The Jews have made their
own life difficult
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF
Associate since 1991
Comments directly to
JonatPower@aol.com
December 19, 2007
JERUSALEM - The Jews are obsessed with themselves, with their history, with the present time and with their destiny. Every nation has some of this and so it should. But, by any comparison, Jewish navel gazing is something else. At this level of intensity it makes compromise difficult and condemns the Jewish state, Israel, to political paranoia and limitless inflexibility.
I have spent ten days here looking for a chink of light and cannot see it. The press is uniformly self-absorbed, rather as were the white-owned newspapers during South Africa’s apartheid years. They seem capable of only being able to write about one single subject. Conversation, at least with an outsider, is similarly single minded. Why Condoleezza Rice, or any other foreign observer, is surprised at Israel’s refusal to stop building settlements that will encircle Arab Jerusalem, when it is supposed to be engaged in negotiating a peace agreement, is to be wondered at. The Israelis don’t see a peace deal except on their total terms and never will unless they are literally bludgeoned into it by the U.S., backed up by the EU holding out a big red carrot that everyone can see - entry into the Union.
The Jews left what we now call Palestine, Israel and Jordan two millennia ago. In AD 70 after the Jewish insurrection the Roman occupiers destroyed the Jerusalem Temple and the majority of Jews fled to Babylon, modern day Iraq. This endured until the eleventh century. Other Jews went to Egypt. The Romans enslaved many and others were dispersed by war and catastrophe to Italy, Spain, Germany, Gaul and Eastern Europe.
The Jews had lived by the sword (see the book of Deuteronomy) and were dispersed by the sword. But so were many other peoples all over the world including in Europe major groupings of people with an equal claim to self-identity, including the Greeks, Romans and the Celts.
In subsequent centuries the Jews lost out to the Christians and the Muslims. The Christians surged into dominance in the West because a powerful Roman emperor in the fourth century made their faith the state religion. The Muslims initially surged in the east because of their prowess on the battlefield.
For the vast majority of Islam’s 1400 years the Jews were reasonably protected by their Muslim rulers. Like Christians, they were accorded the status of dhimmi, “protected minority”, which gave them civil and military protection, as long as they respected the laws and supremacy of the Islamic state. The Jews were not persecuted and there was no tradition of anti-Semitism.
Within the Christian world it was different. Until the Middle Ages Jews lived in Europe rather securely. After the turn of the millennium there were some intense periods of persecution and over the centuries a growing undercurrent of anti-Semitism, culminating in the nineteenth century expulsions and pogroms in Poland and Russia and the “final solution” in Nazi Germany. But for most of the time, most of the centuries, in most countries, the Jews were reasonably integrated into the host society. The full two thousand year long European history of the Jews is gravely distorted by contemporary Jewry - the idea of continuous, unabated, suffering in the Diaspora has become embedded in liturgical and other forms of Jewish culture.
Yes, Jews and Christians often lived apart but they lived for most of the time together too. Whilst persecutions were recorded the years of peaceful coexistence often went unrecorded. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there were serious expulsions of the Jews from western Europe with the exception of Germany and Italy. They had to find refuge in the Ottoman Turkey, Poland and Lithuania. But the second half of the sixteenth century saw an end to the expulsions as policy turned 180 degrees towards readmission.
Throughout the ages the fear of violence, in myriad forms, was a constant that both Jews and Christians had to confront, but the Christians more. Europe was riven by bitter Christian internecine feuding from the Reformation onwards. Whether one was Catholic or Protestant became during the period 1559-1648 the most important reason for waging war and this was especially so of civil wars which erupted on all and every occasion, as religious minorities battled against intolerance from on high. But the Jews by and large were exempt from all this. After the Enlightenment Jews played an increasingly important role in most of Europe.
Can swords ever be beaten into ploughshares in the Middle East when one side is so embedded in a partial and misleading narrative of its history?
Copyright © 2007 Jonathan
Power
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Jonathan Power can be
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and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Jonathan
Power
2007 Book
Conundrums
of Humanity
The Quest for Global Justice
“Conundrums
of Humanity” poses eleven questions for our future progress, ranging
from “Can we diminish War?” to “How far and fast can
we push forward the frontiers of Human Rights?” to “Will
China dominate the century?”
The answers to these questions, the author believes, growing out of
his long experience as a foreign correspondent and columnist for the
International Herald Tribune, are largely positive ones, despite the
hurdles yet to be overcome. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, London, 2007.
William Pfaff, September 17, 2007
Jonathan Power's book "Conundrums" - A Review
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