Customer Reviews

The Jewish Wars: Reflections by One of the Belligerents

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This superb, secular study really brings home to the reader the levels of inherent, painful, frustration felt within so much of the Israeli populace at the levels of terrorism and violence which have racked their nation throughout the so called "peace process". The reader is also left with an almost tangible sense of how the individual Jew/Israeli feels amidst what the book translates as a deep, painful resentment at their betrayal by their so called "peace partners" and the International community as a whole. The writer's own indignation and personal exasperation permeate this work and almost transport the reader into the realm of the "Jewish experience".

Through a collection of essays this thought-provoking book examines a number of issues involving Israel, anti-Semitism (hatred of the Jews) in addition to the Middle East "peace process" itself. The reader should be aware that despite being a series of essays, the book really flows from beginning to end and is a compelling read. Although written in 1996, it will not take the reader long to discover that the superbly presented contents are as applicable and as blatantly relevant today as they were at that time. This is an excellent, readable work which is another extremely valuable contribution to the library of anyone interested in studying the Middle East.

The book investigates a number of prominent figures in the fields of politics, journalism & literature etc., who are described as personally manifesting hostility and even an open hatred of the Jewish people and Judaism. Amongst those mentioned are Edward Said, Patrick Buchanan, Michael Lerner, Noam Chomsky, Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Yossi Beilin and Shimon Peres. Relevant quotations and references are supplied in each case.

The contents of this study dissect the Palestinian "intifada" and describe how it has proved an immensely potent propaganda weapon in engaging International sympathy against the Jewish state of Israel, amidst what the book further describes as the "quagmire of the peace process". The book analyses how the entire basis which allowed Israel and the International community to embrace PLO/Yasser Arafat as "participants" in the Middle East "peace process" was the PLO/Arafat's denunciation of terrorism, acknowledging the right of Israel to exist and an accord/promise to resolve ALL disagreements at the negotiating table WITHOUT RESORTING TO ANY VIOLENCE. These issues and the utter failure of Arafat/PLO to comply with these requirements are addressed in some detail. The book also analyses the disturbing manner and context in which many scores of Palestinian civilians are increasingly being brutally murdered as "suspected collaborators" with Israel.

A crucial reference is also made to the "media spectacle" in 1993 on the White House lawn where Rabin, Peres, Clinton & Arafat shook hands etc.. The book analyses how Yasser Arafat, LATER THE VERY SAME DAY, declared in Arabic on Jordanian television that all that he had actually done was to implement the "phased plan" for Israel's destruction. The book addresses how public reference to the "phased plan" to destroy Israel is frequently made to audiences in Arabic, but never in English. The book pulls no punches in elaborating that the "phased plan" referred to by Arafat actually calls for the creation of a Palestinian state in ANY territory vacated/ceded by Israel, as a FIRST stage only. The book proceeds to address how this "Palestinian state" would then being used as a base/platform for what the book quotes as the "continued armed struggle" against Israel. Further amplification here describing the purpose of this "armed struggle" as "INCITING A WAR" in which the neighbouring Arab states would then become involved and annihilate a smaller, weakened Israel.

The Holocaust, Holocaust denial and schemes used to delegitimise Jewish claims to the Holy Land are amongst a number of other issues addressed at some length. The book also investigates what it describes as the contribution of "self-hating Jews" towards the ideology and politics of such anti-Semitism in these and other pivotal issues. Page 173 actually questions whether in the history of diplomacy, there has ever been a "phenomenon" comparable to former Israeli leader Shimon Peres. The book alleging that the latter sometimes speaks as either the "foreign minister of an Arab country" or "the hired defense attorney for Yasser Arafat", even allegedly protecting the latter from accusations of murder and treachery.

The malicious allegation used by those hostile to Israel which equates "Jews with Nazis", is another pertinent subject examined. Something shown to actually antedate the establishment of the Jewish state itself. Author & politician Conor Cruise O'Brien is quoted as having traced such a policy to actually being a "British invention", where even in 1941 British official circles were unbelievably using the epithet "Jewish Nazi state" to refer to "Jewish Palestine". This is a comprehensive and informative book which will both move and frustrate the reader. A book that addresses issues which others have chosen to ignore. Highly recommended.

