I could simply say that I do not believe in the viability of the State of Israel and I do not see any future for the so-called Two State solution. I consider the formation of the State of Israel to have been a huge error and injustice. The only hope for peace in the area - given that the clock cannot be wound back , even a mere 50 years - is for the Israeli Government to enter proper negotiations. What likelihood of this? Who could have imagined the South African negotiations, the fall of the Berlin Wall? (Only an anti-semite or racist would categorise me as a Jew. Someone determined to see essential characteristics in a person descended from another group. According to Jewish custom and law, I am not Jewish. A Jew would not consider me to be Jewish. My mother was a Gentile. Perhaps this was, in the 1950s, an unusual childhood, but probably more common today. My South African family, apart from my brother, myself and my mother, were all Jewish. My Grannys Grandfather was the business partner and brother in law of the Jewish mayor of Cape Town during the period when the Gardens Synagogue was under construction. If one can take pride in ones roots, I am proud to have this link to the people of Kafka. I have always allowed myself the freedom to imagine myself as essentially Jewish. I have also imagined myself as Russian, Irish, English, Scottish, Dutch, Khazar, Maygar, Armenian, Syrian, Tatar, etc. As a so-called half-Jew (a particularly South African designation, often applied to half-Gentile rugby players) I was exposed to the strange fault line where my otherwise reasonable Gentile friends (I am using my Granny Nins terminology, for the hell of it) would be suddenly exposed as anti-semites. This was especially notable in some of the seaboard suburbs, where for one reason or another, the Jewish section of the community was generally (I am trading in generalisations) better off, and anti-Jewish feeling was mixed with simple envy of bigger houses and newer cars. Like many with an interest in the Jewish Diaspora, I probably made too much of the suffering of the Jews. It is easy to construct, from the ashes of another groups victimhood, a series of projected moral assumptions. One imagines The Jews as the people of Roman Vishniacs photographs, poor and stoic. The wisdom of the disempowered. One can rationalise various justifications for Israels militarism, incorporating into the argument the destruction of the first , and subsequent temples, the various Biblical and historical periods of exile and wandering, the Pogrom, the Shoah, and the ages long relationship as The Chosen People of an only God. None of this makes as much sense to me as the light that the story of the Chappers casts on the terrible price paid by subject peoples as a means to survival (chap, Yiddish grab). In 1827, Czar Nicholas published a Recruitment Decree. A quota of Jewish males between the ages of 12 and 25 were to be liable for 25 years military service - if not a death sentence, a day by day destruction of Jewish reality and identity. During his reign, about thirty years , more than seventy thousand boys were taken into the army. To better organise the traumatic event of the round up, the Jewish Kahals (community leaders) whose job it was to arrange that the quota was met, introduced the system of the Chapper. These were press gangs of masked thugs who were paid a fee by the Kahals for each child abducted for handing over to the military. The system was open to abuse. Wealthy members of communities often bribed the Chappers to pass over their homes, and others hired the sons of poor families as ringers for their own. This inhumane administration - by Jews themselves - of a Means to an End, reminds me of the excesses of modern Israel. There are no bad means to a good end.)
Posted on: Sun, 13 Jul 2014 09:43:28 +0000
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