BBC Starts the Week with claim that Israel is like the Nazis

This morning's BBC Radio 4 Start the Week programme gave a good slot of its time to Eva Figes, who volubly claimed that the Israelis are like the Nazis. Yes, she said during the broadcast, I know they're not running extermination camps, but that's only because they know people would find out. She went on to complain that all Israelis are filled with hate, and that they hated Holocaust survivors who came to Israel and only put up with them because they had to in order to start the state.

She also claims that the only reason Israel came into existence as a state is because America caused it to be created so that they wouldn't have to take the Holocaust refugees as survivor refugees. How does she know? Well, she researched it, she says. President Truman wrote it in a letter (she didn't say where). Oh,  it must surely be true, then.

So what's all this based on? Well,  she's written a book, based mainly on her discussions with a fellow Jewish woman, Edith, who was her family's maid in Berlin, before the latter emigrated to former Palestine. Edith subsequently left the kibbutz she'd settled on and came to the family in London, claiming she'd been treated very badly by the kibbutzniks because she was a German Jew, a Yekke, not an Eastern European Jew like them. It's astounding enough to have based the main theme of her book on the reported experience of one woman.It's even more astounding to realise (and this was not made clear in the programme) that this analysis was based on her memories of her conversations with Edith as a teenager, some fifty years ago. As an insight into how accurate or perceptive her memories might be, she can't even recall the woman's surname, and didn't have that close a relationship with her anyway. It doesn't seem to have occurred to Eva Figes that she might have heard a somewhat one sided account from Edith. 

Israel, according to her teenage memories of Edith, is a country where everybody hates everybody else.

Not a surprising conclusion, perhaps, because Eva does not seem to be someone given to critical self awareness or looking beyond her own perceptions. Here, in the Camden Book Review, we can see how she has used her own experiences of a few visits to Israel to confirm her view of Israel and the Israelis

Edith was cold-shouldered, says Figes, because “Israelis are never welcoming to newcomers”.
Figes herself has only had unfortunate experiences in Israel. She has been to “male chauvinist” kibbutzim and when she went on an international women’s conference she met hostility, aggression and rudeness.
“We were not treated like honoured guests or respected authors,” she says.
Imagine, then, what it was like for weary survivors like Edith. “Zionists were only interested in human material – young, fit and ready for anything.” In her book she goes further: “Zionists and Nazis had more in common than is generally acknowledged” she writes.

You can get some sense of the quality and accuracy of her information from the information she confidently gives about the origins of the mocking nickname "Yekkes" (jackets) given to German Jews. According to Figes on this morning's broadcasts, that's an insulting term invented by the Israelis because they regarded the German Jews as so posh, they would go out to plough the fields in suit jackets. Well, no. The Camden Review article tells us Figes was brought up with virtually no Jewish knowledge, and here's one of the places it shows. Yekkes is the Yiddish for jackets-- but it originated with the traditional Orthodox Jews of Eastern Europe, long before the time of the modern Jewish return to Israel, at a time when the latter wore long robes and caftans, and they saw the wearing of short jackets as symptomatic of the secularising and assimilationist tendencies of the German Jews, who at that time styled themselves as "Germans of Mosaic persuasion". The German Jews responded in kind, calling the Jews of Eastern Europe "Ostjuden", a term whose insulting connotations are difficult to appreciate today. In pre-war Germany, many German Jews saw the Ostjuden as the source of all their problems with Hitler and the Nazis. To be called an "Ostjude" bore something of the opprobrium that casual British racists of today would attach to calling Asian Britons "Pakis".

She also claims the term "sabon", an insult term based on the Hebrew word for "soap" was used against Edith to associate her as a German Jew with the extermination practices of the Nazis. Again, another piece of Figes' etymological ignorance and fakery. The term "sabon" in Hebrew is routinely used as a slang for a drip or a nerd, unrelated to any connotations of the Holocaust. I first learnt the term in Tel Aviv in 1962 when my glamorous Israeli cousin applied it to my then rather nerdy and boring English cousin, and to accountants as a group. My family was not one which would ever have countenanced using any term which mocked the extermination of Jews of any ethnic background, given the very large numbers of our closest relatives who were murdered in the camps.