This book is a collection of essays written about antizionist attacks on Jewish rights. Special attention is given to "some of the more brazen and flamboyant combatants" in what Alexander calls "the Jewish wars," such as Ed Said, Pat Buchanan, and Alex Cockburn. The book takes issue with people from all parts of the political spectrum.

One test that Alexander applies to Jewish critics of Israel is this: do they refuse to demand for themselves the same rights that they demand for others? While I think that Alexander thus underestimates the value of the writings of David Grossman and Leonard Fein, I have to agree that it is significant that they do not pass this test.

Alexander reserves his sharpest criticism for those who are politically committed to deny human rights to Jews. While Alexander exposes many misstatements by antizionists, he does not lose focus on the goals of those who write them. His main criticism of Ed Said is not for Said's "longstanding habit of confidently reciting the most preposterous falsehoods" but for Said's demands for the "right" to murder "collaborators" with Israel.

This is not a typical discussion of the Arab war against Israel, but given the biases and weaknesses of most books on the topic that can be found on college campuses today, I think it is a welcome addition to the bookshelf.

In these essays published in 1996 Alexander takes on some of the worse critics of Israel from the Chomsky- Cockburn- Said school and shows how distorted and hatefilled their thinking is. He also takes on the whole Oslo process, and rightfully sees how it will not lead to peace. Alexander also considers the propaganda - efforts of the Palestinians, and how they succeeded in moving much of Western sympathy to their side. Holocaust- denial and deniers is another subject Alexander considers.

These essays show him to be one of the most effective defenders of Israel and the Jewish people on the political polemic scene today.

Edward Alexander is a professor at the University of Washington and a respected commentator on Jewish affairs. His book is a devastating study of the vast underworld of bigots and charlatans for whom the title "critic of Israel" is a warrant for slander.

The best-known essay in this collection is the explosive "Professor of Terror," an indictment of the late Edward Said. A former member of the PLO's ruling council, Said openly endorsed the massacre of Arab dissidents and informants during the first intifada, claiming that "the UN Charter and every other known document or protocol" entitles people under "occupation" to "deal severely with collaborators [sic]" (Critical Inquiry, Spring 1989). Alexander replies that he has searched without success for the unnamed "document or protocol" which would have entitled fascist disciples of Tojo or Hitler to slaughter Japanese and Germans who co-operated with the American occupation forces after the Second World War. Moreover, if Said's PLO colleagues think they have a UN mandate to slaughter their fellow Arabs, what can they have in mind for the Jews?

Alexander has many other targets: left-wing journalist Alexander Cockburn, who accuses the media of "obediently catering to Zionist fantasies" (New Statesman, August 27, 1982); Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who declares that Jews "thought they had a monopoly on God," so "Jesus was angry that they could shut out other human beings" (Hartford Courant, October 29, 1984); Nelson Mandela, who lauds Cuba and Libya as paragons of liberty while smearing Israel as "a unique form of colonialism" (New York Times, February 28, 1990). On the right, he exposes Patrick Buchanan, who has discovered a "Holocaust survivor syndrome" involving "group fantasies of martyrdom," adding the claim that gas chambers do not kill (New York Post, March 17, 1990). As Alexander points out, Buchanan's best-known attacks on the Jewish community appeared on Jewish holy days - a rather astonishing coincidence.

No less compelling are the chapters on Jewish self-hatred. In a powerful essay, "Antisemitism, Israeli-Style," Alexander argues that this disease has infected much of Israel's radical left. He recounts the daubing of swastikas on synagogues and the desecration of holy books - crimes committed, not in Austria or in Egypt, but in Israel. He exposes the use of Jewish suffering as a weapon against its victims - manifest in the constant equation of Israelis with Nazis and Arabs with Jews. He quotes Amos Elon, who warns of Israeli "concentration camps"; Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who calls his country "Judeo-Nazi"; Yehoshua Sobol, for whom "Judaism is an abyss in the Jewish soul"; and Ran Cohen, who refers to the "pogroms of the occupation."

Such libels are also found in America. Hence the views of Michael Lerner, founder of Tikkun Magazine, guru to Hillary Clinton and inventor of the infamous "politics of meaning," which reduces Biblical ethics to the banality of a New Age cult. Lerner denounced the American Jewish community as a racist, corrupt band of apologists for capitalism and imperialism; he described black antisemitism as "a tremendous disgrace to Jews" and warned that "the synagogue as currently established will have to be smashed" (Judaism, Fall 1969). As Alexander points out, these ravings conceal a disturbing agenda: the project of transforming Jewish tradition into a manifesto for the ephemeral concerns of the American left.

