I’ve been thinking a bit about those people, much more Jewish than me, who attend demonstrations for Palestine, marching alongside those who call, knowingly or unknowingly, for their eradication; or, if we are not going to pussyfoot about our terms, their death. They are a valuable propaganda tool, placed up front and centre, their identities as Jews proclaimed either by t-shirt, placard, or, in the case of Neturi Karta, their religious threads. Those last we know consider the existence of Israel to be, absent the arrival of the Messiah, a blasphemy; the others are presumably motivated by nothing other than altruism and a desire for justice; or maybe something else is at play, as in the case of those black people who would join the National Front in the 1970s, possibly because (a) they felt the need of a peer group, and (b) calculated that membership would guarantee their safety in a future race war. Oh, and (c) a place front and centre of their marches.
I won’t speculate about their motives, because it would be rude to, and I’m just going to assume their motives are wholly benign. The rest of the Jewish polity, as you know, call them “self-hating Jews”, which I am beginning to think is something of a misnomer; for the prominent ones seem to think very highly of themselves indeed.
The two most prominent, in this country at least, are Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party, and Michael Rosen, the children’s author. In the USA, the equivalent figures would be Bernie Sanders and Noam Chomsky; the latter has been a bit quiet lately, not just because of his advanced age, but because he was recently exposed as being a frequent guest of the late Jeffrey Epstein. The general idea is, as far as I can see, that Israel is an illegal occupier of the land, and a morally bankrupt custodian of it.
In a recent Facebook post, Rosen raised the question of Israel’s legitimacy with these words, which I reproduce here entire and unabridged, written with straightforward simplicity, as if to a child: “The History of Israel in 5 chapters: 1. Invent a god. 2. Make up a story that the god said we can have some land. 3. Tell a story how we went into that land and defeated the people living there. 4. 1000s of years later, tell the world this is the truth so this gives us the right to have that land, no matter who’s living there. 5. Turn this story about a god into a title deed that can apply even to people who don’t believe in that god, so long as these people can say they’re descended from people who once did believe in that god.”
There is a lot to unpack here, not least his abridgement of the question of why the creation of modern-day Israel was deemed an urgent necessity in the first place. As it happens, Rosen and I are friends on Facebook, although whether we still will be after this article is brought to his attention is another matter. So I jumped in and asked him this, cutting to the chase, so to speak: “So let me get this straight,” I asked, “do you think the state of Israel should be abolished?” He replied by asking me in return: “do you think that if Scotland became independent or if Northern Ireland became part of the Republic, the UK would be abolished? Was Yugoslavia abolished? Was Czechoslovakia abolished?” Etc., etc. I took that as a “yes”; and the fight was on. I thought to myself: I can’t believe I’m having an argument with the author of We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. (A book whose chief appeal to the adult reading aloud resides in its brevity, and the fact that children grow out of it after six months or so.)
I admire his certainty, if not his theology or history. After all, should the Jew forever be prey to doubts, to self-interrogation, to a perpetual internal debate if there is no one else to argue with in the immediate vicinity? Rosen and Polanski have this in common: a kind of romantic conviction that what they say is right, and that they are conforming to an internal manifesto that allows them to ignore inconvenient facts. It is doctrinaire and does not admit of uncertainty or nuance, like an extreme kind of socialism. The socialist Bund of course deplored, since its foundation at the end of the 19th century, the very idea of Zionism, and that once liberation was applied across the board, there would be no need for a modern Israel. They died, of course, along with the millions of other Jews, and you will note that modern Jews who declare for Palestine are overwhelmingly to be found in countries where the Nazis never set foot. (Of course, where the Nazis once marched, there are very few Jews at all.)
Zack Polanski, to turn to him, seems to have the answers, as he does to everything, even if, for reasons we can only guess at, his attitude to Israel has hardened of late; and if there is any policy proposal of his that is more self-confident than that he can sit down with Vladimir Putin and persuade him to give up his nuclear arsenal, I have yet to hear one – from anyone. It makes his now-abandoned suggestion that hypnosis can enlarge a woman’s breasts, for which he has been given the unimprovable nickname “Hypnotits”, look like rigorously peer-reviewed science. I see a lot of outrage among my Jewish friends about the behaviour of the current Israeli government, while still acknowledging, as a principle, that Israel must continue to exist; Polanski and Rosen et al seem to be saying that it shouldn’t, or that it was a bad idea in the first place.
But repeated declarations can mask a profound uncertainty, an internal division outwardly expressed by their willingness to sympathise with those who would do them harm. The refrain of Rosen’s most famous book about the bear hunt has the children saying “we’re not scared.” The phrase is repeated ad nauseum. I thought about this during the thousands of times I read it to my children. Are they really not scared? Or is it something you say out loud to convince yourself when, deep down, you know that there is a bear out there in the woods, and that it is hungry, and would eat you up in a flash if it could?
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