The Wandering Who: A Study of Jewish Identity Politics (18 page)

Chapter 22

Being in Time

One may be left perplexed on learning that just three years after the liberation of Auschwitz (1945) the newly-formed Jewish state ethnically cleansed the vast majority of the indigenous population of Palestine (1948). Just five years after the end of World War Two, the Jewish state brought to life racially-discriminatory return laws in order to prevent the 1948 Palestinian refugees from coming back to their cities, villages, fields and orchards. These laws, still in place today, were not categorically different from the notorious Nazi Nuremberg Laws.

This unique institutional lack of compassion deserves some attention. One might expect the victims of oppression and discrimination to locate themselves at the forefront of the battle against evil. One might expect the victims of oppression and discrimination to not visit the same fate on others. This expectation never happened as far as the Jewish State is concerned. With millions of besieged Palestinians, Israel has given itself the reputation of a pariah state.

How is it that the Jewish political and ideological discourse fails so badly to draw the obvious and necessary lesson from history and Jewish history in particular? How is it that in spite of ‘Jewish history’ appearing to be an endless tale of Jewish suffering, Israel and its lobbies are so blind to any form of ethical or universal thinking? How is it that, in spite of the Holocaust, Israel and Jewish lobbies invest so much energy in evoking hatred towards enemies of Israel and world Jewry?

As we have discussed, within the context of Jewish identity politics and Ideology, history doesn’t play a guiding role.

As Sand noted, instead of history, the Torah provided
Rabbinical Judaism with a spiritually-driven plot. It conveyed an image of purpose and fate. However, things changed in the 19
^th
century. Due to the rapid emancipation of European Jewry together with the rise of nationalism and the spirit of Enlightenment, assimilated European Jews felt bound to redefine their beginning in secular, national and rational terms. This is when Jews ‘invented’ themselves as ‘people’ and as a ‘class’. Like other European nations Jews felt the urge to posses a coherent narrative.

Inventing history is not exactly a crime
–
people, organisations and nations often do it. Yet, in spite of the rapid process of assimilation, Jewish secular ideology and politics failed to encompass the real meaning of historical thought. Indeed, the assimilated secular Jews was very successful in dropping God, they managed also to drop their symbolic identifiers such as the skullcap and the
kaftan
. And yet, the assimilated Jews failed to replace divinity with an alternative anthropocentric ethical and metaphysical realisation.

The newly-born Jewish political identity was, indeed, quick to invent history. Yet, not a single Jewish attempt to replace God with a Jewish secular anthropocentric moral system has been noted
¹¹⁰
. In short, when Jewish secular humanists are preaching to us in the name of ‘Jewish values’ we had better challenge them and verify what values they are referring to.

Temporality

I only recently understood that the Jewish secular project is not only foreign to history and ethical thinking, it is actually detached from the notion of temporality.

Temporality is inherent to the human condition. ‘To be’ is ‘to be in time’. We are hung between the past that is drifting away into the void and the unknown that proceeds towards us from the future. Through the present, the so-called ‘here and now’, we meditate on that which is past, and hope for forgiveness. Ethics, as reflected by Kant’s categorical imperative, is also bound up with temporality: ‘act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’. Kant reviews the moral act in respect to its temporal perspective. The universal law is looked upon from the perspective of the future and past. Ethics and temporality can be seen as an endless dialogue between ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’.

The present should be understood as a creative dynamic mode where past premeditates its future. But far more crucially, it is also where the imaginary future can re-write its past. I will try to elucidate this idea through a simple and hypothetical yet horrifying war scenario. We, for instance, can envisage an horrific situation in which an Israeli so-called ‘pre-emptive’ nuclear attack on Iran escalates into a disastrous nuclear war, in which tens of millions of people perish. I guess that amongst the survivors of such a nightmare scenario, some may be bold enough to argue that ‘Hitler might have been right after all.’

The above is obviously a fictional scenario, and by no means a wishful one, yet such a vision of a ‘possible’ horrific development should restrain Israeli or Zionist aggression towards Iran. As we know, Israeli officials threaten to flatten Iran rather too often. In practice, pre-TSS Israelis make this devastating scenario into a possible reality.