No discussion would be complete without mention of Noam Chomsky and his apologetics for Holocaust denial, conducted under the pretext of defending free speech. As Alexander notes, Chomsky began by describing the denier Robert Faurisson as "a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort" ("Some Elementary Comments on the Rights of Freedom of Expression," October 11, 1980, online). Then he feigned ignorance: "I don't know enough about [Faurisson's] work to determine if what he is claiming is accurate or not" (Liberation, France, December 23, 1980). Finally he became an agnostic: "we don't want people to have religious or dogmatic beliefs about the existence of the Holocaust" (Le Matin, France, January 19, 1981). Alexander's criticism provoked a scurrilous libel from Chomsky. In a perfect example of tu quoque, Chomsky accused him of denying Nazi genocide against Gypsies. Alexander refutes this smear, pointing out that he had merely reiterated the standard view among Holocaust historians - that the destruction of the Jews was sui generis.

In a prescient final chapter, Alexander turns to Israel's peace agreement with the PLO, accurately predicting the inevitable disaster. His critique is important, not only for its wisdom, but also for its moral sensitivity. Why, he asks, did the Israeli government choose retrospectively to condone the hundreds of unspeakable terrorist atrocities against Jews, not only in Israel - recall the schoolchildren of Ma'alot, the mothers and infants of Kiryat Shemona, the women of Kibbutz Shamir - but all over the world, in synagogues in Istanbul, Paris, Vienna, Antwerp, Copenhagen and Rome, at the Munich Olympics, at restaurants in Paris, airports in Germany and Italy, airplanes everywhere? The answer is all too familiar: the loss of confidence among Israel's ruling elite, caused by decades of Arab hostility. Will Israel be saved in time? Only if we hear the message which Alexander proclaims with such courage and integrity.

This is an excellent book. This book shows how the causes of Israel and Zionism are just and how its foes are vile, despicable, hypocritical, liars, and at least in some cases, anti-Semitic. He also exposes the so-called "peace process" between Israel and the PLO as being a set-up for the purpose of destroying Israel in stages and how the Israeli Government is complicit in this plot. I just pray that this plot is defeated.

It is very sad that so many people who do not believe in the sanctity of the Jewish state feel justified to be holier than the followers of Aaron who seek peace. Those of us who listened to Ben Gurion's 1967 warning to get out of the captured territories before we choke on them or Tzur's to help raise the standard ofliving of Palestinians to be the envy of the Arab world, who visited, unarmed and unguarded, the camps and shops and classrooms of Palestinians who saw Israel as a beacon of hope after Jordanian and Egyptian oppression, and then watched as defense contractors and ideologues and land developers and every kind of carpetbagger exploited the newly conquered land and its people without any effort to make it in the Palestineans interest to live cooperatively with Jews, without even a plan, who believed the non-sense that we could not help people move from refugee camps to good permanent housing because "the Geneva Convention prohibits interfering with populace of occupied territories" (Rabin at Harvard, 1969) who warned that Arab culture could not be insulted without consequences, who urged that Israelis actually read the old Jordanian text books that we couldn't be bothered to replace, all of us will be dismayed by the finger-wagging of these paartisans. Golda waited for a call from Nasser while Benvenisti began to study the needs of Arabs that were never met. The indigenous leadership of Palestinian mayors was systematically (and at times violently) destroyed in the foolish belief that, without any effort to cultivate more cooperative leaders, we could dispense with "radical" (but non-violent) leaders. The peace process was too little, too cynical, too late, too focussed on how self-important politicians would play reluctantly (on both sides) at peace rather than rooting peace in the mutual wellbeing of ordinary people in real democracies. The smart contributors to this volume lack compassion for the aspirations of the decent Jews and Arabs who became the playthings of arrogant opportunists and remote geo-political interests. They are intellectuals with neither humility nor reverence who arrogate to themselves the right to damn two peoples to perpetual hatred, even more sanctimoniously than those God-maddened zealots who know that it is in the nature of "Esau" to hate "Jacob" forever. For shame.