'Why Israel can't win the war' Paul Rogers

 

Brain Power - Israel's Secret Weapon

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn

IS it some international conspiracy — or perhaps a secret weapon — that allows Israel to lord over the Mid­­dle East? How did a country of nine million — between one-half and one-third of Karachi’s population — manage to subdue 400m Arabs? A country bui­lt on stolen land and the ruins of destroyed Pal­estinian villages is visibly chuckling away as every Arab government, egged on by the khadim-i-haramain sharifain, lines up to recognise it. Economically fragile Pakistan is being lured into following suit.

Conspiracy theorists have long imagined Israel as America’s overgrown watchdog, beefed up and armed to protect American interests in the Middle East. But only a fool can believe that today. Every American president, senator and congressman shamefacedly admits it’s the Israeli tail that wags the American dog. Academics who chide Israel’s annexation policies are labelled anti-Semitic, moving targets without a future. The Israeli-US nexus is there for all to see but, contrary to what is usually thought, it exists for benefiting Israel not America.

It was not always this way. European Jews fleeing Hitler were far less welcome than Muslims are in today’s America. That Jewish refugees posed a serious threat to national security was argued by government officials in the State Department to the FBI as well as president Franklin Roosevelt himself. One of my scientific heroes, Richard Feynman, was rejected in 1935 by Columbia University for being Jewish. Fortunately, MIT accepted him.

What changed outsiders into insiders was a secret weapon. That weapon was brain power. Regarded as the primary natural resource by Jews inside and outside Israel it is an obsession for parents who, spoon by spoon, zealously ladle knowledge into their children. The state too knows its responsibility: Israel has more museums and libraries per capita than any other country. Children born to Ashkenazi parents are assumed as prime state assets who will start a business, discover some important scientific truth, invent some gadget, create a work of art, or write a book. 

In secular Israel, a student’s verbal, mathematical, and scientific aptitude sets his chances of success. By the 10th grade of the secular bagut system, smarter students will be learning calculus and differential equations together with probability, trigonometry and theorem proving. Looking at some past exam papers available on the internet, I wondered how Pakistani university professors with PhDs would fare in Israeli level-5 school exams. Would our national scientific heroes manage a pass? Unsurprisingly, by the time they reach university, Israeli students have bettered their American counterparts academically.

There is a definite historical context to seeking this excellence. For thousands of years, European anti-Semitism made it impossible for Jews to own land or farms, forcing them to seek livelihoods in trading, finance, medicine, science and mathematics. To compete, parents actively tutored their children in these skills. In the 1880s, Zionism’s founders placed their faith solidly in education born out of secular Renaissance and Enlightenment thought.

But if this is the story of secular Israel, there is also a different Israel with a different story. Ultra-orthodox Haredi Jews were once a tiny minority in Israel’s mostly secular society. But their high birth rate has made them grow to about 10 per cent of the population. Recognisable by their distinctive dress and manners, the Haredim are literally those who “tremble before God”.

For Haredis, secularism and secular education are anathema. Like Pakistan, Israel too has a single national curriculum with a hefty chunk earmarked for nation-building (read, indoctrination). In the Israeli context, the ideological part seeks to justify dispossession of the Palestinian population. Expectedly, the ‘Jewish madressah’ system accepts this part but rejects the secular part ie that designed to create the modern mind.

The difference in achievement levels between regular and Haredi schools is widening. While all schools teach Hebrew (the holy language), secular schools stress mastery over English while ‘madressahs’ emphasise Hebrew. According to a Jerusalem Post article, Haredi schools (as well as Arab-Israeli schools) are poor performers with learning outcomes beneath nine of the 10 Muslim countries that participated in the most recent PISA exam. A report says 50pc of Israel’s students are getting a ‘third-world education’.

The drop in overall standards is causing smarter Israelis to lose sleep. They fear that, as happened in Beirut, over time a less fertile, more educated elite sector of society will be overrun by a more fertile, less-educated religious population. When that happens, Israel will lose its historical advantage. Ironically, Jewish identity created Israel but Jewish orthodoxy is spearheading Israel’s decline.

There is only one Muslim country that Israel truly fears — Iran. Although its oil resources are modest, its human resources are considerable.

The revolution of 1979 diminished the quality of Iranian education and caused many of Iran’s best professors to flee. But unlike Afghanistan’s mullahs, the mullahs of Iran were smart enough to keep education going. Although coexistence is uncomfortable, science and religion are mostly allowed to go their own separate ways. Therefore, in spite of suffocating embargos, Iran continues to achieve in nuclear, space, heavy engineering, biotechnology, and the theoretical sciences. Israel trembles. 

Spurred by their bitter animosity towards Iran, Arab countries have apparently understood the need of the times and are slowly turning around. Starting this year, religious ideology has been de-emphasised and new subjects are being introduced in Saudi schools. These include digital skills, English for elementary grades, social studies, self-defence and critical thinking. Of course, a change of curriculum means little unless accompanied by a change of outlook. Still, it does look like a beginning.

Israel has shown the effectiveness of its secret weapon; it has also exposed the vulnerability of opponents who don’t have it. There are lessons here for Pakistan and a strong reason to wrest control away from Jamaat-i-Islami ideologues that, from the time of Ziaul Haq onward, have throttled and suffocated our education. The heights were reached under Imran Khan’s Single National Curriculum which yoked ordinary schools to madressahs. But even with Khan’s departure, ideological poisons continue to circulate in the national bloodstream. Until flushed away, Pakistan’s intellectual and material decline will accelerate.

Desmond Tutu, Keir Starmer & The Friend of Jeffery Epstein

 

Jordan Peterson on Israel-Palestine/ a quick explanation of the history

 

Meet the Wrong Type of Jew

 

Sanders & Socialism: Debate Between Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman & Socialist Economist Richard Wolff

For 2,000 years we’ve linked Jews to money. It’s why antisemitism is so ingrained

From Judas to Shylock, Jews have been blamed for the evils of profit and capitalism. To some leftists, that story still appeals writes Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian


 

Illustration by Matt Kenyon


I’m reluctant to add to the workload of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which this week announced the first step towards a statutory inquiry into Labour and antisemitism. If it goes ahead, it will be only the second time the commission has seen fit to investigate a British political party for racism – the first related to the BNP – and, given the number of complaints that have been reported, it’ll have its work cut out. Nevertheless, I have a research trip to suggest.

First, though, a word of context. An oft-heard defence of Labour is that a party of its now vastly increased size is bound to reflect the wider population; since that population includes some antisemites, then, sadly but inevitably, so will Labour. But that swerves around a gloomier possibility: that anti-Jewish racism might exert a particular appeal to some on the left – even, paradoxically enough, those who might otherwise proudly regard themselves as anti-racists. 

----Also read

Is anti-Zionism the same as anti-Semitism?

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John Harris deftly explained the point on these pages this week, writing that Labour has embraced a form of left populism that “tends to present the very real failings of modern capitalism not as a matter of anything systemic, but as the work of a small group of people who are ruining things for the rest”. Such thinking immediately invites a question: who, exactly, are these people who have wrought such havoc? Who makes up this wicked cabal? Antisemitism is there to provide an answer, the same answer it has provided for so long and in so many places: the Jews.

That Momentum recently felt the need to produce a video urging its members not to be seduced by the age-old conspiracy theory that the Rothschilds secretly rule the world confirms that a certain kind of leftist – one who blames capitalism’s deformities on evil individuals, rather than structures – can be susceptible to the lure of antisemitism. But that should scarcely come as a shock, especially in the western societies of Christian Europe, including – perhaps especially – Britain. For in these societies capitalism – money – has always been linked to, even deemed synonymous with, Jews.

Hence my suggestion of a research trip. On 19 March, the Jewish Museum London will open an exhibition both fascinating and deeply unsettling. It’s called Jews, Money, Myth, and it makes clear that the tendency to connect Jews and money is a habit centuries – indeed millennia – old.

