Let’s hear it for Israel's mainstream left-wing newspaper, Ha’aretz, which can teach The Guardian a thing or two when it comes to publishing articles delegitimizing and demonizing israel, zionism and its democratically elected politicians.
Yesterday, their home page headlined an-oped “Michael Oren pinkwashes the truth about Israel and gay Palestinians” by one Aeyal Gross which expands the delegitimizing “pinkwashing” theme that the evil Israelis only host support for Palestinian lesbians and gays as a deliberate and cynical subterfuge to cover up their crimes and evil ways:
And if Oren’s bit about Dana speaks to the appropriation that was, a different part of his speech constitutes a rewriting of the facts for the sake of waving gay rights as a fig leaf, perhaps the last for Israeli democracy, in order to obscure the injustices of the occupation. In both his speech as well as in an interview given later, Oren clamed that Israel was fighting for gay rights before the 1967 war. Perhaps Oren should be reminded that in 1967, and actually until 1988, homosexual intercourse was considered illegal under Israeli law. Despite the fact that the Attorney General issued instructions not to use that law when the subjects in question are men in a consensual relationship back in the 1950s, the shadow of discrimination has never really disappeared.
Israel did not fight for the rights of gays, not in the sixties nor in the seventies. Only at the end of the eighties and in the nineties, in the wake of vigorous activism on the part of members of the LGBT community and a small number of politicians who supported them, did any progress take place. This included the cancelation of the criminality of homosexual intercourse and the creation of a law and a ruling that would prevent discrimination. Now, said progress, part real and part imagined, is being appropriated for Israeli hasbara.
Here he explicitly states that the only reason for Israel to host and be publicly proud of having two Israeli-Palestinian LGBT centres is to divert attention from Israeli oppression of Palestinians:
While the headquarters of two LGBT Palestinian organizations that operate in both Israel and in the West Bank are located in Israel, the state does not give them “shelter,” and their appropriation for Israel’s propaganda needs is outrageous – not only because of the ongoing oppression of Palestinians in Israel and in the territories, but also because the appropriation is done in order to divert the conversation from Palestinian oppression in an attempt to present Israel as a liberal democracy.
The protesters, among them Israelis, were right to blame Oren for what is known across the world as “pinkwashing.
The clip at the head of this post from a young Palestinian woman involved in the organizations Gross' article slams as propaganda ruses makes clear that the issue of Palestinian gay identities and Israeli ones alike is a profoundly complex and individual as well as collective one for both Israeli and Palestinian gays. It belies the simplistic and partisan reductionist smearing Gross presents.
Israel is a state whose legal and official policy framework grants quite remarkable legal rights, freedoms and protection from harassment and discrimination to lesbians and gays, unknown in the rest of the Middle East and many other countries of the world. Culturally, Israel is far from having a monolithic attitude to lesbians and gays, ranging from active condemnation and hostile campaigning from some Haredi groups to overt courtship and celebration by far left secular parties such as Meretz and an extraordinarily lively lesbian and gay scene in Tel Aviv.
By contrast, in both the Palestinian Authority and in Hamas-controlled Gaza, not only is homosexuality viewed as an unacceptable individual and social evil, but there is no shortage of cases which show that families and communities, whether Muslim or Christian, are prepared to execute their own relatives and members found to be involved in homosexual activity, let alone taking up gay advocacy
As Fabian from Israel pointed out in a recent comment on a previous post, the underlying political theme is that a Jewish state founded on zionism, like the traditionally anti-semitic stereotype of the Jew, is inherently evil, murderous, bent on domination and dispossession and deceptive with it. If it does good for a persecuted section of its enemies, that’s solely to sugarcoat and gloss over its evil actions.
And his view, with which I agree, is– that’s anti-semitism. Because I can’t think of any other contemporary state to which such inherent and ineradicable motives of radical bad faith are attributed and made the subject of a worldwide campaign for which no objective evidence is ever adduced.
For example, have you ever seen an article suggesting that the UK or the US gave refuge to persecuted gays from Iran solely in order to cover up their supposed crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and which in the course of doing so reminds you that homosexual acts were punishable under UK law with imprisonment till 1957?
Have you ever seen a blog post from the gay activists promoting the “pinkwashing” campaign against Israel, or any other gay activists, accusing David Cameron of making speeches sympathetic to gay marriage and highlighting the UK's positive attitudes to gay rights solely to gloss over and divert attention from the UK’s persecution of its Muslim community and its participation in supporting the campaign to destroy Muslim freedom struggles and resistance movements worldwide?
Be careful before you rejoice over the Hollande victory. His magic wand politics is based on selling the idea of socialism in one Eurozone-- based on getting all the other EU countries' populations also to vote socialist so they can set up a superKeynsian programme where the whole of the EU happily prints money and hands it out for whatever benefits the good citizens have become accustomed to.
Thus, he promises an instant end to austerity, job creation a la carte, restoring cuts in pensions public spending etc.
This is very appealing to electorates feeling the pinch and hating the austerities of getting rid of deficits for years ahead.
Imagine if Hollande is able to sustain this illusion for 2-3 years as first the Eurocrats indulge him in order to ensure the Eurozone doesn't break up.Then a whole series of other EU states also vote in magic wand Eurozone keynsian socialist governments, Apparently even in Germany, the votes for the Social Democrats are soaring. So then what happens if these magic wand programmes are voted for across the EU (including in the next EU elections)?
Come 2015 we could be facing Ed Miliband offering a UK version of Hollande's magic wand programme, with crowds of happy deficit fuelled populations across the EU as examples of how well the magic wand works. It means signing up to the new socialist print-as-much-as-you-want Euro. So Ed Mili is right behind an EU referendum, only this time on a "free money, end to austerity, magic wand" embrace-the-Euro programme. The Lib Dems will be enthusiastic supporters
The Tories and UKIP would then be the only parties opposing this glorious magic wand socialist vision. They'd get their referendum. But guess what? They'd lose it hands down, because the euphoria of the free money vision would be far more appealing than the Sturm und Drang of leaving the EU and yet more austerity.
If you doubt this, remember that until Livingstone dreamed up his Fare Deal magic money offer, he was hopelessly behind Boris in the polls. Once that was offered, his popularity soared. Had Andrew Gilligan & Guido Fawkes not exposed his tax avoidance and matching hypocrisy, people would have accepted his promises as credible. Once the tax evidence was out (including Livingstone's failure to deliver on his promise of publishing his accountant-certified tax records) and widely exposed, people stopped believing in the magic beans fare reductions. Boris' popularity and credibility recovered, but the gap between him and Livingstone never went back to what it was before the launch of the Fare Deal promise.
Even so, over a million people voted for Livingstone's magic wand, magic beans, free money programme and for him, knowing that he was an habitual liar and serial promise breaker.
Botis and his reality programme only just --just-- won. And a major reason for that was the strength of Boris' personality and personal appeal compared with the very negative features and track record of Livingstone.
