July 17, 2014 19 Tamuz 5774 Blog At 8:30, I am awake, Adam is on the phone talking to Susann, Idit and our grandchildren still sleep (Idit seems in no rush to return to her home), Eitan is in Moscow waiting for his flight to New York, the animals go about their emotion and instinct driven lives, the war with Hamas continues with exchanges of rocket fire (them) and air raids (us) so that lying here, propped on pillows and drinking coffee and typing, I can feel that nothing is happening, although much is. Adam is near Beit Shemesh cutting wooden boards he will, later today, bring here and install in our walk-in pantry, thus increasing the usefulness of that room. Susann has major changes in the layout of our bedroom/bathroom in mind, so that life would be easier still, hard as that is to imagine. I may have lost a friend yesterday, a student who has fallen, I think, off the left side of the narrow plank of sanity I project over the great gulf of crazy underneath it all. (That last sentence would have been better crafted if a rocket warning siren had not sounded right after “plank,” so I had to get up and go, using my walker, to an interior hallway I consider safer than the bedroom. Sirens disrupt continuity of thought and make the dog whimper. There was a distant explosion, either a rocket falling in a field or an Israeli missile intercepting a rocket. I am back in bed now, Idit, Chayli and Ashrei are awake, Susann has gone into Netanya for a physiotherapy session.) My friend, if she still is my friend, has been caught up in the anti-Israel (really, as many have made clear, anti-Semitic) false analysis of the Western “left.” Very briefly: Israel is a sovereign state and, in protection of that sovereignty, may use force. In the Middle East, surrounded by illiberal absolutist States, force sometimes, perhaps often, is necessary. Force is bad. In Genesis, the two sources of evil are laid out almost in a diagram. The snake uses seduction, the first source of evil, one in which the victim is convinced he or she is acting in the victim’s own interests when in fact the victim is acting in the seducer’s interests, and force, the second source of evil, when Cain kills Abel. Force, to repeat, is bad. Israel uses force. Israel is bad. Leftist analysis does not go much further than this, and I write this from the left (I think.) But further: If Israel must use force as a sovereign State, and Israel is bad, perhaps Israel should not exist. Perhaps (the next leap of reason) sovereign States should not exist. A world without any sovereign States seems beyond the current left’s imagination, so they imagine only a world without Israel. Then, working backwards, sins of creation (displacement of aboriginal populations) are attributed to Israel, as if this were an Israeli rather than a universal source of statehood. Even Tibetans displaced proto-Tibetans, and every North American Indian nation treasures tales of driving out earlier inhabitants. The Jews certainly treasure tales of defeating Canaanites. So all States are based on evil and we need, however ironically, to live with evil. The irony lies in our concept of ourselves as good even as we benefit from the evil State. Perhaps, the left may think, the Jews, those lions of virtue, self-appointed paragons of good, can be accused of the greatest hypocrisy and be denounced as symbols of universal evil. Then, the Jews can be evil for all of us and the extirpation of the Jews would be the casting off of our own evil. It is a profoundly Christian trope, one death as an atonement for much evil. But my friend, and much of the left, is Jewish. Adopting these positions, inane if they did not cause damage to real people, insane because they do, is a form of conversion to Christianity, yet another Jewish attempt to avoid our minority, deeply ethical position in the world. I loved my friend and am sorry at the loss. Living in Israel, I am more accustomed to people falling off the right side of that thin and shaky plank, and a friend has. Meanwhile, I apologize for being so political, but there is something about being under rocket attack that turns one’s mind to that. There is talk, chatter, of a ceasefire. If it happens, I shall turn back to poetry.
Posted on: Thu, 17 Jul 2014 06:47:35 +0000
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