Perhaps you’d be unsurprised by the 20th-century examples, including the grotesque caricatures of rich, fat Jewish bankers controlling the globe, sometimes rendered as repulsive, multi-legged, insect-like monsters. (The equality commissioners might be struck by the echo here of the image that Labour officials deemed unworthy of sanction when shared by a party member: it showed an Alien-style creature, marked with a Star of David, clamped to the face of the Statue of Liberty.)

Entering the Victorian era, the casual visitor might nod with similar familiarity at the nutcracker in the shape of Fagin, Charles Dickens’s miserly Jewish pickpocket, a reminder that Jews were mocked for being both too poor and too rich, caricatured as both beggars and bankers, pedlars and plutocrats – a premonition of their later fate, to be blamed for both communism and capitalism. Even so, some of the cartoons might still shock in the ugliness of their depictions of Jews as more akin to rats or insects than people. You head back 400 years and think, “Of course, Shylock” – Shakespeare’s Jew who says, “I did dream of money-bags tonight.” Back through the centuries you go, to the York massacre of 1190, which left an estimated 150 Jews dead, thanks to mob violence stirred by one Richard de Malbis, filled with resentment at the Jews to whom he owed money.

You keep going until you find yourself at Judas, ready to betray the son of God himself for “30 pieces of silver” – a phrase that lives on, incidentally, in social media posts hurled at Jews or their defenders. Now, of course, all the 12 disciples, like Jesus himself, were Jews – yet, as this new exhibition shows, it was Judas who western art chose to depict as the Jew, often with the red hair that marked him out as a betrayer, alongside his mysteriously fair-haired, fair-skinned fellow apostles. The power of the Judas story lives on: Judas a byword for traitor, the word Jew and Judas almost indistinguishable in several languages, including German.

The historical explanation for this enduring linking of Jews and money is that Jews were pushed into financial roles by a church that barred Christians from, say, lending money for interest, and barred Jews from doing much else, such as owning and farming land. As Anthony Julius – whose Trials of the Diaspora is the definitive history of English antisemitism – puts it, in a feudal society in which Jews could be neither peasants nor lords, there was “no other niche” available. But psychological explanations also suggest themselves, starting with the notion that Christian society was able to split off that aspect of itself it regarded as sinful – its pursuit of wealth and profit – and project it instead on to a hated other: the Jew.

Whatever its origins, the archetype of the avaricious Jew acquired its place in the culture. It can operate at the level of playground insult – “Jew” as a synonym for stinginess – and at the level of global conspiracy theory, with Jews, or “Rothschilds”, the hidden hand pulling the strings of world capitalism and its necessary corollary, imperialism. It is planted deep in the soil of western civilisation, in Britain, the land of Fagin and Shylock, especially. It is deep enough to shape our thinking – there to be reached for when a crisis, such as the 2008 crash, requires an easy, explanatory villain – but also so deep that it is almost buried, out of sight.

The result is that sometimes we can’t even see it, even when it is right in front of us. Recall that Jeremy Corbyn’s first response on hearing that the notorious mural depicting Jewish bankers playing Monopoly on the backs of the poor was to be removed, was to ask, “Why?” He literally could not see the problem. (An image of that mural will be included in the exhibition, alongside other examples of antisemitic depictions of supposed Jewish power.)

Given the 2,000-year-old history of this equation between Jews and the wickedness of money, it is absurd to imagine any one of us would be immune to it. Inevitably, plenty of Jews have themselves internalised it – including no less than Karl Marx, whose writings are peppered with anti-Jewish sentiment, who referred to money as “the jealous god of Israel”, and who looked forward to “the emancipation of mankind from Judaism”.

It is equally absurd to think that merely announcing yourself as an anti-racist automatically inoculates you from this history. It doesn’t. Instead it has to be brought into the open and confronted. But first we have to admit that it’s there.

Is anti-Zionism the same as anti-Semitism?

All over the world, it is an alarming time to be Jewish – but conflating anti-Zionism with Jew-hatred is a tragic mistake writes Peter Beinart in The Guardian


It is a bewildering and alarming time to be a Jew, both because antisemitism is rising and because so many politicians are responding to it not by protecting Jews but by victimising Palestinians.

On 16 February, members of France’s yellow vest protest movement hurled antisemitic insults at the distinguished French Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut. On 19 February, swastikas were found on 80 gravestones in Alsace. Two days later, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, after announcing that Europe was “facing a resurgence of antisemitism unseen since World War II”, unveiled new measures to fight it. 

Among them was a new official definition of antisemitism. That definition, produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016, includes among its “contemporary examples” of antisemitism “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination”. In other words, anti-Zionism is Jew hatred. In so doing, Macron joined Germany, Britain, the United States and roughly 30 other governments. And like them, he made a tragic mistake.
Anti-Zionism is not inherently antisemitic – and claiming it is uses Jewish suffering to erase the Palestinian experience. Yes, antisemitism is growing. Yes, world leaders must fight it fiercely. But in the words of a great Zionist thinker, “This is not the way”.

The argument that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic rests on three pillars. The first is that opposing Zionism is antisemitic because it denies to Jews what every other people enjoys: a state of its own. “The idea that all other peoples can seek and defend their right to self-determination but Jews cannot,” declared US Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer in 2017, “is antisemitism.”

As David Harris, head of the American Jewish Committee, put it last year: “To deny the Jewish people, of all the peoples on earth, the right to self-determination surely is discriminatory.”

All the peoples on earth? The Kurds don’t have their own state. Neither do the Basques, Catalans, Scots, Kashmiris, Tibetans, Abkhazians, Ossetians, Lombards, Igbo, Oromo, Uyghurs, Tamils and Québécois, nor dozens of other peoples who have created nationalist movements to seek self-determination but failed to achieve it.

Yet barely anyone suggests that opposing a Kurdish or Catalan state makes you an anti-Kurdish or anti-Catalan bigot. It is widely recognised that states based on ethnic nationalism – states created to represent and protect one particular ethnic group – are not the only legitimate way to ensure public order and individual freedom. Sometimes it is better to foster civic nationalism, a nationalism built around borders rather than heritage: to make Spanish identity more inclusive of Catalans or Iraqi identity more inclusive of Kurds, rather than carving those multiethnic states up.

You’d think Jewish leaders would understand this. You’d think they would understand it because many of the same Jewish leaders who call national self-determination a universal right are quite comfortable denying it to Palestinians.

Argument number two is a variation on this theme. Maybe it is not bigoted to oppose a people’s quest for statehood. But it is bigoted to take away that statehood once achieved. “It is one thing to argue, in the moot court of historical what-ifs, that Israel should not have come into being,” argued New York Times columnist Bret Stephens earlier this month. However, “Israel is now the home of nearly 9 million citizens, with an identity that is as distinctively and proudly Israeli as the Dutch are Dutch or the Danes Danish. Anti-Zionism proposes nothing less than the elimination of that identity and the political dispossession of those who cherish it.”

But it is not bigoted to try to turn a state based on ethnic nationalism into one based on civic nationalism, in which no ethnic group enjoys special privileges.

In the 19th century, Afrikaners created several countries designed to fulfil their quest for national self-determination, among them the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Then, in 1909, those two Afrikaner states merged with two states dominated by English-speaking white people to become the Union of South Africa (later the Republic of South Africa), which offered a kind of national self-determination to white South Africans.

The problem, of course, was that the versions of self-determination upheld by the Transvaal, the Orange Free State and apartheid South Africa excluded millions of black people living within their borders.

This changed in 1994. By ending apartheid, South Africa replaced an Afrikaner ethnic nationalism and a white racial nationalism with a civic nationalism that encompassed people of all ethnicities and races. It inaugurated a constitution that guaranteed “the right of the South African people as a whole to self-determination”.

That wasn’t bigotry, but its opposite.

