even to consider acting as an individual or know how to do it.[30]
Shahak continued, “If the word ‘rabbi’ is substituted for ‘an officer’ we will have a perfect image of classical Judaism. The latter is still deeply influencing Israeli-Jewish society and determining to a large extent the Israeli policies.”[31] And then recalling Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, Shahak commented, “Historical Judaism and its two successors, Jewish Orthodoxy and Zionism, are both sworn enemies of the concept of the open society as applied to Israel.”[32] The sort of influence that classical Judaism spread and hardened within Israeli-Jewish society is described by Shahak and his coauthor Norton Mezvinsky thus,
Secular and militaristic right-wing, Israeli Jews hold political views and engage in rhetoric similar to that of religious Jews. For most Likud followers, “Jewish blood” is the reason why Jews are in a different category than non-Jews, including, of course even those non-Jews who are Israeli citizens and who serve in the Israeli army. For religious Jews, the blood of non-Jews has no intrinsic value; for Likud, it has limited value.[33]
According to Rabbi Avracham Kook (1865-1935), Chief Rabbi of Palestine 1920-35 during the British Mandate era, “The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews – all of them in all different levels – is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.”[34] This racist Talmudic view antedated the Nazi ideology of racial differences between “Aryans” and “non-Aryans”, and Jewish/Zionist leaders like Rabbi Kook, recalled Shahak, “in Germany welcomed Hitler’s rise to power, because they shared his belief in the primacy of ‘race’ and his hostility to the assimilation of Jews among ‘Aryans’. They congratulated Hitler on his triumph over the common enemy – the forces of liberalism.”[35]
The deep-seated bigotry rooted in the Talmud directed against non-Jews and, most proximately, Palestinian Christians and Muslims, frames the basic Israeli “Law of Return” for Jews in the diaspora. In accordance to this law Israel as the Jewish state belongs exclusively to Jews regardless of where they are residents outside of Israel, while non-Jews within Israel denied any state benefits are required to leave, or be ethnically cleansed, “in order to make Israel a more ‘Jewish’ state.”[36] Furthermore, Shahak stated, “the whole question to how the Palestinians ought to be treated is, according to the Halakhah [Jewish religious law], simply a question of Jewish power: if Jews have sufficient power, then it is their religious duty to expel the Palestinians.”[37] In addition, Israel as a state has no officially declared boundaries so as not to compromise inherent Zionist expansionism reinforced by Talmud-ism of “redeeming” the Biblically demarcated lands of Eretz Israel. Shahak wrote,
My own early political conversion from admirer of Ben-Gurion to his dedicated opponent began exactly with such an issue. In 1956 I eagerly swallowed all of Ben-Gurion’s political and military reasons for Israel initiating the Suez War, until he (in spite of being an atheist, proud of his disregard of the commandments of Jewish religion) pronounced in the Knesset on the third day of that war, that the real reason for it is ‘the restoration of the kingdom of David and Solomon’ to its Biblical borders. At this point in his speech, almost every Knesset member spontaneously rose and sang the Israeli national anthem. To my knowledge, no zionist politician has ever repudiated Ben Gurion’s idea that Israeli policies must be based (within the limits of pragmatic considerations) on the restoration of the Biblical borders as the borders of the Jewish state.[38]
So, what are the Biblical borders? According to Shahak,
A number of discrepant versions of Biblical borders of the Land of Israel, which rabbinical authorities interpret as ideally belonging to the Jewish state, are in circulation. The most far-reaching among them include the following areas within these borders: in the south, all of Sinai and a part of northern Egypt up to the environs of Cairo; in the east, all of Jordan and a large chunk of Saudi Arabia, all of Kuwait and a part of Iraq south of the Euphrates; in the north, all of Lebanon and all of Syria together with a huge part of Turkey (up to lake Van); and in the west, Cyprus… Certainly the late [Rabbi Meir] Kahane and his followers, as well as influential bodies such as Gush Emunim, not only desire the conquest of those territories by Israel, but regard it as a divinely commanded act, sure to be successful since it will be aided by God.[39]
Religiously sanctioned racism and religiously endorsed expansionism by classical Judaism are the twin pillars of contemporary Zionism and Israel that Shahak and Mezvinsky exposed. This is what explains the segregationist worldview of Israelis and their hostility against the Gentile world which when opportunity is seen by them, they want war against non-Jews considered as the modern-day Biblical version of Amalekites. Rabbi Kook’s racist views from early last century resonates blood-chillingly with 21st century Israelis. According to Shahak and Mezvinsky, the pervasive influence of classical Judaism and Rabbi Kook’s thinking persist across the political spectrum among Israelis. They reported,
Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, an influential member of the Habad movement and the head of a yeshiva near Nablus, for instance, opined in an April 26, 1996 Jewish Week article, reproduced in Haaretz that same day: “If every single cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, and is thus part of God, then every strand of DNA is a part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA.”… It is noteworthy that Rabbi Ginsburgh is one of the authors of a book lauding Baruch Goldstein, the Patriarchs’ Cave murderer. In that book Ginsburgh contributed a chapter in which he wrote that a Jew’s killing non-Jews does not constitute murder according to the Jewish religion and that killing of innocent Arabs for reasons of revenge is a Jewish virtue. No influential Israeli rabbi has publicly opposed Ginsburg’s statements; most Israeli politicians have remained silent; some Israeli politicians have openly supported him.[40]
The world of Talmudic thinking was not known to Christians until, as Shahak recounted that history, in the 13th century when Jewish converts to Christianity who were well-versed in the Talmud shared that knowledge with Christians. Then Christians learned that the Talmud contained
very offensive statements and precepts directed specifically against Christianity. For example, in addition to a series of scurrilous sexual allegations against Jesus, the Talmud states that his punishment in hell is to be immersed in boiling excrement – a statement not exactly calculated to endear the Talmud to devout Christians. Or one can quote the precept according to which Jews are instructed to burn, publicly if possible, any copy of the New Testament that comes into their hands. (This is not only still in force but actually practiced today; thus on 23 March 1980 hundreds of copies of the New Testament were publicly and ceremonially burnt in Jerusalem under the auspices of Yad Le’akhim, a Jewish religious organisation subsidised by the Israeli Ministry of Religions.)[41]
Consequently, the predictable Christian response came, and Jews were driven to devise elaborate defense through apologetics, polemics, deception, deceit, and other means of subterfuge to explain away passages in the Talmud offensive to Christians. Accordingly, Shahak commented, “Almost all the so-called Jewish studies in Judaism, from that time to this very day, are polemics against an external enemy rather than an internal debate.”[42] Deception became as a result part of the Jewish way of life within Christendom in an effort to disarm Gentile criticisms. For Shahak the celebrated thinker Rabbi Martin Buber (1878-1965) of Germany was a good example of a deceiver. “The crime of deception is all the greater in view of the fact that Buber’s eulogies of Hassidism,” wrote Shahak, “were first published in German during the period of the rise of German nationalism and the accession of Nazism to power. But while ostensibly opposing Nazism, Buber glorified a movement holding and actually teaching doctrines about non-Jews not unlike the Nazi doctrines about Jews.”[43] Shahak levelled similar criticism about Moses Hess. “One of Marx’s early friends, Moses Hess, widely known and respected as one of the first socialists in Germany, subsequently revealed himself as an extreme Jewish racist, whose views about the ‘pure Jewish race’ published in 1858 were not unlike comparable bilge about the ‘pure Aryan race’. But the German socialists, who struggled against German racism, remained silent about their Jewish racism.”[44]
This deceptive practice of Jews is not confined to politics. It is at the core of classical Judaism and non-Jews, especially Christians, being clueless about this feature simply assumes that Judaism is a ‘biblical religion’ or, as Shahak stated, “that the Old Testament has in Judaism the same central place and legal authority which the Bible has for Protestant or even Catholic Christianity.”[45] It is the Talmud that takes precedence in classical Judaism that religious Orthodox and messianic groups, as is the settler movement the Gush Emunim (“Block of Faithful” in Hebrew), insist upon and follow. Those selected books of the OT that matters for Israelis, such as the Book of Joshua, are interpreted through the lens of the Talmud. “Many, perhaps most, biblical verses prescribing religious acts and obligations are ‘understood’ by classical Judaism, and by present-day Orthodoxy,” Shahak explained, “in a sense which is quite distinct from, or even contrary to, their literal meaning as understood by Christian or other readers of the Old Testament, who only see the plain text.”[46] In addition, Shahak further stated, “Apologetics of Judaism claim that the interpretation of the Bible, originated by the Pharisees and fixed in the Talmud, is always more liberal than the literal sense.”[47] On the contrary, Shahak provided several Biblical verses from the OT to elucidate the ‘apologetics of Judaism’, and I will mention two here.
