Israeli leaders, for their part, stopped blaming American Jews and recognized the legitimacy of serving Israel while residing in the United States. In very revealing terms, Benjamin Ginsberg writes that already in the 1950s, “an accommodation was reached between the Jewish state in Israel and the Jewish state in America”; but it was after 1967 that the compromise became a consensus, as anti-Zionist Jews were marginalized and silenced.512 Thus was born a new Israel, whose capital was no longer only Tel Aviv but also New York; a transatlantic Israel, a nation without borders, delocalized. It was not really a novelty, but rather a new balance between two realities, one old and the other beginning in 1947. Let us not forget that until the foundation of the Jewish state, “Israel” was a common designation of the international Jewish community, as when the British Daily Express of March 24, 1933, printed on its front page: “The whole of Israel throughout the world is united in declaring an economic and financial war on Germany.”513
In May 1947, the Zionists gave the name Israel to the new “Jewish nation” they proclaimed in Palestine, giving the word a different meaning. The two notions (national Israel and international Israel) are made inseparable by the fact that every Jew in the world is virtually a citizen of Israel, since all he has to do is ask. In the 1970s, the hearts of an increasing number of American Jews began to beat secretly, and then more and more loudly, for Israel. Reform Judaism, which until then had declared itself to be exclusively religious, soon rationalized this new situation by a 1976 resolution affirming: “The State of Israel and the Diaspora, in fruitful dialogue, can show how a People transcends nationalism while affirming it, thus establishing an example for humanity.”514
It is important to emphasize that the commitment of an international Jewish elite capable of influencing foreign governments has been necessary not only for the foundation of Israel, but also for its survival. Even today, Israel’s survival is entirely dependent on the influence of the Zionist network in the United States and Europe (euphemistically called the “pro-Israel lobby”). Again, the parallel with the post-exilic period is valid, since for many centuries the kingdom of Israel was virtually ruled by the Babylonian exiles, with Nehemiah himself retaining his principal residence there. Is it not written in the Book of Baruch that the Babylonian exiles collected money to send to the Jews who remained in Jerusalem? After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, Babylon remained the center of universal Judaism (and the place where the Talmud was written).
The American Jewish community (New York, for short) now fulfills the same function, as has been pointed out by many prominent Zionists such as Jacob Neusner in A History of the Jews in Babylonia (1965), and, before him, Max Dimont in Jews, God and History (1962). The American Jews who prefer to remain in the United States rather than emigrate to Israel are, Dimont argued, as essential to the community as the Babylonian Jews who declined the invitation to return to Palestine in the Persian era: “Today, as once before, we have both an independent State of Israel and the Diaspora. But, as in the past, the State of Israel today is a citadel of Judaism, a haven of refuge, the center of Jewish nationalism where dwell only two million of the world’s twelve million Jews. The Diaspora, although it has shifted its center through the ages with the rise and fall of civilizations, still remains the universal soul of Judaism.”515 In other words, New York is to Tel Aviv what Jewish universalism is to Jewish nationalism: two sides of the same reality. Although its theoretical vocation is to welcome all the Jews of the world, the State of Israel would collapse if it achieved this goal. It is unsustainable without the support of international Jewry, mobilized by such groups as AIPAC and B’nai B’rith (in Hebrew, “sons of the covenant,” founded in New York in 1843).