I don’t consider Israel an apartheid state. But its ethnic nationalism excludes many of the people under its control. Stephens notes that Israel contains almost 9 million citizens. What he doesn’t mention is that Israel also contains close to 5 million non-citizens: Palestinians who live under Israeli control in the West Bank and Gaza (yes, Israel still controls Gaza) without basic rights in the state that dominates their lives.

One reason Israel doesn’t give these Palestinians citizenship is because, as a Jewish state designed to protect and represent Jews, it wants to retain a Jewish majority, and giving 5 million Palestinians the vote would imperil that.

Even among Israel’s 9 million citizens, roughly 2 million – the so-called “Arab Israelis” – are Palestinian. Stephens says overturning Zionism would mean the “political dispossession” of Israelis. But, according to polls, most of Israel’s Palestinian citizens see it the opposite way. For them, Zionism represents a form of political dispossession. Because they live in a state that privileges Jews, they must endure an immigration policy that allows any Jew in the world to gain instant Israeli citizenship yet makes Palestinian immigration to Israel virtually impossible.

They live in a state whose national anthem speaks of the “Jewish soul”, whose flag features a Star of David and which, by tradition, excludes Israel’s Palestinian parties from its governing coalitions. A commission created in 2003 by the Israeli government itself described Israel’s “handling of the Arab sector” as “discriminatory”.

So long as Israel remains a Jewish state, no Palestinian citizen can credibly tell her son or daughter that they can become prime minister of the country in which they live. In these ways, Israel’s form of ethnic nationalism – Zionism – denies equality to the non-Jews who live under Israeli control.

My preferred solution would be for the West Bank and Gaza to become a Palestinian state, thus giving Palestinians in those territories citizenship in an ethnically nationalist (though hopefully democratic) country of their own.

I’d also try to make Israel’s ethnic nationalism more inclusive by, among other things, adding a stanza to Israel’s national anthem that acknowledges the aspirations of its Palestinian citizens.

But, in a post-Holocaust world where antisemitism remains frighteningly prevalent, I want Israel to remain a state with a special obligation to protect Jews.

To seek to replace Israel’s ethnic nationalism with civic nationalism, however, is not inherently bigoted. Last year, three Palestinian members of the Knesset introduced a bill to turn Israel from a Jewish state into a “state for all its citizens”. As one of those Knesset members, Jamal Zahalka, explained, “We do not deny Israel or its right to exist as a home for Jews. We are simply saying that we want to base the existence of the state not on the preference of Jews, but on the basics of equality … The state should exist in the framework of equality, and not in the framework of preference and superiority.”

One might object that it is hypocritical for Palestinians to try to repeal Jewish statehood inside Israel’s original boundaries while promoting Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza. One might also ask whether Zahalka’s vision of Jewish and Palestinian equality in a post-Zionist state is naive given that powerful Palestinian movements such as Hamas want not equality but Islamic domination.

These are reasonable criticisms. But are Zahalka and his colleagues – who face structural discrimination in a Jewish state – antisemites because they want to replace Zionism with a civic nationalism that promises equality to people of all ethnic and religious groups?

Of course not.

There is, finally, a third argument for why anti-Zionism equals antisemitism. It is that, as a practical matter, the two animosities simply go together.

“Of course it’s theoretically possible to distinguish anti-Zionism from antisemitism, just as it’s theoretically possible to distinguish segregationism from racism,” writes Stephens. Just as virtually all segregationists are also racists, he suggests, virtually all anti-Zionists are also antisemites. You rarely find one without the other.

But that claim is empirically false. In the real world, anti-Zionism and antisemitism don’t always go together. It is easy to find antisemitism among people who, far from opposing Zionism, enthusiastically embrace it.

Before Israel’s creation, some of the world leaders who most ardently promoted Jewish statehood did so because they did not want Jews in their own countries. Before declaring, as foreign secretary in 1917, that Britain “view[s] with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”, Arthur Balfour supported the 1905 Aliens Act, which restricted Jewish immigration to the United Kingdom.

And two years after his famous declaration, Balfour said Zionism would “mitigate the age-long miseries created for western civilisation by the presence in its midst of a Body [the Jews] which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb”.

In the 1930s, the Polish government adopted a similar tack. Its ruling party, which excluded Jews, trained Zionist fighters on Polish military bases. Why? Because it wanted Polish Jews to emigrate. And a Jewish state would give them somewhere to go. You find echoes of this antisemitic Zionism among some rightwing American Christians who are far friendlier to the Jews of Israel than the Jews of the US. In 1980, Jerry Falwell, a close ally of Israel’s then prime minister, Menachem Begin, quipped that Jews “can make more money accidentally than you can on purpose”.

Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in 2005 said, “we have no greater friend in the whole world than Pat Robertson” – the same Pat Robertson who later called former US air force judge Mikey Weinstein a “little Jewish radical” for promoting religious freedom in the American military.

After being criticised by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in 2010 for calling George Soros a “puppet master” who “wants to bring America to her knees” and “reap obscene profits off us”, Glenn Beck travelled to Jerusalem to hold a pro-Israel rally.

More recently, Donald Trump – who told the Republican Jewish Coalition in 2015: “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money” – invited Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress, who has said Jews are going to hell for not accepting Jesus, to lead a prayer at the ceremony inaugurating the American embassy in Jerusalem.

In 2017, Richard Spencer, who leads crowds in Nazi salutes, called himself a “white Zionist” who sees Israel as a model for the white homeland he wants in the US.

Some of the European leaders who traffic most blatantly in antisemitism – Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Heinz-Christian Strache of Austria’s far-right Freedom party and Beatrix von Storch of the Alternative for Germany, which promotes nostalgia for the Third Reich – publicly champion Zionism too.

If antisemitism exists without anti-Zionism, anti-Zionism also clearly exists without antisemitism.Consider the Satmar, the largest Hasidic sect in the world. In 2017, 20,000 Satmar men – a larger crowd than attended that year’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference – filled the Barclays Center in Brooklyn for a rally aimed at showing, in the words of one organiser: “We feel very strongly that there should not be and could not be a State of Israel before the Messiah comes.”

Last year, Satmar Rebbe Aaron Teitelbaum told thousands of followers: “We’ll continue to fight God’s war against Zionism and all its aspects.” Say what you want about Rebbe Teitelbaum and the Satmar, but they’re not antisemites.

Neither is Avrum Burg. Burg, the former speaker of the Knesset, in 2018 declared that settlement growth in the West Bank had rendered the two-state solution impossible. Thus, he argued, Israelis must “depart from the Zionist paradigm, and move into a more inclusive paradigm. Israel must belong to all of its residents, including Arabs, not to the Jews alone.”

Other Jewish Israeli progressives, including the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti, the Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy and the activists of the Federation Movement, have followed a similar path.

Can one question their proposals? Of course. Are they antisemites? Of course not. To be sure, some anti-Zionists really are antisemites: David Duke, Louis Farrakhan and the authors of the 1988 Hamas Covenant certainly qualify. So do the thugs from France’s yellow vest movement who called Finkielkraut a “dirty Zionist shit”.

In some precincts, there’s a growing and reprehensible tendency to use the fact that many Jews are Zionists (or simply assumed to be Zionists) to bar them from progressive spaces. People who care about the moral health of the American left will be fighting this prejudice for years to come.

But while anti-Zionist antisemitism is likely to be on the rise, so is Zionist antisemitism. And, in the US, at least, it is not clear that anti-Zionists are any more likely to harbour antisemitic attitudes than people who support the Jewish state.

In 2016, the ADL gauged antisemitism by asking Americans whether they agreed with statements such as “Jews have too much power” and “Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind”. It found that antisemitism was highest among the elderly and poorly educated, saying: “The most well educated Americans are remarkably free of prejudicial views, while less educated Americans are more likely to hold antisemitic views. Age is also a strong predictor of antisemitic propensities. Younger Americans – under 39 – are also remarkably free of prejudicial views.”