At 3:35 into this clip, you'll hear Ken Livingstone make the astounding anti-semitic claim that Orthodox Jewish laws of religious conversion are racist and that they originate from the same late nineteenth century German racist exclusivist ideologies that culminated in Nazism.
You wait apparently forever for some unambiguous evidence that, yes, Ken Livingstone really has uttered anti-semitic statements, despite his pious denials, then three eye-popping bits come along at once.
Thanks to the hard work of Joseph K published as a comment on this post yesterday, here's a transcript of the context and the key words used by Livingstone in the course of chairing this 2010 Press TV broadcast reviewing a polemical anti-zionist book on zionism:
Is not the problem here that when Zionism was conceived of back in the 1880s, the world was one that accepted racial division… The Germans talked about anyone of German blood, even if it had been a thousand years since they left, able to come back. The world broadly accepted this racism at all levels, and that was the origin of Zionism – ‘every other group is racially selective, we will do it’.
We see that today in this ridiculous situation that that whereas Christianity and Islam massively goes out there to convert people to its [sic] faith, it’s very difficult to convert into Judaism. I think it’s a real problem, there’s this racial exclusiveness that has its origins in that dreadful time… 1880s, when all nations suffered from it.
As ignorantly wrong about the history he claims to be drawing on as he is about the teachings of Christianity and Judaism, Livingstone targets Judaism as a different religion that is racist and intolerant, unlike Christianity and Islam. His “history” of the conversion rules of Judaism being based on nineteenth century German racial exclusivism is a total and malign fantasy calculated to represent Judaism and Nazism as having the same roots. Equating zionism and Nazism are central features of anti-semitic anti-zionism.
Making Judaism difficult to convert to goes back to Talmudic times, not long after the period of Rabbi Hillel and Jesus of Nazareth and although the Rabbis made it more difficult in the centuries following the Jewish Diaspora, has nothing to do with the rise of political zionism in the mid to late nineteenth century.
Judaism is not interested in race. A child is Jewish if he or she is the child of a Jewish mother, whether he or she is black, like the Jews of India, Ethiopia and many parts of the Maghreb, or pale skinned, blond haired and blue eyed, like some of the Jews of Poland and Russia, frizzily dark haired and curved-nosed like many of the Jews of Germany, or has the characteristic skin colour and eyes of the children of Jewish converts who came from Japan and China. Anyone can convert to Judaism, provided they are not the children of a sexual union ruled illicit in the Torah, such as an incestuous union. All shades of zionist movement (of which there are many, both secular and religious, socialist and economically conservative), have always accepted that anyone born or converted according to Orthodox Jewish rules is eligible for citizenship of the Jewish state, wherever they live in the world.
Religious zionism however goes back to the first Psalms of the first period of Jewish exile to Babylon, which yearn for the return by the entire people to the homeland, both the land of Israel, and Zion-- the City of Jerusalem. They have been sung and chanted by religious Jews everywhere in the world as part of the prayers which accompany every meal they ate for almost two thousand years and continue to this day. Every orthodox Jewish wedding going back to the earliest exile days has begun with an invocation to "Let us go up to Jerusalem" taken from the Song of Solomon and other Hebrew Bible texts
Each and every Orthodox Jewish prayer service is suffused with repeated scriptural readings and prayers which long for the return of the whole people to”our Land” and to Jerusalem, which the Jews have always prayed to be granted “speedily and in our days” and continue to pray for today.
Small groups of religious Jews, including some of the most renowned Jewish Rabbis of history such as Maimonides and Rabbi Yitzchak Luria continued to make pilgrimages to and even settle in various areas of present day Israel and the West Bank, particularly the Old City of Jerusalem, Safed and Hebron going back many hundreds of years. The birth of modern political zionism is manifestly not a copying of the emergence of proto Nazi racism in the 1880s, but a complex series of movements which first started being articulated in the wake of the Enlightenment and the 1848 revolutions.
Modern political zionism first became a mass movement not because of German ideology but because of the rise of new post Enlightenment state-organized forms of persecution of assimilated and unassimilated Jews alike across European countries from republican France to Tsarist Russia. But all were in their different ways rooted in Jewish scriptures and traditions of study leading to action.
There was always a minority orthodox religious current in political zionism that sought to persuade Jews to return to Zion so that they could more fully observe Jewish religious practice, including the Torah religious obligation to live in the land of Israel and the range of religious commandments that can only be observed in Israel and Jerusalem.
Livingstone however strives to smear zionism as a monolithic racist movement explicitly derived and descended from the very same racially exclusivist roots as Hitler’s Nazism. That's anti-semitic enough. But then to smear the ancient Talmudically rooted laws of conversion to Judaism as having the very same roots originating in the same period is on an altogether more malignant form of anti-semitism, falsely smearing Judaism as racist and the racism concerned sharing its origins with Nazism.
That fits very comfortably with the ideologies of the current Iranian regime which Livingstone has professed himself to be so much as in opposition to.
Yesterday, a post on Harry's Place featured this video of Livingstone addressing a meeting of Londoners to organize against the EDL.
He claimed to be speaking against ethnic and religious division, but his speech airbrushes out the inheritance of Judaism, seeking to place the Jewish Talmudic Sage of Israel, Rabbi Hillel in what he refers to as what we like to think of as Palestine, by which he in fact means the present day state of Israel where Hillel lived and studied.
Livingstone then talks of Jesus, likewise of Ancient Israel, also without mentioning that he was an observant Jew who regarded himself as such, as coming along several hundred years later than Rabbi Hillel. In fact, they were virtually contemporaries drawing on identical Jewish scriptures and traditions and there are far more similarities in their religious teaching and practice than there are differences. Livingstone claims that Jesus of Nazareth never once uttered a single sentence of intolerance of anybody. He seems not to have come across these quotations of the words of Jesus from the Christian Gospels which include some of those most at variance with rabbinical Jewish teaching :
“Then shall he also say unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting FIRE, prepared for the devil and his angels.”
“It would be better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he was cast into the sea, than that he should cause one of these little ones to stumble.”
“Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.’
“For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; 3and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household.”
“And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.”
The implications of both this talk and the Press TV one, is that while Christianity to some extent, and particularly Islam (based centrally on one small extract from Mohammed's final sermon, and ignoring some more problematic issues with different interpretations of Mohammed's teachings as a whole by some groups of its followers) are exemplary in teaching racial tolerance, Judaism is not, and incorporates Nazi-style racism in its very conditions for joining the religion.
If we do want to look for some shocking examples of religious bigotry born of ignorance and malice which Livingstone decries in his talk to the Unite meeting, we need look no further than Livingstone himself speaking on Press TV just a year earlier and in this talk.