Broadly, among the Jewish community, Israel brings together all those who, through their family origins, feel “eternally” or “unconditionally” attached to it. Israel is thus a country of the heart and not just an administrative citizenship. In this sense, the fifty-two American Jewish representative organizations, as well as the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which has been coordinating them since 1956, are part of Israel, insofar as they are openly devoted to Israel’s defense—for example when they fight anti-Zionism by calling it anti-Semitism. From this point of view, Israel has two world capitals: Tel Aviv and New York. Over the years, pushed by their representative elites, American and European Jews have forged such a personal and intimate connection with the State of Israel that the defense of this state has become for them a sort of second nature, a self-preservation instinct. It would seem that Zionism has succeeded in transforming each Jew into an Israeli at heart, even a sleeper agent of Israel. As a result, the phenomenon announced by Alfred Lilienthal in 1953 has been realized: “In contemporary Judaism, the worship of the State of Israel is crowding out the worship of God.”516 Israel has become what Yahweh once was: the soul or god of the Jewish community. Basically, Israel substituted itself for its national god in the same way that Humanity had substituted itself for its universal God during the Enlightenment. The phenomenon can be regarded as indirect proof that Yahweh has never ceased to be for the Jews the god of Israel.
But Israel is not the only divinity of contemporary Jews. For “The State of Israel is God’s answer to Auschwitz,” wrote Abraham Herschel in 1969, in a Trinitarian formula that summarizes the relationship between Yahweh, Israel, and Holocaust.517 The memorial cult of “the Holocaust” (the term refers to a religious sacrifice and is intimately linked in the book of Ezra to the reconstruction of the Temple) is today inseparable from support for Israel; the two form a single amalgamated bond holding the global Jewish community together. The cult was inaugurated during the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel (abducted in 1960 in Argentina, tried in 1961, hanged in 1962)—a formidably effective global communications operation, staged by Ben-Gurion “to educate our youth. In addition, this trial is needed because the world has started to forget the Nazi horrors.” He admitted: “The fate of Eichmann, the person, has no interest for me whatsoever. What is important is the spectacle.” The Eichmann trial, declared Mapai’s general secretary in an electoral speech, was intended as “the trial of the Jewish people against eternal anti-Semitism in all nations and through all generations.”518 At the same time, it was necessary to scrub away the still-fresh stain of the collaboration between Zionism and Nazism: it was bad taste to remind the world that Adolf Eichmann, an admirer of Herzl, had visited Palestine for the first time in 1937 under the Haavara Agreement, and had met on this occasion Ben-Gurion’s assistant, Teddy Kollek, future mayor of Jerusalem.519
The Holocaust, the avatar of Yahweh, escapes history to join the category of myth, which is why “it is not within reach of historians.”520 This sacralization of the Holocaust through permanent media brainwashing fulfills two complementary functions: guilt in the Gentiles, fear among the Jews. Through guilt, the Gentiles are kept in check and all their criticisms are neutralized under the threat of passing for potential gas chamber operators. Through fear, the Jewish community is kept under control and their loyalty to Israel strengthened, Israel being presented to them as an “insurance policy,” a fortress (preferably well armed) in which to take refuge in the event of a new Holocaust. The spiritual power of this cult is such that the trauma of the Holocaust has now been proven to be passed from generation to generation on the genetic level, via what is called “epigenetic inheritance” according to a research team at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, led by Rachel Yehuda.521
