To:-- Truthout.Org
Re:-- "Israel Pathology" (11/14/2009) reporting on a NYT Op-Ed piece by Henry Siegman, form president of the American Jewish Congress arguing that "the Jewish Israeli body politic is diseased" as too many Jews are "stuck [sic] in the ancient feeling of powerlessness and victimhood."
It's about time that someone from the Jewish/Zionist establishment let the cat out of the bag. But in fact, the cat has been out for quite some time and, frankly, who cares?
Jews as hapless, perpetual victims is an old song, sung even throughtout the Old Testament. The paradox, if not pathology, of this self-perspective is even discussed frankly in Israel, at least among academics and intellectuals, and has been for quite some time.
Ten or so years ago when Israel's education ministry suggested revising text book accounts of Israel's history so as to de-emphasize the cult (and justification) of victimization, the reaction from the American Jewish establishment was nothing short of furious.
It is not that Jews -- as almost everyone else -- have not been persecuted at some time or another; it is rather that they have not always been persecuted and have not always been helpless. In fact, generalizations about "all" Jews are just as tenuous as generalization about "all" anyone else. Just as not all Jews were "world controlling" merchants and bankers (as some would have it) not all Jews were helpless peddlers and rag collectors. The class breakdown among Jews tracks that of other groups: 2% + 5 % + everyone else as best he or she can.
But woe to him who dares speak commonsensically and fairly about Israel, Jews-in-General, or who dares to question prescribed accounts of historical events. Then the "woes is us" lament snaps and turns into vicious, relentless snarl that hounds and persecutes dissenters from Zionist Orthodoxy.
Sufficient to cite the persecution of Norman Finklestein or the fury heaped upon Jurist Goldstone (whom the NYT would like to forget is both Jewish and an espouser of Zionism). And then there is hapless Bishop Williamson who had the temerity to believe things he had read in so-called revisionist histories. Whether those views are correct is not the point. Every man has the right to question and think for himself -- brightly or dimly as the case may be. He does not deserve to be hounded into destitute oblivion for not confessing someones Mandatory Truth.
That is not the only account at issue. More current is that account which denies that the Palestinians are a people, that they ever really were in Israel or that there are archeological remains of a non-Jewsh presence. As Gold Meir put it, "Palestinians? What Palestinians?"
Dare to speak up for these, and the same professional victims will accuse you of hate speech and promoting islamo-terrorism.
This organized, vindictive, vigilantism long ago exhausted patience and goodwill. That the august New York Times sees fit to print an opinion to the effect that something is rotten in Denmark, falls into the "look what the cat dragged in" category.
The Times has consistently fostered a one sided account of anything to do with Israel. It affects a thin veneer of detachment but it is in fact simply an organ of toney sounding propaganda. It studiously does not report outrages committed against Palestinians and when it must because there is no avoiding it, it finds a way to diminish or excuse the outrage; as when Steven Erlanger sneered that starving Palestinians who had broken the wall to get into Egypty last year were on a "shopping spree".
So Siegman has finally acknowledged the nasty underbelly of "Zionist Identity" and its even nastier consequences to others... Frankly Scarlett, I could give a damn.
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