There are many who swear that Livingstone is not anti-semitic, notably Ed Miliband, who famously declared, albeit meaninglessly, that he "does not have an anti-semitic bone in his body". Actually, I am inclined to believe that were there three or four million Jewish voters in London and Israel owned the oil supplies of the western world and the Islamic countries had none, he might be regularly heard courting Jews and actually learning something about Judaism. Maybe.
In fact the question of whether Livingstone "is" anti-semitic or not is not as relevant as the fact that he chooses to use anti-semitic tropes and smears for political purposes,just as he is currently uttering the expression of believers' piety for the Islamic prophet Mohammed, "peace be upon him". Only in the case of his anti-semitic utterances, his reasons for doing so are malign and utterly discreditable, and over the last few years they seem to run very closely parallel to the anti-semitic views and eliminationist "ideals" central to the politics of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian regime.
On Tuesday 24th, there was an open meeting organized by the London Jewish Forum, backed and co-organized by the Jewish Leadership Council, at which Ken Livingstone spoke and answered questions from London's Jewish community. about his Mayoral bid and his past and present views.
The introduction given for Livingstone by the meeting chair Adrian Cohen, the very aimiable non-elected Labour loyalist who chairs the LJF, came across as an astounding piece of straight advocacy. He spent over five minutes presenting every possible positive piece of information he could dig up to show how positive and supportive Livingstone is and always has been towards the Jewish community. The repeated controversies and tensions were alluded to in the briefest of euphemisms. It was in contrast to the introduction he gave at the equivalent meeting for Boris Johnson, which, although friendly, warm and suportive, did not compare, did not amount to advocacy, and was nothing like as long and gushing.
Here's a YouTube clip of Adrian Cohen’s gush
Adrian Cohen's introduction confirms the case I’ve made here. What’s supposed to be a genuinely representative body for the whole Jewish community is now controlled and unacceptably biased to serve the political priorities of a Labour Party/liberal left and Peace-Now oriented unrepresentative group of millionaires, billionaires and party activists who do not reflect the political outlook of the Jewish community as a whole.
In the case of the London Mayoral election, it's as if they set out to do everything possible to window-dress Livingstone’s image, airbrush out and explain away his long established record of Jew-baiting and invoking anti-semitic allusions to attack Jews he doesn't like, and present him as a much misrepresented warm friend to the London Jewish community.
I don't think Adrian Cohen himself is a part of that inner group. He has honourable intentions, and like some other supporters of the present direction, may well have believed that he should do everything possible to avoid presenting a hostile or aggressive Jewish community face to Livingstone, and that his role was to help the audience take on board that Livingstone should not be regarded as a pantomime villain, and the fact that his record does include some positive actions towards the Jewish community recognised. There was an alternative, of course, which was to be polite and welcoming, to acknowledge some of the few high notes of Livingstone's relationship with the community when Mayor and then act as a facilitator.
It does say something about the dangers of an inward-looking largely non-elected politically highly compatible insider group holding the reins of access to dialogue between the Jewish community and local and national government that he could consider as acceptable an introductory speech instantly labelled by audience members other than myself as "a Party Election Broadcast", "ridiculous" and "unbelievable". Those were all spontaneous comments I heard from others I'd never met before who walked downstairs or stood outside with me after the meeting.
In my view, it represents a sort of political myopia which can be paralleled with that of Livingstone, except that his is malign, where theirs is misguided and unjustified, given their status should derive from genuinely representing rather than trying to manipulate the views of the wider Jewish community. Above all it springs from an unrepresentative and largely unaccountable group being able to take decisions about how to deal with challenges to the Jewish community, and opportunities to influence policy without having to subject their plans to scrutiny. Behind that, they've a shared belief that, at best, they know what the community wants, or at worst, they know best and it's a utopian fantasy to operate any other way.
There are those who take the view (and I'm told that it's a view amongst some of those who ran this meeting) that Livingstone will win the London Mayoral election, and it's therefore important to have a Jewish community group who can speak to Livingstone rather than further promoting the widely perceived view of the organized Jewish community being hostile to him. But in my view, that's a self-serving and highly misguided argument, based on an either-or choice of two extremes. It would have been perfectly possible to have a policy of engaging with Livingstone and inviting him to meet the Jewish community, whilst adopting at least the same level of stringent neutrality to him as a candidate as would be expected of a broadcasting service. In a very close election, being seen to have been leaning over backwards to present a highly controversial candidate in the best possible light is totally unacceptable for a supposedly whole-community body.
In the course of the discussion in the video clip at the head of the post, there's a question asked about why Livingstone’s so called “apology” to the Jewish community included the astounding statement that Jews are a people, not an ethnic group or a rellgion. The response by both Adrian Cohen and by Livingstone was that this was what the Jewish Leadership Council and London Jewish Forum strongly pressed him to write, so he wrote it. In other words, not only was the ‘apology” not his own sentiments, but Adrian Cohen and his colleagues openly acknowledge their role in helping draft it. Adrian Cohen appears to see the statement as perhaps the unfortunate consequence of his attempts to explain to Livingstone the nature of Jewish peoplehood, but it does not account for Livingstone having written that Jews are not a religion and are not an ethnic group.
Again, I find it difficult to stress sufficiently how utterly out of order this bit of partisan spinning and lobbying is for a whole Jewish community representative body to have indulged in, and how utterly cynical it shows Livingstone to be when in pursuit of votes.
Livingstone consistently presented himself as a mild-mannered friend to the Jewish community, in favour of a two state solution, against suicide bombing anywhere, and ahead of his time in seeing the way to Middle East peace before the Jewish community and Israel.
You'll hear in the clip at the head of this post Livingstone's repeated assertions that he "doesn't agree with" the extremist hate preacher Qaradawi's strong support of suicide bombings and killings of Jews of every age in Israel.
But consider this. At least two young British Jews were murdered in Israel since the Hamas campaigns of bombing buses and stabbing lone Jews took off.
Shmuel Mett, a Mir Yeshiva student about to be married, was stabbed to death walking through the Old City back to his Yeshiva in Jerusalem circa 2007.
Yoni Jesner, a promising 19 year old university student spending the summer on a Bnei Akiva youth movement visit, was murdered in a bus bombing in Tel-Aviv.
Many London Jews knew one or both of these young men personally.
Bnei Akiva is the largest and most popular youth movement of the mainstream Orthodox and Yoni Jesner was a well loved and admired young leader in the movement.
Shmuel Mett was the son of a former teacher at the Hasmonean High School, and studied at the Mir Yeshiva, which is the most revered and prestigious of the great Charedi Yeshivas in Israel, where many strictly Orthodox and mainstream orthodox young men from London choose to spend a period of study.
As you can hear on the clip, Livingstone was repeatedly pressed about his embrace of Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s hate preacher who advocates suicide bombings and murders of Jews in Israel as a religious obligation.
But look at what he said at the meeting when repeatedly pressed to give an assurance that he would not be inviting Qaradawi or any other hate preachers to London again if elected Mayor:
“I won’t ask Qaradawi to drive the 210 bus”
That’s how aware of and sensitive he is to London’s Jews, and how seriously he takes their feelings about Israeli suicide bus bombings.