In 2018, however, when the Pew Research Center surveyed Americans’ attitudes about Israel, it discovered the reverse pattern: Americans over the age of 65 – the very cohort that expressed the most antisemitism – also expressed the most sympathy for Israel. By contrast, Americans under 30, who according to the ADL harboured the least antisemitism, were least sympathetic to Israel.

It was the same with education. Americans who possessed a high school degree or less – the most antisemitic educational cohort – were the most pro-Israel. Americans with “postgraduate degrees” – the least antisemitic – were the least pro-Israel.

  

As statistical evidence goes, this is hardly airtight. But it confirms what anyone who listens to progressive and conservative political commentary can grasp: younger progressives are highly universalistic. They’re suspicious of any form of nationalism that seems exclusive. That universalism makes them suspicious of both Zionism and the white Christian nationalism that in the US sometimes shades into antisemitism.

By contrast, some older Trump supporters, who fear a homogenising globalism, admire Israel for preserving Jewish identity while yearning to preserve America’s Christian identity in ways that exclude Jews.

If antisemitism and anti-Zionism are both conceptually different and, in practice, often espoused by different people, why are politicians such as Macron responding to rising antisemitism by calling anti-Zionism a form of bigotry?

Because, in many countries, that’s what communal Jewish leaders want them to do.

It is an understandable impulse: let the people threatened by antisemitism define antisemitism. The problem is that, in many countries, Jewish leaders serve both as defenders of local Jewish interests and defenders of the Israeli government. And the Israeli government wants to define anti-Zionism as bigotry because doing so helps Israel kill the two-state solution with impunity.

For years, Barack Obama and John Kerry warned that if Israel continued the settlement growth in the West Bank that made a Palestinian state impossible, Palestinians would stop demanding a Palestinian state alongside Israel and instead demand one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, neither Jewish nor Palestinian, that replaces Israel.

Defining anti-Zionism as antisemitism reduces that threat. It means that if Palestinians and their supporters respond to the demise of the two-state solution by demanding one equal state, some of the world’s most powerful governments will declare them bigots.

Which leaves Israel free to entrench its own version of one state, which denies millions of Palestinians basic rights. Silencing Palestinians isn’t a particularly effective way to fight rising antisemitism, much of which comes from people who like neither Palestinians nor Jews. But, just as important, it undermines the moral basis of that fight.

Antisemitism isn’t wrong because it is wrong to denigrate and dehumanise Jews. Antisemitism is wrong because it is wrong to denigrate and dehumanise anyone. Which means, ultimately, that any effort to fight antisemitism that contributes to the denigration and dehumanisation of Palestinians is no fight against antisemitism at all.

Targeting Corbyn

Mahir Ali in The Dawn


LAST Sunday, many of the participants in the latest protest in London against the Labour Party’s allegedly inadequate response to anti-Semitism are likely to have been buoyed by a report in The Observer about a £50 million project to launch a centrist third force in British politics.

There is no guarantee that such a party will indeed take shape before the next general election, but it does not require much imagination to categorise it as part of the effort to ensure that Jeremy Corbyn never becomes prime minister. Whether many members of the Parliamentary Labour Party would be dumb enough to latch on to such an enterprise, given the dire fate of the last concerted effort to ‘break the mould’ back in the early 1980s, is an open question.

The majority of Labour parliamentarians were discombobulated by a dedicated socialist’s emergence as party leader three years ago, and moves to unseat him were launched almost immediately. The idea of a dedicated socialist leading a party that had once prided itself on its socialism, but had in the 1990s lapsed into a kind of neoliberalism that made it virtually indistinguishable from the Conservative Party, was anathema to the Blairite diehards.

But Corbyn enjoyed mass support among the party membership, and an attempt to replace him led to his re-election with an even bigger majority. Never mind, the malcontents thought, the next general election will render his leadership untenable after Labour is decimated. But when Theresa May made the mistake of calling an early election last year, the opposition made substantial gains while the Tories lost their majority.

Corbyn’s critics were temporarily silenced. A few stepped back, and some opponents even recanted their scepticism about his leadership. The ideological divide remained unbridged, though, and the tendency to latch on to smear campaigns undiminished.

Not long ago, they were heartened by news reports suggesting Corbyn might have been a communist spy, based on the testimony of a delusional former Czechoslovak diplomat. That mud didn’t stick. Corbyn’s considered response to the poisoning of a Russian ex-spy and his daughter in Salisbury offered another opportunity to malign him, just because the Labour leader sensibly suggested that solid evidence of Russian state complicity in the outrage should precede any action against Moscow.

Reverting to the anti-Semitism trope emerged as the next best option for destabilisation, the latest hook being Corbyn’s sympathy eight years ago in a Facebook post for an artist deploring the erasure of an anti-capitalist mural he had pained on a wall. Corbyn has apologised for failing to notice the mural’s anti-Semitic implications at first glance — namely a couple of stereotypical Jewish faces among the bankers sitting around a table that is crushing the rest of humanity.

It has been claimed the depiction echoes Nazi propaganda, although the critics generally fail to mention that in Germany back then it was common for ‘Jewish financiers’ to be condemned specifically for bankrolling Russia’s Bolshevik revolution, many of whose stalwarts were in turn targeted by their foes on the basis of their Jewish origins.

There is a long history of virulent anti-Semitism across Europe, which contributed to the Holocaust but also survived the Second World War. Its European manifestations today are found mainly on the Continent rather than in Britain, largely on the far right of politics. They are dwarfed, though, by growing anti-Muslim prejudice.

It is perfectly appropriate that even the most passionate critics of the militant Islamic State group or Saudi Arabia, including Corbyn, are seldom branded as Islamophobes. By the same token, it is utterly ridiculous for all critics of Israel, including Jews, to be dubbed anti-Semitic. It is certainly wrong to conflate Jewishness with Israel or with Zionism. But this is a grave error that is routinely compounded by all too many Zionists and most representatives of the Israeli state.

It was in evidence last week when Corbyn was berated for attending a Passover Seder organised by a non-Zionist Jewish collective called Jewdas in his London constituency. To an extent, this particular smear backfired on the Jewish Board of Deputies and other critics. On the other hand, a poll published last Sunday found that half of the British electorate believes — contrary to the evidence, but in keeping with the malign diatribes echoed throughout the mainstream media, from The Guardian to the Daily Mail — that Labour has a bigger anti-Semitism problem than other parties, and that 34 per cent of voters believe Corbyn is among those who hold anti-Semitic views, notwithstanding his unrelenting opposition to all forms of racism.

The latest campaign may have been motivated in part by the May 3 local elections, and its efficacy should be visible in a couple of weeks. It is reassuring, though, that Corbyn has not been cowed into tempering his criticism of the latest atrocities in Gaza.

What actually is antisemitism?

Leftist antisemitism tends not to be about treacherous genes, but the treacherous heart. It links Judaism to Zionism, Zionism to imperialism, and imperialism to global control.


Eric Heinz in The Independent


Simmering tension within the British Labour Party over claims of antisemitism has boiled over. First MP Naz Shah was suspended; now theparty’s former London mayor, Ken Livingstone has joined her. It’s an ideal moment to consider what antisemitism actually is.

Many probably – perhaps secretly – gave up puzzling over antisemitism long ago. They’ve moved on to some other issue, like battery hens, where the oppressors are shamefaced and the victims can’t speak.

The first step towards conquering antisemitism fatigue is to admit that you have the problem. I need to do it every day. Perhaps Shah and Livingstone, and a few others, might do so too. Allow me, if I may, to return to a few basics for deciphering our perennial “Jewish problem”.

Semitic cultures and languages, largely traceable to the Middle East, include both Arabs and Jews. Unsurprisingly, people often bristle at the very phrase “antisemitic”: how dare the Jews act as if they’re the only Semites, let alone accuse Arabs of antisemitism?

Indeed, how dare the Jews even pose as victims of racism, detracting attention from victims of “real” racism? After all, the average European Jew often physically and socially resembles the average indigenous European. So problems with Jews are simply “white on white”.

