A Dangerous Time to Be A Jew
by Joe Katzman at July 23, 2004 05:53 AM
Gary Farber has this gem from renowned scholar Simon Sebag Montefiore, writing in The New Statesman (of all places) about the fact that it is increasingly dangerous to be a Jew in Europe. I really liked this passage - it isn't directly relevant to the subject, but it's a classic example the Jewish mindset turned into humour:
"When I was 16, I went to toil in a kibbutz in Israel for a few months, imagining myself as a Hebraic warrior, sweatily harvesting oranges with fecund Israeli girls in groves blossoming with Jewish ingenuity amid the once-sterile Negev Desert. I actually found myself making plastic toilets. This was not good for my Jewish self-image. David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founder, foresaw that statehood meant Jewish intellectuals, but also truck drivers and criminals. But he never mentioned loo-makers. From the shtetls of Lodz to Starbucks in Manhattan, even our comic geniuses - Sholom Aleichem, Woody Allen or Jerry Seinfeld, had not invented the Jewish toilet-maker. So here I was: a new character in our ancient canon of self-mockery, the humour that makes our tragedies bearable, our successes ridiculous. My favourite example: my witty great-uncle being asked his age at a funeral. "Ninety-two," he said. "Hardly worth going home, is it?"
From funny, to frightening... on a much less humourous note, there are also passages like these:
"Yet something has changed about the European attitude to Jewishness. One feels it everywhere: we have moved, as it were, from the world of Howard Jacobson back to Franz Kafka. This is connected to Israel, America, 9/11 and Iraq. For more than a decade now, Israel has been the fashionable bete noire of the chattering classes. The response to Israel in the European media, particularly the BBC and the Guardian, has long been prejudiced, disproportionate, vicious, often fictitious....
...Yet, in the British media, every Israeli sin is amplified, while those of the Arab world are ignored. The million dead of the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein's 300,000 victims, thousands more massacred in Chechnya, the Arab militias killing black Sudanese, the torturing Middle Eastern tyrannies are ignored - but in Britain, every Palestinian death is reported like a sacred rite. Our media conceal the venom directed at Israel by Arab clerics, television and the internet, presenting Israeli complaints as propaganda. The Middle East commentator Tom Gross revealed in the National Review that when the "moderate" Saudi cleric Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais visited Britain this month, the BBC hailed him as a brave worker for "community cohesion". Yet his Friday sermons call for Jews - "scum of the human race, rats of the world" - to be "annihilated".
It is not anti-Semitic to criticise Israel. Many of its policies are clumsy, self-defeating, wrong. I am against most of the settlements, against the razing of Palestinian houses. Israel will lose its soul if it uses citizen-soldiers to skirmish through Rafah or Hebron for much longer. I want a Palestinian state; I care deeply about the humiliation and deaths of Palestinians. If criticisms against Israel were based purely on its political faults, no one could complain. Yet, since the first intifada, Israel's critics use hysteria and unreality, holding Israel to standards to which Britain, for one, could never aspire...."
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