Zionism, Jews and the The Law of Return<
What happens when American Jews realize that the Zionists, with their incredible
arrogance, have taken on a mission and a meaning that is utterly preposterous, that is pure
mythology? What happens when they come to realize that they have been sold a bill of goods and
that, far from being superior to Diaspora Jewry, these Zionists are inferior by every measure of
civilization? What happens when American Jews discover that they have been duped, that they have
constructed an allegiance to Israel on the basis of irrational guilt, of vengeful fantasies, above all,
above all, based on the most naive delusions about the moral identity of this state? Because this state
has no moral identity. It has forfeited its moral identity, if it ever had any to begin with. ... [T]his is
what they have done by breaking the hands of Arab children on the orders of their illustrious minister
of defense. Even to world Jewry it will be clear: this is a state founded on force and maintained by
force, a Machiavellian state that deals violently with the uprising of an oppressed people in an
occupied territory.... They have advertised this state for forty years as essential to the existence of
Jewish culture, people, heritage; they have tried with all their cunning to advertise Israel as a
no-choice reality when, in fact, it is an option, to be examined in terms of quality and value. And
when you dare to examine it like this, what do you actually find? Arrogance! Arrogance! Arrogance!
And beyond the arrogance? Nothing! And beyond the nothing--more arrogance! And now it is there
for the whole world to see on television--a primitive capacity for sadistic violence that has finally put
the lie to all their mythology! 'The Law of the Return'? As if any self-respecting civilized Jew would
want to 'return' to a place like this! 'The Ingathering of the Exiles'? As if 'exile' from Jewishness begins
to describe the Jewish condition anywhere but here! 'The Holocaust'? The Holocaust is over.
Unbeknownst to them, the Zionists themselves officially declared it over three days ago at Manara
Square in Ramallah. I will take you there and show you the place where the decree was written. A
wall where the soldiers took innocent Palestinian civilians and clubbed and beat them to a pulp. ...
The end of the Holocaust is written on that wall in Palestinian blood.
For forty years they have been dragging Jews from all over the world, making payoffs, cutting deals,
bribing officials in a dozen different countries so as to get their hands on more and more Jews and
drag them here to perpetuate their myth of a Jewish homeland. And now comes Philip Roth to do
everything he can to encourage these same Jews to stop squatting on somebody else's land and to
leave this make-believe country of theirs before these unregenerate, power-mad, vengeful Zionists
implicate the whole of world Jewry in their brutality and bring a catastrophe down upon the Jews
from which they will never recover.
By Philip Roth in Operation Shylock: A Confession
pp.134-137 |