For example, perhaps the most sacred Jewish formula, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One’, recited several times each day by every pious Jew, can at the present time mean two contrary things. It can mean that the Lord is indeed ‘one’; but it can also mean that a certain stage in the union of the male and female deities has been reached or is being promoted by the proper recitation of this formula. However, when Jews of a Reformed congregation recite this formula in any language other than Hebrew, all Orthodox rabbis, whether they believe in unity or in the divine sexual union, are very angry indeed.[48]
This example raises the question regarding not biblical but classical Judaism about which Shahak wrote, “it is quite clear, though much less widely realised, that the latter, during its last few hundred years, was for the most part far from pure monotheism. The same can be said about the real doctrines dominant in present-day Orthodox Judaism, which is a direct continuation of classical Judaism. The decay of monotheism came about through the spread of Jewish mysticism (the cabbala) which developed in the 12th and 13th centuries, and by the late 16th century had won an almost complete victory in virtually all the centres of Judaism.”[49]
The second example is with the widely quoted verse from the OT.
The famous verse ‘thou shalt love thy fellow as thyself’ (Leviticus, 19:18) is understood by classical (and present-day Orthodox) Judaism as an injunction to love one’s fellow Jew, not any fellow human.[50]
The interpretation of this Leviticus verse is consistent with the view expressed by Rabbi Avracham Kook quoted above on the difference between a Jewish soul and non-Jewish souls. It follows that “redeeming” the lands of Israel from the Sinai to the Euphrates means as Rabbi Yoseph, according to Shahak and Mezvinsky, “acknowledged that in messianic times Jews would be more powerful than non-Jews and would then be obligated to conquer the land of Israel, to expel all non-Jews and to destroy the idolatrous Christian churches.”[51]
Classical Judaism is stamped with the Bronze Age closed circle, exclusivist, segregationist, exceptionalist, collectivist, and non-critical thinking and Shahak, in summing up, recalled that “Judaism, especially in its classical form, is totalitarian in nature.”[52] He further stated, “Any support of human rights in general by a Jew which does not include the support of human rights of non-Jews whose rights are being violated by the ‘Jewish state’ is as deceitful as the support of human rights by a Stalinist.”[53]
iv].