For more than a millennium a term such as “anti-Jewish” would have made more sense than “antisemitism”. Some Jewish writers still believe it better captures the earlier source of the hostilities, which were often justified in theological terms. The term “antisemitic” kicks in with the Enlightenment, through the rise of race theory and the concomitant racialisation of Jews.

Heart of the matter

By the 19th century, rapidly growing upheavals wrought by market forces propelled the association of Jews with finance and behind-the-scenes control. Of course, Jews had over centuries turned to finance in part due to their rigorous exclusion from other economic activity, and, far more importantly, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority lived in poverty.

Leftist antisemitism tends not to be about treacherous genes, but the treacherous heart. It links Judaism to Zionism, Zionism to imperialism, and imperialism to global control. Of course, many Jews have long pioneered leftist and anti-imperialist politics. When they criticise Israel with fervour, they all too easily become the voice of authenticity, the pure hearts.

Resentment is also commonly expressed at the particular association of the Holocaust with Jews. The death camps, after all, claimed other victims, such as communists, Roma, homosexuals, the disabled, and Christian clergy. Millions of people were slaughtered by Nazi forces throughout Europe.

Of course, anyone who seriously follows Holocaust remembrance knows that Jews have never claimed to be the only victims, and recall others in their commemorations. Nor, contrary to ubiquitous opinion, do Jews “use” the Holocaust to justify their presence in Israel or that state’s controversial military and security measures. To reduce the intricacies of the Arab-Israeli conflict to such a simplistic formula is an act of epic reductionism.

Still, the distinctness of a particularly Jewish Holocaust runs far deeper.

Nazi doctrine of course vilified many humans they deemed to fall short of some fantasy Aryan ideal. Other groups were at times portrayed as useless or defective, but Jews were singled out as the signal enemy of all humanity – ironically, the hidden force behind both imperial capitalism and Soviet Bolshevism.

That image of Jews not merely as less-than-human but as the opposite of human, merely racialised, hence modernised, the age-old equating of Judaism with Satan. Even secular Europeans continue to believe de-contextualised appropriations of the maxims “eye for an eye” or “chosen people”. These are turned into opposites of what they originally meant: that Jews ought not to seek justice out of proportion to any wrongdoing done to them, and that God bestows not particular privileges but rather particular duties upon Jews.

Hate crimes

So yes, others were unquestionably brutalised in the Holocaust. But when the citizens of Vienna chose to force a group to its knees to clean the streets it was not any of those other groups. It was Jews. When shop windows were systematically painted in a boycott campaign and then later destroyed, they belonged to Jews. When towns boasted their compliance with Aryanisation, they erected signs advertising themselves “Free of Jews” (Judenrein).

Hitler, in countless speeches and writings rehearsed gripes against any number of groups, but when he dug to the “root” of all those problems he found not them, but Jews. When Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer adopted front-page slogans about Germans’ misfortune, the group causing it was none of those others, but Jews. When a German film about treating cancer included an “educational” animation, it displayed SS-men exterminating not members of any other group, but a tight cluster of grotesequely caricatured Jews.

No apologies

Anyone who denies the outright racialisation of Jews, and antisemitism as full-blown racism, perpetrated not only by Nazis but throughout Europe over centuries, reveals a frightful ignorance about the histories, meanings, and consequences of racism.

When invective like “Nazi” or “apartheid” is then hurled at Jews, often with breathtakingly myopic readings of colonial and post-colonial histories – and yes, even when dissident Jews dramatise their views with such language, however well-meaning may be their intentions – then don’t be surprised that it comes across as antisemitism. Because it is.

When we read daily reports revealing massive new waves of antisemitism by educated and influential people, tidied up with “apologies” (quite frankly, open and candid admissions about what they really do think would serve us all far better than the endless train of “Oops, I didn’t really mean it” fudges), then don’t be surprised that it comes across as antisemitism. Because it is.

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The question of forgiveness

Shiv Visvanathan in The Hindu



On May 18, standing before the House of Commons, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will offer a full apology for the Komagata Maru incident. File Photo


Canadian leader Justin Trudeau is to tender a full apology for the Komagata Maru incident of 1914. It should trigger similar repentance elsewhere for other sins of the past.

History rarely produces moments of epiphany, where politics appears as a creative act of redemption and the future becomes a collective act of healing. Each society carries its wounds like a burden, a perpetual reminder that justice works fragmentarily. Suddenly out of the crassness, the crudity of everyday politics, comes a moment to treasure. On May 18, standing before the House of Commons, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will offer a full apology for theKomagata Maru incident.

The drama of the ritual, the act of owning up to a wrong and voluntarily asking for forgiveness is rare in history. One immediately thinks of Willy Brandt, the West German Chancellor, kneeling down during his visit to the Warsaw Ghetto and apologising to the Jews. The act was moving. For once instead of the mere word, the body spoke in utter humility as Brandt knelt before the monument. It was a sheer act of courage, responsibility and humility, an admission of a politics gone wrong, a statement of a colossal mistake that needed redemption.

Hundred years to atonement

This movement for forgiveness is important. Forgiveness adds a different world to the idea of justice. To the standard legal idea of justice as retaliation, compensation, forgiveness adds the sense of healing, of restoration, of reconciliation. Society faces up to an act of ethical repair and attempts to heal itself. Memory becomes critical here because it is memory that keeps scars alive, and memory often waits like a phantom limb more real than the event itself.

The Komagata Maru incident is over a hundred years old. But like the Jallianwala Bagh atrocity, it is a memory that refuses to die easily. It is a journey that remains perpetually incomplete, recycled in memory as Canada would not allow the homecoming.

Komagata Maru was a ship hired by Gurdit Singh, a Hong Kong/Singapore-based Sikh businessman, a follower of the Ghadar Party, who wanted to circumvent Canadian laws of immigration. The journey of 376 Indians, 340 of them Sikhs, began from Hong Kong. They finally reached Vancouver where a new drama of attrition began. British Columbia refused to let the passengers disembark, while Indians in Canada fought a rearguard struggle of legal battles and protest meetings to delay the departure. Passengers even mounted an attack on the police showering them with lumps of coal and bricks.

The ship was forced to return to Calcutta, 19 of the passengers were killed by the British and many placed under arrest. Komagata Maru was a symbol of racism, of exclusionary laws, a protest to highlight the injustice of Canadian laws. When Mr. Trudeau apologises, he will perform an act of healing where Canada apologises not only to India but to its own citizens, many of whom are proud Sikhs. The index of change is not just the ritual apology but another small fact. The British Columbia Regiment involved in the expulsion of the Komagata Maru was commanded between 2011 and 2014 by Harjit Sajjan, now Canada’s Minister of National Defence.

Apology and forgiveness

This incident echoes the need for similar apologies, acts of dignity which can repair political rupture. Imagine the U.S. apologising to Japanese prisoners imprisoned in World War II. Imagine Japan apologising for war atrocities. Think of the U.S. apologising for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Press even further and dream of Narendra Modi apologising to the victims of the Gujarat riots of 2002. One senses some of these dreams are remote and realises that, after nearly two years in office as Prime Minister, Mr. Modi does not have the makings of a Willy Brandt. Truth and healing are still remote to the politics of the majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party.

The very act of apologising and forgiveness reiterates the importance of memory and the vitality of the community as a link between past, present and future. It raises the question of the responsibility for the past and its injustices. Somehow for many politicians, the past is a different country for which they have no responsibility. Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard refused to apologise to the Aborigines, contending that present generations cannot be responsible for the past. Tony Blair was ready to apologise for the mid-19th century Irish potato famine but refused to apologise for the depredations of colonial rule. One is not asking for facile or convenient apologies, one is asking for a rethinking of politics. David Cameron, in February 2013, came close to an apology for Jallianwala Bagh. More than that, I think what one needs is a British apology for the Bengal famine of the 1940s which eliminated over three million people. It is a pity that it has not received a Nuremberg or a Truth Commission. I realise apology is a mere moral act without the materiality of reparation, but apology returns to the victim and the community the acknowledgement of human worth and dignity. Without the axiomatics of dignity, no human rights project makes any sense.

