|
bb57dc7
|
Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where--as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen--even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings. I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest--if they were lucky--or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. Jerusalem: that place of blood since remote antiquity. Jerusalem, over which the British and French and Russians had fought a foul war in the Crimea, , on the matter of which Christian Church could command the keys to some 'holy sepulcher.' Jerusalem, where the anti-Semite Balfour had tried to bribe the Jews with the territory of another people in order to seduce them from Bolshevism and continue the diplomacy of the Great War. Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked. It certainly made a warped appeal to my sense of history.
|
|
war
history
christianity
ancestry
antisemitism
arabs
armageddon
arthur-balfour
bedouin
bolshevism
britain
colonialism
crimea
crimean-war
democracy
diplomacy
ethnic-cleansing
fanaticism
france
free-speech
house-arrest
israel
jerusalem
jews
leftism
london
palestine
palestinians
persecution
raimonda-tawil
ramallah
religious-extremism
russia
territory
world-war-i
zealotry
philip-roth
secularism
oppression
torture
|
Christopher Hitchens |
|
d9ccef5
|
There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don't much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti-Jewish fascism comes again to the Christian world--or more probably comes at us via the Muslim world--I already consider it an obligation to resist it wherever I live. I would detest myself if I fled from it in any direction. Leo Strauss was right. The Jews will not be 'saved' or 'redeemed.' (Cheer up: neither will anyone else.) They/we will always be in exile whether they are in the greater Jerusalem area or not, and this in some ways is as it should be. They are, or we are, as a friend of Victor Klemperer's once put it to him in a very dark time, condemned and privileged to be 'a seismic people.' A critical register of the general health of civilization is the status of 'the Jewish question.' No insurance policy has ever been devised that can or will cover this risk.
|
|
christianity
christendom
intermarriages
jewish-question
law-of-return
leo-strauss
mosaic-law
nuremberg-laws
victor-klemperer
exile
religious-conversions
civilisation
christians
israeli-palestinian-conflict
muslims
atheism
fascism
honour
islam
redemption
ancestry
antisemitism
israel
jerusalem
|
Christopher Hitchens |
|
99b7624
|
It is almost impossible to overemphasize the importance with which ancestry is held in the Middle East and North Africa.
|
|
middle-east
ancestry
|
Tahir Shah |
|
88a6770
|
The precise ancestry of a black drug dealer or cop killer is irrelevant. His blackness predicts and explains his crime. He reinforces the racist presumption. It is only when that presumption is questioned that a fine analysis of ancestry is invoked. Frederick Douglass was an ordinary nigger while working the fields. But as a famed abolitionist, it was often said that his genius must derive from his white half.
|
|
racism
mixed-ancestry
white-supremacy
frederick-douglass
obama
ancestry
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
b1eba03
|
I have had my mother's wing of my genetic ancestry analyzed by the tracing service and there it all is: the arrow moving northward from the African savannah, skirting the Mediterranean by way of the Levant, and passing through Eastern and Central Europe before crossing to the British Isles. And all of this knowable by an analysis of the cells on the inside of my mouth. I almost prefer the more rambling and indirect and journalistic investigation, which seems somehow less... deterministic.
|
|
history
determinism
british-isles
central-europe
eastern-europe
genealogy
genetics
investigation
levant
mediterranean-sea
national-geographic
savanna
sub-saharan-africa
journalism
ancestry
|
Christopher Hitchens |