From: Mermaid . (britannica@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Apr 19 2002 - 23:36:21 MDT
Yea? I *really* *really* wish I had more time right now to discuss this one
fully...but hey!
http://argument.independent.co.uk/regular_columnists/howard_jacobson/story.jsp?story=286912
Think what you like about Israel, but to equate Zionism with Nazism is
simply incendiary
Howard Jacobson
20 April 2002
One thing is not another thing. What makes a thing the thing it is and not
something else is not just a question for artists and intellectuals, it is
the question. Where all things look the same, there is no life of the mind.
More committed to the life of the mind than has always been good for them,
the Jewish people came to understand their faith as exceptional, unlike
other faiths. Though it has been wilfully misinterpreted as pride, the
concept of chosenness, of bearing the burden of selection – choosing to be
chosen – was one of the ways they identified this exceptionalness. Centuries
later the Nazis paid them back in kind. For an exceptional people, an
exceptional fate.
When Jews demur from the word Holocaust each time there is an instance of
man's inhumanity to man, it is not because they think their suffering is
keener, or somehow more pristine, than anyone else's. It is simply that one
thing is not another thing. When next there is an attempt first to slander
and then to wipe out a whole people, to burn away every trace of them and
their beliefs from the face of the earth, to make it as though they never
were and to ensure they never will be again, Jews will accept that Holocaust
is the word.
This is not a species of scholasticism, verbal fastidiousness for its own
sake. If we do not properly describe what a thing is like and not like, we
do not know what it is. It is in the nature of hatred not to know what a
thing is like and not to care. Which is why we say that hatred is blind.
Indeed, one of the signs that hatred is being brewed, in an individual or a
community, is the deliberate wedding of like to unlike. Brutes yoke unlikes
together in haste, enjoying that surge in emotional violence that blurring
all distinctions brings.
Here is why intellectuals, philosophers, artists, poets, are so important to
our wellbeing. By exploring the ways things are different, however much they
may sometimes look the same, by showing us how and why a thing became the
thing it is and not another thing, they help still the undifferentiated
violence of the furious and embittered. Little by little, they bring the
calm of distinctness and individuality back into our lives.
So when the poet Tom Paulin throws himself on the side of those who would
equate Zionism with Nazism, it is his calling as an artist and intellectual
he betrays. He is allowed to think what he likes of Israel. He is allowed to
misread history in the quiet of his Oxford room, if misreading history is
his bag. I am even half inclined to say he is allowed to indulge himself the
dark barbaric satisfaction that comes with saying the unsayable, in this
instance accusing a people who have suffered a grievous wrong of now being
the instigators of it themselves. If he must get high on this psychic
thrill, he must. But he is not allowed to use the word Nazi where nothing
remotely resembling Nazism is afoot.
The systematic defamation leading to the wholesale destruction of another
people who posed no threat, who threw no bombs, who simply were – does he
charge Zionists with that? Gas chambers, euthanasia, experiments on
"degenerates", human soap factories – does he accuse Zionists of those? When
they weren't killing Jews, the Nazis also slaughtered gypsies and
homosexuals – does Paulin know the number of gypsies and homosexuals so far
murdered by Zionists?
Let me be clear: I do not charge Paulin with anti-Semitism. I'm not sure I
even charge him with sensationalism, though I understand why a poet in our
time must grab a headline. What I charge him with is stupidity. He has a
mind and in this instance he has refused to use it. He has chosen to be a
fool.
Nor is he the only one. AN Wilson has been vulturously circling the subject
of Israel for a long time. In his column in last week's Evening Standard, he
swooped. I will not fight him for his dinner. Let him complain that no Jews
were on the pro-Palestinian march in Trafalgar Square last Sunday, when in
fact there were. A man must eat. But a man must also think. And when Wilson
claims that the activity of Israeli troops around the Church of the Nativity
in Bethlehem is "the equivalent of the Taliban destroying Buddhist
sculpture", he ceases to be a thinker.
One thing is not another thing. Central to Taliban theology was the
destruction of all other faiths and all monuments to any aesthetic but their
own. There was to be no other doctrine, no other music, no other conception
of beauty. So where is the "equivalence" of which AN Wilson speaks? Does he
know of a deliberate Israeli clampdown on Christianity and Islam? Can he
show us that Israeli concert halls play only Jewish music and that paintings
by non-Israeli painters are being ripped off gallery walls? Or does he
simply mean that in the course of prosecuting a war of which he does not
approve Israeli soldiers have caused terrible damage, as do all armies when
they fight? I minimise nothing. But one crime is not another crime.
There is something incendiary in Wilson's "equivalence" – accusing Jews of
deliberately desecrating Christian sites. I do not know on what disreputable
journey into his own heart of medieval darkness Wilson has embarked, but you
can always tell when a civilised man wishes to embrace barbarism – things
not alike all start to look the same to him.
_________________________________________________________________
Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Sep 25 2002 - 13:28:46 MDT