Just how sick is this?
From Melanie Phillips’s Diary:
The Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, is constitutionally confrontation-averse. He has also formed a brotherly bond with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, which isn’t surprising since in many ways they are two of a kind, being scholars who are less than comfortable at finding themselves expected to navigate the political piranha pool. So Sir Jonathan’s stinging attack last week on the Church of England for its vote to support disinvestment in Caterpillar Inc. because the Israelis use its bulldozers to destroy Palestinian houses – a vote which Dr Williams supported – is all the more notable. It shows just how grave Sir Jonathan thinks the situation is when the Church, as he said, has chosen this of all moments to extend to Israel vilification rather than support, just when Israel is under renewed existential threat from Iran and Hamas and has itself risked civil war to carry out the Gaza withdrawal.
Today, a churchman has replied to Sir Jonathan in terms which suggest that the Chief Rabbi’s remarks understated the unfathomable depths of the venom towards Israel within parts of the church. In the Guardian, Canon Paul Oestreicher has written a riposte which turns the stomach through its combination of manipulation, misrepresentation and sheer unadulterated hatred – which is even more disgusting because it has the gall to present itself as love. Yes, says Oestreicher, Sir Jonathan is right that hatred of Judaism continues to stalk the world. But then, having carefully wrapped himself in the mantle of both Judaism and the Holocaust through his Jewish-born father, and having even more carefully identified himself with ‘Jewish fears’ over Iran’s threat to obliterate Israel, he says this hatred of the Jews is their own fault. They have brought it on themselves through Israel’s behaviour. And he supports this odious claim with a series of gross misrepresentations. Thus:
I cannot listen calmly when an Iranian president talks of wiping out Israel. Jewish fears go deep. They are not irrational. But I cannot listen calmly either when a great many citizens of Israel think and speak of Palestinians in the way a great many Germans thought and spoke about Jews when I was one of them and had to flee.
Now let’s get this right. He’s comparing Israeli Jews to German supporters of the Nazi party. German Nazis believed the Jews were a global virus which had to be exterminated. Israelis have been under existential attack by Palestinian Arabs for fifty years. Israelis don’t want to wipe out Palestinians; Palestinians want to wipe out Israelis. The comparison beggars belief – and Oestreicher wraps himself in the mantle of the Holocaust to make it.
I passionately believe that Israel has the right, and its people have the right, to live in peace and in secure borders. But I know too that modern Israel was born in terror and made possible in its present Zionist form by killing and a measure of ethnic cleansing. That is history.
No it is not. It is propaganda. Modern Israel was not born in terror. It was born as a result of a decision by the United Nations finally to honour the pledge made decades earlier to restore the Jews to their ancient homeland but reneged upon and blocked by Britain until the Holocaust shamed the world into action.
It was not born through ‘killing and a measure of ethnic cleansing.’ On the contrary, it had to defend itself from ethnic cleansing and annihilation by the onslaught from five Arab armies which tried to strangle it at birth. And what on earth does ‘made possible in its present Zionist form’ mean? Zionism is the movement for the self-determination of the Jewish people. Israel is the physical embodiment of that movement. Oestreicher’s comment appears to be part of the current attempt to demonise Zionism by redefining it as the policies used to contain the war by terror being mounted from the disputed territories, policies which are themselves misrepresented and demonised. In the light of all this, Oestreicher’s ‘passionate’ belief that Israel should live in peace and security is the purest humbug.
The Israel characterised by the words of Golda Meir that ‘there was no such thing as Palestinians … they did not exist’ is an Israel that is inevitably surrounded by enemies and that can only survive militarily and economically as a client state of the world’s only superpower, for now.
What Golda Meir meant by that, as she went on straightaway to say, was that there was no such thing as a distinct Palestinian people – which was the truth. ‘Palestine’ was an artificial colonial construct and the Arabs who lived there considered themselves to be part of the wider Arab nation; Palestinian national identity was created solely by the attempt to destroy Israel. And to blame this perception of the Palestinians for the fact that Israel is ‘inevitably surrounded by enemies’ is grotesque. Israel has been surrounded by enemies since its creation, simply because it exists.
Peace cannot be made by building a wall on Palestinian land that makes the life of the miserably conquered more miserable still. A Palestinian bantustan will be a source of unrest and violence for ever.
But the security barrier is being built as a last-ditch measure to prevent Israelis from being systematically murdered. It is not this barrier that prevents peace; it is the refusal by the Palestinians to make peace that necessitates the barrier.
I say all this despairing of the Israel I love. Its people are my people…
Oh please. Spare us this cant.
The Palestinians are my neighbours. I wish they had stronger and better leaders. I wish their despairing young people had not been driven to violence. Just as I understand Jewish fears, I understand their despair.
They have not been ‘driven to violence’ by despair. They have chosen violence because they have been taught to hate – by being fed the kind of malevolence that Oestreicher is spouting, and worse.
And there are Jews in Israel and in the diaspora who know it. Most of them, out of a fear of being thought disloyal, are afraid to say what they know to be true. The state of Israel has become a cruel occupying power. Occupations, when they are resisted, are never benevolent. They morally corrupt the occupier. The brave body of Israeli conscientious objectors are the true inheritors of the prophets of Israel. They are the true patriots. What nation has ever loved its prophets?
This is really disgusting stuff. The claim that Israel is ‘a cruel occupying power’ is a lie. The only reason it imposes hardship on the Palestinian Arabs is because they remain in a state of war against it. Yet only those Jews who condemn Israel, he is saying, are the true Jews. So Jews who defend Israel against its aggressors are betraying their own moral heritage. To be true to that heritage, apparently, a Jew must turn upon and traduce his own people for having the audacity to try to prevent themselves from being murdered. And Oestreicher has the indecency to wrap himself in the shroud of the Holocaust to say so.
But the main objective of my writing today, is to nail the lie that to reject Zionism as it practised today is in effect to be antisemitic, to be an inheritor of Hitler’s racism. That argument, with the Holocaust in the background, is nothing other than moral blackmail. It is highly effective. It condemns many to silence who fear to be thought antisemitic. They are often the very opposite. They are often people whose heart bleeds at Israel’s betrayal of its true heritage.
Well, if many feel condemned to silence because of this, I’d really hate to be around if they actually felt free to voice their opinions. The fact is that Israel is demonised, dehumanised and delegitimised every day, in language which openly uses the motifs of medieval and Nazi Jew-hatred.
I wish it were mere rhetoric to say that Israeli politics today make a holocaust the day after tomorrow credible. If the whole Muslim world hates Israel, that is no idle speculation.
So if there is a second Holocaust of the Jews, in Oestreicher’s view the cause will not be those who exterminate them but the Jews themselves who will be responsible for their own destruction. Just what kind of moral sickness is this?
Singling out the Jewish state for delegitimisation by misrepresenting as aggression its attempts to defend itself from extinction through the systematic use of distortions and lies — a treatment meted out to no other people on earth — may not be considered antisemitism; misrepresenting Israel’s history so that the Jews are presented in a false and hateful light, a treatment meted out to no other people on earth, may not be considered antisemitism; demonising Israeli Jews as Nazis may not be considered antisemitism; blaming the Jews for their own prospective annihilation may not be considered antisemitism; claiming that the only true Jews are those who would refuse to support Israeli attempts to defend themselves and the Jewish state from annihilation may not be considered antisemitism.
So what is it?