Classical Judaism in the Middle Ages was entrenched in the Jewish ghettoes, and within those ghettoes totalitarianism under the keen eyes of the rabbis, officers as Shahak termed them, or political commissars as in the totalitarian systems that emerged in the early 20th century, authoritatively ruled over every aspect of private and communal life of those living in the closed circle of shtetls in Central and Eastern Europe. In the second half of the 17th century a “wind of change” began to unsettle Western Europe with the transformative ideas of reason and rationalism, of individual rights and liberty, of scientific inquiry and freedom of religion, of the rule of law and constitutional government, of republicanism and democracy. These ideas together inaugurated what came to be known as the “age of Enlightenment” and those who came to embody the zeitgeist of that age which peaked in the 19th century were a galaxy of Western European names – Newton, Locke, Spinoza, Hume, Leibniz, Montesquieu, Smith, Kant, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hegel, Mill – and in the New World Jefferson, Madison, Paine, Franklin. But the Jewish ghettoes remained mostly untouched by this “wind of change”, though there was exception with the spread of new urban centres in Central Europe as in Prague, Vienna, Berlin, where Jews were also to be found and unsettled by the new ideas they encountered. Out of this arose the Jewish Enlightenment (the Haskalah) to acquaint Jews to the ideas beginning to transform Western Europe. It was in part spurred by the internal crisis of classical Judaism and the contradictions within the closed circle of ghetto life in the late 18th and into the 19th century. But the largest portion of Jews on the continent were in Eastern Europe and within the Czarist Empire of Russia enclosed within their own totalitarian system of faith and culture.
It is interesting to note, as Shahak does, that the erudite thinker and author, Hannah Arendt (1906-75), failed to consider in her major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, the closed circle of Jewish ghettoes where authoritarianism was prevalent. For Arendt it was about Jews as primarily victims of antisemitism with which she began her study of totalitarianism and that the “Jewish question” in Europe “should have been this seemingly small and unimportant Jewish problem that had the dubious honor of setting the whole infernal machine in motion.”[54] There is no mention, Shahak pointed out, “in Hannah Arendt’s voluminous writings, whether on totalitarianism or on Jews, or on both, the smallest hint as to what Jewish society in Germany was really like in the 18th century: burning of books, persecution of writers, disputes about the magic powers of amulets, bans on the most elementary ‘non-Jewish’ education such as the teaching of correct German or indeed German written in the Latin alphabet.”[55] This deflection of the internal reality of Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe by blaming non-Jews entirely for their depressing condition came naturally as a feature of the totalitarian mindset. When liberation came for Jews, it came from the outside. According to Shahak,
In the countries of east Europe as well as in the Arab world, the Jews were liberated from the tyranny of their own religion and of their own communities by outside forces, too late and in circumstances too unfavourable for genuine internalised social change. In most cases, and particularly in Israel, the old concept of society, the same ideology – especially as directed towards non-Jews – and the same utterly false conception of history have been preserved. This applies even to some of those Jews who joined ‘progressive’ or leftist movements. An examination of radical, socialist and communist parties can provide many examples of disguised Jewish chauvinists and racists, who joined these parties merely for reasons of ‘Jewish interest’ and are, in Israel, in favour of ‘anti-Gentile’ discrimination. One need only check how many Jewish ‘socialists’ have managed to write about the kibbutz without taking the trouble to mention that it is a racist institution from which non-Jewish citizens of Israel are rigorously excluded, to see that the phenomenon we are alluding to is by no means uncommon.[56]
Arendt’s apologetics, indeed all apologetics and polemics, ride on the crude absurdity of eluding the logic of “two wrongs do not make a right”. This is also of course the characteristic of pointing fingers at others, of searching for splinters in the eyes of others when beams are firmly embedded in the eyes of those doing the pointing. For the adherents of classical Judaism, the instant reflex in the modern world when confronted with Enlightenment-based critique of their closed circle ghetto culture is to claim victimhood, to deflect, deny, and accuse the critic of engaging in antisemitism.
