Unlock Editorial Digest for Free
FT editor Roula Khalaf chooses her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The author is a contributing editor of the Financial Times. His latest book is Foreign Bodies: Epidemics, Vaccines, and the Health of the Nation
Faced with the brutal facts: murdered babies, kidnapped grandmothers, massacred villagers, chants of “Gas the Jews” during the Free Palestine demonstrations in Sydney, simple words feel like they are unable to carry so much horror and sorrow. The press’s outpouring of the cause and its implications seemed indecent, at least until the bodies were collected and returned to the families. So don’t give me context, don’t analyze me, suspend your partially informed diagnosis; abandon your hard work and treat everyone the same. Let us grieve, rage, and weep; says the mourner’s Kaddish.
So, maybe images instead of words? The terrified young men instantly go from dancing to running wildly in a futile attempt to escape a hail of bullets; a kibbutz dog is shot dead as he emerges from a house (which must have helped Free Palestine); a young woman is kidnapped sweatpants covered in blood when tied up by a policeman; a knife lying on a sofa in Kibbutz Beeri, where 10% of the population was killed; or visual evidence of “resistance” such as that of Mor Beeri Video of De’s murdered grandmother, which the killer uploaded to Moore’s Facebook page.
Compassion abounds these days, and as author Dara Horn points out in the title of her unsparing collection of essays, People love dead Jews; The living, especially us, should defend ourselves boldly, not so much. We also rightly sympathize with the Palestinians in Gaza, who are also victims and prisoners of Hamas and should not be punished for the evil perpetrated by their fanatical tyrant, nor for the death of a Jewish family that will Punished for the fantasy of Israel disappearing. .
We won’t disappear. But we do suffer. Salo Wittmayer Baron, the great historian at Columbia University, spent his career railing against the fatalism of what he called the “tear-jerking conception” of Jewish history. I myself strive to look to the positive side: poetry, music, religious and secular literature that celebrates the diaspora; thinking about Jewish history, the human smoke of Auschwitz blown away by time and education.
But now that seems like a useless hope. Judging from reports from around the world in the days following last weekend’s massacre, it’s clear that the spectacle of Jewish death still inspires rather than suppresses anti-Semitism.
Obviously, it still needs to be pointed out that Zionism is not the cause of perpetuating, dehumanizing anti-Semitism, but rather its consequence. The pogrom of the Jews not only predates Zionism, but is an ongoing fact in the diaspora. Jews were attacked and exterminated in both the Muslim and Christian worlds during the Middle Ages: six thousand were massacred in Fez in 1033; thousands more in the Almoravid in Granada in 1066; the entire city of York in 1190 Community. A friend of mine currently in Spain told me that almost every elite intellectual she met insisted that the victims were to blame, which is somewhat rich considering that thousands of Jews were murdered in 1391.
This persecution is not really about religion either. Survivors who converted to Christianity, despite professing their Christian faith, were tortured and burned alive by the Inquisition, who suspected that their blood was too impure to achieve salvation. Thus, Jews were murdered for being too separated and murdered for not being separated enough. They were massacred by Cossacks in 1648; pogroms in Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1899, an anti-Dreyfus magazine asked readers what they wanted to do to the Jews. The response was enthusiastic and ingenious: using them as targets for new artillery, turning them into dog food, and, needless to say, attacking them with poison gas.
In the face of mortal danger, help is conditional. Children were rescued from kindergartens after being separated from their parents, many of whom would never see them again. In 1943, a conference on “refugees” was held in Bermuda, when the Final Solution was announced, essentially on the condition that the word “Jew” was never mentioned. It was this lose-lose situation that prompted Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, to predict impending destruction, insisting that the Jews could ultimately only rely on themselves to protect themselves.
Zionism’s core tenets collapsed on Saturday, not least because Netanyahu’s government stubbornly refused to listen to Israel’s security chiefs, who warned him that dangerous divisive policies were jeopardizing the country’s security. Regardless of the country’s immediate unity, his days as prime minister are numbered and his legacy will forever be that of a disaster. But this inevitable departure cannot stop the tears, it cannot bring the dead back to life, it cannot heal the wounds. If a ground invasion occurs, the price will be horrific in innocent Palestinian and Jewish lives, and Hamas doesn’t care.
But Israel will survive and be restored. If only because, even in this horrific extreme, a passage from Deuteronomy 30:19 remains at the tirelessly beating heart of Jewish history:
I call heaven and earth to record this day before you, when I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse: therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live.
Svlook
