But even if I weren't all that, these affidavits of identity have become so cheapened, so meaningless, so obnoxious, that how can they mean anything? It's a complete non sequitur to say that only Jews have the right to opinions on Israel, or only Israelis do, or only Zionists do, because whether or not they have a right to opinions - they will have opinions anyway. If people say that non-Jews, non-Zionists, have no right to opinions on Israel, the opinions we don't like we don't like will only grow stronger. If Jews dismiss all criticism of Israel, and unfortunately I have all too much experience of how so many Jews do at the most visceral level, then it will be the loudest, most irrational, and strident anti-semites who control worldwide discourse about this most important subject to us. Yes, identity does matter somewhat - and everybody seems to pretend that identity matters completely when it's beneficial to them and not at all when it isn't, one of the many things that matters much more than identity is veracity. And one of the most obvious examples of the foolishness of identity politics in the entire world is how Jewish anti-Zionists are trotted out these days every time the anti-Zionists need a somebody to speak out against this horrible state that is the State of Israel, and Jewish anti-Zionists are all too willing, because what matters far more to them than their identity as a Jew is their identity as an asshole.
We are living in yet another age in which being Jewish is the mirror image of the rest of the world. In country after country, we seem the most prosperous minority who has little reason to complain when so many groups suffer worse than us, until the moment we're slain in the span of a year at numbers that more obviously oppressed groups don't equal in a hundred. We've seen this movie hundreds of times, and while we don't know how long the movie is, we know its ending. And yet there are always Jews, politically conservative ones, who want to crow about Jewish achievements to the world, who think that all it takes is for us to preserve ourselves better is to be more assertive, to antisemites, to gentiles, to anyone whom an antisemitic thought might occasionally cross their mind; which is of course everybody, and in doing so, they sign our eventual death warrants.
The antisemitism of the hundred years before the Shoah would not exist as it did without the 19th century's most obvious precursor to neoconservatism: Benjamin Disraeli. How he was precisely that is material for another episode of course - we won't deal with Disraeli the politician today. Today, we'll deal just briefly with Disraeli the writer. I've never read a novel by Disraeli, I doubt too many people have in a hundred years, but believe it or not, Disraeli was a respected and prolific writer of fiction in his time during a time and place when, for better or worse, eminent politicians had to be intellectually distinguished. Adam Gopnik, one of the major writers for the New Yorker in recent decades, compared him to the recently late Tom Wolfe, like Wolfe, the novels of Disraeli are apparently populated with the archetypes of London - satires of every kind of status seeker and fashionable trend, contrasted with a protagonist who is an alpha male from a rural part of the country whom, through his boring manly stoicism, personifies the moral rectitude which it would never occur to these fragmented souls to emulate. Such seems to be the weird plight of the conservative intellectual in every age, so pornographically fascinated by all those things they inveigh against that they seem far more animated when speaking of what they hate than of what they love.
Anyway, when it came to Jews, Disraeli's fiction had plenty of hooked-nose Jewish mizers, but he was often quite triumphalist about Jewish achievement and power. Some of it can be forgiven. According to the Little Brown Book of Anecdotes, Disraeli once responded to an antisemitic insult in Parliament by Daniel O'Connell, leader of the Irish Catholics with the retort: "Yes, I am a Jew, and while the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon." Though sadly, I doubt he would have used this retort if the antisemite were an Englishman rather than an Irishman.
Other quips were, in some ways, playing with fire, and a man as intelligent as Disraeli obviously was, should have probably known better. He once quipped about Lord Rothschild with pride: "Rothschild is the Lord and Master of the money markets of the world, and of course virtually Lord and Master of everything else. He literally held the revenues of Southern Italy in pawn, and Monarchs and Ministers of all countries courted his advice and were guided by his suggestions.." Rothschild is still the Jewish family around which every conspiracy theory seems to turn, and Disraeli's witticism is still used as though it's an admission of guilt.
But much more damaging was the novel Conningsby, in which the eponymous hero meets a sage of the forest named Sidonia, a latter-day old testament prophet who believes that race is a heirarchy of pre-destined power, and that Jews sit atop the racial heirarchy - the true extent of their power over other nations unseen by the world. Yes, these are certainly offensive notions according to our day, though hardly as offensive as most of the racial theories going around in the 19th century cause it was fiction, and surely his theory was nowhere near so fleshed out. But because England had a long standing conservative Prime Minister who espoused, at least in fiction, a theory of Jewish racial superiority and hidden Jewish power, a century of Europeans were all too willing to believe this fiction fact. They then combine this passage with another quote from the same book, "The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes." This quote is not in reference to secret Jewish power, but to the Reform Bill of 1832, pushed through by the Whig Party, Disraeli's lifelong opponents, to change the British electoral system.
This is hardly the only example from our history that Jewish triumphalism ends with Jewish death, and perhaps its the weakest example when you consider how destructive the path to which Bar Kochba lead us, and Isaac of Diocesaria, and in a rather different way, Shabbetai Tzvi, who in a fit of what we would today call psychotic delusion, announced himself to the Ottoman Empire as the Messiah almost directly after the Bogdan Chmielnicki massacres of the Ukraine in 1648, perhaps even partially because of them. Old estimates used to put the Chmielnicki massacres at as many as 400,000, but the true number is probably much closer to fifty-thousand, which, when you consider that the total number of Jews in the Ukraine at that period was roughly a hundred thousand, meant that the genocide of Jews in the Ukraine was half successful - compare that in the twentieth century to even the worst genocides, perhaps Armenia or Rwanda, and you realize that those two were one-third successful, and yet again, you begin to imagine the full scope of horror in Jewish history, where genocide against us is something that just happens every so often. In fact, the genocide consisted of roughly one-third of the entire Jewish population in Europe at the time.