Eastern European Jews brought with them into Palestine their pre-modern medieval culture of the shtetls completely at odds with native Palestinians, Christians and Muslims. Palestine since the Arab-Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 638 CE as part of their conquest of the Levant, became an integral part of the Arab-Islamic empire-civilization in formation from the mid-7th century onwards through its “golden age” between the 8th and the 15th centuries, and its decline in the modern era beginning in the 18th century. Though Palestine was somewhat of a remote province of the Islamic empire, the culture of Palestinians was influenced and shaped by the high culture of the Islamic civilization that stretched from southern Spain (Andalusia) and across North Africa, the Levant and the Middle East to Central Asia and India. The contrast between the culture of Palestine, the crossroads of the Islamic civilization, and the cultural insularity and backwardness of Eastern European Jews was starkly dissimilar. Palestinians became exposed to the high culture of Western Europe with the entrance of Napoleon into Egypt and the Levant followed by the British at the end of the 18th century; but Palestinians were unprepared to meet and deal with Jews arriving as colonial-settlers from their closed world of Eastern Europe’s shtetls, while for Eastern European Jews the Oriental-Arab culture of Palestine was terra incognito regardless of their imagined and fake claim of descent from ancient Israelites. The clash was inevitable between vastly different two peoples and two cultures as a repeat of the Crusaders arriving in Palestine from Europe at the end of the 11th century bringing death and destruction, and eventually driven out by Arab-Muslim armies from the Levant at the end of the 13th century.
The Zionist colonial-settler movement in Palestine is predatory and, under the protection of Britain as the mandatory power, the vulgarity of Eastern European Jewish chauvinism against non-Jews found unbridled expression. Instead of reforming the faith and culture of classical Judaism, Palestine offered Jews for the first time since the destruction by Romans of the Second Temple in 70 CE the opportunity to reclaim and implement their ethnocentric ethics of Talmudism without inhibition. The result has been relentless and unchecked drive to expel Palestinians from their native land assisted by the Anglo-American powers and since post-1945 by the collective West. Jewish reformation was a prerequisite for any promise of peaceful coexistence of Palestinians and Jews to occur and the test for this, as Shahak observed, required of Jews self-criticism and critique of the Jewish past. Shahak wrote,
The most important part of such a critique must be detailed and honest confrontation of the Jewish attitude to non-Jews. This is what many Jews justly demand from non-Jews: to confront their own past and so become aware of the discrimination and persecutions inflicted on the Jews. In the last 40 years the number of non-Jews killed by Jews is by far greater than the number of the Jews killed by non-Jews. The extent of the persecution and discrimination against non-Jews inflicted by the ‘Jewish state’ with the support of organised diaspora Jews is also enormously greater than the suffering inflicted on Jews by regimes hostile to them. Although the struggle against antisemitism (and all other forms of racism) should never cease, the struggle against Jewish chauvinism and exclusivism, which must include a critique of classical Judaism, is now of equal or greater importance.[57]
The Gaza genocide prove that Israel, given the worldview of most Jews within and outside the Jewish state, is incapable of making peace with Palestinians based on the two state UN resolution 181 of November 1947 and arrive at a final settlement with Arab states and mutually respectable accommodation with Muslim countries of Asia and Africa. The reason being at the core of this worldview of classical Judaism is the Talmudic prescription that the categorical difference of blood and soul separates Jews from non-Jews. Such a difference – as was spelled out by Rabbi Avracham Kook that it “is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle” and, as the notorious Kiryat Arba rabbi, Dov Lior, in praising Baruch Goldstein, the mass murderer inside the Ibrahimi Mosque, Hebron, in February 1994 declared: “Since Goldstein did what he did in God’s own name, he is to be regarded as a righteous man”[58] – prohibits or impedes religiously and ideologically any Israeli leader attempting to do what Yitzhak Rabin, as Israel’s prime minister attempted,[59] and for which he was killed by the pronouncements of those quasi-secular and religious leaders on the right of Israeli politics.
Israel Shahak as a man of Enlightenment and of science and, as Hitchens noted, an intellectual descendant of Baruch Spinoza, would not dissemble the fact that the Jewish worldview makes for the incompatibility of Israelis to coexist with non-Jews in West Asia. His conclusion was starkly stated right at the beginning of Jewish History, Jewish Religion that “Israel as a Jewish state constitutes a danger not only to itself and its inhabitants, but to all Jews and to all other peoples and states in the Middle East and beyond.”[59] The Gaza genocide has worsened the situation and for justice to be done for victims of the State of Israel either the overdue two states in Palestine be enforced by the collective will of the UN member states, or eventually the “cunning of history” dismantles the Jewish state as was the Crusader kingdom in the Levant.