One must emphasise that forgiveness and apology are not sentimental acts constructing melodramatic spaces creating what French philosopher Jacques Derrida called “the grand scenes of repentance and theatricality”. Here, as Derrida claimed, is that rare moment where the human race shaken against itself examines its own humanity. Anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu is even more hard-headed when he says, “In almost every language, the most difficult words are ‘I am sorry’.” Mr. Tutu adds that spurious reconciliations can only lead to spurious healing. For him forgiveness is a wager, an ethical wager on the future of a relationship. This is why the few events of apology which stand up to critical scrutiny deserve to be treasured.

India’s own chequered past

One must realise the past haunts India. Truth-telling, truth-seeking and the dignity and the courage of rituals of apology and forgiveness may do a lot to redeem the current impasses of Indian politics. Indians have not forgiven history or what they call history for its injustices. Yet, the language, the philosophy of forgiveness adds to the many dialects of democracy. I am merely listing moments of apology which could change the face of Indian politics. I am not demanding a census of atrocity but a set of ethical scripts whose political possibilities could be played out. The effort is not to provoke or score points, but to help create a deeper reflection and reflexivity about the growing impact of violence in the Indian polity.

First, I would like Narendra Modi to apologise to the Muslim community and to India for the horror of the 2002 riots. The genocide of 2002 froze Gujarat and India at a point, and the thaw can only be an ethical one demanding the humility of truth and forgiveness. A lot has been written about the unfinished nature of the 1984 riots in which over 5,000 Sikhs lost their lives. I know Manmohan Singh did offer an apology, but the Congress’s behaviour has turned this into an impotent mumbling. In the rightness of things, the Gandhi family owes an apology to the Sikhs, something it has not had the ethical courage to venture. Third, as an Indian, I think one not only has to withdraw the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act but also apologise to the people of Kashmir and Manipur for the decades of suffering. One must request Irom Sharmila to end her 15-year-long fast demanding the withdrawal of the Act with dignity. There has been enough violence here, and it is time that we as a nation think beyond the egotism and brittleness of the national security state.

Each reader can add to the list and to the possibilities of a new ethical and moral politics which requires a Gandhian inventiveness of ritual and politics. What I wish to add is a caveat. The rituals of apology and the question of justice, reconciliation and ethical repair are not easy. They require a rigour and an inventiveness of ethical thinking which necessitate new experiments with the idea of truth and healing in India.

Mr. Tutu makes this point beautifully and wisely. He talks of the man known as the Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal. In his book, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, Wiesenthal spoke of a Nazi soldier who had burnt a group of Jews to death. As the Nazi lay dying in his deathbed, he confessed and asked for absolution from Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal found he could not forgive him. In the end, he asks the reader, “What would you have done?” — and The Sunflower is an anthropology of various responses.

We need an equivalence of The Sunflower experiment to ask Kashmiri Pandits, Kashmiri Muslims, Manipuris, Dalits, tribals, women what it would take for forgiveness after an act of atrocity. In fact, each one of us is a potential citizen, as perpetrator, spectator and victim, in that anthology. Is forgiveness and healing possible in the history of our lives? Democracy needs to think out the answers.

The Art Of Fear-Mongering

Uri Avnery in Outlook India


"WE HAVE nothing to fear but fear itself," said President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was wrong.

Fear is a necessary condition for human survival. Most animals in nature possess it. It helps them to respond to dangers and evade or fight them. Human beings survive because they are fearful.

Fear is both individual and collective. Since its earliest days, the human race has lived in collectives. This is both a necessary and a desired condition. Early humans lived in tribes. The tribe defended their territory against all “strangers" — neighboring tribes — in order to safeguard their food supply and security. Fear was one of the uniting factors.

Belonging to one's tribe (which after many evolutions became a modern nation) is also a profound psychological need. It, too, is connected with fear — fear of other tribes, fear of other nations.

But fear can grow and become a monster.

RECENTLY I received a very interesting article by a young scientist, Yoav Litvin [*], dealing with this phenomenon.

It described, in scientific terms, how easily fear can be manipulated. The science involved was the research of the human brain, based on experiments with laboratory animals like mice and rats.

Nothing is easier than to create fear. For example, mice were given an electric shock while exposed to rock music. After some time, the mice showed reactions of extreme fear when the rock music was played, even without being given a shock. The music alone produced fear.

This could be reversed. For a long time, the music was played for them without the pain. Slowly, very slowly, the fear abated. But not completely: when, after a long time, a shock was again delivered with the music, the full symptoms of fear re-appeared immediately. Once was enough.

APPLY THIS to human nations, and the results are the same.

The Jews are a perfect laboratory specimen. Centuries of persecution in Europe taught them the value of fear. Smelling danger from afar, they learned to save themselves in time — generally by flight.

In Europe, the Jews were an exception, inviting victimizing. In the Byzantine (East Roman) Empire, Jews were normal. All over the empire, territorial peoples turned into ethnic-religious communities. A Jew in Alexandria could marry a Jewess in Antioch, but not the girl next door, if she happened to be an Orthodox Christian.

This "millet" system endured all through the Islamic Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate and still lives happily in today's State of Israel. An Israeli Jew cannot legally marry an Israeli Christian or Muslim in Israel.

This was the reason for the absence of anti-Semitism in the Arab world, apart from the detail that the Arabs are Semites themselves. Jews and Christians, the "peoples of the book", have a special status in an Islamic state (like Iran today), in some ways second-class, in some ways privileged (they do not have to serve in the army). Until the advent of Zionism, Arab Jews were no more fearful than most other human beings.

The situation in Europe was quite different. Christianity, which split off from Judaism, harbored a deep resentment towards the Jews from the start. The New Testament contains profoundly anti-Jewish descriptions of Jesus' death, which every Christian child learns at an impressionable age. And the fact that the Jews in Europe were the only people (apart from the gypsies) who had no homeland made them all the more suspicious and fear-inspiring.

The continued suffering of the Jews in Europe implanted a continuous and deep-seated fear in every European Jew. Every Jew was on continuous alert, consciously, unconsciously or subconsciously, even in times and countries which seemed far from any danger — like the Germany of my parents' youth.

My father was a prime example of this syndrome. He grew up in a family that had lived in Germany for generations. (My father, who had studied Latin, always insisted that our family had come to Germany with Julius Caesar.) But when the Nazis came to power, it took my father just a few days to decide to flee, and a few months later my family arrived happily in Palestine.

ON A personal note: my own experience with fear was also interesting. For me, at least.

When the Hebrew-Arab war of 1948 broke out, I naturally enlisted for combat duty. Before my first battle I was — literally — convulsed by fear. During the engagement, which happily was a light one, the fear left me, never to return. Just so. Disappeared.

In the following 50 or so engagements, including half a dozen major battles, I felt no fear.

I was very proud of this, but it was a stupid thing. Near the end of the war, when I was already a squad leader, I was ordered to take over a position which was exposed to enemy fire. I went to inspect it, walking almost upright in broad daylight, and was at once hit by an Egyptian armor-piercing bullet. Four of my soldiers, volunteers from Morocco, bravely got me out under fire. I arrived at the field hospital just in time to save my life.

Even this did not restore to me my lost fear. I still don't feel it, though I am aware that this is exceedingly stupid.

BACK TO my people.

The new Hebrew community in Palestine, founded by refugees from the pogroms of Moldavia, Poland, Ukraine and Russia, and later reinforced by the remnants of the Holocaust, lived in fear of their Arab neighbors, who revolted from time to time against the immigration.

The new community, called the Yishuv, took great pride in the heroism of its youth, which was quite able to defend itself, its towns and its villages. A whole cult grew up around the new Sabra ("cactus plant"), the fearless, heroic young Hebrew born in the country. When in the war of 1948, after prolonged and bitter fighting (we lost 6500 young men out of a community of 650,000 people) we eventually won, collective rational fear was replaced by irrational pride.