Every religion has its priests. It was in the late 1960s that Elie Wiesel became an international star of the Holocaust. His book Night, published in 1958 with a preface by François Mauriac, was translated into German in 1962 with, as if by magic, the “crematory ovens” (intended to incinerate the dead) systematically transformed (11 times) into Gaskammer, or “gas chambers,” which thus make their appearance in force in Holocaust mythology. As Alain Soral put it, “As founding sacrifice, the gas cham
ber has replaced the cross of Christ.”522
Shortly after Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, controversy erupted. Wiesel was denounced as an impostor by Miklos Grüner, a friend and fellow prisoner of the real Lazar Wiesel at the camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.523 But what does it matter? Elie Wiesel remains to this day “the consummate narrator of the death and resurrection of the Jewish people.”524 In the writings of Wiesel and company, the Holocaust has become an initiatory mystery, as ironically illustrated by Norman Finkelstein, himself the son of two survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the camps, who quotes from Wiesel’s book Against Silence: “Wiesel intones that the Holocaust ‘leads into darkness,’ ‘negates all answers,’ ‘lies outside, if not beyond, history,’ ‘defies both knowledge and description,’ ‘cannot be explained nor visualized,’ is ‘never to be comprehended or transmitted,’ marks a ‘destruction of history’ and a ‘mutation on a cosmic scale.’ Only the survivor-priest (read: only Wiesel) is qualified to divine its mystery. And yet, The Holocaust’s mystery, Wiesel avows, is ‘noncommunicable’; ‘we cannot even talk about it.’ Thus, for his standard fee of $25,000 (plus chauffeured limousine), Wiesel lectures that the ‘secret’ of Auschwitz’s ‘truth lies in silence.’”525
As an “ideological representation,” Norman Finkelstein explains, “The Holocaust” is “a coherent construct” whose dogmas “sustain significant political and class interests. Indeed, The Holocaust has proven to be an indispensable ideological weapon. Through its deployment, one of the world’s most formidable military powers, with a horrendous human rights record, has cast itself as a ‘victim’ state, and the most successful ethnic group in the United States has likewise acquired victim status.” As a matter of fact, “organized Jewry remembered The Holocaust when Israeli power peaked, [and] when American Jewish power peaked. […] Thus American Jewish elites could strike heroic poses as they indulged in cowardly bullying.”526
The sacralization of the Holocaust, while sealing the exceptionality of the Jewish people as unsurpassable victim of history, allows it to universalize its enemy. Ben-Gurion had already, speaking of the imminent war in Palestine in 1947, warned that the Arabs were “the disciples and even teachers of Hitler, who know only one way of solving the Jewish problem: total destruction.” But it was during preparations for the Six-Day War that what Idith Zertal calls the “Nazification of the Arabs” began. Equating Nasser with Hitler became a common theme of Israeli propaganda. Haaretz led the campaign with such articles as “The Return of the Hitlerite Danger,” where the paper’s military correspondent claimed that Israel must “crush the machinations of the new Hitler right away, while it is still possible to do so.” Even Ben-Gurion, the head of state, joined in: “I have no doubt that the Egyptian dictatorship is being instructed by the large number of Nazis who are there.”527
The Holocaust is universal and polymorphous. After being incarnated in Nazi Germany, it can return in the guise of a new enemy. For there are, forever, only two camps: Israel and the rest of the world. The enemy changes identity but remains the same, universal and timeless: Hitler was himself only an avatar of Nebuchadnezzar, and the Holocaust the latest biblical episode. In the Bible itself, moreover, the enemies follow and resemble each other: Egypt, Babylon, and Persia form a series, completed by Rome, but at bottom they are one in the Jewish imagination. They are all Esau. They are interchangeable: the story of Esther could just as well happen in Babylon, and that of Daniel in Persia.
Chapter 9
THE VICIOUS CABAL
“O Lord, You made the world for our sakes. As for the other people, which also come of Adam, You have said that they are nothing, but like spittle.”