Figes' extraordinary outpourings were mildly challenged by the presenter, Andrew Marr, and one of the guests, Kenan Malik. Her view is rather extreme, said Marr. In that case, what was Start the Week doing offering it a national platform in prime broadcasting time? Would Start the Week countenance let alone invite a member of the British National Party to speak on the programme about the supposed universally negative characteristics of British Asians or Palestinian Muslims?

And when Figes went on to rant on further about the history of Israel (the Zionists always intended to take the whole of Palestine; there are letters by Ben Gurion that prove it, she said), Israelis (I am totally appalled by Israeli behaviour, said Figes), she was challenged by fellow guest Kenan Malik who asked her on what basis she could draw conclusions about Israel and zionism as a whole from such limited evidence. She quickly sidestepped that one by saying that the real issue wasn't about what Israel did in 1948, it's about what's happening now. The murders in Gaza, she said (but of course not the murders committed by Hamas and its fellow Islamist terror groups). 

Malik called her on what she'd written in her book: 9/11 was "the Muslims finally striking back". Nothing of the sort, he roundly said. And pointed out what a reactionary and atavistic group the perpetrators were.

Figes ended declaring that the whole purpose of her book was to attack the current action of the USA and Israel in the Middle East. Not so much a self-hating Jew; I always think that appellation is mistaken. People like Figes are in fact profoundly self-obsessed and self-important Jews, utterly convinced of their competence to make selective grand judgements which fly in the face of whatever facts are there. As she said of her book in the Camden Book Review, she ends up with a tale of "good Germans and bad Jews".

So here we have a flagship BBC programme, choosing to give huge national publicity to a woman whose wilful ignorance, self-importance and pernicious use of discredited source material have enabled her to foist a quite fantastic and mendacious view of Jews and Israel on a largely unaware wider public.

If you want to get a sense of how utterly off the wall any comparison of Israeli action against Palestinian terrorism is--or Israeli rule of the Palestinian areas it controls is-- you could begin by listening to some holocaust survivor accounts, like the one in the clip at the head of the table. And then you could get a more reliably evidenced sense of what Israel has been for its 250,000 Holocaust survivors here, here and here.

Interestingly, the evening repeat broadcast of "Start the Week" had edited out Figes' most outrageous comments, including the one where she directly compared Israel to the Nazis and said the only reason they weren't running extermination camps was because people would notice, plus her wilder anti-American comments.

And who published the book which contains what are all too obviously the most gross and outrageous errors? Granta Books, now owned by millionaire philanthropist, Sigrid Rausing. Its stablemate Granta magazine was until last year edited by Ian Jack. Who happens to be a former editor of the Independent on Sunday and is now a regular and predictably anti-Israel, anti-Boris and anti-UK-in-Iraq writer for the Guardian. I expect that's entirely a coincidence, don't you?

Comments

[Inna]

Actually, what really annoyed me most about the whole I, as-a-Jew-am-here-to tell-you-Israelis-are-Nazis nonsense Eva spouted is that in her own account, she didn't care for Edith at all. And if this was not obvious from the fact that she was using and almost certainly distorting her story (and how does Edith feel about this btw?) it is obvious from the fact that her family made no effort to get her out of Germany and really would have preferred that she kept well away after the war. She makes that clear in the interview. Of course she says "Oh that's just my mother" and "It was very difficult to get out of Germany" etc. but the fact remains that 1) an Israeli kibbuts took Edith in whereas Eva would not; and 2) an Israeli kibbutz gave Edith a place to go and Edith would not.

And the Israelis are the Nazis who have treated Edith badly?

Regards,

Inna

[ami]

Thank you Judy for articulating so superbly what many appalled listeners feel.

I have just spoken to a 70 year old friend of mine originally
from Split in Croatia but Austrian parentage, who is also very upset by
this interview. She herself was taken to Israel at age 16 after the war where she spent 10 years in a Ma'abarah and she acknowledges that personal relations were "very problematic" in those early years- not surprising the social fabric should have been very strained under the weight of this huge influx, but she refutes utterly the picture of official and universal hostility, and came to dearly love Israel and its people.

