Welcome to the New Year Issue 5764 of HASHKAFOT: REVIEW. Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, we are now able to bring this newsletter to you on a regular basis. In this issue we will discuss three important challenges at hand: Terrorism and the Delegitimization of Israel and The Jewish People, Post-Zionism and Other Manifestations of Jewish Self-Hatred, and The Holocaust and the Copenhagen School or Supersessionism.
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Since Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948, the shrill voices of anti-Israel hatred have attacked Israel without cease. We are not referring to the crude loathsome hatred of the Arab and Moslem world which is ongoing even today, but rather to the views of Western thinkers, critics and writers. Thinly disguised as differing from the former anti-semitism of the pre-war era and its evil twin, “The Jewish Question,” the new vitriol has targeted Israel and Zionism directly. Anti-semites include personalities such as Dorothy Parker (born Jewish), Vincent Sheean (formerly a reporter for the New York Times), and most importantly the British historian of “everything,” Arnold Toynbee, who declared “...the creation of Israel was a greater crime than Hitler’s murder of European Jewry.” In spite of the fact that this hatred was ongoing and continuous, most people in the post war world of the 1950’s and 60’s nevertheless sympathized with Israel. In fact, in 1967 when Israel was truly fighting for its very existence, most people, with the exception of dyed in the wool communists and anti-semites, were on its side.
Since Israel’s miraculous victory, the strategy of the Arabs, anti-semites, communists and their ilk have benefited from the identification of the Arabs living in Israel as “oppressed people seeking their own land.” This view has coincided with the 1947 Arab League’s plan to destroy the Jewish State via four areas of attack: 1)War and Terrorism; 2) Diplomacy; 3) Economic Boycott; and last of all 4) Delegitimization of Israel. This last facet of the Arab League’s design has been particularly heinous and unfortunately the most effective.
While there are many different aspects to the delegitimization of Israel, it is important to point out the two most invidious ones: The creation of a “Palestinian” nationality, and the intentional omission and diminution of Jewish history.
Prior to 1948, “Palestinian” was merely an appellation given to native Jews living in Eretz Israel. Arabs by contrast living in the British Mandate and before that in the Turkish Empire were tribal people, either nomadic or living in villages in a feudalistic society. That there was a free movement of Arab populations between present day borders has always been acknowledged.
The creation of a “Palestinian people” was a ruse to question the right of Jews to live and settle in Israel. Similar to the Nazi propaganda minister Goebbel’s quote, “... tell a lie repeatedly and people will believe it, ” from 1948 onward the term “Palestinian” has been constantly uttered, until it has achieved its desired purpose in competing and surmounting the Jewish historicity of the Jewish presence and historical right to Israel.
Today colleges and universities have incorporated the lies of the Arab League and their confederates in courses and departments, obscenely using words formerly used only for Jews, or the Nazi terms “Diaspora, Ghetto, Gauleiter,” in descriptions of their class courses. At Berkeley University these lies have even infected the English faculty in their required readings for Freshman English.
In their specific UN strategy, the Arabs have used the organs of this world government to promote their venom. And of course the UN is notorious as the venue for the famous speech “Zionism is Racism” uttered by Arafat, who was cheered on by UN members. The third world countries have joined in this feeding frenzy of attacking Israel and delegitimizing the Jewish People’s rights by imbibing the bibles of anti-semitism, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Mein Kampf.
In Europe, the Church of England and the Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German, and Finnish Lutheran Churches have embraced “Replacement Theology,” declaring that the Jews have no right to Israel, theologically as well as territorially. This provides the lies of the Arabs with a “moral high ground” in their attacks on Israel.
The NGO’s (nongovernmental organizations, e.g., Amnesty International, and The International Red Cross) have a special animus toward Israel and Zionism, and in the case of the Red Cross, have a sullied history in collaborating with Nazi Germany to cover up the crimes of mass murder.
Amnesty International has already been implicated in providing cover for terrorists from the PLO, Hezbollah, and Hamas. The Copenhagen School and its theory of Supersessionism is an updated form of delegitimization of Jewish History. This follows in the footsteps of the discredited theories of Wellhausen as to the authorship of the Bible, and the antisemitic archaeologists such as John Allegro, Roland De Vaux, Kathleen Kenyon and John Strungnell who omitted Jewish references in the Dead Sea Scrolls and other important archaeological finds.
These movements, attacks, and strategies have brought all elements of European society, both left and right, to boycott Israel and to gloat at her misfortunes. Even the Holocaust has been trivialized, as recent studies have posited it to be a natural response to Jewish domination of certain trades and professions. In short, the bad guys seem to be winning in their world war against Israel.
