Israeli Academic
Extremism
Hebrew University Professor Elhanan Yakira (Dept of
Philosophy) denounces the Academic Fifth Column in Israel
Who are the big names in the Israeli
community of opprobrium?
There are so many, and no doubt most of them
are unfamiliar to English readers. Haifa-born Ilan Pappe, who now
teaches in England, completely embraces the Palestinian narrative.
There is Yehuda Shenhav, who has a new book out challenging the
right of Israel to exist even within the 1967 "Green Line." I devote
part of my book to Adi Ophir, former editor of the post-modernist
Hebrew journal Theory and Criticism and an academic at Tel
Aviv University and the Shalom Hartman Institute. There is also Oren
Yiftachel at Ben-Gurion University, who speaks of Zionism as a
"colonialism of refugees" and "creeping apartheid." Then there is
the Haaretz crowd, including Amira Hass and Gideon Levy.
Outside Israel, a key name is the historian Tony Judt, with his
advocacy of a bi-national state.
http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/detail/continue-reading-left-in-zion
Left in Zion
A philosopher who
did not set out to be a Zionist polemicist stirs anger and debate.
Interviewer: Elliot Jager
March 19, 2010
Elhanan Yakira, professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem, has all the credentials of a man of the Israeli Left:
born and raised in Tel Aviv as a Zionist and socialist , a lifelong
secular Jew, an opponent of West Bank settlements, an advocate of
government intervention in economic policy. Yet many of his
colleagues on the Left denounce him as a right-winger and a traitor.
Why? Because he maintains that Israel was not born in sin at the
expense of the Palestinians Arabs and that it has a right to exist
as a Jewish state. Yakira's critique of his fellow leftists,
Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust (subtitle: "Three Essays on Denial,
Forgetting, and the Delegitimation of Israel"), was rejected by
five Israeli publishers before finally being brought out in 2007--
only to be greeted in the Hebrew press by a months-long silence. The
controversy, when it at last erupted, was fierce; Yakir, a
philosopher who did not set out to be a polemicist, had started a
debate on the Left.
In April, Elhanan Yakira will be speaking in the United States
about the English-language edition of his iconoclastic work, just
published by Cambridge University Press and carrying
endorsements by, among others, Michael Walzer and Fouad Ajami. We
talked in the living room of his Jerusalem home .
In Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust, you coin a
phrase, "the community of opprobrium." Members of this community
maintain that Israel exploits the Holocaust to justify its
illegitimate existence, and that the Jews have been doing to the
Palestinian Arabs what the Nazis did to the Jews. In brief: blame
Israel and the Jews first.
Well, I should explain that the Hebrew essays- only later did
they become a book - were intended as a polemic against the
Israeli community of opprobrium. As I worked on the English
edition, it became clear that the Israelis are nurtured by an
international community: a huge subculture devoted to the de-legitimation
of Israel, the Zionist idea, and the Jewish nation. What I did in
the book was essentially to take one element of this campaign-the
manipulation of the Holocaust-and show how it was morally and
intellectually wrong.
Who are the big names in the Israeli community of
opprobrium?
There are so many, and no doubt most of them are unfamiliar to
English readers. Haifa-born Ilan Pappe, who now teaches in England,
completely embraces the Palestinian narrative. There is Yehuda
Shenhav, who has a new book out challenging the right of Israel to
exist even within the 1967 "Green Line." I devote part of my book to
Adi Ophir, former editor of the post-modernist Hebrew journal
Theory and Criticism and an academic at Tel Aviv University and
the Shalom Hartman Institute. There is also Oren Yiftachel at
Ben-Gurion University, who speaks of Zionism as a "colonialism of
refugees" and "creeping apartheid." Then there is the Haaretz
crowd, including Amira Hass and Gideon Levy. Outside Israel, a key
name is the historian Tony Judt, with his advocacy of a bi-national
state.
The community refers to Israel's presence in Judea and
Samaria as, in your words, "occupation with a capital O."
To be perfectly frank, I accept much of their criticism: the
settlement situation is catastrophic. But what the capital-O crowd
advocates is the now fashionable "one-state solution." It's
completely unworkable. Daft! They also refer to Zionism as guilty of
"original sin." Their opposition to Israeli policies is so visceral
that it carries them to the point where they support policies that
are, in effect, annihilationist.
