Published in
Culture Wars Magazine,
September 2004
Culture Wars
“Death Watch”
Department
A Jew With a Program for Peace
By Tom
White
Israel Shamir is an
Israeli writer who marches to the beat of a distinctly different
drummer. He lives in Jaffa and pops up here and there around the
world—Malaysia, Russia, England, Spain, but not—not that I know
of—in the U.S. His emails, however, in English and sometimes
French, span the globe, and they are intensely interesting to
anyone, like myself, trying to make heads or tails of the
present international scene.
Shamir was born in
Novosibirsk in Siberia, a grandson of a professor of
mathematics. He is a descendant of a rabbi from Tiberias in
Palestine. He read math and law at Novosibirsk University. In
1969 he immigrated to Israel and fought as a paratrooper in the
1973 war. I would guess he was then in his 20s and therefore is
now in his 50s. There followed several years as a freelance
journalist covering the last stages of the Southwest Asian war
in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
In 1975 he moved to London
and joined the BBC. In the late 70s he lived in Tokyo and worked
for the Israeli daily Maariv. He published his first book
there, Travels with My Son. He returned to Israel in
1980, worked for Ha'aretz and other papers, was in the
Knesset as spokesman for the Israeli socialist party, published
a number of translations from English (for example, Joyce’s
Ulysses), and from Hebrew, and advanced his own writings.
His most popular work is The Pine and the Olive, the
story of Israel and Palestine and their near-fatal embrace.
But Shamir’s life, though
astonishing—as is his evident skill with many languages—is not
so astonishing as his present intellectual position. A highly
visible and, I should say quite distinguished Israeli writer, he
has become a Christian and is a radical opponent of the entire
Zionist enterprise. In the emails I mention he advances his
views with zero regard for anybody’s notion of political
correctness. To view his emails go to
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/shamireaders/messages
and
to sign up for them
send a blank email to
shamireaders-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
His website
is
www.israelshamir.com and
www.israelshamir.net
(As I write a Shamir
essay is featured on his home page, “The Stumbling Block: How
‘The Passion of the Christ’ may help bring Peace to the Middle
East.” Shamir contends that Gibson’s film has broken through the
dizzy thrall of the evangelical “rapture” Christians and shown
them that the alliance of Christ-hating Zionists and
Christ-loving Christians was an absurdity from the beginning.
May it be so.)
My best
guess is that Shamir remains a socialist of some sort, but he
does not seem to write about that much. I tend to personally
lament that position, if he holds it, since socialism seems to
me a bankrupt social program, as I believe has been convincingly
demonstrated by Shamir’s fellow Russian, Igor Shafarevitch, in
his great book The Socialist Phenomenon.
Shamir does,
however, write much about his view that the only solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian battle is to go to a single state, “one man,
one vote,” and proceed to live in peace and tolerance. I am not
sure whether this is proof of invincible innocence, naiveté, and
sheer Panglossian optimism, or whether it is indeed, as he
evidently thinks it is, the only decent human answer to a crying
human and horrible dilemma. In any case he deplores the
brutality of the present Israel stance and would end it at once
if he had power.
My reason
for writing about Shamir now is to call attention to a recent
email in which, in a few strokes, he reviews some high points of
Western history since Christ and gives a striking slant to them
from the point of view of someone who takes seriously the
long-running effort of the “revolutionary Jew”—in the sense that
E. Michael Jones has used that term in recent issues of this
magazine—to impose his ethos on the entire world, it being
understood that Zionism is just the most recent phase of a
determined opposition to the Christian order that goes back all
the way. (I think Shamir’s term, “Masters of Discourse” can be
taken for present purposes as a rough equivalent of Jones’s
“revolutionary Jew.”)
Shamir says
things I can hardly imagine any gentile saying without falling
under indictment as a wicked anti-Semite. What he has up for
description is the famous “elephant in the living room” that
nobody is supposed to notice or mention: the extraordinary
assertiveness and effectiveness of a tiny Jewish minority in
political and cultural affairs, most notably in the U.S. lately
in the heavily Jewish and warlike neoconservative domination of
our foreign policy with its marked pro-Israel bias.