Fourth Book of Ezra 6:55–56
Neoconned
As we have seen, the end of the 1960s marked a decisive turning point in the United States’ relationship with Israel. One key factor was the emergence of a new American Jewish elite who, under the misleading name of “neoconservatives,” was gradually gaining considerable influence over American foreign policy. The neoconservative movement was born in the editorial office of the monthly magazine Commentary, the press organ of the American Jewish Committee. “If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it,” writes Gal Beckerman in The Jewish Daily Forward, January 6, 2006. “It is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants’ grandchildren.”528
The founding fathers of neoconservatism (Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Donald Kagan, Paul Wolfowitz, Adam Shulsky) are disciples of Leo Strauss. Born into a family of German Orthodox Jews, Strauss taught mainly at the University of Chicago and was a specialist in Thomas Hobbes. Strauss’s thought is often elliptical because he believes that truth is harmful to the common man and the social order and should be reserved for superior minds (while religion is for the rest, as the necessary opium of the people). For this reason, Strauss rarely speaks in his own name, but rather expresses himself as a commentator on such classical authors as Plato or Thomas Hobbes. Though Strauss is difficult to read, three basic ideas can easily be extracted from his political philosophy. First, nations derive their strength from their myths, which are necessary for government and governance. Second, national myths have no necessary relationship with historical reality, but rather are socio-cultural constructions that the state has a duty to disseminate. Third, to be effective, any national myth must be marked by a clear distinction between good and evil, for it derives its cohesive strength from the hatred of an enemy nation.529
Strauss greatly admired Machiavelli, the fifteenth-century political philosopher who rejected the classical tradition that sought to make virtue the foundation of power, and asserted that only the appearance of virtue counts, and that the successful prince must be a “great simulator” who “manipulates and cons people’s minds.” In his Thoughts on Machiavelli, Strauss parts from the intellectual trend of trying to rehabilitate the author of The Prince, and instead agrees with the “simple opinion” that regards his political theory as immoral, for it is precisely in this immorality that resides “the intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech.” Machiavelli, writes Strauss, “is a patriot of a particular kind: He is more concerned with the salvation of his fatherland than with the salvation of his soul.”530
Strauss, like his disciples, could be qualified as a meta-Zionist in the sense that, while he is an ardent supporter of the State of Israel, he rejects the idea that Israel as a nation should be contained within borders; Israel must retain her specificity, which is to be everywhere. In his 1962 lecture “Why We Remain Jews,” Strauss quotes, as “the most profound and radical statement on assimilation that I have read,” Nietzsche’s Dawn of Day aphorism 205, a sort of prophecy of the Jews’ conquest through integration: “It only remains for them either to become the lords of Europe or to lose Europe […] at some time Europe may fall like a perfectly ripe fruit into their hand, which only casually reaches out. In the meantime it is necessary for them to distinguish themselves in all the areas of European distinction and to stand among the first, until they will be far enough along to determine themselves that which distinguishes.”531
Second, the neoconservatives of the first generation mostly came from the left, even the extreme Trotskyist left for some luminaries like Irving Kristol, one of the main editors of Commentary. It was at the end of the 60s that Commentary became, in the words of Benjamin Balint, “the contentious magazine that transformed the Jewish left into the neoconservative right.”532 Sexual liberation, which they had largely supported, suddenly seemed decadent; and pacifism, irresponsible. Norman Podhoretz, editor-in-chief of Commentary from 1960 to 1995, changed from anti-Vietnam War activist to defense budget booster, leading the rest of the magazine along with him. He gave the explanation of this turning point in 1979
: “American support for Israel depended upon continued American involvement in international affairs—from which it followed that an American withdrawal into the kind of isolationist mood [. . .] that now looked as though it might soon prevail again, represented a direct threat to the security of Israel.”533 Since the survival of Israel depends on American protection and help, US military might and global involvement must be reinforced. This is why Irving Kristol committed members of the American Jewish Congress in 1973 to fight George McGovern’s proposal to reduce the military budget by 30 percent: “This is to drive a knife into the heart of Israel. [. . .] Jews don’t like a big military budget, but it is now an interest of the Jews to have a large and powerful military establishment in the United States. [. . .] American Jews who care about the survival of the state of Israel have to say, no, we don’t want to cut the military budget, it is important to keep that military budget big, so that we can defend Israel.”534 It is therefore good for Israel that American Jews become, as American citizens, ardent interventionists. But it was also necessary that this interventionism should appear on the national public scene as American patriotism. This explains why the neoconservatives take such special care to forbid any public mention of their Jewishness. Even Carl Bernstein, though a Jew himself, provoked a scandal by citing, on national television, the responsibility of “Jewish neocons” for the Iraq war.535 The truth is that the neoconservatives are crypto-Zionists. The “neoconservative” label they have given themselves is a mask. (Most “neo” things are fake).
From Yahweh to Zion Page 37