You write that "there is not much point in talking
with the anti-Zionists."
That's right. There is no point. They can't be swayed by facts.
Their anti-Zionism has a structural affinity to anti-Semitism. It is
irrational. I don't want to speculate or indulge in psychoanalytic
explanations. Instead, what I do in the book is to talk about
anti-Zionism.
It is a condition that seems to have permeated the Israel
Left.
It's actually a complicated picture. I am convinced that the
silent majority on the Israeli Left is not anti-Zionist. That is
certainly the case in my department at the university. But the
anti-Zionists are highly mobilized. They combine ideological zeal
with academic pretense—or, rather, their academic work is placed at
the service of their ideology. These instructors have created an
uncomfortable climate in the classroom. I myself never use my
lectures as an excuse to propound my political views.
Over time, not only have the academic anti-Zionists had a
devastating influence in the universities, but everything they say
is nurtured and amplified by the media and the international
community of opprobrium. It's a vicious circle. The non-Israelis
point to the Israelis in justifying their own anti-Zionist line. For
their part, the Israelis basically direct their efforts toward the
outside world, which rewards them by inviting them to travel, speak,
and publish their academically worthless rubbish.
Let's talk about Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), to whom you
devote an entire chapter in your book. By coincidence, the first
Hebrew translation of her magnum opus, The Origins of
Totalitarianism (1951), is just out in Hebrew. In
reviewing it, Shlomo Avineri has said that she was not tainted by
Jewish self-hatred but was "a proud Jew."
I agree; she was a proud Jew. She was also a complicated
Jew, and extremely ambivalent about her own Jewish identity. Though
at times in her life she operated in a very Jewish milieu, she knew
very little about Judaism. She grappled especially with, on the one
hand, the need for Jewish political expression through a state and,
on the other hand, her opposition to Jewish particularism. Still,
until her death—we can't speculate beyond that—I don't believe she
would have challenged the right to Jewish self-determination or
countenanced calls to dismantle the state of Israel.
You refer to her Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) "a
bad book" and "morally scandalous."
Well, she talks about things she doesn't understand. Her portrait
of Adolf Eichmann was harnessed to her larger polemical aims. The
concept of the "banality of evil," which she made famous, wasn't
even hers. It originated with the German philosopher Karl
Jaspers—who by the way stood courageously by his Jewish wife against
the Nazis. Jaspers went on to write a book about German guilt, which
Arendt read. The term "banality" appears in his letters to her.
Moreover, the Eichmann book does not propound a real theory. What
she said about the "banality of evil" was intellectual gymnastics,
pathetic nonsense.
In the controversy over Eichmann in Jerusalem,
Arendt was accused by her friend Gershom Scholem of lacking
ahavat Yisrael, fidelity to the Jewish people.
Yes, she had this inner conflict about her Judaism and about
Israel. She grappled with the place of the Jew in European culture.
Her writings are often interpreted as relating to the place of Jews
and of Israel on the global stage, but in fact she was addressing
the dilemma of how others, particularly Westerners,
understand Jews and Jewish identity. Her life was the embodiment of
this dilemma—which has now been transferred to Israel and within
Israel.
So what was her answer to the Jewish problem?
Integration. But I am not sure she had a coherent position. About
Zionism, as I say, she was always ambivalent. That ambivalence
was Hannah Arendt.
An ambivalent thinker with an incoherent position, yet an
icon whose writings are constantly invoked by the community of
opprobrium.
Exactly. An entire Arendt hagiography has evolved. My feeling is
she would not appreciate being so used, but it is mind-boggling how
many anti-Zionist Jews and Israelis, relying partially on her work,
play such an important role in the campaign against Israel.
What impels some Diaspora Jews to lead the charge against
Israel? You contrast them with the Chinese Diaspora, which appears
to react with equanimity to the truly egregious human-rights
violations of Beijing.
Yes, the Jews, unlike the Chinese, somehow feel pressured to
dissociate themselves from their ancestral homeland. You'd have to
ask the one-state proponent Tony Judt or the philosopher Judith
Butler, who is pushing the anti-Israel boycott, to explain what
motivates them and why they are emotionally invested with Israel to
such an unhealthy degree.
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