The nation of jews...

Grinker grinker at mweb.co.za
Fri Aug 3 12:27:07 PDT 2001



> Nathan said:
>
> >How about adding that a good chunk of my family died in death camps, so I
> >understand why all this stupid reductionist talk about imperialism and
> >Israel just misses the point of why Israel mattered for a lot of folks.

Todd wrote:
> You're talking about terror, Nathan? Not wanting to be in the situation
> that lots of Jews were/are in? Yep, understandable. I've been reading
> Peter C. Newman's book The Establishment, and he gives a
layman's/reporter's
> psychological assessment of capitalists and CEOs; he comes up with just
that
> point: that one reason capitalists do what they do is sheer terror of what
> would happen to them if they didn't (don't worry: Newman doesn't get
> mawkishly sentimental for them one bit).

Does anyone else find this as offensive as I do? Is this supposed to be an analogy between the subjective outlook of "capitalists and CEOs" and that of desparate Jews in post holocaust Europe? Are you saying that Jews had a similar outlook to your average (modern) bourgeois?

Are you not aware that by the '30s many European Jews didn't even consider themselves Jewish? That, as somebody once said, social conditions and later Nazism in Europe meant that even long-assimilated Jews were "squeezed out of the pores" of European society and held up for public scorn, isolation and repressive measures?

What alternative did many Jews have but to go to Palestine? Do you not know that the Western world was closed to most of them? Or that Jews who returned to Eastern Europe faced yet further pogroms when they tried to reclaim their houses and property? What were they expected to do when a Jewish state (undeniably on stolen land) was all that was on offer after all they'd been through? That this involved a sordid compromise with Western countries which somehow didn't have the space for them on their own soil was something they just had to put up with.

This was the "bloody trap" that Trotsky wrote so eloquently about so long ago (go and read it for god's sake). He also wrote that an important consequence of the terrible compromise made in accepting a Jewish state solution would be yet more anti-Semitism. There's a distinct whiff of it in the air:


>After The Holocaust what Jew wouldn't want to get out of Dodge, and find
peace of mind by being surrounded by like-minded folks.

"Like minded folks"? Often the only common characteristic of these people was that they were identified as Jews by others who had until recently slandered, expropriated, assaulted and killed them on a production line basis.


>I just wish they hadn't decided to take over where they did, and helped
start that widening pool of blood they're standing in.

Who had the power to "decide"? I wish that there had been some alternative.

Russell



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