In psychological terms, such denigration as there was is readily if sadly, explicable in terms of the much studied (see Boyarin) manifestation of internalised oppression, where the new Jew turned the blame and contempt inwards and tried to reinvent himself and in the process distance himself from the horror of the old Jew.

Figes seems to be doing something similar: as one of those pre war German Jews with a love affair with Germany, she is unable to turn her hostility towards Germany, seeks to put the Germans in as good a light as possible, and instead turn all this hatred inwards to herself and then project it onto the entire Israeli people.

Figes has shown how poor her ability is to assess historical material and read other peoples work:
This is evidenced when she tried to dismiss the other guest, Ian Kershaw's book, by saying he was writing about Bavaria, not Germany and Berlin in discussing the attitudes of Germans (Her book is an attempt to put Germans in a better light ) and he corrects her on this point.

But even more, for a novelist, Figes seems to have poor insight, as she ignores the psychological trauma and sociological crisis of the oundational years of Israel to impose a shallow and twisted interpretation on the behaviours of the populace to say the whole Zionist enterprise was a cynical deception with the survivors being the tools, instead of the truth, which is that their fate was a genuine impetus, but not the whole picture, in the
reasons for the need for the State of Israel.

[Linda Grant]

Ian Jack is not the Guardian's Middle East editor, the Middle East editor is Ian Black. So no couincidence after all. Granta also published my book, When I Lived In Modern Times. Which can hardly be called anti-Israel.

[ami]

Linda Grant: With your background and experience, I would be most interested to read your take on Fige's book, and the Start the Week piece.

[Linda Grant]

I was asked by two separate publications to review the book and turned it down. I have not read it, and I do not comment on works I have not read. I did hear the interview and would agree with much of Judy's assessment. My disagreement with her post is the insertion of a factual inaccuracy on which is built a conspiracy.

[judy]

I don't suggest any conspiracy. Ian Jack's affiliations are listed on the Granta web site. He does come up on a Google watch as Guardian Middle East editor, though it's now apparent to me that that's a Google inaccuracy, where they list Ian Black under a pointer link to Jack, who both Granta and the Graun list as one of their regular writers. Jack also used to be editor of the Independent on Sunday , which matches the Graun in its blame- Israel bias.

In my view the fact that Start the Week featured Linda Grant's first major book on Israel demonstrates only that as per usual with the Beeb, their perspective on Israel extends all the way from critics who see the main issue as Israel's occupation to those like Figes who see Israel as like the Nazi. Their other most recent feature on Israel was a reverential platform for Jacqueline Rose's most recent anti-Israel book, which almost matched Figes for inaccurate and outrageous misuse of sources.

It would be interesting to hear more of Linda's reasons for refusing to review the Figes book.

[Linda Grant]

I would expect that you will now amend your post to remove the reference to Ian Jack as the Guardian's Middle East editor. For to analyse the work of others in search of factual inaccuracies, one must make sure one's own nose is clean.

[ami]

I agree the post does need correcting regarding the Ians and the inferences therefrom. Linda: you say you do not comment on works you have not read: This would not be an insurmountable obstacle: You could, well, read it. If that was the only reason for not reviewing it.

[Linda Grant]

You asked me to comment on it here, on this site. I explained I was unable to do so as I had not read it. Of course were I to have accepted the commission to review it that would be another matter.

[ami]

I guess then the question was wrongly framed: I was curious if there was any interesting reason why you turned down the commission, twice. It is really none of my business, though.

[Linda Grant]

No particularly interesting reason. I was told that the book was more an 'angry polemic' than a family memoir and I'm not very interested in polemical works.

[Judy]

Hilariously, Ian Jack is even listed here on the Guardian's profile page for him as the paper's Middle Eastern Editor. I had thought its reputation for garbling copy through misprints had gone with its hot metal days, but no-- you have to look very closely to see that the words under his photo list Ian Black as the ME editor.

I couldn't update my original post when I wrote my earlier comments at lunchtime--an iphone is terrific for keeping up with mail and key sites, and even writing comment responses. But good as the iphone version of the Typepad editor is, you'd need a lot more time and patience than I had to make a workable job of the necessary links for the update.

