The rules of the BBC Radio Four Today programme’s game clearly have not changed one whit. Wednesday’s edition demonstrated that, bombs or no, it is still performing its iconic function as the noticeboard of a sick establishment. First came London’s Mayor Ken Livingstone, the groupie for Sheikh Yusuf Quaradawi who endorses human bomb attacks on Israelis and Iraqis, to give us the benefit of his wisdom about the measures being taken against terror. He reiterated his support for Qaradawi, and for good measure blamed Islamic terrorism on Israel, saying a clear majority of Muslims identified with the Palestinians and that there was a ‘clear parallel’ between Islamic terror and the South African ANC because Israel had ‘occupied other people’s lands’.

That last assertion is of course untrue; the disputed territories are actually no-man’s land, having been previously illegally occupied by Jordan and Egypt. As for the comparison with the ANC, Livingstone was of course implying that Israel is guilty of apartheid, which is another great and baseless libel. The ANC fought a war of liberation against a minority which had deprived the majority of political power and relegated it to separate development. The Israelis are fighting a 50-year war of survival against Arabs who want to destroy their lawfully established and democratic country in which Arab Israelis have full equal rights; the Palestinians have repeatedly been offered a state of their own but have turned it down in order to continue fighting for their goal of the ethnic cleansing of the Jews from their historic homeland. The comparison is therefore grotesque. The Today programme of course made no attempt to challenge these lies, nor did it put up anyone else to counter them.

Having given the anti-Israel bigotry of the British left its regular airing, the programme showed its commitment to balance by broadcasting a sample of anti-Israel bigotry from the Israeli left. Amos Oz, Israel’s revered novelist, read out the text of a piece that had been published in that day’s Times. The whole thing was an out-and-out attack on religious Judaism, and bore the despicable implication that a) religious Judaism had created the monstrous injustice of the settlements and that b) the settlements were the obstacle to peace with the Arabs:

‘But we, too, have a dream for Israel, totally different from the settlers’ religious fantasy. We want to live in peace and in freedom, not under the rule of the rabbis, not even under the rule of the Messiah, but under our own elected government. We have a dream of being free from the lasting occupation of the Palestinian territories. Israel and Palestine, for almost 40 years, are like a jailer and a prisoner, handcuffed to each other. After so many years there is almost no difference — the jailer is not free and the prisoner is not free. Israel will only be a free nation when the occupation and the settlements are terminated and Palestine becomes an independent next-door country...

‘The struggle in Gaza was not essentially a struggle between the army and the settlers, not even between hawks and doves. No. It was a struggle between Church and State (to be more accurate, between Synagogue and State). This is something many nations have experienced: what should be the position and the influence of religion and of clerics in the business of running a country? Some countries have sorted this out centuries ago. Other nations have been struggling with it endlessly. The Muslim world, with the exception of Turkey, has not even begun.

‘During these past days in Gaza we have been witnessing what might prove to be the first battle between Synagogue and State in Israel, the first showdown over the nature of the Jewishness of the only Jewish state. Are we first and foremost a religion, or are we first and foremost a nation? In this first round it looks like secular, rational, pragmatic Israel painfully prevails over fanatic Israel. But let us not forget that this is only the first round.’

There are a number of dishonest or unpleasant assumptions in this argument. The first is that the settlers were mainly motivated by religious fanaticism. Some undoubtedly were. But many – probably the majority overall, certainly in Gaza to which many had migrated from impoverished southern development towns – were not religious but merely poor people, lured to Gaza by the prospect of cheap housing. Second, Oz equates religious Judaism with nationalist fanaticism. Yes, some nationalist extremists are religious. Yet some ultra-religious Jews oppose the very existence of the state of Israel, which they think is illegitimate until the Messiah arrives. And most important of all, Israel was set up to be a secular state. Oz’s obsessive hatred of religious Judaism – which encompasses an enormous spectrum of attitudes -- indicates that it is he, the militant secularist, who is the fanatic. The third fallacy is his assumption that Israel’s agony will only end if the settlements go and the Palestinians have a state. Not so. Israel’s agony will only end if the Arabs end their war of extermination against Israel, which started long before the settlements came into being.

Oz’s desire to strip Israel of its religious Jewish identity -- tantamount to a desire to strip the soul from a human being – is illuminated by a devastating critique of his attitude in an excellent and thought-provoking recent book by American psychiatrist Kenneth Levin, ‘The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege’ (Smith and Kraus). Levin writes of Oz that, as a result of the Arab siege of Israel which has systematically prevented him from living a normal life, he is possessed by rage towards Jewish history, Jewish culture, Jewish ties to the land – the ‘Jewish mystique’ that for him is ‘a tyranny of the dead over the living’ and which can lead to a ‘murderous rage’. Levin observes:

‘It is most reminiscent of 19th century Jewish intellectuals in Europe who railed against the curse of the Jewish, of Jewish history and Jewish identity (often doing so – as Oz does – while professing individualism or universalism as more noble and high-minded than any narrow ethnic or religious or national identity) but whose indictments of all things Jewish were a response to Europe’s besiegement of the Jews and their own eagerness to escape the siege’.

Even his defence of Zionism is vitiated by his stated animosity towards the nation state, saying that ‘nationalism is the curse of mankind’. Levin comments:

‘He would prefer to have the world consist of “only spiritual civilisations tied somehow to their lands, without the tools of statehood and without the tools of war.” He is a Zionist only because of absolute necessity, because Israel is necessary to protect the lives of Jews: “I am forced to take it upon myself to play the ‘game of nations’… because existence without the tools of statehood is a matter of mortal danger.” But Oz’s impulse to define this utility of the state so narrowly and so starkly – saying nothing, for example, or cultural, ethnic and religious values and their free cultivation -- is in large part a reaction to the siege and a reflection of the wish that claiming little more for the state, eschewing everything that he chooses to perceive as going beyond the basic protection of life, will placate Arab hostility’.

Oz’s pathological disdain for his own people -- and the extent to which he is lionised by both Jews and their detractors -- is thus the Jewish tragedy incarnate.

Posted by melanie at August 26, 2005