Seemingly, Israelis and Zionist politicians fail to see their own actions in the light of history. They fail to look at their actions in terms of their consequences. From an ethical perspective, the above ‘imaginary’ scenario is there to prevent Israel from attacking Iran. Yet, as we all know, Israel and its lobbies are desperate to dismantle the so-called ‘Iranian threat’. My explanation is simple. The Jewish state and the Jewish discourse in general are completely foreign to the notion of temporality. Israel is blinded to the consequences of its actions, it only thinks of its actions in terms of short-term pragmatism. Instead of temporality, Israel thinks in terms of an extended present.

Grasping the notion of temporality is the ability to accept that the past is shaped and revised in the light of a search for meaning. History, and historical thinking, are the capacity to rethink the past and the future.

To a certain extent, history revisionism is the true essence of historical thinking for it reshapes the past through an imaginary future perspective and vice versa. Revisionism is imbued in the deepest possible understanding of temporality, and therefore inherent to humanity and humanism. It is obvious that those who oppose historical revisionism are, in practice, operating against the foundations of humanism.

This philosophical outlook is not very flattering to Jewish discourse and identity politics. Jewish ideology and political discourse openly opposes revision and revisionism. Similar to the Judaic precept, Jewish politics is there to fix and cement a narrative and terminology, and it would oppose any historical revision or reformism. The Zionist ideology presents itself as a historical narrative, and it took me many years to grasp that Zionism, Jewish identity politics and ideology were actually crude, blunt assaults on history, the notion of history and temporality. In fact, Jewish national politics is an attempt to place the people of Israel beyond historical temporality. Once the Jewish past is cemented and sealed, the fate and the operative actions can be deduced: from a Zionist prospective, the Diaspora Jews should adhere to and support the homecoming project, the Palestinian people should clear the space, Western superpowers should finance it all, and so on. Such a vision alienates its followers from temporality and ethics. Those who still insist on criticising the validity of the Zionist argument are silenced. Those who follow the Zionist and Jewish political philosophy are doomed to drift away from humanism and humanity.

Such an explanation starts to throw light on Israeli conduct and Jewish support for Israeli war crimes.

Inventing a past is not the most worrying issue when it comes
to Israel and Zionism. As I mentioned before, people and nations do tend to invent their past. However, celebrating one’s phantasmic past at the expense of the other is obviously an ethical issue, and in the case of Israel the problem goes deeper. It is the attempt to seal yesterday that led to the collective ethical collapse of Israel and its supporting crowd. Instead of a celebration of life through transformation of meanings, Zionism was there to promise redemption via a blind acceptance of a single narrative. It promised to bring the ‘wandering’ to an end. It promised to bring about a ‘new Jew’, a civilised being, an ethical character. Establishing a fictitious, unchangeable past, Zionism aimed to deliver the Jews an eternal redemption through an exclusivist and racially-oriented homecoming project. Jewish politics in general and Zionism in particular should be realised as attempts to place the people of Israel beyond temporality. The Marxist East European Bund invented the ‘Yiddish Nation’ that was supposed to save the Jews via the communist revolution, Zionism invented Jewish exile in order to create the pretext for ‘homecoming’. Once the Jewish past is cemented and revision is prohibited, the Jewish fate becomes a matter of logical deduction. This is also when compassion and ethics evaporate.

The dismissal of temporality, the lack of capacity to reflect upon oneself from the futuristic perspective, explains the Israeli collective complicity in some of their horrendous war crimes. This should be enough to explain why the Israelis sliced up the Holy Land with separation walls and barbed wires. It explains why Israelis drop White Phosphorous on their next-door neigh-bours as they seek shelter in a UN shelter. It also explains why Israeli Navy Seal commandos ended up executing peace activists on the Mavi Marmara on the high seas. It also explains why newly-born Israel was quick to expel the vast majority of the Palestinian indigenous population just three years after the liberation of Auschwitz. These events have nothing to do with the
colonialist nature of the Jewish state as some Marxist ideologists insist. They may have something to do with the racist, supremacist, chauvinist ideology that fuels Zionism, and must be grasped in philosophical and metaphysical terms. We are not talking here about sociology, psychology or material determinism, we are actually searching for categorical understanding.