Technically, the rebellion was not against the Jews, it was against the Polish landowners who were responsible for oppressing the Ukranian underclass. But the Jews were the leaseholders of the land, and therefore were blamed for oppression which was mostly due to the policies of other, more powerful people. I think you see where this is going, but there is no Shabbetai Tzvi story without the Chmielnicki massacres, because had it not been for the Chmielnicki massacres, Jews would never have been so desperate to believe that they had been cleansed in a new era in which the old rules of antisemitism may no longer apply.
It took another seventeen years for Shabbetai Tzvi to become a mass movement, after the trauma of Chmielnicki, Jews were so willing to believe that Shabbetai Tzvi was Moshiach that the rumors about Shabbetai Tzvi took on a life of their own and neither Shabbetai Tzvi or his prime promotor, Nathan of Gaza, could even control them. Every Shtetl in Europe, every ghetto in every city, every Jewish neighborhood and town in the Sephardic lands, had followers of Shabbetai Tzvi, and some even sold their possessions so that they could come to Jerusalem to be with Shabbetai Tzvi in what they believed was the start of a new messianic age. When Shabbetai Tzvi sailed to Constantinople in 1666, where Nathan of Gaza prophesized that Shabbetai Tzvi would place the crown of the Sultan on his own head. The Islamic lands, generally speaking, were a little bit more enlightened than their Christian equivalents - perhaps not overly so but there were certainly many fortunate moments in earlier Jewish-Islamic relations. When Shabbetai Tzvi arrived in Constantinople, he was immediately arrested and taken to prison, where he was apparently extremely well treated with his own private secretary and chef. The Sultan gave him a choice - convert to Islam and receive a Royal Stipend of 150 Gold Crowns every month, or decapitation. Shabbetai Tzvi chose conversion. It is one of the ultimate humiliations of Jewish history, and was bully fodder for Christians and Muslims everywhere Jews lived for generations.
It's now seventy-three years after the Shoah, and however bad the trauma after Chmielnicki, the trauma of the Shoah is much much worse and may yet take still longer than the seventy years since the founding of Israel and seventy-three years since World War II's end to reveal itself. We have so assembled in Jerusalem that we now even have an American embassy there. Perhaps this era of fake news means that it may soon be easier for journalistic lies to redouble themselves more now than it's been since before the invention of the telegraph. In this secular age of ours, messianic claims need not be divine, they just need to be false and dangerous. They need to make Jews, or anybody else, believe that an age is at hand in which we can transcend the old problems that exist for our people from generation to generation. Whether his lies are merely humiliating like Shabbetai Tzvi's were, or put millions of Jews in mortal danger the way the Polish landowners did, the opportunity for another Jewish false Messiah is exceedingly ripe.
In age after age, we exist as the model minority, the semi-privileged class who serves as a buffer to the truly privileged, and when the truly privileged need someone to blame, they throw us to the lions every time. The fanaticism of the Likud party has brought us to the most familiar position in all Jewish history - the most protected minority by rulers who allow us to rise to the height of achievement, and therefore earn the perpetual envy of the underclass. We are therefore can most easily be blamed when circumstances get particularly dire.
History would seem to show that every time a Jewish leader arrives to proclaim that the pragmatic rules of dealing with antisemites needn't apply anymore and that if Jews proclaim themselves a great nation unashamed because people will finally realize that there is a price for attacking Jews, that leader is proven a false Messiah, and either right before or right after, we pay for it in blood unimaginable.
Netanyahu, fanatic though he can be, has at least pragmatism enough in his makeup that he is clearly not that leader; but if Likud keeps following its rightward tread, Netanyahu's stoking of his right-wing base could end up devouring him. Netanyahu, in comparison to his talk, is wisely relatively gun shy. If he launched a military operation every time he threatened to, Israel would know very little but war over the course of his premiereship. There are so many younger Likud candidates who could unseat Netanyahu, and all it would take is to promise that they would back up the words of Netanyahu with the actions he never provided. Naftali Bennet, Ayelet Shaked, Gideon Sa'ar, Gilad Erdan, Yisrael Katz, Yuli Edelstein. With so many younger right-wing politicians jockeying for position, how will any of the six distinguish themselves from each other? Every major voice in Likud who believed in pragmatism over ideology followed Ariel Sharon to Kadima in 2005 - Ehud Olmert yes, and also Tzippi Livni, Meir Sheetrit, Gideon Ezra, Avraham Hirschorn. Likud is now an ideological party that believes in magical thinking - that Israel does not have to accommodate the obvious practical realities of its situation and can still pursue a goal of eventual control over Gaza and the West Bank. Should Netanyahu's successor present himself in the next ten years, he or she will, in all likelihood, be the one who tells the most extreme lies about Israel's situation the loudest.
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