By: L. B. Benjamin

“I am not sorry that we notice the barbarous horror of such acts, but I am heartily sorry that, judging their faults rightly, we should be so blind to our own.” 

– Montaigne, Of Cannibals

Some things in political life are every bit as inescapable as the turning of day into night. The occasional rise and eventual fall of nations is one them. The hold exerted by Israel over the moral imagination of mankind is another. If a man came to regard the darkness of nightfall as a problem, he could not remove it, no matter how many alternative sources of light he discovered or crafted. And though every nation wishes eternity for itself, none attains it. Similarly, it matters very little whether the spirit of an age is imperial or democratic, religious or secular, open or closed. Israel tests that spirit and finds it wanting in some decisive way.

That Israel captures the moral imagination of mankind in a way that no other nation or state has ever done is, in itself, a very old story. Israel and the Jewish people, in their various permutations, which are even more remarkable perhaps for the consistencies among them than for their impressive variety, have had this effect on humanity for millennia. We have been allowed to consider the phenomenon as substantially new only because we have been trained to forget the actual issues; hatred has been remade as faith was remade before it, it is now always conceived of as utterly pure, absolutely irrational and therefore to be disregarded, often with rudeness.

According to the temper of the times, hatred cannot point to real difficulties with the hated thing, nor can it be taken to indicate real deficiencies in the souls of those who hate, other than that their capacity to hate at all is a defect. From this it follows that humankind as such is perhaps the only worthy object of human contempt. All the more interesting, then, is hatred of Israel, for it is a notable exception to this too, testing the integrity of one of the day’s leading moral principles, one which is the result of long and assiduous cultivation.

The effects of that cultivation express themselves in the character of defenders of Israel, as well as in that of her so-called critics. As we have become largely incapable of regarding Judaism, or any other religion, as truly problematic, since religions have been reduced to magic words, empty rituals and hollow wishes, we conceal from ourselves its merits as well, and the very human problems to which it presents a solution.

Both Flavius Josephus and Alan Dershowitz, for example, living in different ages, on different continents and in different regimes, have been compelled to defend Israel. But Josephus was at least somewhat concerned with the substance of what he sought to defend. He wrote histories of Israel (The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews) while his arguments on its behalf against detractors (Against Apion) were important but relatively minor works. Dershowitz, by contrast, is all defense (The Case for Israel, The Case for Peace, The Advocate’s Devil, The Best Defense, etc.). And, yet, while the essential phenomenon regarding Israel might remain unchanged or largely so, the shades and appearances in which it is expressed are manifold. Serious attempts to understand the matter must then be welcomed for the following reason: it touches upon deep and permanent human problems and it does so, first, by addressing the active and present way in which those problems animate us today.

One of the most notable and important dimensions of the controversies regarding Israel is, fittingly, also one of the least remarked upon with seriousness. It is the proliferation of the controversies themselves. This ever-spreading smoke, behind which there must be fire. But where is the blaze? Is it in the building or is it in the hearts of the men who rush to put it out? And what kind of fire is it, after all? Is it the kind that consumes whatever it touches or the kind that banishes whatever shadows lie before the light it casts?

The subject of Israel arouses anger in so many quarters and that anger is so little understood. That anger flourishes in the East, where anger generally remains vital and yet has so many other manifestly worthwhile objects. But it is also thrives in the West, where anger is so barely tolerated and so rarely felt, where generations have been raised to “hate nothing at all except hatred”, as Bob Dylan put it in his It’s Alright, Ma, (I’m Only Bleeding), which is to hate in a sublimated manner, it cannot be repeated enough, the whole of mankind.  

In his Mishneh Torah, no less than Maimonides emphasizes the earlier Talmudic teaching that, “whoever becomes angry is considered as if he worshipped false gods”. Anger is, in this view, a “foreign power” operating inside of man, from which the Jew is enjoined, in the most severe terms, to seek his liberty. This serves as reminder that our commitments and our indignations with regard to Israel tell us about ourselves, who we are and what we are. The same is also revealing in regard to our civilizational counterparts in the world; it exposes who they are and what they want, in what ways they are deeply the same as us and in what ways they are truly different.

To Be Continued…