Back then, remember, reviewers gave a respectful welcome
to Joan Peters' book From
Times Immemorial, which purported to argue that
Palestinians had no claims on the land of Canaan, and
that they had snuck into Israel from Saudi Arabia in comparatively
recent times. The New York Times lavished praise
on this nonsense which was duly exposed as fraudulent
from start to finish. Back then, newspapers gave similarly
polite coverage to prime minister Golda Meir's pronouncement
that there were no such people as Palestinians. To write,
as I often did, about Palestinians' just claims, as represented
by the PLO, was to invite torrents of abuse. In New York
particularly it was virtually impossible to have a rational
political discussion on the topic.
If
today the coverage is fractionally more honest, credit
should go in part to a quirky, cantankerous professor
of organic chemistry, born in a cultivated Jewish family
in Warsaw, who died last week in his apartment in Jerusalem,
his body worn out at the early age of 68, thanks in no
small measure to the two years he spent as a boy in the
German concentration camp at Bergen Belsen.
Year after year those on Shahak's mailing list would
get, every few weeks, a package containing six or so single-space
typewritten foolscap pages of his translations from the
Hebrew-language press in Israel, studded with his own
acerbic and often eruditely amusing comments. Each package
would usually address a theme, such as housing demolitions
of Palestinians by the Israelis, or corruption in the
IDF and Mossad.
To read them was not only to learn facts entirely inaccessible
in any English-language publication, but also to realize
that in Hebrew-language newspapers such as Ha'aretz
and Yediot Ahronot there were honorable reporters
and editors without any qualms about writing and publishing
material extraordinarily discreditable to Israel's "official
truths," as diligently recycled by the western press corps
in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Of course, these journalists
could have hired translators or even learned Hebrew, but
they didn't. They relied on the Jerusalem Post
which, precisely because it was accessible in English,
was wholly dedicated to "official truths."
I first met Shahak in 1980 in New York. I'd been reading
his communiqués and conveying their import as best I could
to an American audience, and wasn't quite sure what sort
of person this tireless translator and erudite footnoter
would turn out to be.
He was on the short side and looked older than the 47
years he carried at that time. With accented English,
he leapt from the travails of Palestinian farmers to learned
exposition of the famous affair of Sabbatai Sevi, the
mystical Messiah who transfixed seventeenth-century Jewry.
In our very first conversation he drew a line between
the credulity of Sevi's followers and the Gush Emunim
or "block of the faithful" who organized settlers on the
West Bank.
He was a singular man, an original. His loathing of hypocrisy
rendered social democracy unappetizing to him. Politically
he always seemed to me to be a nineteenth-century liberal
in the best sense of the term. He was above all a rationalist,
who had reviewed the evidence for God's existence at the
age of 13 and found it wanting. This was a year after
he had been freed from Bergen Belsen and was deciding
to migrate to the Palestine of the British Mandate. Just
over 20 years later, after the Six Day war he took an
unsparing look at Israel's brutal treatment of Palestinians
and decided that Israel was not a democracy and that the
system of racist oppression bore many elements that were
reminiscent of Nazism. "Nazi-like" was a much used epithet
in Shahak's notations, and it incensed many. In 1968 he
began, as he put it, "to act."
Back at the start of the 1980s the image of Israel as
a rational exercise in social democracy flourished mightily
and thus it was all the more startling to hear Shahak's
expositions of the racist, mystical strains in Israel's
religio-political culture.
"This mysticism," he told me, "is extremely dangerous.
If you accept religiously the validity of 16th
and 17th century mysticism, then you have the
basis for their conclusions. It has parallels to Christian
fundamentalism. If you accept the idea that Jonathan Edwards
was right in the 17th century, many things
that Jerry Falwell says now follow. In normal Judaism
the messiah will redeem Israel; the Jewish people will
conquer the land of Israel, build the temple and that
is all. There will be a Jewish state and the world will
go on as before. In Jewish mysticism the coming of the
messiah is a cosmic event. The messiah redeems the fall
of Adam and Eve. The world is full of the power of Satan
– I don't have to give you the parallels –
and Satan prevents cosmic salvation. It will be the messiah,
with the help of mystic contemplation of right-thinking
Jews, who will redeem the whole world. No sacrifice is
too great to achieve this goal." He paused. "The right-wing
religious fanatics compose the most dangerous group, socially
and politically, that has existed in the entire history
of Israel."
Looking back at my record of that first session with
Shahak, I see that our conversation started with a typical
Shahakian comparison: "It would be a good thing, I think,
for Americans to ask themselves once a year whether the
USA was a democracy before 1865; that is, before the constitutional
abolition of slavery. The situation of the state of Israel
and of the territories occupied by it is quite analogous.
Just as the situation of the occupied territories resembles
that of the pre-1865 South, so the situation inside the
state of Israel resembles that of many states of the USA
some 50 or 60 years ago when racism was popular, and when
the really influential Ku Klux Klan made and unmade politicians,
just as Gush Emunim now does in Israel."
Shahak was full of unexpected learning. He delighted
in ironies. Though they had virtually no imperial tradition,
the Danes, he told me, had imposed in their tiny colony
of St. Croix one of the most ferocious labor codes in
history. A moment later he was discoursing on a strange
international tribunal of judges that toured through the
Congo in full ceremonial judicial regalia in the early
twentieth century, interviewing people about the horrors
of their subjugation by King Leopold. Then he embarked
on a discourse on Jewish jokes, a topic on which he claimed
to be a great authority. We agreed that I should come
to Israel and he would show me around, outlining his views
on Jewish jokes as he did so. Alas, I never found time
to take him up on the offer.
What effects did Shahak's unsparing explications of the
situation in Israel have on public opinion? I would say,
over the years, that he exercised great influence, ripples
from his bulletins and, later, from his books, spreading
slowly, often imperceptibly out through the pond. He didn't
always get things right. For years he prophesied a war
between Israel and Syria that never came. He could be
volcanic in his disputes. He was a great man, a great
conscience, because he understood not only the broad outlines
and historical origins of systems of oppression and racism,
he understood the sting of these oppressions and racisms
in all their pettiest details, like a military bureaucrat
in the Territories bullying a Palestinian tomato farmer
because his permit for sale was torn.
"Here is a practical proposal to you," he said to me
at the end of our first meeting. "Discuss the basic facts
of the oppression of the Palestinians by Israel as much
as you can, going right down to the basics of everyday
racism. Point out the obvious contradiction between what
the majority of American Jews demand for themselves in
the USA and what they defend in Israel. Do not be intimidated
in the struggle against racism and for human dignity,
equality and freedom by any demagoguery about peace and
democracy, if they are used in the cause of discrimination,
and perhaps the words of the prophet (Amos, 5.15) will
come true. ‘Hate the evil and love the good and
establish judgment in the gate, it may be that the Lord
God of hosts will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.'"
Copyright
© 2001 Alexander Cockburn
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