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Politics : America Under Siege: The End of Innocence -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: michael97123 who wrote (20840)	12/23/2002 5:34:18 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 27666

If there were no nazis and no repressive USSR most jews would have probably stayed in europe. mike The impetus behind Zionism goes further back in time than that -- blame the Dreyfus Affair and the Czarist Pogroms, combined with the rise of European nationalism and anti-Semitism. Also remember that most Israelis now are not of European descent at all, but are Mizrahim, Jews who came from the Arab lands. So while the Nazis and the USSR certainly played their part, it's only part of a longer story. Here are some good comments from Israeli blogger Imshin: A few words about Israeli Europeanism, as I see it: Jews were always considered an alien element in Europe. As I see it, the intentional destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis, with quite a lot of support from various nations they were occupying at the time (by saying this I am not belittling the courageous people who helped the Jews in this dark era, but rather elevating them), is one of the results of the first real appearance of acceptance of Jews in Western European society, in the guise of the emancipation. Claims that Israel is a European colonizing agent are therefore particularly ironic and unjust. The first Jews to arrive here, not for religious reasons but to begin to realize the Zionist vision of a return of the Jewish people to their homeland, were European. In fact, the whole idea grew out of European emerging nationalism, which had no place for perceived foreign elements such as the Jews. But how European were these first settlers, really? Most of those who came to live here, initially, were breaking out of the confinements of Jewish traditional communities in Russia and Poland. European philosophy and idealism were something new and exciting for them, not something they had encountered in their Eastern European Jewish homes, in the “Heder” or in the Yeshiva, not something they had grown up with. How European are today’s ultra-religious Jews of Mea Shearim? These people live in a world of their own, not only unreceptive to external influences, but actively fighting against them. This is the world the first Zionist settlers in the Land of Israel came from. That they should have the good sense to embrace Western European values of democracy and personal freedom is not obvious. It took Russia and Poland, the countries they came from, many more years to embrace these values. The Jewish Zionists of the first half of the twentieth century built a secular European-style society here, in defiance of the Jewish religious world they came from. The Yekkes, the highly educated secular German Jews, fleeing Nazi Germany in the thirties, were welcomed even as their stiff European manners were widely ridiculed. Hundreds of thousands of displaced and often badly traumatized Holocaust survivors, mainly from Eastern Europe, also managed to somehow build a home for themselves in this Europeanist atmosphere, quite naturally. Among them was the young Tommy Lapid. When hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab countries flowed in, they were also expected to assimilate into the prevalent Europeanism, which must have been completely bewildering for many of them. It seems that on the whole, they sincerely attempted to, initially. But much of their acceptance of this Europeanism was superficial, and they eventually rebelled. I wrote yesterday about the subsequent cultural transformations, which I think we are still in the midst of. I strongly believe that shedding off an exclusively European self-image is important for the development of an Israeli society that is a natural and integral part of the Middle East. This doesn’t mean lowering our standards. This means enjoying the richness of our diverse society, accepting and dealing with the more problematic aspects of it and not succumbing to dangerous tendencies. imshin.blogspot.com