Is there any room for hope? The answer is a resounding “Yes!” For the first time in Jewish history, the majority of people who are on Israel’s and the Jewish people’s side are not Jewish. This fact is often overlooked, but to many millions of people, Israel’s existence and survival is one of the benchmarks of whether the world itself will survive. The second point to remember is that five million Jews live in Israel, and they will fight for their survival. These are not the Jews of the ghetto or mellah, nor the cosmopolitan Jews of Prague and Vienna. These people have weapons and they will use them if necessary.
Since 9/11, we as a country have seen the awful truth: Many in the world (obviously religious Moslems) hate us because we are a free pluralistic society. We have also seen that much of the world has gloated at our pain either tacitly or quite vocally, as seen in many European countries. Many academics and media types have analyzed the attack and murder of 3,000 Americans as a “lashing out from desperation.” Even more despicable, if a bus is blown up in Israel, or Jews are murdered by suicide bombers, there is an attitude by these same people that it is deserved “payback” for Israel. Does this logically mean to them that if Israel were destroyed, the world would be at peace, and the Arabs would then finally love us?
In one way what happened to us has been beneficial. We are now without any more illusions. Much of the world goes “where the wind is blowing.” Europe, and particularly France, allied themselves with Nazi Germany in the first years of the Second World War. They did this not only militarily, but culturally and intellectually. This clearly appears to be a repeat performance with the “usual suspects.” The NGO’s of today echo the “humanitarians” of the World War II era in their quest to save buildings, historical sites and pedigreed horses rather than people, especially Jews.
Unfortunately, as Europe goes, so goes academia. Rare are courageous college leaders such as Lawrence Summers of Harvard, who has spoken out against the “New Anti-Semitism.” Thus we must ignore the constant barrage of lies, malefactions, and revisions of history, religion, statements of self-hating Jews, and reaffirm our belief and support for Israel and the Jewish People. This entails getting our information from reliable sources, as well as responding, either by avoidance or by letter, to the deprecations of the media. We should support our friends, and drop our enemies.
Sadly, not everyone likes us, so we shouldn't’t waste our scarce resources by trying to convince anti-semites that we have a right to be in Israel, that the Bible and Jewish history are one and the same, that the Jews of today are direct descendants of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses, as well as the Prophets, sages, and leaders who form a continuous link of civilization from Ur to the present, that it is absurd that 12 million Jews are the cause of the world’s problems, and that Arabs as the indigenous people of Israel are impostors aided and abetted by anti-semites throughout the world. We should take heart from Andrew Jackson’s famous dictum paraphrased that “One man with courage (to speak the truth) makes a majority.”
One of the major reasons for Herzl’s quest for a Jewish State was as an antidote to the Jewish self-hatred that was manifest in the Vienna of Fin-de-Siècle Europe, as well as the raw hatred he saw in Paris during the Dreyfus trial. Assimilated Jews had so absorbed the stereotypes of racial and religious anti-semitism that their behavior and attitudes reflected this disgust. Herzl saw all this and more, and created Political Zionism with the first Zionist Congress in 1895.
The first and second Aliyahs in preindependent Israel that were made possible by Herzl’s Zionist movement provided a new example for Jews throughout the world to follow. These were not Jews who apologized for being Jewish or poor Jews who lived in squalid ghettos where they were visited periodically by lynch mobs (pogroms). These were proud Jews redeeming themselves and the land. This Zionist movement which eventually led to the founding of Israel in 1948 and the ingathering of more than 3,000,000 Jews from over 80 countries ran out of steam by the time of the Six Day War in 1967. The early Socialist-Zionist ideology of Israel was subsumed into an attitude of being different from the other Jews, i.e., being Israelis, not Jews.
Many young Israelis born into this milieu looked to Europe, not to Judaism and Jewish history and the diaspora, as their guide. These were the first generation of Jews who lived as a majority people in their own land, without the encumbrances of living as a semi-tolerated minority group or more often a hated group as the Jews had lived for over two thousand years. Unfortunately, many in this generation rejected all aspects of Judaism, Jewish history, and even Zionism as their bench marks and personal philosophies.
European anti-semitism drifted into this void disguised as existentialism, (Heiddeger’s far reaching ideas of ontology in complete opposition to Jewish thinking for over 4000 years), deconstructionism (a French import taking off from Heiddeger in relativizing language and thought), and most perniciously, a melange of left wing thought couched in a revisionist view of history, with an anti-American bias.
The intoxicating aroma of Old World (European ideas) decadence was too powerful for many young Israeli intellectuals to withstand, particularly since they had already rejected Jewish thought and Jewish history as their world view.
To fully be accepted by the European intelligentsia they had to show that they were not parochial, that they themselves would have to imbibe and regurgitate the anti-Israel ideas universal to European society.