Despite his
open hostility to Sharon and all he stands for, however, Shamir
appears to go back and forth from Israel unimpeded by
government. For all the government’s iniquity, Israel seems to
be relatively open to disagreement among its citizens, perhaps
more than we are with our notorious and pusillanimous
self-censorship.
In the email
I cite, Shamir records a talk he gave in Spain to launch there
his book, The Green Rain of Yasuf or Masters of Discourse.
The same book is called The Flowers of Galilee in English
(Tempe, Arizona: Dandelion Books, 2004) and The Other Face of
Israel in French. (I am unable to find any other Shamir
titles on Amazon.) Shamir complimented the Spanish on their
decision to pull their troops out of Iraq. And then said
something I think quite true:
When I wrote so [that the war was about Israel] in the series of
articles presented in this book over a year ago, it was a wild
opinion shared by a selected few; while majority was fed by
stories of a war for liberation of Iraqis, a war for democracy
in Iraq, a war to terror, a war to stop Saddam’s WMD, or a war
for oil. A year passed and all these explanations vanished like
smoke in the night. No WMD were found in devastated Iraq; no
connections to al-Qaeda were revealed by tortured prisoners of
Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo; liberation of Iraq turned out to be
the brutal occupation regime; as for oil, at the beginning of
the war, oil price stood at 20 dollar a barrel, while now it is
about 40 dollars. The oil companies that were blamed for pushing
for the war, are pulling out of Iraq, and oil production is well
below its pre-war levels. On 29th of April, 2004, the Guardian
reported that BP decided to leave Iraq saying that the oil
company has no future there.
It leaves us exactly with one reason for war, the reason we
stated over a year ago. Sometimes it is called ‘the war for
Israel’, but this definition misses the point: the state of
Israel does not need this war for its safety; Israelis do not
need this war for their well-being. The Jews can live as equals
in Palestine or elsewhere; but they want to dominate water, land
and souls of the others. For this reason they kill children and
ruin homes of Palestinians in Gaza and Iraqis in Faluja. This is
the war for Jewish supremacy waged by the US adepts of this
concept, against the principle of equality of all dwellers in
the Holy Land. In such a war, Spain has no reason to side with
the forces of Jewish supremacy, to provide cover for mass
destructions in Palestine and for mass tortures in Guantanamo.
After this start, Shamir
keeps going. He is a determined blaster of tidy, time-honored
notions of history, particularly, I might remark— with a touch
of Irish Schadenfreude—those that are over-kind to our English
brethren. For example, it is an old English custom to go on and
on about how bad the Spaniards were as colonizers. Here is
Shamir:
Spain had no reason to fight for Jewish racism as your country
has a glorious anti-racist record often distorted in modern
Jewish narrative, which became the dominant Anglo-American
discourse. You are blamed for so-called Expulsion of 1492. But
majority of exiled Jews came back, gave up their racist
tradition of superiority, agreed to share bread and wine with
other Spaniards—for that is the meaning of Eucharist—and became
honourable citizens of Spain. S Teresa of Avila and S Juan de la
Cruz are the shining examples of their glory.
On the other hand, England under
Cromwell accepted the exiled Jews and received kudos from the
Masters of Discourse for this deed. They do not speak of its
connection with fencing out the English commoners, with massacre
of Irish peasants and Scots, and with massive genocide of Native
Americans in their colonies, but the regimes that are ‘good for
Jews’ are rarely good for anybody else.
The same Masters of Discourse vilify Spain for its treatment of
Native Americans. But in the end, Spaniards married natives and
brought forward the modern nations of Latin America, while the
North American colonists, who were very good to Jews and
considered themselves ‘new Jews’, killed off almost all natives
and transferred the remainder into reservations.
I remember
just this point being made (without reference to the influence
of Judaism) by Garrett Mattingly, author of The Armada,
when I took a course in European history under him at Columbia
in 1947. I never forgot it. He said the Spanish and Portuguese
accepted Indians as fellow human beings; the great Bartolomé
de las Casas argued that very thing before Spanish legists.
They left the native gene pool (if that is the correct term) in
place; in fact they joined in it. The English goal was racist—to
extirpate it. That is one reason I do not join in the
anti-Hispanic frenzy with quite the enthusiasm of some of my
“Anglo” neighbors here in Texas; the Indians owned the place to
begin with, and, God-willing, may be good for it in the long
run.
