facts be damned, it just doesn't feel right to criticize Israel …
If that's my reaction - and I'm very open to the sentiments Gaarder expresses and the facts behind them - I imagine the typical reaction among Americans would be even more negative.
I am intrigued at how deeply imprinted on the American psyche is our cultural bias in favor of Israel.
Or maybe it's just me. I grew up in a Christian cult that interpreted the Bible (well, the parts they wanted, anyway) literally - which included elevating Israel onto a pedastal of mythic proportions. We eschewed the pagan celebrations of Christmas and Easter, observing instead the same Hebrew festivals and Holy Days as Jesus - and a central tenet of the cult was a belief that the people of Great Britain and the United States are the descendents of Ephraim and Manasseh, two of the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, with other countries in Europe representing the other tribes - France from Reuben, Switzerland from Gad, Denmark the tribe of Dan, etc.
(sorry Martin - Germans were considered the true latter-day descendents of the Assyrians, the biblical bad guys who carried off the lost ten tribes – and boy, does God ever have it in for you, you Sennacharib-lovers!).
Hence I grew up thinking the Jews were my physical as well as spiritual kinsmen.
I also read Leon Uris's QBVII, Mila 18, Exodus, and The Source in junior high and high school, along with Max Dimont's Jews, God, and History - so i was fairly familiar with the history of the Holy Land, the Diaspora, the Holocaust, and the establishment of Israel in 1948 - and I cheered Israel when they kicked butt in 1967 and again in 1973.
Far from anti-semitic, I was probably more "pro-semitic" than the average American.
A shift in my consciousness was prompted by Anwar Sadat's courage and compassion, as I realized not all Arabs were bad guys. Eventually I even dared to think that not all Israelis were automatically good guys. But though I've transcended my upbringing, nevertheless the picture of the universe formed in childhood still provides an unconscious context within which I evaluate what's going on in Israel/Palestine today. My initial gut reaction is almost always behind the Israelis - and then I check myself, step back and examine the facts of the situation, and with luck arrive at a more balanced view
(but one that doesn't automatically assume the Israelis are the bad guys, either).
Many of Gaarder's points ring true for me - for example, comparisons of Israeli policy and practice to South Africa's apartheid and Saddam Hussein's Iraq
(e.g., Iraq violated 16 U.N. resolutions and had no weapons of mass destruction after 1991; Israel has violated 70 U.N. resolutions and does have weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons they won't officially admit).
Even more compelling for me is his agreement with a point Joseph Campbell often made. Campbell notes that Israel owes its existence to the power of a mythological idea - which it does. (This is a point Campbell makes about mythology, not about Israel - he's not suggesting Israel should be disbanded or doesn't have the right to exist.)
After World War II there was much debate about what to do with the DPs - "displaced persons," or refugees - who survived the concentration camps. There was even discussion of creating a homeland for them from part of South Africa - but momentum had been building for a Jewish homeland in Palestine since the end of the nineteenth century (and encouraged by the British government's Balfour Declaration of 1917) as growing numbers of Jews emigrated there.
Political considerations aside though, the Western psyche eagerly embraced the idea of a nation of Israel almost two thousand years after that nation had ceased to exist and her people mostly melted away. This idea clearly resonates with the biblical mythology that informed and shaped our civilization and still holds sway today.
Flip the channel to most religious broadcasters in the United States and there's not only unqualified unreflective knee-jerk support for everything Israel does, but also a near universal presumption that “the end times” or “latter days” prophesied in the Bible began with the establishment of Israel in 1948 (a conclusion based on the parable of the fig tree in Mark 13:28 – “Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When her branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves (out of season), ye know that summer (harvest time) is near” – which assumes the fig tree is a metaphor for Israel).
True, not every Christian in America so believes – maybe not even most – but certainly the noisiest. I think of Pastor John Hagee, who has the ear of the president, and publicly proclaims that we may be weeks away from the rapture as World War III breaks out in the Middle East – a war that destroys unthinkable numbers and ends at Armageddon in a confrontation between Israel and the United States against much of the rest of the world.
This thinking makes me nervous – especially when I hear secular neocons (like William Kristol) - the other group that has the ear of the president – claiming on FOX news that the Lebanon crisis is the opening salvo of World War III ... followed by the president wanting to give Israel enough time to redraw the map of the Middle East (“birth pangs,” as Condi Rice calls it).
But that’s wandering far afield from a focus on Israel’s actions.
The attack on Lebanon does seem an overreaction (it’s Lebanon’s infrastructure, not Hezbollah’s they’re destroying) as the death of innocent Lebanese civilians from Israeli bombs (far in excess of the handful of Hezbollah casualties) blunts outrage over the far fewer number of Israeli civilians killed by Hezbollah rockets. These and other facts do make me wonder about the morality of Israel’s actions, and Gaarder does a wonderful job of addressing those concerns:
If Israel is to be treated as the Chosen People, then her actions should be held to the same high standard to which God held the Chosen People in the book of Amos.
(Of course, that’s hardly a consistent standard throughout the Hebrew testament. God often commands His People to commit dastardly atrocities – particularly the slaughter of Canaanites, right down to male infants, and the taking of “fields which you did not plant, cities which you did not build” – though genocide certainly resolved the Palestinian refugee problem of the day ...
so I’m reticent about basing policy on God's concept of morality).
Gaarder’s suggestion of responding to Israel’s behavior with tactics similar to the boycott and pressure applied to South Africa that hastened the end of apartheid is certainly creative – though to be effective it requires collective action on the parts of nations, institutions, and individuals, which was slow to build against South Africa, and I suspect would be harder to sustain against Israel today
... especially in the United States, where any criticism of Israel, legitimate or not, is met with charges of anti-semitism.
The only direct comment I can find by Joseph Campbell on Arab-Israeli tensions is in response to a question posed by an interviewer wondering what the U.S. stance should be. Campbell suggested an even-handed approach – taking into consideration equally the concerns of all parties to the conflict.
It’s interesting that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has earmarked the term “even-handed” as revealing anti-semitic tendencies – so Campbell’s call for fairness to all in negotiations exposes his anti-semitism (which strikes me as an odd designation, given that the Palestinians are also Semites ...). When criticizing Israeli policies – even very bad policies that we criticize in other nations – whether right or wrong, you’re expressing anti-semitism ... and then the argument becomes no longer about a specific policy, but about racial and religious bias (shades of the Holocaust).
Of course, I don’t believe what some call the Jewish lobby has “orchestrated” America’s support of Israel. Fears of appearing anti-semitic does help keep the American left aligned behind Israel, while fundamentalist dogma and faith in the approaching apocalypse (which heralds the Second Coming) does the same for the American right ... but these motivations aren’t external (though outside factors certainly help reinforce them).
These come from within – which brings us back to that unconscious cultural bias.
A cursory reading of Gaarder’s essay seems to deny the existence of Israel, call for her destruction and the scattering of her people. A closer reading reveals that Gaarder supports Israel, but the Israel of 1948, not what she had become today. That, though, is obscure in the essay, and will doubtless be overlooked by those already inclined to disagree with Gaarder.
What do I think of the essay?
It strikes a chord – but could be better written. I suspect it will turn off more people than it enlightens – at least it will on this side of the Atlantic
- but it does open a discussion we must have, and ask questions we must face someday, if not today.
Nevertheless, I can’t shake that vague perception in the back of my head of doing something very wrong by even considering questioning Israel’s actions - sorta' like buying Mel Gibson a beer ...
http://www.jcf.org/forum/viewtopic.php?topic=2275&forum=27&7
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