From this transformation, there has evolved a movement in Israel known as PostZionism, which combines lies, half-truths, wishful thinking, and a self-hatred not known since the pre-war days of the Jewish community in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, many of the leaders of this movement are academics similar to the anti-Israel, antiAmerican academics in American colleges and universities. Their premises would be laughable if they weren’t so vile.
They claimed that Jews in 1948 were much more powerful than their adversaries (seven Arab countries with armies totaling 450,000 soldiers, the British trained and officered Arab Legion, Nazi SS volunteers and former Nazi collaborators from Europe, and the British Army, Navy and Air Force who were in sympathy with the Arabs against the Jews!) In fact, these armies had armor, artillery and air forces, and the Jews had almost nothing. They stated that the Jews forced the Arabs to leave their homes (this lie goes back to the Arab League)’ and, last, they said that David Ben-Gurion rejected peace overtures from the Arabs. There are other canards even worse, that the Zionist movement profited from the Holocaust and that Zionism is a racist movement. (Sound familiar?)
Unfortunately, there is no cure for Jewish self-hatred. However, shining the light of truth on this ugly movement will do much to lessen its influence on people interested in Israel. These people should never be allowed to spread their lies in Jewish institutions or under any Jewish auspices. Let them migrate to the supporters of the suicide bombers, or to Hamas and Hezbollah where they belong. Regretfully though, these people are a part of Jewish history.
Just as the apostate Pablo Christiani spread lies about Judaism in 12th century Spain, the Post-Zionists are promoting their falsehoods today. What is especially sad is that these lie-spreaders are usually native born Israelis whose existence is founded on the sacrifice of thousands of Jews and on the hopes of millions of Jews for the past two thousand years, and that they have chosen to offload the whole of Jewish history for the approval of their European cohorts.
The great scholar and founder of Biblical Archaeology, William Albright, systematized the nascent field of archaeology to investigate the hidden secrets of the Bible. The many scholars who studied with him brought forth great discoveries in Israel that tended to confirm that the Bible was not only a Holy Book, but also the best record of history in the ancient world.
From its very beginning, Biblical Archaeology remained a nonJewish field with its emphasis on Jewish history and Biblical criticism. This is truly an irony of ironies! While Dr. Albright was truly a just and unbiased scholar, many of the first biblical archaeologists were either genteel antisemites or even worse, rejectionists of Jewish history. This strain of anti-semitism has grown in recent years to comprise a movement associated with the University of Copenhagen as well as a name: Supersessionism.
Unlike earlier attacks on Jews by antisemitic archeologists, which minimized Jewish contributions to civilization, the Copenhagen School has attacked the entire history of the Jewish people by positing that they never really lived in Israel; that the Bible’s chronology is contrived; that the story of creation is a copy of Mesopotamian myths; that the City of David,Jerusalem is a lie; and that maybe the Jewish people, whoever they are, may at best have passed through Israel 200 years before Christ. Unlike the former Copenhagen School of Physics where Niels Bohr developed the basis of modern physics, this new school has attracted Holocaust deniers, Post-Zionists, self-hating Jews, Arabs and every breed of anti-semite.
The logical conclusion of the Supersessionists (Copenhagen School), is that Israel (read “Palestine”)is really, and has always been, an Arab land. This is a particularly hateful attack on the Jewish people whose 2000 year sojourn in Europe has included the most horrendous acts of cruelty ever performed upon mankind, including the Holocaust, countless pogroms,
ghettos, and now the destruction by academics of an entire history.
Denmark always points with pride to their record in the Second World War. While it is true that King Christian X helped to protect and later assisted in Denmark’s small Jewish community’s rescue to Sweden (8,000 Jews), it is also true that Denmark specifically closed the door to Jewish refugees who were trying to flee Germany, Austria and Eastern Europe in the 1930’s . Furthermore, there were many collaborators in Denmark during the War, and even an SS unit (The Viking Division), comprised of Danes and Norwegians. There has been too much myth associated with Denmark’s behavior in the War. They, like most Europeans, followed the winning side as events were unfolding. The disgusting nature of the Copenhagen School must be confronted in spite of the “Good Public Relations” of the Danes during the Holocaust.
The Holocaust is mentioned here for two reasons. The first is that members of this movement always bring it up to prove that they are not anti-semites. The second is to challenge the right of the Danes to be self-righteous about their miniscule rescue, when 6,000,000 Jews were being murdered. Ironically, the greatest rescue that the Danes participated in was their rescue by ship of more than 3,000,000 Germans from East Prussia, as well as several hundred pedigreed Trakhener horses.
The danger from the Copenhagen School is that it is bolstered by 2000 years of European Jew hatred and tremendous sums of Arab money which have been flooding academia. These lies must be treated as lies, and the liars must be branded as Jew haters. There is no room for civil discourse with these people. They are in the same category as Holocaust deniers
The following are videos to further your exploration of these topics.
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