Here we were, a new nation on new soil, strong and self-reliant. We could afford to be fearless. But we were not.

Fearless people can make peace, reach a compromise with yesterday's enemy, reach out for co-existence and even friendship. This happened — more or less — in Europe after many centuries of continuous wars.

Not here. Fear of the "Arab World" was a permanent fixture in our national life, the picture of "little Israel surrounded by enemies" both an inner conviction and a propaganda ploy. War followed war, and each one produced new waves of anxiety.

This mixture of overweening pride and profound fears, a conqueror's mentality and permanent Angst, is a hallmark of today's Israel. Foreigners often suspect that this is make-believe, but it is quite real.

FEAR IS also the instrument of rulers. Create Fear and Rule. This has been a maxim of kings and dictators for ages.

In Israel, this is the easiest thing in the world. One has just to mention the Holocaust (or Shoah in Hebrew) and fear oozes from every pore of the national body.

Stoking Holocaust memories is a national industry. Children are sent to visit Auschwitz, their first trip abroad. The last Minister of Education decreed the introduction of Holocaust studies in kindergarten (seriously). There is a Holocaust Day — in addition to many other Jewish holidays, most of which commemorate some past conspiracy to kill the Jews.

The historical picture created in the mind of every Jewish child, in Israel as well as abroad, is, in the words of the Passover prayer read aloud every year in every Jewish family: "In every generation they arise against us to annihilate us, but God saves us from their hands!"

PEOPLE WONDER what is the special quality that enables Binyamin Netanyahu to be elected again and again, and rule practically alone, surrounded by a flock of noisy nobodies.

The person who knew him best, his own father, once declared that "Bibi" could be a good Foreign Minister, but on no account a Prime Minister. True, Netanyahu has a good voice and a real talent for television, but that is all. He is shallow, he has no world vision and no real vision for Israel, his historical knowledge is negligible.

But he has one real talent: fear-mongering. In this he has no equal.

There is hardly any major speech by Netanyahu, in Israel or abroad, without at least one mention of the Holocaust. After that, there comes the latest up-to-date fear-provoking image.

Once it was "international terrorism". The young Netanyahu wrote a book about it and established himself as an expert. In reality, this is nonsense. There is no such thing as international terrorism. It has been invented by charlatans, who build a career on it. Professors and such.

What is terrorism? Killing civilians? If so, the most hideous acts of terrorism in recent history were Dresden and Hiroshima. Killing civilians by non-state fighters? Take your pick. As I have said many times: "freedom fighters" are on my side, "terrorists" are on the other side.

Palestinians, and Arabs in general, are, of course, terrorists. They hate us for taking part of their land away. Obviously, you cannot make peace with perverse people like that. You can only fear and fight them.

When the field of terrorist-fighters became too crowded, Netanyahu switched to the Iranian bomb. There it was — the actual threat to our very existence. The Second Holocaust.

To my mind, this has always been ridiculous. The Iranians will not have a bomb, and if they did — they would not use it, because their own national annihilation would be guaranteed.

But take the Iranian bomb from Netanyahu, and what remains? No wonder he fought tooth and nail to keep it. But now it has been finally pushed away. What to do?

Don't worry. Bibi will find another threat, more blood-curdling than any before.

Just wait and tremble.

My parents helped me to lose my virginity

When he was 16, Boris Fishman and his girlfriend felt ready to have sex but he wanted the setting to be right and there was nowhere to go. Then he had an idea ...

• Boris Fishman
• The Guardian, Friday 12 September 2014 14.30 BST

Boris Fishman … 'I wanted it to resemble the epic lovelorn couplings in Marquez's books.'

We were each other’s firsts. I was 16, a stressed-out immigrant kid, she was the daughter of Colombian Catholics who were quite fond of the church’s policy on pre-marital sex. So it took us quite a while to awkwardly, semi-defeatedly concede to each other that we had run out of excuses to avoid sex. “This weekend?” I said grimly.

“Your house?” she said.

On Saturday morning, when the springtime sun finally made a strong showing outside after a dreary, wet winter, I came downstairs, where my parents and maternal grandmother were gathered around breakfast, and asked, as casually as I could: “Are you guys doing anything tonight?”

My father, not one for socialising or reading between the lines, wrinkled his forehead and said: “No?”

But my mother, who reads between the lines, needed only one look at me to say: “Of course!” She didn’t know why she was being asked, but she knew she was being asked.

“Why not go out for dinner?” I said, feeling guilty. “My treat.” Since arriving from the Soviet Union a decade before in 1988, none of our immigrant habits had eased; we almost never ate out – too expensive.

But I had been hoarding dollars from my summer jobs landscaping and lifeguarding. My offer must have indicated to my mother how badly I wished for the thing I was asking.

“But we’re not going anywhere tonight,” my father repeated, confused. My mother smacked his arm with the back of her hand: “Yes, we are.”

My grandmother only lolled her head, smiling. Whatever the adventure, she was in, as long as it included the family. (She had lost most of hers in the Holocaust.)

With curiosity, scepticism and goodwill, my parents and grandmother piled into the cramped, rusty Buick that was our first car in America and fumed off to whatever discount place they were going to for dinner. Newly permitted to drive, I jumped into our other car and sped off to a linen shop, in one of the nondescript shopping malls that surrounded our town like a blockading army.

I had been reading quite a bit of Gabriel García Márquez – my girlfriend’s compatriot – and I wanted her first time to resemble the epic, lovelorn couplings in his books. I wasn’t sure how things would hold up at my end, so at least everything else could be perfect.

After buying sheets (surely, I was the only unaccompanied 16-year-old male in the store), I stopped at the florist’s and asked for two dozen roses, rapidly depleting the funds I had set aside for my family’s dinner. I was so anxious that I gashed a finger trying to open the cellophane packaging in which the sheets were packed. I laid them down and wondered how tacky it was for the folding creases to show. Márquez had said nothing about folding creases. I tore the sheets back off the bed, yanked my mother’s ironing board from the hallway closet and got to work, the clock marching forward without mercy. My girlfriend was almost due and my family surely soon after that.

I gashed another finger plucking the petals off the thorn-riddled roses. (You thought I was going to give my girlfriend the flowers? No, like a maestro unveiling his circus, I would peel back the bedspread to reveal … fresh sheets covered in rose petals!)

Trying desperately not to bleed all over the enterprise, I stretched the ironed sheets over the mattress, scattered 300 rose petals on top and covered it all with the bedspread.

The main event was nothing like my literary hero had promised: primarily, we were relieved it was over. Now we could savour the falsely sweet memory of a milestone achieved. We turned on the television, called the diner and ordered a takeaway.

However, there was no sign of the adults. It was dark by now; I couldn’t imagine them choosing a restaurant that took serious time with its meals. There was no such place in our town, in any case.

They weren’t back when I drove my girlfriend home and they weren’t back by the time I returned. Eleven turned to midnight to 1am, and I turned from amusement to worry to terror at having consigned my family to catastrophe all because I wanted to lose my virginity.

I paced the living room and waited.

Boris Fishman’s parents, Anna and Yakov.

Though I would be unable to explain the feeling until many years later, the unease in my chest that evening had less to do with the awkwardness of a first coupling than the knowledge that it had been an obligation performed by two young people who felt a tremendous amount of affection for each other and desperately wished that could be enough.

I wrote my first poems for Gloria and she listened patiently to my complaints about the pressures of all that was expected from me at home. She came to my tennis matches and I wrote her term papers. But there were too many silent moments between us and the fact that our parents did not see us together – a Catholic and a Jew – only deepened the gloom. Our parents’ opinions mattered to us with all the weight they suspected was lacking.

Gloria and I would never regret that we had given ourselves to each other, but among the many other lessons with which adulthood awaited us was the news that for a life together it was not enough to love someone; you had to like them, too.

