It’s An Old Story

Over the years I have had ongoing discussion with my friend and colleague, John S. Dowd about Israel’s plight in the Middle East. He argues that Israel’s miliary responses to the threats that surround her are only making her situation worse as world opinion increasingly sides with the plight of the Palestinians. I argue that Israeli concessions and accommodations with various national, tribal, and extra-legal interests will never appease all or even most of her adversaries, at least some of who who will never relent until the Jews are “driven into the sea”.

I contend that, at its root, of the Israeli conundrum is not about Middle East real estate. It is about the historical events, predominantly European, that led to the creation of Israel itself. It is about a 2000 year history of anti-Semitism in which the Jew was cast as the “other”. This protracted real-world passion play provided the impetus and legitimacy for the ongoing exclusion and brutalization of Jews in Diaspora throughout the Christian world and culminated amid the ashes of the Holocaust and creation of the Jewish state of Israel. The Jews and the state of Israel are not just one more case of the illogical or problematic drawing of national boundaries by which one group gains more and another group gains less. The creation of the state of Israel was a Christian attempt  to compartmentalize the real consequences of the Jew’s role as “other” in the mythic narrative of Christianity.

John sent me a link to a series of conversations between Christopher Hitchens, the noted atheist-intellectual, and Atlantic Magazine writer, Jeff Goldberg. Hitchens’ facile thought process succeeds in making some key points that have been particulary difficult for me. If you are interested in the process by which consciousness is constructed as well as the problems of the Middle East, you should find it interesting. Note that the interview is published in segments so you will need to click additional links to hear them all.

My reply to John after viewing the interviews, follows the video link.

John,

Interesting (and a bit gut wrenching). On the whole I have not been a great fan of Hitchens, if only because his arguments, with which I tend to agree, leave off where I begin.

Do you find his explanation of anti-Semitism clearer or more compelling than the ones I have variously put forth in our conversations?

I certainly agree with Hitchens that the oppression of the Jewish as “other” in general, and the Holocaust in particular, cannot be equated with other hatreds and genocidal events so often cited by apologists and revisionists who seek to cast Israel and its Jews as impotent victims turned into powerful oppressors.

But the 2000 year-old storyline of evil and conspiratorial Jew-power that exists in complete disproportion to their numbers, is ascendant yet again! (Was it ever not so?)

The Jew was created as part and parcel of the Christian narrative and as the Gospel of Christian salvation was spread across the globe generation after generation, the story of the Jew as “other” became ingrained as a mythic reality. As Hitchen’s explains, the Jew as “other” transcends territorial, tribal, and national affiliations. Revealingly, the mythic nature of the Jew as “other” even transcends revisionist and ecumenical religious doctrines that “absolve” the Jews.

The Jew is not the product of his Jewish religious identity. He is the product of the Christian identity. In the absence of the Christian mythos, the Jew as “other” would not exist in the minds of non-Jews.

More apropos of the phenomenon of anti-Semitism is the Christian’s deep seated suspicion of the non-believer, and Hitchens touches on an observation that has long intrigued me. He notes that the Jewish tradition seems to he a wellspring of non-dogmatic thinking that has notably produced some of the most inquiring and productive minds throughout history. It is not Jewish genes nor Jewish doctrine that produces these powerfully divergent minds, but rather then Jew as “other”. The Christian mythos that is under-girded by the necessity of true belief, that creates the “other” who, by Christian definition, violates true belief.

From this comes the persistent question of what does it mean to be a Jew. Is it a religion? Is it a national identify? It is a cultural identity? Is it a racial identity?

Of course all of these miss the mark. It is an identify wrought by the Christian narrative that has become mythic in nature. Although atheist thinkers can be found in every group, it is the Jew who is the mythic embodiment of the non-believer. The Jew is the violator of the moral regime of true belief that is prescribed by the Christian myth.

So the Jew becomes to a Christian world, and even to Jews themselves, the transcendent “other” who defines moral belief. And it is the flourishing of the Christian narrative across the “modern” world that has ensconced the Jew as “other” not only in religious doctrine, but more deeply in the symbolic bedrock of all true believers.

As Hitchens contemplates his mortality at close hand, he pridefully confesses that he is actually a Jew. What he means of course, is that as a devout non-believer, he cleaves to the “otherness” of Jews.

The most important lesson to be learned here, is that the Jew as “other” is a historical phenomenon of mind-bogglingly immense proportions. The Jew tribes spawned Christianity which divided those tribes. Thence forth, the doctrine of salvation, along with the interplay of various interests, spread Christian true belief in various and sundry forms, across the planet. Even Islam, a salvation doctrine, was a spin-off.

It seems that belief in heaven and hell is a powerful motivator and we should ask, in the absence of such belief, what motivates the “other”. What motivates the Jews of Israel?