Jewish Identity & Israeli Exceptionalism (P II)

The State of Israel provides the platform for all people to worship freely. That includes Israel’s Arab minority.  This is in opposition to the intolerance and persecution of minorities that is central to Islamic culture and an Islamic theological pillar of conditional tolerance which can be revoked at any time.  Every state (including Israel) is entitled to embrace its past, celebrate its present and anticipate a positive future.  That is how we retain our identity.

A Jewish identity does not require a law of return and it is time for it to be abolished.  A constitution that recognises the historic Jewish identity of the State does not preclude the provision of equal rights to all of its citizens irrespective of their race, creed or colour. The minority population in Israel has equal rights. It doesn’t have the right to support the enemies of the State.  This also should be spelled out. Israel has a Jewish identity and it should be enshrined in its constitution.  Any discrimination must be addressed. However, action by the Israeli-Arab leadership that undermines and challenges the Jewish nature of the State is unacceptable. The right to democratically seek superior status at the expense of the majority Jewish population is a betrayal of the State.  It is a right that no one demands of the Saudis, or any other Muslim nation. And Israel is a nation surrounded by Muslim nations that respect only that which is enunciated without ambiguity. The State of Israel should take the bold step to declare that Judaism is part of its national identity.

I hope that I do not promote hatred of Islam – promoting ones own past does not have to be at the expense of others.   However, in the West, particularly in England we are fighting a battle against the revision of Jewish history that denies Israel any past as a means of ensuring that it has no future.

History is the whole past not just the bits that the anti-Zionist, anti-Jewish bigots want to celebrate or rewrite. Separate education and separate housing must also be abolished.  While the Arab think-tanks have effectively called for the setting up of voluntary Arab Bantustans – autonomous Palestinian areas within Israel, this is a fundamental challenge to the independence of the State.  On a wider note, it is one the ultra orthodox would support because they actively desire the same separation and for similar reasons that the Arab sector desires it. And it must be opposed for the same reason.

Israel’s basis for establishment is recognised in the universally accepted right of all peoples to national self-determination and statehood. This was acknowledged by UN resolution. The state of Israel has been and continues to be the only nation-state of the Jewish people. The Islamic world has been fighting a proxy war against the existence of a Jewish State via allies that have overwhelmingly accepted the argument of a Jewish ‘oppressor’ while dismissing the obvious issue that the (Arab) ‘oppressed’ are also the oppressor. That complicates matters.

When we stop calling the State of Israel, ‘The Jewish State,’ it does not stop being a Jewish State, because intrinsically, it is understood to be so, but to describe Israel as Jewish is superfluous and antagonistic to those who are not. This identity is what Islamic religious bigots and Arab racists will passionately fight against.  To deny the Jewish centrality of the geographic area of Israel and thus its narrative importance is also fundamentally racist.  Whether one is Jewish or not, the historical reality of Jewish history both in the Holy land and in the rest of the Near East is unassailable. It is the reason the Islamic world with the active complicity of its Liberal-Left allies have tried to erase it archaeologically, deny its historic authenticity and through its international organs of religious, financial and political control to rewrite history to deny Israel a legitimate place amongst the nations. As a consistent act of denial it is the apotheosis of political and intellectual betrayal.

The impact that Israeli actions have on Jews in London is only real because we allow it to be so.  Recently the BBC and the Guardian refused to acknowledge Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel. The only group willing to fight them was “Honest Reporting” (and they are not even based in Britain). They alone issued a complaint against the Guardian while the British Jewish establishment did nothing. When the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) outrageously accepted the Guardian premise and in fact embellished its own ruling against Jerusalem being Israel’s capital, “Honest Reporting” sued the PCC.  Almost immediately the PCC withdrew their contemptible judgment. The Guardian was forced to publicly backtrack.  HR is allegedly continuing with its case through the British courts.

Making truth of the lie is the propagandist’s weapon and we in Britain seem to be unwilling to invest resources in defeating them.  It is only when we actively prevent racist British institutions from creating facts that the conditions will take form that allow us to change the narrative. Identity is how we feel as well as how we present ourselves to others. It is how we react perceptually to external conditions as well as how our institutions guide us to behave that continuously reinforces as it feeds our identity, both communally and individually.

Anti-Semitism can and often does exist and thrive in a state without Jews.  Israel is the excuse but not the reason for Muslim bigotry. However, Israel is the historic fountainhead of Jewish faith, even as it fails as the spiritual source for its continuity it remains the ethical epicentre of monotheism and the historic, undeniable emotional soul of Judeo/Christian identity. This represents yet another reason for Muslims to theologically oppose its existence.  Islam, to the Islamic faithful replaces all other faiths, it physically denies them the right to exist outside of an Islam which imposes inferiority through Dhimmitude and an identity stripped of its past.

A synthetic national identity that was unable to reconcile a jingoistic nationalism with eloquently expressed, historically anchored intolerance created the conditions under which fascism thrived and Nazism became the dominant German ideology.  Similarly, the tribal nature of Arab society continues to ensure that reconciliation with parochial Islamism is next to impossible to achieve.  The artificial creation of Islamic nation states under European imperialist endeavours, in particular in the Arab world, has created enormous instability that is wholly independent of the existence of any Jewish state in their midst.

The Congress of Vienna created the modern nation state based on centralised power and unified ethnic societies.  This is in sharp contrast to the catastrophe created by the Sykes–Picot Agreement which artificially fashioned the Islamic mess we have all inherited today in the Near East. It gave Arab overlords dominance over non-Arabs with European weapons exchanged for oil nourishing this symbiotic but poisoned relationship.  The Arab Spring, far from bringing enlightenment and freedom to persecuted minorities has filled in the barely papered over cracks within Arab ruled society with a toxic brew of fundamentalism and intolerance.  It has brought bigots to power across the Arab world. It will embolden them to celebrate their past ‘glories’ as they deny us ours.  

In terms of the universality of civilisation – there is a convergence of values where murder and theft are proscribed virtually without exception. In “A German Identity 1770-1990” Harold James described the progressive radicalisation that took place, a loss of inhibition contributed to its momentum.  This resulted in the ends justifying the means. In Nazi Germany it enabled genocide to be explained away as the fulfilment of a supreme purpose. Islam through its missionary zeal already possesses the religious framework for this purpose.

The Liberal-Left establishment controls debate in order to ensure conformity. McCarthyism has been intrinsic to a philosophy of control. How reality is presented can and does determine the direction that society takes.  The Jewish establishment is no different except that it fears being outside of the consensus. Perhaps this is understandable. Jews have always stood apart. It is both their greatest creative strength and the source of their greatest weakness.

The righteous hypocrite requires no excuse for their display of passionate anti-Semitic prejudice.  But in that case any lie will do as long as it is plausible, and after a few smears the implausible becomes reasonable.  I am not saying that we can or should avoid the issues that are debated within Israel but when we hold back from debating the issues that afflict our society, it is easy to acquiesce to the lies and the false narratives of our enemies. Then our lies forfeit any right we possess as a ‘civilised’ nation to criticise what occurs in Israel.

But even so, our identity is sullied by the constant assault on our senses of a false storyline and its relentlessly negative publicity. Only when Israel reasserts its rights to an Israeli narrative will it also be capable of fighting its enemies deceptions and begin to win the war of world opinion.   It is a fight that affects us all.