And in case you think I'm making too much of an unfortunate foot-in-mouth moment, Livingstone expressed amazement at what he said was the audience's "obsession with Qaradawi. He also said,
"It's only Jewish Londoners who ask me about Israel. No-one else ever mentions it."
Livingstone carefully avoided saying anything about any other hate preachers, which he was repeatedly questioned about, gave no undertakings, despite being repeatedly urged, not to invite or welcome more of them, and maintained his line that he knew nothing but good of Qaradawi when he invited him. And he's still unwilling to accept the repeatedly and widely documented record of Qaradawi's misogyny and homophobia, as well as his anti-semitism should mean he revises his original opnion to one of condemnation.
The wish to improve the reach of the 210 bus route, by the way, exercises many in London’s most orthodox Jewish communities, because it’s the nearest route to a direct connection between Stamford Hill and Golders Green, the two largest centres of Charedi Jews in London. Only so far, it involves having to get off the bus and change at Finsbury Park Station.
If anyone has any doubts about what a totally dishonest performance the whole thing was, here's my transcription of what Livingstone actually said– with a degree of passion and intensity of feeling that was wholly absent fromTuesday’s performance– about his real feelings about Israel, at the Trafalgar Square Gaza rally in 2009.
Let’s send a message directly to the Israeli government: if you think you can win votes by the indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian men, women and children, you are wrong.
That is what is happening. In an attempt to outflank the even more abominable Netanyahu, they are prepared to unleash this terror.
And this has to end. When we campaigned here and many of these faces—Tony Benn, George Galloway and many others, were here in this square were here again and again to demand an end to Apartheid, demand justice for black South Africans. And that was crushed in just over four decades.
The Palestinians continue to suffer now into a seventh decade of oppression and near-slavery.
What we see in Gaza is a ghetto. A ghetto in which people cannot achieve their potential. A ghetto in which death rains down. This is obscene.
And if it was any other conflict, world leaders would be queueing up to denounce it.
But there’s a double standard at work. And that double standard is wrong.
I heard Gordon Brown denounce Apartheid year by year by year.
I want him to denounce the oppression of the Palestinian people. I want our government to say, “If you behave like savages, we will not send an Ambassador to Israel. We shall be withdrawing our Ambassador. We shall be convening a meeting of European Union leaders to say, “Why should we tolerate the importation of goods grown on stolen land, whilst the people dispossessed from that land look on from the camps where they’ve been incarcerated for over sixty years. “”
In the same way that Apartheid was doomed to fail, the attempt to deny the Palestinian people their right will fail as well, because it’s an injustice that screams out to be rectified.
And although so many world leaders seem to be frightened to condemn the Israeli government, when I did my radio programme this morning, the calls supporting Palestine as opposed to Israel were three or four to one in favour of justice for the Palestinian people.
Here in this square, that is London’s central square, know this: that Londoners by a vast majority want to see an end to the oppression of Palestinian people. They want to see justice for Palestine. This city recognises that.
I think we need to say, we will not tolerate year by year of this oppression.
Don’t complain when young men launch their rockets, when that’s all you’ve left them the right to do.
One of the most revealing aspects of the dishonesty of Livingstone's performance becomes apparent if you look at his body language on Tuesday's meeting. His whole LJF performance comes across as that of a bored machine politician. There's no passion in his voice. Look at his body language. His facial expressions are bland, but his hand gestures are dismissive, constantly flipping and brushing away. He sits as part of a solid phalanx behind the tables, like a man who's most at ease behind the platform barrier of an old-style party machine.
Contrast that to the obvious passion in his facial expressions and his voice when he's ranting on in Trafalgar Square with his real political convictions about the Israeli government as the equivalent of the South African Apartheid regime and the supposed enslavers in camps and ghettos of the Palestinians for the last sixty years.
And here's another contrast-- a clip of Boris Johnson answering questions at the equivalent London Jewish Forum meeting just a week earlier. Boris chooses to stand and engage with the audience. His hand gestures reach out towards the audience, and his facial expressions show him relishing spontaneously knocking his own official and a fellow Tory London politician--"the Councillor from Barnet" as well as enjoying some opportunities to make jokes at Livingstone's expense.
Livingstone has rightly said that the Mayoral contest isn't about electing a chat show host. But it is about electing a Mayor who seems genuinely interested and engaged in interacting with people outside the party machine, who responds with more than just the entirely predictable line, and who seems ready to acknowledge their own shortcomings and say openly when their own administration isn't serving the voters well enough.
Make your own judgement between these two candidates as to who's more engaged and responsive to the what the Jewish community says it's concerned about, and who's more concerned to explain to that community why their perceptions are mistaken and their concerns about anti-semitism and hate preachers aren't worth worrying about. And consider also whether the way the meeting with Livingstone was conducted really enabled Jewish Londoners to press Livingstone and get real answers to his attitudes to hate preachers and taking their concerns seriously.
By the way, there's one thing that both the London Jewish Forum and the Jewish Leadership Council deserve huge credit and applause for. That's the quality of the spreads they provided for both the breakfast meeting with Boris Johnson and the meeting with Ken Livingstone. I don't know which kosher caterer they hired, but the food was good enough to have been served at an upscale wedding reception. And perhaps it's only at a Jewish community event that a free spread of that quality would be served in abundance for all comers.
In the summer of 2009, Ken Livingstone was pitching to be selected as Labour's candidate for London's 2012 Mayoral election. It was very helpful to reinvigorating his then has-been public profile that he was invited to guest-edit the September 21st issue of the New Statesman, the UK's leading left-wing weekly. No such opportunity was given to his main opponent for the candidacy, Oona King, a Blairite former MP who was defeated in Bethnal Greeen, a constituency with a high Muslim electorate by George Galloway of Respect in the 2005 General Election. Respect and Galloway targeted her support for the invasion of Iraq, in a campaign which repeatedly harped on her Jewish ancestry and sloganized Islamist themes of support for "resistance" against British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So haw did Livingstone choose to make use of the opportunity the New Statesman gave him?
He made it quite clear, as the clip above shows, that his aspiration is to make London an independent city-state, with himself as its direct ruler.
But surprisingly, he chose to make the centrepiece of the issue his staging of a trip to Bashar Assad's Damascus in which he interviewed Khaled Meshaal, the leader of Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist group by the United Nations, the European Union and the UK. From the discussion in the clip above, it's clear that Livingstone wanted to make his interview part of his portfolio of reasons why he should be selected as London's Mayoral candidate.
As the analysis below shows, Livingstone's interview was little more than a prompt role, feeding questions for Meshaal to promote Hamas' efforts to sanitize itself and sell itself to the West as just an honest plain old liberation movement, the victim of unfair smears and distortions of its record and intentions.
