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| …I had an Israeli woman friend for many years, raised in a truly antisemitic Communist household, who spent ten years in London getting a degree in history and then becoming a professor of history in Israel, who was convinced even after ten years in London, that the English did hold English Jews in contempt but not Israelis whom they saw as virtually another nationality. Some of the English, she believed, were so uneducated they did not think of Israelis as Jews at all.
She is the type of Leftist intellectual here who insists that because she does not believe in the Jewish religion, she is not a Jew. She does not believe in Catholicism, so don’t call her a Catholic, and likewise don’t call her a Jew. Ron Pundak, another I think historian, one of the Oslo architects, says the same thing. He insists he is not a Jew but like her a Communist. And one suspects it is this attitude which contributes to the inability of Israelis like the otherwise estimable Bibi to declare the legality, indeed the righteous right of Israel to sovereignty in Judea and Samaria, a right ultimately rooted in the Jewish religion, because they are embarrassed to identify with it. Or like Livni and Beilin, they are determined to keep religion out of it, out of the conflict here, because then there is no solution… |
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