Wednesday, February 16, 2005
"Israel doesn't recognise Israel". posted by Richard Seymour
Jews Sans Frontieres links to a fabulous essay by the late Israel Shahak, posted at Jews Against Zionism . He quotes:The routine means for enforcing discrimination in everyday life is the ID card, which everyone is obliged to carry at all times. ID cards list the official 'nationality' of a person, which can be 'Jewish', 'Arab', 'Druze' and the like, with the significant exception of 'Israeli'. Attempts to force the Interior Minister to allow Israelis wishing to be officially described as 'Israeli', or even as 'Israeli-Jew' in their ID cards have failed. Those who have attempted to do so have a letter from the Ministry of the Interior stating that 'it was decided not to recognise an Israeli nationality'. The letter does not specify who made this decision or when.But he ought to have also quoted from the gorgeous little foreword by one of the Tomb's favourite authors, Gore Vidal:
Sometime in the late 1950s, that world-class gossip and occasional historian, John F. Kennedy, told me how, in 1948, Harry S. Truman had been pretty much abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an American Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-stop campaign train. 'That's why our recognition of Israel was rushed through so fast.' As neither Jack nor I was an antisemite (unlike his father and my grandfather) we took this to be just another funny story about Truman and the serene corruption of American politics.This is classic Gore, and that is either good or bad depending on your viewpoint. First, a Palimpsest-style reminiscence about Jack Kennedy (who Vidal probably had the horn for). Then, a beautifully sarcastic expression of disdain for religious fundamentalism, (whether the God is of the sky or earth-bound). Finally, innocent expectations betrayed - no, the American Republic betrayed, just another declension in its freefall into the entanglements of empire.
Unfortunately, the hurried recognition of Israel as a state has resulted in forty-five years of murderous confusion, and the destruction of what Zionist fellow travellers thought would be a pluralistic state - home to its native population of Muslims, Christians and Jews, as well as a future home to peaceful European and American Jewish immigrants, even the ones who affected to believe that the great realtor in the sky had given them, in perpetuity, the lands of Judea and Samaria. Since many of the immigrants were good socialists in Europe, we assumed that they would not allow the new state to become a theocracy, and that the native Palestinians could live with them as equals. This was not meant to be.