Edward Alexander - The Jewish Wars

Originally published in 1996 by Southern Illinois University Press.

Published 2011 by Transaction Publishers.

Published 2017 by Routledge

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The Jewish wars / Edward Alexander.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4128-1132-3 (alk. paper)

1. Israel--Foreign public opinion, American. 2. Public opinion--United States. 3. Jews--United States--Attitudes toward Israel. 4. Antisemitism-United States. 5. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Infl uence. 6. Israel and the diaspora. I. Title.

DS102.95.A43 2010

956.94054--dc22

Jews have been at the storm-center of history since the time of the Dreyfus Affair; or perhaps since the moment in 1789 when Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre declared in the French Assembly that Jewish Emancipation was contingent on the Jews giving up most of what defined them as Jews: To the Jew as a citizen, everything; to the Jews as a people, nothing; or perhaps from the time that Voltaire warned, in his entry on Juifs, in the Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764), that the Jews must renounce their past and join the forward march of humanity if they do not wish to have all the terrors of the Christian Middle Ages revived against them: We [Christians] have burned you as Holocausts. Some would go back a good deal farther and observe that, to quote from Simon Rawidowiczs famous essay Israel The Ever-Dying People, the first ancient non-Jewish document which mentions Israel by name is, symbolically apt, a message of total annihilation. It is the monumentin possession of the British Museumon which Mer-neptah, the thirteenth century BCE Egyptian forerunner of Nasser, ... states succinctly: Israel is desolated; its seed is no more.

I wish I could say that this collection of essays, which I described in 1995 as dealing with a brief recent phase (from 1987 to 1994) of a war that seems to have no respite although it assumes different forms and names, is now of value mainly because it affords a glimpse of a particular historical moment and is of interest mainly as a historical document. Alas, this is not the case. Nearly all of its subjects and most of its protagonists (including the dead ones, like Edward Said) are still very much with us, invoked and celebrated precisely for what is most shameful in their words and deeds. Bishop Desmond Tutus prominence at college graduations, often as the recipient of honorary degrees, has not diminished one iota because of his raw Jew-hatred. Michael Lerner no longer has ready access (via Mrs. Clinton) to the White House, but his spirit lives on in such products of palpable imposture as J Street, an organization of Jews claiming they must be cruel to Israel in order to be kind, a group that can justly claim a sympathizer and supporter whose claim on the White House is a good deal stronger than that of a presidents wife. The ideology of multi-culturalism (a warm, fuzzy feeling about all cultures, includingor perhaps especiallythe most barbaric) has now assumed monstrous proportions and fuels not only what the astute Pierre-Andre Taguieff calls Palestinophilia but also xenophilia. Multiculturalisms twin brother, diversity, which until only yesterday meant that people should look different but think alike, has become diversity unto death, as was apparent in its invocation by President Obama and his top generals in the aftermath of the November 2009 Fort Hood massacre by a (self-proclaimed) Islamic jihadist. Politically motivated distortion and exploitation of the Holocaust, the subject of several essays in the book, has now reached the point where the Holocaust has become a virtual tool-kit for European Judeophobes.

Although some of the books essaysthose on Michael Lerner and Noam Chomsky, for exampledeal with Jews who define their Jewishness in opposition to the state of IsraelI came to feel that this subject was so large that it deserved a book (perhaps an encyclopedia) devoted to it exclusively. As George Gilder has acerbically remarked, in his 2009 book The Israel Test, Jews, amazingly, excel so readily in all intellectual fields that they outperform all rivals even in the arena of antisemitism. That is why, in 2006, I published, with Paul Bogdanor, The Jewish Divide over Israel: Accusers and Defenders (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers), which tries to take the measure of this particular Jewish excellence.

I blush to confess that the essay in that book which gave me most pleasure and even a (momentary) conviction that The Jewish Wars had not been written in vain was the one by Haifa University professor Menachem Kellner, a veteran of the Israeli peace camp chastened by the intifada, who wrote as follows: I gravitated to the moderate left end of the Israeli political spectrum.... I supported the two-state solution, never considered voting for a religious party, and usually found some grouping to the left of the Labor Party to support. There was even a time when members of the [leftist] Haifa Meretz party sounded me ... out about representing them on the Haifa religious counsel. So of course I supported the Oslo accords, and dreamed of the day that I could board a train in Haifa and disembark in Paris. I read Edward Alexander and Ruth Wisse in Commentary