It was a completely uncritical interview. Livingstone did not mount any serious challenge to any of Meshaal's obviously propagandist assertions, particularly those in which Meshaal presented Hamas as taking action purely in response to unprovoked Israeli aggression.
By way of introduction to the interview, Livingstone justified it as being intended to clarify that Hamas is quite different from Al Qaeda, and that his aim was to open up the route to dialogue with Hamas by the West. He described the situation as analogous to the UK's former refusal to negotiate with Gerry Adams and Martin O'Guinness of Sinn Fein, but he did not mention that such negotiations only took place after Sinn Fein renounced armed struggle and gave up on their core political aim of using terrorism to achieve a united Ireland. In passing, he equated the leaders of Sinn Fein at the height of their terrorist campaign with Benjamin Netanyahu, the elected Prime Minster of Israel. Here's what he wrote:
In the Middle East, peace can only be achieved through discussion between the elected representatives of both the Israelis and the Palestinians - and that means Hamas, which won a big majority in the last Palestinian parliamentary election, as well as Fatah. This does not mean that I agree with the views of Hamas, Fatah or the government of Israel. Far from it: I do not. For example, I think a number of passages in the original Hamas charter are unacceptable and should be repudiated. Many observers believe that this is also the view of some in Hamas.
Yet, for too many people, Hamas as an organisation remains opaque. What they know about it is derived from a hostile media; it has no face. Most would probably think its leader is some disturbed Osama Bin Laden figure. In fact, al-Qaeda's supporters in Gaza are so hostile to Hamas that they have declared war on it.
For these reasons, I thought it important to interview the de facto leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshal, who lives in exile in Syria. Not every issue is clear. But at the beginning of any peace process, what matters most is engagement. Dialogue is necessary to get to clarity and mutual understanding. Sinn Fein did not answer every question at the beginning and neither does Binyamin Netanyahu today. The answers from Meshal come at a time of heightened tensions and renewed death threats against him, adding to the permanent danger of assassination bids not only by the Israelis, but also al-Qaeda supporters in the region.
I hope this interview will help to make the case for the dialogue that is needed, which I believe is inevitable. It is simply a question of how much suffering there will be, on both sides, before we get there.
The UK Foreign Office, not noted for partisan support of Israel, saw it differently. Ivan Lewis, then a junior Foreign Office Minister in Gordon Brown's Labour government, made the following condemnatory statement immediately after the interview:
Foreign Office Minister, Ivan Lewis, has responded to Ken Livingstone's interview with Khaled Meshaal (Head of Hamas) in the New Statesman.
Ivan Lewis said:
"Ken Livingstone rightly earned praise for his strong and responsible leadership in the aftermath of the 7/7 attacks on London.
It is therefore particularly regrettable that he learned the wrong lessons from history by handing a propaganda coup to the leader of a terrorist organisation.
Hamas has not only breached international law by firing rockets at civilian populations in Israel but continues to violate the human rights of Palestinians in Gaza".
Livingstone used to be a strong supporter of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and regularly parroted its claim to be "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people".
Livingstone today is a consistent supporter of the terrorist proxy groups which are the clients of the Iranian regime, whilst being ready to condemn Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups which are the declared enemies of Iran in the struggle to lead Islamist terrorism. Hardly surprising for someone who fronted a programme series for Press TV. But it's not so often that we see him actively using an opportunity presented to him by the UK's respectable left, not to promote ideas for improving the lives of Londoners, but to soft-sell Hamas as not an Islamist terror organization dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel and to the pursuit of anti-semitic aims, but as just another nationalist liberation movement on the way to acceptance by the family of nations.
No doubt it was no coincidence that the Muslim Brotherhood mouthpiece, Anas al-Takriti, promptly ran a linked propaganda piece in the Guardian on 21st September 2009, celebrating the interview and underlining the message that Hamas is no Islamist movement, but just the Palestinian national struggle against Israeli occupation, and that any impression to the contrary was just Israeli propaganda
The Israeli Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre published a detailed fisking of the interview on 23rd September 2009.
I'm reproducing their analysis below. Readers can form their own view of whether this is just more lying Israeli propaganda, or whether it shows why the UK Foreign Office chose to issue a statement condemning Livingstone's action as handing a propaganda coup to a terrorist leader.
There are plenty of people who consider Livingstone's position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict irrelevant to the role he would have as Mayor. While it's true that he has no specific powers on UK foreign policy, he is able to make appointments and stage events and even open overseas offices which propagandize and materially assist overseas regimes and political movements. This is effectively what he did in relation to the Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela.
Livingstone in any case makes no bones of his desire to run London as an independent city state. In this New Statesman interview, he gives one example of how he is likely to go about doing that.
1. Khaled Mashaal, head of the Hamas political bureau in Damascus, was recently (September 17, 2009) interviewed by Ken Livingstone for the New Statesman. The interview, laced with vicious anti-Israel propaganda, represented the Palestinians as the victims of Israeli oppression, and aimed at Western readers, it evaded clarification of Hamas’ extremist ideology. Khaled Mashaal called on the international community and the Arab world to exert pressure on Israel, expressed Hamas’ willingness to open up to the rest of the world and sought “to establish good relations and conduct constructive dialogue with all those concerned with Palestine.”
2. Ken Livingstone, who conducted the interview, is extremely left-wing and overwhelmingly biased against Israel. He was Mayor of London until 2008 and a Labor MP until he was expelled from the party in 2000. He prefaced the interview by saying that peace could only be achieved in the Middle East through Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, which he said meant dialogue with Hamas, claiming it represented the majority of Palestinians. His questions and the way he conducted the interview were clearly biased in favor of Hamas and made it easy for Khaled Mashaal to market his ideology and policies to British readers.
3. Throughout the interview Khaled Mashaal used the soft rhetoric familiar from his and other Hamas spokesmen’s interviews with the Western media. Hamas spokesmen express their willingness for a sovereign Palestinian state to be established within the 1967 borders and to cooperate with the international community, obscuring or concealing the movement’s ideology, which seek the destruction of the State of Israel and openly adopt the option of terrorism. When speaking to Palestinian audiences, Hamas spokesmen make their true positions clear, as was made evident three days after the interview.
4. The interview was criticized by the British Foreign Office. Ivan Lewis, Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, expressed regret at the line taken by Livingstone, saying that “[i]t is...particularly regrettable that he learned the wrong lessons from history by handing a propaganda coup to the leader of a terrorist organization” (British Foreign Office website, September 20, 2009).
The main points of the interview
5. The most telling questions were the following:
i) Why do you think Israel is still imposing the blockade on Gaza?