___________________
Notes:
[1] Excerpts from Julian Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals [La Trahison des Clercs], New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1928.
[2] Excerpts from Rev. Munther Isaac’s sermon see: https://salimmansur.substack.com/p/christ-under-the-rubble
[3] See: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session60/advance-version/a-hrc-60-crp-3.pdf, p. 3, article 3.
[4] See U.S. National Archive collections: https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2003/winter/truman-diary-1947 ; and
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/5859986
[5] Cited in Simon Schama, Belonging: The Story of the Jews 1492-1900, (London: Penguin Random House, 2017), pp. 393-94.
[6] Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem. Translated by Rabbi Maurice J. Bloom. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1958), p. 13.
[7] David J. Goldberg, To The Promised Land: A History of Zionist Thought, (London: Penguin Books, 1996), p. 13.
[8] Ibid., chapter 4.
[9] Hess, op.cit., p. 77.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Christopher Sykes, Crossroads to Israel 1917-1948 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), p. 4.
[12] Ibid., p. 5.
[13] Ibid., p. 14.
[14] For Edwin Montague’s memorandum see: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/montagu-memo-on-british-government-s-anti-semitism
[15] See Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (London: Verso, 2009), p. 215.
[16] Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and its Heritage (New York: Random House, Inc., 1976; reprint edition of the original by Last Century Media, 2015), p. 18.
[17] Sand, op. cit.; see chapter four, pages 218-249.
[18] Ibid., p. 238.
[19] Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel(New York: Olive Branch Press, 1992), p. 166.
[20] Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London: Oneworld Publications, 2006), pp. xii-xiii.
[21] Ibid., p. xiii.
[22] Elfie Pallis, “Israel Shahak: Belsen survivor who attacked Israel’s treatment of Palestinians,” in The Guardian (UK), Friday, July 6, 2001. See: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/jul/06/guardianobituaries.physicalsciences
[23] Ibid.
[24] Foreword by Gore Vidal in Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years (London: Pluto Press, 1994), p. viii.
[25] Israel Shahak, ‘The Life of Death’: An Exchange, in The New York Review of Books, January 29, 1987, issue. See: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1987/01/29/the-life-of-death-an-exchange/
[26] Foreword by Christopher Hitchens in Israel Shahak, Open Secrets: Israeli Foreign and Nuclear Policies (London: Pluto Press, 1997), p. xii.
[27] Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years(London: Pluto Press, 1994), pp. 1-2.
[28] Ibid., p.39.
[29] Ibid., p. 13.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel Second Edition (London: Pluto Press, 2004), p. 11.
[34] Ibid., p. xix.
[35] Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion, p. 71.
[36] Ibid., Shahak, p. 7.
[37] Ibid., p. 91.
[38] Ibid., pp. 8-9.
[39] Ibid., p. 9.
[40] Shahak and Mezvinsky, op. cit., p. 43.
[41] Shahak, op. cit., pp.20-21.
[42] Ibid., p.22.
[43] Ibid., pp. 27-28.
[44] Ibid., p. 30.
[45] Ibid., p. 36.
[46] Ibid.
[47] Ibid.
[48] Ibid., p. 35.
[49] Ibid., p. 32.
[50] Ibid., p. 37.
[51] Shahak and Mezvinsky, op. cit., p. 20.
[52] Shahak, op. cit., p. 103.
[53] Ibid.
[54] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: World Publishing Co., 1951, 12th printing 1972), p. 3.
[55] Shahak, op. cit., p.16.
[56] Ibid., pp. 17-18.
[57] Ibid., p. 103.
[58] Shahak and Mezvinsky, op. cit., p. 101.
[59] See: https://salimmansur.substack.com/p/rabins-murder-is-prehistory-of-gaza
[60] Shahak, op. cit., p. 2.