People who defy the true meaning of history are alienated from temporality. People who cannot revise their past are doomed to fail to comprehend the notion of consequence, causality and ethics. People who defy history never look in the mirror. They are doomed to think that anti-Semitism is an ‘irrational’ social phenomenon that erupts ‘out of nowhere’. Accordingly they must believe that the
Goyim
are potentially mad. Bear in mind that the Goyim are the vast majority of the human population.

That which is called ‘Jewish history’, is actually a relentless attempt to narrate the past from the point in time where Jewish pain is detected. I would argue that the appropriate temporal approach would be to ask what is it that brought so much hatred on the people of Israel. I would even take it further and ask, is there anything that we know nowadays about Jewish culture that may help us to understand the Jewish past and Jewish suffering? Can Israeli behaviour throw light on the events that led to the Holocaust, or other instances of persecution of Jews?

The relentless clinging to a phantasmic, invented yesterday is there to provide the false and very misleading impression that the tomorrow can be also determined. Seemingly, by the means of self-imposed blindness, Israel has led itself into an inevitable disaster. Clearly, Zionism failed to answer the Jewish question. Yet it may be that the conditions created by enlightenment, liberalism and emancipation cannot be easily addressed by any form of Jewish political collectivism except orthodoxy, which is pretty much impervious to enlightenment, liberalism, individualism and emancipation all together. If this is indeed the case, Jewish
secular collectivism is disastrous. As we come to the end of this text, it seems as though the Third Category’s political, ideological and identity discourse cannot be sustained.

However, Israel is not alone. As tragic as it appears to be, America and Britain have managed to willingly give up on temporality. It is the lack of true historical discourse that stopped Britain and America from understanding their future, present and past. As in the case of Jewish history, American and British politicians insist on a banal and simplistic historic tale to do with WWII, Cold War, Islam, 911 etc. Tragically, the criminal Anglo-American genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan, AKA ‘The War against Terror’, is a continuation of our self-inflicted blindness. Since Britain and America failed to grasp the necessary message from the massacres in Hamburg and Dresden, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, there was nothing that could stop English-speaking imperialism from committing similar crimes in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Similarly, both Britain and America were caught completely unprepared for regional
Intifada
in the Middle East and North Africa. Western estrangement has taken its toll. Western political leadership is totally detached from humanist thinking or judgments that involve ethics.

For America, Britain and the West to rescue themselves all they have to do is to revert to Western values of ethics and openness. They must drift away from Jerusalem and reinstate the spirit of Athens.

Closure

It is my hope that this book will throw some light on questions to do with Jewish-ness and Jewish ideology, identity and politics. Having thought and written about this topic for over a decade, and looking back over my work, I realise that it was actually the Jewish ‘anti-Zionists’ who taught me more about Zionism, Jewish nationalism and tribalism than any rabid Zionist or Israeli nationalist.

While both Zionism and Jewish socialism are full of inconsistencies, Zionism can be realised as an attempt to resolve the abnormality in the Jewish condition. The so-called Jewish progressive discourse, on the other hand, is an attempt to shove ideological inconsistencies and discrepancies (largely tribalism vs. universalism) under the carpet.

As much as this book explores different aspects of Jewish political neurosis, and may help to untangle the bond between Israel and Jews across the world, it fails to answer one question: what do modern emancipated Jews want? Considering the energy and resources that Jewish lobbies pour into political parties around the world, and the efforts undertaken to influence media and leadership, it is far from clear what the Lord Levys and the Haim Sabans are trying to achieve. They spend a lot of money but what are they trying to buy? What is Israel itself trying to achieve? The more influence Jewish and Israeli lobbies gain, the greater resentment Jews earn. Is it ‘security’ that they seek, as they say? I really do not think so.