Israel Shahak's Jewish History,
Jewish Religion
Foreword by Gore Vidal [p. vii-viii]
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
concetration 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.
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