Livingstone blatantly exaggerated “the difficult humanitarian situation” in the Gaza Strip, claiming that it was being “blockaded” by Israel, and that the Gazans were trapped in the largest jail in history. He asked Khaled Mashaal what part the United States, the European Union, Britain, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority played in the “blockade,” and Mashaal answered that it never would have succeeded without the “collusion of regional and international powers.” For the blockade to be lifted, he said, international law and the basic rights of the Palestinians had to be respected, including the right to live with dignity and free from persecution. [Note: Khaled Mashaal asks for international law to be respected while heading a murderous terrorist organization which systematically violates international law by deliberately killing Israeli civilians and which does not hesitate to brutally attack the Gazan civilians who oppose its rule.]
Photos and reports from the Gaza Strip do not support Khaled Mashaal’s bleak descriptions.
ii) What are the ideology and goals of Hamas?
Khaled Mashaal represented the Palestinian people as victims of the “colonial project called Israel.” After a long description of Palestinian suffering, he said that Hamas was struggling to end of the “occupation” and restore “Palestinian rights,” including the “right” to return to their homes.
[Note: When speaking to their Palestinian target audiences, Hamas spokesmen make it clear that by “rights” they mean the establishment of a Palestinian state in all of Eretz Israel, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.]
Livingstone asked if Khaled Mashaal was “committed to the destruction of Israel.” Instead of answering a direct question, he said that “What is really happening is the destruction of the Palestinian people by Israel; it is the one that occupies our land and exiles us, kills us,... We are the victims, Israel is the oppressor, and not vice versa.”
He claimed that the issue of recognition of Israel was an excuse, because Israel refused to recognize the “rights of the Palestinians,” who were the victims of Israeli “oppression.” iii) Why does Hamas support military force in this conflict? Khaled Mashaal referred to military force as the “option” used by the Palestinian people because “nothing else works.”
[Note: At no point in the interview did either Livingstone or Mashaal make it clear that by “military force” they meant lethal, indiscriminate terrorist attacks including rocket fire and suicide bombing attacks targeting Israeli civilians. However, the word “terrorism” was never mentioned by either Livingstone or Mashaal.]
He claimed that the Palestinians preferred to resolve the conflict with Israel through peaceful means. He claimed that if the “occupation” were to end and the Palestinians were able to “exercise self-determination” in their “homeland,” there would be no further need for the use of force.
[Note: That is, if Israel were to evaporate of its own free will, as Mashaal demands, there would be no need to employ “military force,” i.e., terrorist attacks, against it...]
Mashaal added that the nearly 20 years of peaceful negotiations had not restored “Palestinian rights.”
[Note: He was careful not to mention that the “peaceful negotiations” were accompanied by mass-casualty suicide bombing attacks in the major cities of Israel. The objective of the attacks, led by Hamas, was to sabotage any possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement by killing as many Israeli civilians as possible.]
iv) Do you wish to establish an Islamic state in Palestine in which all other religions are subordinate?
Mashaal said that Hamas was a “national liberation movement” which saw no conflict between Islamic identity and its political mission. He claimed that Hamas’ first priority was to end the “Israeli occupation” of the Palestinian homeland [i.e., to destroy Israel] and only then would the Palestinian people define what type of government the future Palestinian state would have.
In a statement clearly intended to please Western audiences, he said that Hamas did not believe Islam could be imposed on people, but that Hamas would campaign, in “a fully democratic process,” for “an Islamic agenda.”
[Note: Representing Hamas, which has enforced a totalitarian regime on the Gazans, as planning to employ the democratic process, is an absurd fabrication meant to mislead the Western target audience. The nature of the Hamas-style “democratic process” is all too evident to the residents of the Gaza Strip, who are personally experiencing Hamas’ imposition of Islamization on all facets of their lives.]
v) Was Operation Cast Lead (“the bombing and invasion of Gaza,” according to Livingstone) the [Israeli] response to repeated breaking of the ceasefire by Hamas and the firing of rockets into southern Israel?
Khaled Mashaal claimed that Hamas “fully abided by the ceasefire” between June and December 2008, while Israel only partially observed it by not fully opening the crossings. He also claimed that toward the end of the ceasefire Israel “resumed hostilities.”
[Note: A deliberately incorrect representation of the facts. During the six months of the Hamas so-called “lull in the fighting” the terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip fired 223 rockets and 139 mortar shells into Israeli territory, most of them during the last six weeks. The lull arrangement, which was systematically violated by the Palestinian terrorist organizations, expired with the announcement made by Hamas and the other terrorist organizations that it would formally expire on December 19, 2008. Once the announcement had been made, Hamas and the other organizations began a series of rocket attacks against Israel which peaked on December 24, when 60 rockets and mortar shells were fired, most of them by Hamas, at the Israeli cities of Sderot, Ashqelon and Netivot, and other towns and villages in Israel’s western Negev. On December 24 the Palestinians opened fire, and not for the first time, at the Kerem Shalom and Erez crossings, through which supplies flowed from Israel into the Gaza Strip.
[Note: Those important crossings between Israel and Gaza Strip have always been a preferred target for Hamas and the other toes.] In addition, Khaled Mashaal made no mention – and Ken Livingstone was careful not to pressure him– about the ongoing rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip which disrupted the lives of hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians in the south between 2000 and 2009, the basic cause underlying Operation Cast Lead.]
vi) Does Hamas have a “road map” for a peaceful settlement?
Fiyaz Mughal of an organization called "Faith Matters" has written a very moving and interesting account of his visit to Poland, to learn about the Jewish community of the past and present, and of the history of the Holocaust. It has been posted on "Harry's Place" under the title "Most Roads Lead Back to Poland". This post started as a comment on his post, but it turned into an open letter to him:
Dear Fiyaz
Your post is a moving account of your experience. I'm touched that you were motivated to go, that you remain committed to finding out more about what happened to the Jews of Poland, and those of every Jewish community and that you wish to learn more.
I'm very surprised, though, at your underplaying the role played by mainstream Poles--not just those you label "collaborators" and the actual minute numbers, by contrast of those Poles who did anything of any sort to help Jews, and the relatively tiny numbers who were saved were no more than a few thousand out of a nation of many millions.
For every person who saves a life, it is as if they saved a whole world. So says the Jewish religious tradition. So each and every Pole who did try to help deserves honour and gratitude on the level as if they had indeed saved a whole world. Some paid for their humanity with their lives. That is why Yad Vashem has its "Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles" which commemorates those who did act in this way. I am very glad that they are honoured in this way.
Yad Vashem, though, does not recognise as "Righteous Gentiles" those who saved or hid Jews or forged passports for them because they were given money to do so by the desperate Jews they helped. Sometimes the sums of money they were given were huge. Nevertheless, if they saved lives, I believe they earned a right to be recognised. And of course, many of them argued that they wanted the pay for risking their lives--and some of them did pay with their lives. Saving a life or many lives is always a very great achievement, even if it comes with exploitation of the potential victims who were saved.