Shamir deals
with 20th century Russia and the U.S., their cold
war, and where the U.S. is today in a paragraph of striking
force and simplicity that points to a grim future (unless):
Indeed it is a
mistake to think that theology is an irrelevant occupation of
useless clerics, while only material possessions matter.
Theology is the deep foundation courses on which the palace of a
society is built. Without foundations, the palace will collapse
at a blow of a strong wind, let alone earthquake. It was the
reason of Soviet collapse: quasi-religious communism had no
strong theological foundation and did not survive. In the
‘neo-Jewish’ US, the Judaic paradigm came forth in place of
apostolic Christianity, and with it the New World Order of
dwindling middle class, vast security apparatus, growing social
gap and impoverishment of spirit. It is not the first time the
Judaic paradigm rises in the world; but such societies
invariably collapse for they lack broad social base. Now its
adepts decided to ensure its survival by making it globe-wide;
this is the reason of wars and expansion, for their design would
not survive on any smaller scale.
And here is a revisionist look at
World War II and the tired political face-off of “left” and
“right”:
The tragic and destructive confrontation of Left and Right
reached its peak in your [Spanish] Civil War and at the World
War Two, where the two great anti-bourgeois movements, ‘left and
right disciples of Hegel’ shed their blood ad majoram US
gloriam, to the greater glory of the neo-Judaic US, the
ultimate winner of war. . . .
Nowadays we have
pseudo-Left and pseudo-Right, for there is no difference between
Thatcher and Blair, Bush and Kerry – both equally support Israel
in its drive for supremacy. In Spain and France, the left and
the right-wing newspapers were united in their condemnation of
The Passion of The Christ by Mel Gibson as ‘offensive to Jews’.
Thus, instead of Left and Right, we have a new dichotomy, a new
split, by attitude to Judaic supremacy. Today the US fights the
Muslims for Israel, but Huntington, the leading theorist of the
war, already calls to contain the Hispanics in the US, as they
are not sufficiently devoted to the Jewish cause.
Shamir’s
last words to his Spanish audience are moving, particularly so
because of his appeal to the central Christian tradition of
Spain:
Spain has an
important role to play, for Spain is inherently connected with
the Land of Christ and St. James, your favourite saint whom you
call Santiago. This Palestinian fisherman was beheaded by orders
of Sharon’s predecessor, King Herod Antipas, and his head was
taken by his disciples to your shores to be interned in Santiago
de Compostella, but his heart remained buried in Jerusalem, and
Cathedral of St James rose above his tomb equally venerated by
Palestinian Christians and Muslims, for in our land Christians
and Muslims live together in great peace and harmony sharing
same places of veneration and—no less important—same enemy.
Their enemy is not ‘the Jew’, for Jews can live peacefully with
Spaniards and Palestinians, but the spirit of Judaic supremacy,
which has to be defeated and it will be defeated.
For my part
I take heart from the assurance of this Jew, Shamir, that our
common enemy is not the Jew, or Jews, but “the spirit of Judaic
supremacy.” I leave it to Shamir to castigate Sharon and the
government of Israel for their hideous campaign of domination
over Palestinians. I intend to concentrate on writing and
praying against the equally hideous campaign of domination of
the world indulged in by our resident U.S. regime, staunch
allies of Sharon and conductors of an illegitimate war against
an aggrieved people in Iraq. We have been irreversibly shamed by
the overall conduct of the war with its slaughter of innocents
and now by the awful photos and stories of torture from Abu
Ghraib. We have been set before the world as enemies of peace
and decency in a way we shall never live down, and in fact don’t
deserve to live down.
Shamir, who
does not get much mention in the “respectable” press, seems to
me a noble spirit and a penetrating analyst of the world scene
today. His love of Christ, of the Holy Land, of the
Palestinians, and indeed of his fellow Jews, shines in his
writing. I shall be interested to see if my notion of him as a
giant of world literature (based, I admit, on a very limited
reading of his works), and as a paradigm of virtuous political
protest, holds up in the years ahead. My guess is it will.
Copyright © 2004
Fidelity Press, All Rights Reserved.
Posted with
permission
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