RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hint:  He was not a Professor at Columbia University. He did not marry Jane Fonda. He is not a pal of President Obama. He has become a major defender of Israel. He was 35 years old at the time…and one year later the magazine this came from folded leaving its editors unemployed so they turned to writing books on the Fords, The Rockefellers and Jackie Kennedy. Although the books were well reviewed, they led to nowhere. A decade later they publicly renounced radicalism and got on the rolling neo-con wagon and turned their conversion into a major cash cow complete with sponsorship levels of platinum, gold, silver and bronze starting at $5,000 a clip, and big buck grants from conservative foundations and annual weekends in Palm Beach which also do a lot to “restore” their coffers. Now the author of this anti-Semitic screed is the martinet of a huge enterprise that actually does excellent work and continues to rake in the dollars. Now if that’s not the capitalism he once railed against what is? rsk

“The basic ground of what can only be called the racist principles of the Israeli state is not ideology, however, but the pragmatism of survival in the context of a basic pessimism about the human condition (a pessimism confirmed by the isolation of Israel in the Arab Middle East). The raison d’etre of Israel is that it is the Jewish raft-state: ultimately Jews cannot depend on any other group for their survival; they must go it alone. If Jews lose control of Israel’s government, Israel loses its raison d’etre. Therefore, the Arab population of Israel must be kept smaller, weaker, and subordinate to the Jewish population of Israel, as a principle of survival. Since Israel is a tiny ghetto state (such is the ironic issue of Jewish nationalism in an age when the nation-state is no longer an adequate vehicle of sovereignty), systematic discrimination, however liberal and humane its forms, must be a constantly operative principle of Israeli politics.

 In its role as an agent of Western imperialism, Israel is very like the regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iran, which exist parasitically on the stream of international oil. By any reckoning, however, Israel is of far less importance to the West than any of these three, a fact which makes Israel’s U.S. support sometimes tenuous and ultimately uncertain. But unlike them, Israel is also an “alien intruder.” Thus, taking a leaf from the antisemitic traditions of the Christian West, the Arab rulers have found that by scapegoating the Israeli Jews they can obscure their own betrayal of the larger interests of the peoples of the Middle East. It is an effort made easy for them by Israel’s continuing oppression of the Arabs of Palestine-not only in the denial of Palestinian self-determination and in the military occupation of the Arab territories, but in Israel itself.

 For the subjection of Arabs in Israel is not only a contingent feature of Israeli society, but a principle of the Israeli state. The Jewish character of the Israeli state, a joint product of the Zionist dream and the Nazi nightmare, is discriminatory de jure and not merely de facto. Under the Law of Return, which was designed to open the doors that the Christian nations had shut to refugee Jews, and also to sustain the Zionist hope for an ingathering of the dispersed nation, Jews-but not Arabs, or any other non-Jews-are granted automatic citizenship status upon arrival in Israel. Israeli Jews, but not Israeli Arabs, are encouraged to procreate and increase their numbers. Similarly, significant tracts of Israeli land, and even whole villages, are reserved for exclusive Jewish ownership and settlement. There are other official and legal devices as well, which consign non- Jewish citizens of Israel to second-class status and emphasize the chosen quality of Israel’s Jewish majority.

 [“LET MY PEOPLE GO”]

What could be more alien to Judaism and the whole spirit of Jewish history than this result of Zionism’s efforts to promote Jewish survival by making the Jews like the nations? Yet because of the centrality of Israel in Jewish consciousness, this distortion of Jewish values has had wide repercussions in the Jewish community at large. Moreover, because of the dependent relationship of Israel to the United States and the pivotal role of American Jewry in maintaining that link in Israel’s survival, this distortion has been injected into the attitudes of the American Jewish community with particular force.

One perverse but illuminating instance of this effect has been the campaign in behalf of Soviet Jewry, undoubtedly the major political effort of the Jewish organizations in America for the last decade. Boycotts have been maintained against Soviet cultural events; demonstrations have been staged at Soviet embassies; gold Stars of David inscribed “Let My People Go” have been sold as fund-raising devices in temples across the nation; and a powerful political lobby, built in Washington, has only recently joined hands with the Pentagon opponents of detente to sponsor

the so-called Jackson Amendment to the Administration’s trade bill. This legislation would make the whole progress of new trade agreements with the Soviet Union contingent upon a relaxation of its repressive emigration policies so that discontented Soviet Jews could go to Israel.

Even though the propaganda to American Jews during this campaign conceded that the immediate threat to the three million Soviet Jews was “spiritual destruction” through the denial of religious and cultural forms of expression rather than a repetition of the Nazi Holocaust, it has nonetheless featured prominently the theme of deadly parallels. The Holocaust thus remains the pivot of the Jewish political imagination. In particular, the implication is always present and often articulated that American Jews are in danger of repeating their alleged crime of “silence” in the dreadful hour when European Jewry was extinguished. “. . . what torments me most,” concludes Elie Wiesel in The Jews of Silence, one of the major texts of the campaign, “is not the Jews of silence I met in Russia, but the silence of the Jews I live among today.”

 Several of the principal features of this campaign, which has been so central to the politics of the American Jewish community, illustrate the pitfalls of a Zionized Judaism, of converting an ethical-ideal-as-ethnic-identity into an ethnic program parading as an ethical ideal.

David Horowitz “The Passion of the Jews” Ramparts Magazine, October 1974, pp. 21-28 http://www.unz.org/Pub/Ramparts-1974oct-00021