However, there are many, many historically reliable accounts that show that the number of Poles who took an active part in the roundups and the persecutions, or who actively celebrated and cheered when they saw the Jews persecuted beyond belief, slaughtered before their eyes, and taken away to the death that those Poles knew was coming to them when the Jews did not, is vast -- it is the majority of the Polish population. A huge number of these Poles simply looted the houses and such property of the Jews as was not taken by the Germans, and made them their own. When tiny numbers of those Jews who did survive tried to return to their homes, the overwhelming majority were driven away and threatened. There are numerous documented instances of these Jews then being murdered by the Poles who feared they might have to give back the looted homes. One of my cousins, a woman who had survived the camps, was murdered this way in Kanczuga in 1946.
There were also those who took part in pogroms which murdered en masse Jews who returned to their villages.
Many millions of Poles were terrified bystanders. They rightly feared for their lives. If they were caught helping Jews, they faced almost certain death or at the very least fearsome punishments, which would often include the murder or removal of their children. I can understand what make them bystanders. Who can be sure they would have not acted in the same way? I would like to think I would in such a position have done something. But I can't be sure because I've never had to face such a terror and I hope that none of us ever will. But at the end of the day, out of their very understandable fear, they stood by whilst their neighbours were persecuted, tortured, murdered and dispossessed. There are many people in Iran today who stand in such a position in relation to their neighbours, though they are of the same ethnic and religious group. They of all the people in the world today are closest to those of the Poles in Poland. An act of support or knowing concealing a person who has done no crime other than raising an entirely peaceful voice against a most brutal, lying and ruthless regime can result in hideous torture, death and the dispossession and arrest of their entire families. I wonder if you recognise the parallels.
What you have given here, Fiyaz, is a grossly distorted view of the role of the vast majority of the Poles in relation to the Jews under the German occupation. I would like to think that this is the result of historical ignorance, and that for some reason you have not read the main historically reliable histories of what happened and what the Poles did, as opposed to selective accounts written by apologists for the role of the Poles, the Soviet Union and even the Germans.
You also owe it to yourself if you are going to be committed to exploring the history of Poland in relation to its former Jewish population to exploring the history of Polish anti-semitism in all its depth, as well as such historical evidence as can be found for relationships of tolerance, as well as the rare evidence of genuine and warm appreciation historically by Poles for Jews and particularly for Jews, Judaism and Jewish culture. The role of the Polish Church in all this is something that will reward study.
However, before you do that, and in relation to the rosy picture of many, many Poles resisting the persecution of the Jews and of their being a small minority of collaborators, you will need, if you have not already done so to read the history of democratic Polish politics before World War II, when the newly restored nation first voted for its own representative parliament. You will need to look at the record of democratically elected majority parties which either had or voted for anti-semitic policies which pauperized religious Jews by insisting that all businesses had to open on Saturdays or Jewish religious holidays or close down. You will need to read how the Polish post Word War I democratically elected government refused to carry out the obligation laid on them to provide the full range of political rights and faciiities promised to the linguistic, religious and ethnic minorities of what became Poland, of which Yiddish-speaking Jews and Ukrainians were the main groups failed by the Poles.
You will also need to read the history of the Polish legislation, passed by the democratically elected parties of the Polish people in 1938 that proposed to strip Poles living for extended periods abroad of their Polish nationality. The vast majority of the Poles thus affected were Yiddish-speaking Jews, and it was done for the express purpose of ridding themselves of Yiddish speakers, as the debates and justifications of this law analysed by historians will show.
The notorious mass deportation by the Nazis of the Polish Jews of Germany which took place at the end of October 1938 was an action taken by the Nazis to ensure that they were not left with hundreds of thousands of hated stateless Polish Jews. My grandfather and uncle were amongst those taken--they were rounded up by the Gestapo in their Berlin home at 3:00am. My father escaped being rounded up by sheer luck and chance but had to spend the rest of his six months in Berlin in hiding.
And what did the Poles do about all these terrified and destitute Jews dumped by the Germans at their border? Why, their new law had come into force. They refused to take them in. They were left in a miserable camp in the no-man's land between the borders. Did these Jews threaten them in any way or say that they wanted to drive the Poles out of Poland and make a Jewish state in Poland? Of course not. But, unless they could find relatives or friends from amongst the Poles prepared to take them in, they were left in misery at the border camp--till the war came and they were taken off to their deaths?
Are the Poles responsible for the evils the Nazis did? No. But they bear some responsibility for their attempts to strip the diaspora Polish-born Jews of their nationalities (my grandfather and uncle had proudly chosen Polish nationality after WWI, although they lived in Berlin--they could have taken Austrian or German nationality.) They were both very proud to be Polish Jews. But in October 1938 it was only because they had cousins in Krakow who came out to help them that they were able to get away from the misery of the camp and live in the cousins' house in Krakow.
The action of the Poles in leaving in misery, destitution and terror those Polish Jews who had become stateless through Polish legislation which was aimed at getting rid of them is an abiding shame, and absolutely inexcusable.
It comes out of a very long history of Polish anti-semitism besides which the help given to Jews by a tiny but noble minority ceases to have all but token significance. The Poles still have some difficulty in dealing with this dreadful history. I hope you do not.
So, Fiyaz, it seems that you do have much further learning to do.But perhaps it is wiser to make sure you are better informed before you post an article which seems so historically under-informed that one could suspect it's biased in favour of a rosy view of the Poles.
And lastly, you conclude in your last sentence with the formula "as a Muslim", which seems gratuitously introduced, and with no further explanation. You may not be aware that on Harry's Place and other internet forums, Jews have come to recognise that this "As A" is a marker of false authenticity or representativeness which is not merited by the quaifications it would need to be representative.
I am a Jew. As it happens I am a proud Galitzianer (southern Polish) Jew whose father was born and lived till he was 22 in a shtetl there. As you may imagine, I have many, many relatives who were murdered (not perished, as if they were so much old rubber) by the German Nazis with the assistance of enthusiastic allies.
I know also that many innocent Poles were persecuted, starved and murdered too. Some had their children stolen. But a great many of those Poles were not innocent in relation to the persecution of the Jews. There are very large numbers, historically authenticated, who betrayed Jews to the Nazi regime. They sadly vastly outnumber those who helped the Jews.
In fact a number of bands of Jews were murdered by Polish Resistance fighters, and the majority of Polish resistance fighters did not help the Jews. That's why the heroic fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto had only tiny numbers of arms at their disposal. The Poles who rose against the Nazis when duped by Stalin and the Soviets into doing so had many, many more arms. There was one specific Polish gentile organization for the aid of the Jews. It included many women amongst its numbers. It is rightly remembered by love and gratitude by Jewish people for its heroic and selfless acts. But they were but a tiny minority who had to do as much to hide their acts from their fellow Poles as they did from the Germans.
But if I wrote "as a Jew" it would not give me authority. Nor would my murdered relatives. I will therefore never use the phrase "as a Jew", because it smacks of claiming something beyond being one individual who should not be taken to be in any way informative about Jewish opinion at large. I could write "as one, possibly unrepresentative Jew". Or I could write, because I think I can demonstrate it beyond doubt, "like most Jews who know their own history and religious tradition".
