"They don’t want us to be"

As Amos Oz noted: in the 1930s, antisemites declared, “Jews to Palestine”. Today they shout: “Jews out of Palestine”. He said: they don’t want us to be there; they don’t want us to be here; they don’t want us to be.

Really excellent piece, "WE FACE A NEW KIND OF HATRED" . Best thing I've read all week. And while I take issue with some of his deductions and his referral to "islamophobia" which is not legit. A fear of Islamic terror is a healthy fear. That notwithstanding,the essay is  by and large, very eye opening. The only thing sorely missing is the legacy of Islamic antisemitism. Islamic antisemitsm was very much a part of the holocaust  and is largely behind the surge of global antisemitism. The omission is glaring.

Excerpts;

The return of antisemitism, after 60 years of Holocaust education, interfaith dialogue and antiracist legislation, is a major event in the history of the world. Far-sighted historians like Bernard Lewis and Robert Wistrich had been sounding the warning since the 1980s. Already in the 1990s, Harvard literary scholar Ruth Wisse argued that antisemitism was the most successful ideology of the 20th century. German fascism, she said, came and went. Soviet communism came and went. Antisemitism came and stayed.

Today’s antisemitism is a new phenomenon, continuous with, yet significantly different from, the past. To fathom the transformation, we must first define what antisemitism is. In the past, Jews were hated because they were rich and because they were poor; because they were capitalists (Marx) and because they were communists (Hitler); because they kept to themselves and because they infiltrated everywhere; because they held tenaciously to a superstitious faith (Voltaire) and because they were rootless cosmopolitans who believed nothing (Stalin).

Antisemitism is not an ideology, a coherent set of beliefs. It is, in fact, an endless stream of contradictions. The best way of understanding it is to see it as a virus. Viruses attack the human body, but the body itself has an immensely sophisticated defence, the human immune system. How then do viruses survive and flourish? By mutating. Antisemitism mutates, and in so doing defeats the immune systems set up by cultures to protect themselves against hatred. There have been three such mutations in the past 2,000 years, and we are living through the fourth.

WE FACE A NEW KIND OF HATRED Sir Jonathan Sacks JC.com hat tip wolf

Sacks is Chief Rabbi of the UK

Hate destroys the hated, but it also destroys the hater. It is no accident that antisemitism is the weapon of choice of tyrants and totalitarian regimes. It deflects internal criticism away by projecting it onto an external scapegoat. It is deployed in country after country to direct attention away from real internal problems of poverty, unemployment and underachievement. Antisemitism is used to sustain regimes without human rights, the rule of law, an independent judiciary, a free press, liberty of association or accountable government. One truth resounds through the pages of history: to be free, you have to let go of hate. Those driven by hate are enemies of freedom. There is no exception.

Finally, to all of us together, we must say: Jews have been hated throughout history because they were different. To be sure, everyone is different; but Jews more than most fought for the right to be different. Under a succession of empires, and centuries of dispersion, Jews were the only people who for more than 2,000 years refused to convert to the dominant religion or assimilate into the dominant culture. That is why antisemitism is a threat not just to Jews but to humanity.

For we are all different. After Babel, there is no single culture. Instead, there is a multiplicity of languages and identities, each one of which is precious. Judaism is the world’s most sustained protest against empires, because imperialism is the attempt to impose a single truth, culture or faith on a plural world. God, said the rabbis, makes everyone in His image, yet He makes everyone different to teach us to respect difference. And since difference is constitutive of humanity, a world that has no space for difference has no space for humanity. That is why a resurgence of antisemitism has always been an early warning of an assault on freedom itself. It is so today.

We must find allies in the fight against hate. For though it begins with Jews, ultimately it threatens us all.

Comments

[Surak]

That quotation at the beginning looked very familiar - it looked similar to something the late Rabbi Kahane z"tl had written. It's a letter called "Dear world", and the theme is similar, but more assertive. What a world, where a man like R. Kahane is called a racist, but Abu Mazen is welcomed by the Commander-in-Chief of the so-called "War on Terror". Here's the link to "Dear world":

http://www.kahane.org/meir/dear_world.htm

[Shy Guy]

In addition to the Amos Oz's quote not being original, why would anyone want to quote a self-hating Jew like Amos Oz when trying to defend Israel?

The word, Pamela, to describe Oz is "drek". We have S**tloads of that here in Israel.

[Shy Guy]

BTW, Kahane's "Dear World" is available as a short video, available at YouTube.