Having said that, Ian Jack's pronouncements on Israel's policies in Hebron and the occupied territories reinforce my point about the common UK liberal media mindset that enables a work like Figes to get published by a supposedly reputable publisher and then get a platform on Start the Week. Here's a couple of quotes from his article on Hebron, written very recently:

I suggested that to equate apartheid in South Africa with Israeli behaviour towards Palestinians in the occupied territories was still "a big step" for most people in Europe and North America. Really, I was talking of myself: it was a big step for me and one I was reluctant to take. Two days' experience of the West Bank didn't seem enough to reach such forthright condemnation, and yet the evidence was already abundant that Israel's behaviour towards its captive Palestinian population is profoundly racist, oppressive and unjust.......

European guilt over Jewish history no longer seems a sufficient excuse. The comparison with apartheid may not be completely apposite, but that hardly matters. What is happening in Palestine is a great and tragic wrong.

Leaving aside the fact that he also wrote an article suggesting we Londoners should move to Scotland if Boris got elected (has he?), the real point is that some key people at Granta must have read Figes' draft and thought it was fit for publication.They must have felt happy about its Israel-Nazi equations and about the array of totally tendentious and disreputable "evidence" she presented. And some key people at Start the Week must have felt exactly the same.

In my view, that renders both outfits (and those whose names are listed as responsible at the time it was decided to publish Figes' book ) disreputable.

Oh, and what pitiful outfits are they that will refuse even to provide a copy of a book gratis for Linda to review? It's extraordinary that there's even one organization ready to expect the reviewer to either purchase the book or write a review without reading it, but two? Goodness me.....

[ami]

Granta was one of the publishers who didn't cover themselves in glory when they backed off their deal to publish Richard Evan's book on Irving. Ironically, it was left to Tariq Ali's outfit, to publish it: see Nick Cohen's article on the affair:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2002/jun/16/politicalcolumnists.comment1

[Linda Grant]

I have absolutely no idea how you have come up with the notion that the publications concerned refused to provide a review copy.

As I have said, ami asked me to comment on the book. I said I hadn't read it. Had I agreed to review it, they would of course have sent me a review copy.

Indeed 'some people' at Granta commissioned the book; but as Ian Jack was the editor of the magazine, not the book imprint, it does not seem likely that it was him.

The people you should really investigate are the Sunday Times which published extracts of the book over two successive weeks, this Sunday and last, and would have paid handsomely for it. Perhaps you should now peer into the political lineage of the editor and the status of News International and its proprietor, Rupert Murdoch.

[Linda Grant]

Here's the Sunday Times extract from Eva Figes' book, published two days ago
http://tiny.cc/2wZxc

[Keeley O’Lomb]

It's a bit rich of Linda Grant to lecture others on keeping their noses clean after she was caught plagiarising in her 'award-winning' book about Israel.

The reason she was so coy about Eva Figes is clear: like most Court Jews in the service of the BBC, The Guardian, The New Statesman, etc., Grant knows better than to bite the hand that feeds her.

[Inna]

Keeley--

I have had (and still have) my share of disagreements with Linda about the BBC and other issues. However, she is anything but a Court Jew.

Aside from her People on the Street, you may also want to check out

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/feb/18/comment.lindagrant

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/feb/18/comment.lindagrant

http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-debate_97/boycott_2770.jsp

or just google Linda Grant Israel and you will get loads of hits.

Regards,

Inna

[Kate]

I don't think anyone should be in the least surprised that this vile individual appeared as a guest on a programme hosted by Andrew Marr.

From a piece at Stephen Pollard's blog which was posted on July 24, 2006 (this article originally appeared in The Times):

"If you watched yesterday's Andrew Marr programme on BBC1, you would have seen a British TV landmark. To judge from its contents, the programme was the first to have been edited by the leader of Hezbollah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.

