July 6th, '04
Rude Shocks

The following article is by David Margolis, a novelist and journalist who was once my boss (and is now my friend). This originally appeared in the Jerusalem Report. You can read more of his fine writing at his website.

Rude Shocks
by David Margolis

Bzzt! I keep getting rude shocks from friends abroad when the conversation turns to Israel.

A gentile academic who's known Jews all her life confides that she views Israel as a "mistake." A Jewish socialist warns, "I have very radical ideas about Israel" - he won't say more. The editor of an otherwise marvelously intelligent New York weekly runs only unsympathetic pieces about Israel. A woman with liberal opinions claims "not to know much" about the Middle East situation; she's correct, but it doesn't stop her from sharing her hostile opinions about Israel.

At what point does the "merely" anecdotal become evidential? Increasingly, decent people on the left seem either to disdain Israel or to view its disappearance as a necessary step toward a perfected world. It was loony radicals who kept Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Magazine, from addressing last year's rally in San Francisco against the Iraq war (despite his impeccable anti-war credentials) because he supports Israel's right to exist - but the "normal" Left among the organizers didn't care enough to object.

Meanwhile, a 2002 Anti-Defamation League survey showing a surge in anti-Israel sentiment in Europe lent instant credibility to last year's flawed EU poll reporting that 59 percent of Europeans consider Israel the world's greatest threat to peace. British journalist Melanie Philips describes "Leftist demonstrators marching with Islamic fanatics chanting 'Hamas, Hamas, all Jews to the gas.'" In the Jew- friendly USA, feminist author Phyllis Chesler reports being bombarded with verbal abuse at Barnard when she stumbles into defending Israel before an audience of black and Hispanic women.

This international plague - the increasingly unthinking assumption that Israel is, at best, all wrong - has infected even the nominally Zionist Jewish Left. Readers with an Internet connection can judge for them selves whether accusations of mindless "Israel bashing" against Tikkun Magazine are justified. But when a well-known Jewish Renewal rabbi on the East Coast informs me that Ariel Sharon and Hamas are essentially the same - even though Israel accepts territorial compromise with the Palestinians while Hamas stands for the destruction of Israel - I despair of logic as well as brotherhood.

The alliance of the Left with oppression is not new, of course. The "Old Left" loved the Soviet Union with all its perversions and cruelties, and their children in the "New Left" glorified the vast murder machine of Maoist Red China (whose genocidal rape of Tibet - no hyperbole - seems to have slipped below much of the Left's radar). But I'm speaking here not mainly of hard ideologues but of ordinary people who combine liberal-left sentiments with antagonism to Israel.

Pundits provide reasons for this: ignorance of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict; Israel's association with "colonialist" America; Prime Minister Sharon's connection to Sabra and Shatila and now to the "evil" Bush; Israel's defective public relations and Palestinian success in portraying themselves as victims; and a well-oiled Arab anti-Israel propaganda campaign, to name a few.

All true - yet somehow none of that fully explains why thoughtful friends in San Francisco have become partisans of the Palestinian cause, let alone why Portuguese Nobel Prize novelist Jose Saramago compared Israel's treatment of Palestinians to "Auschwitz" and anti-fascist Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis called Jews "the root of evil" - decent folks, all of them, and I mean it.

I don't argue that Israel is always right. But how can people with an automatic tropism toward democracy, human rights, women's rights and open society ally themselves so easily with corrupt despotisms and the dispatchers of bus bombers? How can it count for so little that Israel is - as journalist Julie Burchill said in resigning from The Guardian last year to protest its "striking bias" against the Jewish state - "for all its faults ... the only country in that barren region that ... any feminist, atheist, homosexual or trade unionist could bear to live" in?

My friends are cultured and tolerant people with whom I share a wide range of political and "lifestyle" opinions, yet they seem unmoved that part of the Palestinian design remains the destruction of Israel. They ignore the Palestinians' endless refusal to compromise while the Israeli electorate votes for compromise every time it sees a real chance for it. The moral magnitude of Israel's achievements in the face of endless Arab belligerence apparently has no weight to them.

So I fish for explanations where politics mixes with the metaphysical. Does the Jews' near-miraculous national rebirth and homecoming insult the Left's religion of universalism by suggesting, once again, the Jews' uniqueness?

Or is the Left's rancor merely an expression of the antagonism toward Jews that seems built into the world's foundation, as if God himself put it there? My friends are not anti-Semites, to be sure, but I wonder if they might be like canaries in a mine, unaware as they fall before the deadly vapors.

And beyond both politics and metaphysics, how shall I cope personally as my good friends become also my enemies?

David Margolis, a novelist and journalist, lives in a village in the Judean hills.

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