She was one year older than me and when she went off to college we unravelled. All the same, when I went to college, my mother demanded to know whether I had chosen it because it was only half an hour from where Gloria was studying.

“It’s Princeton, Ma,” I said. “Who cares why I chose it?” (I had selected Princeton because it offered the most financial assistance and because my parents would be footing the bill). But having spent their formative years in a country that lied to and abused its citizens, especially if they were Jewish, my parents were always alert to a con, even from their own flesh and blood.

As for Gloria, we reconnected several years ago after more than a decade. We have dinner every few months, each meeting as if no time has passed. The intense feelings that we experienced in those impressionable years have left us with a seemingly ineradicable tenderness available only to people like us. Sometimes I wonder: would we have stood a chance if we had ignored our parents about our relationship, too? There is no way to know.

So, this is adulthood: being old enough to have questions that will never be answered. Now, the parents listen only sometimes. Gloria and I laugh and commiserate about it when we meet at dinner. In those moments, our friendship feels like a secret and a gift.

But back to that spring night in 1996. When I heard the garage-door rumble open at 2am, I leapt off the couch where I was napping fitfully and burst through the connecting door in the front hallway.

“Where were you?!” I demanded like a parent sighting children who had violated their curfew. “It’s 2am!”

“We wanted to give you your time,” my mother said, taken aback.

“Where were you?” I demanded.

Recent immigrants don’t eat out, not if someone in the family is paying (my pocket was as good as their own, as far as they were concerned). They had spent seven hours parked in the lot outside Shop Rite down Hamburg Turnpike, next to the diner from which my girlfriend and I had ordered food. They had made sandwiches. They snacked on turkey slices with mayo and cucumber and talked about all the things they wished their only son to achieve. Seven hours they had talked and they could have gone on until dawn.

The Need for Roots brought home the modern era's disconnection with the past and the loss of community

Having recently moved to a Himalayan village, I felt Simone Weil's focus on uprootedness spoke directly to me

• 
• • Pankaj Mishra
  • The Guardian, Sunday 18 August 2013 15.02 BST

An idol of the Hindu god Ganesh. ‘A rare European thinker who was as curious about Hindu and Buddhist traditions as about the Cathars, Weil despised colonialism as well as nationalism.’ Photograph: Sanjeev Gupta/EPA

There has rarely been a day since I first read The Need for Roots, nearly two decades ago, that I haven't thought of Simone Weil – one of my earliest heroines along with Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemburg. It was the title that initially attracted me more than the contents. Having recently moved to a Himalayan village after a peripatetic life in the plains, I had begun to feel rooted for the first time, connected to a stable community which, living off the land, neither poor nor rich, and low rather than upper caste, was marked above all by dignity – remarkable in a country where villages had become synonymous with destitution. And when Weil asserted that the central event of the modern era was uprootedness – the disconnection from the past and the loss of community – she seemed to speak directly to my experience.

The range of her admirers – from TS Eliot to Albert Camus – attest to the difficulty of describing Weil. She was a bourgeois Jewish intellectual from France who, in a viciously antisemitic climate, rejected both Judaism and Zionism. A youthful Marxist who fought on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war she, after an immersion in the "icy pandemonium of industrial life", came to believe that "it is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people". A devoted Hellenist, she despised the Roman empire, implicating it with an oppressive tradition of the authoritarian state in Europe that culminated in Nazi Germany.

A rare European thinker who was as curious about Hindu and Buddhist traditions as about the Cathars, Weil despised colonialism as well as nationalism. "When one takes upon oneself, as France did in 1789, the function of thinking on behalf of the world, of defining justice for the world, one may not become an owner of human flesh and blood." She possessed an ironic view of historians – how they buttress the ideological claims of the hyper-power of the day: "If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilised Europe."

Freed of the popular intellectual's obligation to boost national or imperial egos, she could point out something that was obvious to many Asian sufferers of European colonialism: the shocking nature of Nazi racism lay, she wrote, "in the application by Germany to the European continent, and the white race, generally, of colonial methods of conquest and domination".

In The Need for Roots she distilled everything she had learned from her intellectual struggles with the ideologies of socialism and liberalism, her experience of working-class conditions and the plight of the Vietnamese in France.

In different ways, Marx, Nietzsche and Max Weber had described how human relationships had shifted dramatically in societies built around commerce, industrial capitalism and the colonisation of vast tracts of the world. Life had lost its old moorings in a world where technology greatly enhanced the power of large abstract entities, such as the state and nationalism. Weil brought a different intensity to this sober diagnosis of the human condition.

Uprootedness was a sickness of the soul, a spiritual malaise, but with far-reaching political consequences that left no one unaffected. As Weil wrote: "Hitler would be inconceivable without modern technique and the existence of millions of uprooted men."

Material affluence and political stability in recent decades has rendered less toxic the extensive deracination that began in Europe in the 19th century. Today, it is people from countries such as India, Iran and Egypt who will immediately recognise Weil's insight that the modern promise of individual development, which was realised through the destruction of old bonds, can leave people dangerously adrift and vulnerable to demagogues.

As the years passed in my village, I witnessed poorly educated young men leaving to seek the greater comforts and liberations of big cities. I would see them on my visits to Delhi. Working in sweatshops and living in equally degrading conditions, the promise of the modern world had turned sour for them. These were the men whose disaffection had traditionally seeded militant ideologies or random violence against those weaker than them.

Recent history shows that the social turmoil provoked by large-scale uprootings helps authoritarians more than progressives. In any case, revolution was both undesirable and unrealisable, since technology and industry were unstoppable. What, then, could be done?

Weil aimed at the rehumanisation of the workplace and, by extension, the larger society. As she put it somewhat melodramatically, a civilisation that did not recognise the spiritual nature of work was doomed.

This was not all abstract speculation. Policymakers can draw much from The Need for Roots: such clear prescriptions as that employers ought to provide an adequate vocational training for their employees, education should be compulsory and publicly funded, and include technical as well as elementary education.

But her most original move was to abandon the language of rights – the claims of possessive individuals against others that had provided political philosophy with its syntax since Hobbes and Locke. Instead, she talked of needs, duties and obligations as the basis of a good society – something that would be immediately familiar to Buddhist philosophers but remains marginal in the western tradition of political theory.

As she wrote, "If you say to someone who has ears to hear: 'What you are doing to me is not just', you may touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention and love. But it is not the same with words like 'I have the right' … or 'you have no right to … ' They evoke a latent war and awaken the spirit of contention. To place the notion of rights at the centre of social conflicts is to inhibit any possible impulse of charity on both sides."

As she saw it, the original advocacy of rights had served the expansion of commerce and a contract-based society in western Europe. But a free and rooted society ought to consist of a web of moral obligations. We have the right to ignore them, but we ought to be actually obliged not to let other people starve, or to let them lapse into destitution.

It should be noted that Weil was not a liberal. For her, there can be no such thing as absolute freedom of expression at a time when "journalism becomes indistinguishable from organised lying", and its consumers don't have the time or leisure to sift truth from falsehood. "There ought to be," she wrote, looking ahead to the age of Leveson, special courts to monitor communications network that are "guilty of too frequent a distortion of the truth".

Indeed, what makes The Need for Roots particularly pertinent today is its critique of the ethic of liberalism that had originally emerged to serve the needs of a commercial society – individuals with highly self-regarding conceptions of their rights. As Weil saw, and we recognise very well in 2013, the extension of the marketplace into the realm of values has severely constrained our moral imagination.

It is easy to criticise some Weil's ideas for being too impractical and occasionally draconian. There is something too sanguine about her view of human nature. As a friend scolded her, shortly before she died of self-induced starvation in Kent in 1943 at the age of only 34: "Man is not pure but a 'sinner'. And the sinner must stink a bit, at the least." Perhaps. But you can only marvel, as Orwell did about Gandhi, at how clean a smell she managed to leave behind.