I write because I have taken the trouble to spend a great deal of time researching this history. That's why I claim the authority to write in as challenging a spirit as I have of what you write here. And I currently do my best to learn of the range and the dominant and minority trends in Muslim opinion in this country and elsewhere. If you care to look up my Twitterfeed "judyk113' you will see that I have greened my portrait. That of itself did not give me authority to write what I did above about the people of Iran, but I did feel that doing my best to follow both the official and the unofficial accounts of what came out of Iran after the election gives me at least the basis on which to claim some reliability for what I wrote.
So, Fiyaz, I'm just as suspicious and sceptical about anyone using the formulation "as a Muslim" as I am of someone saying "as a Jew". It has all to often been a marker of quite a different agenda, and one based on attempts to pass off unrepresentative views as typical or as having an importance beyond their own speaker's presence.
And one other piece of history intervenes in my response to your post. It is the history of the PLO under Arafat setting up some sort of ceremony where they would go and place wreaths at either Auschwitz or the site of the Warsaw Ghetto in mourning for the victims of the Holocaust. It was done at the time when they insisted that they had been made the victims of European guilt for the Holocaust, that European Jews have no connection to Israel or to Jerusalem. I am glad they did not as far as I am aware, invoke Islam in this ceremony, which utterly disgusted me, and I believe the vast majority of the Jews of the world. Of course they had and continue to have a retinue of some thousands of Jews (who would invariably invoke the As A Jew formula) who supported and continue to support those of them who wish to see an end to the State of Israel, and who wish to see all Jews removed from living in the occupied territories.
I hope, Fiyaz, you are sincere in your learning. But for the Jews of Islamic lands, most roads do not lead back to Poland. They lead back to the history of Jewish settlement and migration in those lands and in Israel, going back centuries. And although their relations with their Muslim neighbours were often cordial and rich, and were incomparably greater than those of Jews with the Christians of Europe, they nevertheless faced institutionalized discrimination and humiliation, and sometimes forcible exclusion expulsion and murderous attacks imposed by the Islamic laws under which they lived.
Never forget, indeed. It would be helpful to ensure first that we know every relevant thing we need to remember.
There are a lot of legends about encounters between Napoleon and the Jews, just as there are about encounters between Alexander the Great and Jews. In both cases, the Jews' ambivalent but ultimately admiring relationship with these world-changing rulers is reflected in the substance of the tales told. They usually show the great ruler learning to admire some aspect of Jewish tenacity in adversity.
One of the ones I always remember about Napoleon is where he's reputed to have passed by a synagogue where he could hear the congregation wailing the mourning chants of the Tisha B'Av service, Tisha B'Av being the saddest day in the Jewish calendar. It's a major fast commemorating the fall on that day of the First and Second temples of Jerusalem, during which Jeremiah's Book of Lamentations is read. When it's explained to him that the Jews he hears are weeping for a loss which took place 1,800 years earlier, he's said to have said:
I vow that this people is destined for a future in their own homeland. For is there any other people who have kept alive similar mourning and hope for so many years?"
Sunday was the 17th Tammuz. For observant orthodox Jews, that's a whole day fast which marks the start of a three week period of mourning, commemorating the beginning of the end of the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE. It culminated in the destruction on the 9th of Av of the Second Temple and the subsequent expulsion of the Jews from their homeland. Most mainstream Jews hardly know of this three week period, though all know of Tisha b'Av, but for those who do, it has some surprisingly effective ways of opening your heart to the sorrows it commemorates. You are not supposed to play or listen to music--and that makes a huge difference in my daily life. You are also supposed to refrain from buying new clothes and cutting your hair. Usually I remember to get mine cut just before the three week period starts. This year, I lost the plot and didn't get it done. So I'll look rather scruffier than I usually do for the next three weeks.
Unlike the major fasts of Tisha B'Av and Yom Kippur, the Fast of 17th Tammuz is one of those you usually observe individually rather than communally.
This year was different. The London Jewish community held a memorial service, arranged almost overnight, for the two returned soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, as well as for the other Israeli soldiers held captive, of whom only one, Gilad Shalit, is known to be still alive.
When I went to the synagogue, I heard the mother of one of the youth group organizers say that they hoped they might get perhaps twenty people attending. By the time the service started, it was packed--even more women than men, with some of them having to stand.
It was quite a low key event, but I was conscious from having spent so much time since the prisoner exchange following the reactions of the UK, Israeli and international media, as well as Israeli bloggers, of the collective sadness that for once united the secular and the religious Israeli public, all too often a non-dialogue of the deaf.
On the same day, Imshin, who, like so many secular Jews, tends to find her spiritual sustenance in Buddhism rather than Judaism, was visiting Jerusalem, and found herself walking up the steps of part of the destroyed Temple. That experience connected with her in a way that I wouldn't have expected:
Here I was standing at the foot of the actual steps that led up to the Second Temple all those years ago. It wasn’t just an old story. It wasn’t a myth. It really happened. And I am a descendant of these people who came to this place to worship....
I always get a bit teary at the Wall, and I’m never sure why. Friday was no exception, standing at the foot of those steps.
I always thought it was all this spirituality in the air that got to me. But perhaps it’s something deeper than that.
When we went over to see Robinson’s Arch , or what’s left of it, the enormity of the destruction really hit me and I was very sad. This has never happened to me before. I must have needed to be able to envision this as a real place, for me to begin to understand the terrible tragedy of what happened back then.
These are actual stones from the outer wall of Herod’s Temple, bearing the distinct features of Herodian masonry, excavated just as you see them, apparently toppled by the Romans when they destroyed the Temple.
And as these things always happen, today was the 17th of Tamouz, believed to be the day the Romans broke through the city walls (among other things), all those years ago (precisely 1938 years I think, if I’m not miscounting).
Then I checked out Karen's Tel-Aviv Diary, as I usually do. She's also a militantly secular Israeli, but being the daughter of Yiddish speaking Holocaust survivors and a fluent Yiddishist herself, she's closer to the traditions of the religion than you might imagine. She is bearing so much beyond the collective grief over the outcome of the prisoners' return-- a tragic family bereavement, the loss of a young nephew after a cruel illness, a husband undergoing chemotherapy, and more.
And in memory of the young man, but perhaps also all the public collective grief over the dead hostage soldiers, she put up on her diary blog a poignant, searing poem by Yehuda Amichai which she had long ago translated. Her translation appeared in the Tel-Aviv Review in 1998, which most English readers, including myself, have no knowledge of.
It commemorates the death--possibly also after a long period of struggle--of someone close to Amichai and yet it also commemorates the pain of some of the legacies that all Jews share.
In a time when it's possible to be silenced by the cynicism and hollow triumphalism emanating from Lebanon and beyond, Amichai's poem speaks into that silence and beyond it.