Most of it was, rightly, given over to the events in the Middle East. But of the four guests interviewed, not one had anything but bile to pour over Israel. Up first was Glenys Kinnock MEP, remarking how "heartening" it is that the Middle East minister, Kim Howells, has begun "a shifting of ground away from defence of Israel". Alongside her was Matthew Parris, who repeated the hostile views he has already made clear to Times readers. A Lebanese minister followed. Then Sir Menzies Campbell, a man whose entire career has been spent attacking Israeli policy, whatever it happens to be.

All were treated with deference by Andrew Marr, as he invited them to honour us with their sagacity."

http://tinyurl.com/4mtm3c

See also an excellent piece posted by Adloyada in 2005:

BBC plugs Robert Fisk's World View

http://tinyurl.com/52zobw

[Linda Grant]

I am not coy about Eva Figes, I think Judy's analysis of her appearance on Start the Week was excellent, I don't have much to add. I still can't comment on her book because I haven't read it. As for being 'caught plagiarising', an accusation was made, but went no further than this and has been refuted by me in print.

[Noga]

About "Ostjuden"

"I remember at one point coming across his collection of materials on anti-Semitism. There were certainly materials from Germany, but the focus of the collection and his own concerns was elsewhere: anti-Semitism was a problem associated with France; Germany in general was presented as the success story. This helps explain the strong self-assurance that German Jews of this golden era felt. They considered themselves Germans. And indeed, one of their faults was certainly a measure of hostility directed against their co-religionists. There were few slurs hurled more heavily by the German Jews who had arrived as those against the Ostjuden."

http://harpers.org/archive/2007/07/hbc-90000464

"Sabon":

"Native-born Israelis used the word to mock Jewish refugees who came to the Jewish state after World War Two. Even today, "sabon" or soap in Hebrew is slang for "meek."

Conscious of survivors' sensitivities, Israel Television changed the name of the 1970s American comedy show "Soap" to "Bubbles."

http://www.heretical.com/holofun/shoah1.html

In my experience, "sabon" was a harmless nickname for a person whose white skin did not respond well to the sun. My aunt, a Sephardic Jew, expected to be able to tan properly, used routinely to refer to herself as "Sabonit", when she returned from a day on the beach all red and peeling skin but no visible tan, which was the colour of "authentic sabras".

"Yekke", btw, whatever its etymology, again in my experience, was never a slur but a descriptor of the befuddlement that born Israelis experienced when encountering German Jews, who had all sorts of rules for everything. Like, no calling or knocking on their doors between 2-4 in the afternoon, or insisting that parseley be cut with scissors, never chopped with a knife. They had a German accent and usually spoke flawless Hebrew. They were mild mannered and always courteous, and took great pains not to appear too snobbish vis a vis the more uncouth sabras.

[Imshin]

My mother-in-law, a Sephardi born in Tel Aviv in the 1930's, once told me that when she was a child all the taxi drivers in Tel Aviv were Yekkes and when one wanted to say about someone that he was well-mannered and polite they sometimes said he was like a taxi driver. Things have changed somewhat in that respect. No polite taxi drivers anymore.

[Imshin]

You must watch this skit -

http://youtube.com/watch?v=alp9scMfmjA

It's an Israeli classic from the early nineteen seventies- Arik Einstein and Uri Zohar in the Lool TV satire program - it shows how each Aliya disliked the one that followed, to put it mildly.

You'll have no problem recognizing the Yekkes...

I don't know if non-Israelis will find this amusing, but you can take my word for it - no Israeli can watch this without rolling about.

[Noga]

The great Uri Zohar.

Thanks for this reminder. The hilarity of the piece is simply untranslatable, though not completely incomprehensible, for anyone who has some solid grasp of the history of Zionism in Israel.

[Judy]

My Tel-Aviv cousins in the sixties told me about German Jews and visiting German tourists who would turn their noses up at Israeli society and say' Bei uns in Deutschland war/ist alles viel besser" (Everything was/so much better back home in Germany). Not surprisingly, saying stuff like this to other Israelis riled the latter up no end....

A sophisticated variant on this de haut en bas attitude was Hannah Arendt (a hyper-Yekke) whose attitude of utter disdain for the lead prosecutor in the 1962 Eichmann trial was based on what she saw as his "emotionalism" and "taste for high drama"-- another side of what Yekkes so despised in Ostjuden.

