First, Survive

Ruth Wisse’s extraordinary book “Jews and Power” has produced an extraordinary review by Edward Alexander in the new issue of the Claremont Review of Books.  The review is entitled “First, Survive.”

Emancipation in
Europe had its unanticipated perils.  Modern Jews were disappointed to find that the replacement of one-man autocracies and systems of state censorship by elected assemblies, the popular press, and other democratic institutions actually reduced Jewish influence and left them in many respects worse off than before.  With kings toppled from their thrones, the new Hamans appealed to the citizenry, often with great success. . . .

By the end of the 19th century the new anti-Semitism, culminating in the Dreyfus Affair, the dress rehearsal for the Nazi movement, had become “the most effective political ideology in
Europe.”  It provided European politicians with a simple explanation for whatever was going wrong:  revolution, psychoanalysis, pornography, moral turpitude.

This pan-European campaign against the Jews as the cause of all misfortunes foreshadowed in several ways today’s “new anti-Semitism” that fixates on Israel, not least in employing the scam which claims that Jewish responses to the campaign of defamation are proof of just how much power Jews do wield and how they use it to “stifle” all “criticism” of
Israel. . . .

The “Return to Zion” represented both a break with the old politics of adaptation and a continuation of it; a belated recognition of the need for self-defense and a persisting Jewish inability to see themselves through the eyes of their enemies; a rescue of the Jews from their status as a pariah people and a discovery that the pariah people has become the pariah nation.

But even those Zionist leaders who managed to acquire something of a goyishe kop, like Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion, could not foresee that the Arab and Muslim countries would make anti-Zionism into a way of life, and the Palestinian Arabs into a kind of anti-nation deriving their entire meaning and purpose from the goal of destroying Israel. 

Nor did they foresee that the Diaspora strategy of accommodation could take its deadliest form in Zion itself, in the strategy of yielding contiguous territory to enemies dedicated to Israel’s destruction, financing and arming their forces in the hope of conciliating them and gaining security. 

Alexander calls it “the ultimate expression of ‘moral solipsism’” — an “injunction to behave decently that disregards your enemy’s intention to remove you from the world” and a “peculiarly Jewish affliction that Wisse in an earlier book defined as ‘the Jewish moral strut.’”

This is a short excerpt from a review that should be read in its entirety.