My poor mother, She was actually born in Berlin, to a Yiddish speaking family from Galicia, so from her earliest childhood, she experienced the contempt of the German Jews around her for her as an Ostjude (her eldest brother denied that he knew Yiddish--his oldest son only realised that he must have done when I told him just a few years ago. Then when the Nazis came to power, she had the misfortune to have the same birthday as Hitler. Imagine it--despised and loathed by the Germans, equally despised and loathed by most of the Jews around her, and regarded as part of being to blame for Nazi anti-semitism--and then seeing huge Nazi parades on her birthday, with Nazi flags on display in all the flats of their non Jewish neighbours.

I thought all the stuff about despising Ostjuden had died with the camps. But in the late 80s, I went to a group for Second Generation children of refugees and survivors--and heard a woman of my age talking about the attitudes and embarrassing behaviour of Ostjuden...

And Figes recycles these attitudes, expressing her embarrassment that one of her relatives married one who was, she says, "true to type".

[Imshin]

In a Yiddish course I started but didn't finish a few years ago, the teacher told us that we were learning Lithuanian Yiddish and that Galician Yiddish was regarded as a corrupt dialect (or something along those lines), the lowest of the low, in short. Having Galician roots myself, that I am proud of (I'm a mixture, but the Galician roots gave me my maiden family name), I wasn't very happy with this apparent snobbery.

So even among the Ostjuden themselves there was a lot of contempt for one another!

[Judy]

Oh, yes, there was a great deal of mutual dislike amongst Lithuanian and Galician Jews. The academic codification and study of Yiddish was started by Lithuanian Jews. So all the textbooks produced for Anglo learners offered Litvak pronunciation (eg bagels rather than beigels -- which is actually much closer to the original Viennese German where they started).

These early Litvak Yiddishists then invested their own dialect with notions of correctness and you will find Litvak Yiddish being taught on all Yiddish courses. Bit like teaching the children of expat Londoners or Scousers to speak American English.

Galitzianer Yiddish for ever!

When my mother's brother married a Litvak Anglo Jewish woman, our family's reaction was-- couldn't he have married a nice refugee girl?

But you can't compare the rivalry of equals represented by Litvak vs Galitzianer Yiddish with the attitude of German Jews to Ostjuden. Their attitude to them was really one of despising and contempt--and as for marrying one-- very much regarded as a source of shame and calamity.

There's a lovely musical celebration of Litvak vs Galitzianer rivalry here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMuzdw5bZYk

No way you'd ever have Yekke klezmer. A contradiction in terms.

[Roger]

To: [email protected]
Subject: Your profound hate for Israel has no limits.

Madam,

What a miserable creep you are.

Your profound hate for Israel knows no limits.
Being your self a refugee from East Africa where your sort were considered " the Jews of East Africa" and expelled and dispossessed, you should have been more careful not to say fair in your caustic and venomous observations.

What does Zimbabwe have to do with Israel but for your single minded hate for the latter.

I quote:

"What a terrible thing this ancestral loyalty is, and yet so powerful and pervasive. So, vociferously anti-Zionist Muslims damn Israel but will not condemn murderous Arabs in Darfur. Kinship ties the tongues of too many Jewish people around the world who should be speaking up against the systematic brutalisation by Israel of Palestinians in Gaza."

Any comparison between the situation of Gaza Palestinians and Darfur or Zimbabwe is simply wrong.You may wish to consider that Jews and Israelis are free to criticize the policies of Israeli governments (and regularly do so) but may actually judge such policies on their merit.

Expressing understanding for Israeli actions to defend her citizens from Gaza missiles and abominable terror acts cannot be reduced to simple "kinship" as the race-obsessed " as you viciously contend.

Yours Sincerely,

[A fan of Judy]

Is there a reason Linda's book is not available at Amazon in the US?

[Voitteta]

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[Leon]

because israelis are terorrists.. tehy will not allow anything that goes against them. EVEN THOUGH IF THEY ARE RIGHT Man they killed more at least 16 innocent people. What the hell is this?