Christopher Hitchens on Israel Shahak - The Nation (July 23/30, 2001)

Jim Farmelant farmelantj at juno.com
Mon Jul 16 15:36:05 PDT 2001


MINORITY REPORT | July 23, 2001

by CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

Israel Shahak, 1933-2001

In early June I sat on a panel, in front of a large and mainly Arab

audience, with Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. Our hosts,

the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, had asked for a

discussion of contrasting images of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The

general tempo of the meeting was encouragingly nontribal; there were

many criticisms of Arab regimes and societies, and one of our

co-panelists, Raghida Dergham, had recently been indicted in her

absence by a Lebanese military prosecutor for the offense of sharing a

panel discussion with an Israeli. However, it's safe to say that most of those attending were

aching for a chance to question Friedman in person. He was accused directly at one point

of writing in a lofty and condescending manner about the Palestinian people. To this he

replied hotly and eloquently, saying that he had always believed that "the Jewish people will

never be at home in Palestine until the Palestinian people are at home there."

That was well said, and I hadn't at the time read his then-most-recent column, so I didn't

think to reply. But in that article he wrote that Chairman Arafat, by his endless

double-dealing, had emptied the well of international sympathy for his cause. This is a very

Times-ish rhetoric, of course. You have to think about it for a second. It suggests that

rights, for Palestinians, are not something innate or inalienable. They are, instead, a reward

for good behavior, or for getting a good press. It's hard to get more patronizing than that.

During the first intifada, in the late 1980s, the Palestinians denied themselves the recourse

to arms, mounted a civil resistance, produced voices like Hanan Ashrawi and greatly

stirred world opinion. For this they were offered some noncontiguous enclaves within an

Israeli-controlled and Israeli-settled condominium. Better than nothing, you might say. But

it's the very deal the Israeli settlers reject in their own case, and they do not even live in

Israel "proper." (They just have the support of the armed forces of Israel "proper.") So

now things are not so nice and many Palestinians have turned violent and even--whatever

next?--religious and fanatical. Naughty, naughty. No self-determination for you. And this

from those who achieved statehood not by making nice but as a consequence of some very

ruthless behavior indeed.

I am writing these lines in memoriam for my dear

friend and comrade Dr. Israel Shahak, who died on

July 2. His home on Bartenura Street in Jerusalem

was a library of information about the human rights

of the oppressed. The families of prisoners, the staff

of closed and censored publications, the victims of

eviction and confiscation--none were ever turned

away. I have met influential "civil society"

Palestinians alive today who were protected as

students when Israel was a professor of chemistry at

the Hebrew University; from him they learned never

to generalize about Jews. And they respected him

not just for his consistent stand against discrimination

but also because--he never condescended to them.

He detested nationalism and religion and made no secret of his contempt for the grasping

Arafat entourage. But, as he once put it to me, "I will now only meet with Palestinian

spokesmen when we are out of the country. I have some severe criticisms to present to

them. But I cannot do this while they are living under occupation and I can 'visit' them as a

privileged citizen." This apparently small point of ethical etiquette contains almost the whole

dimension of what is missing from our present discourse: the element of elementary dignity

and genuine mutual recognition.

Shahak's childhood was spent in Nazified Poland, the Warsaw Ghetto and Bergen-Belsen

concentration camp; at the end of the war he was the only male left in his family. He

reached Palestine before statehood, in 1945. In 1956 he heard David Ben-Gurion make a

demagogic speech about the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt, referring to this dirty

war as a campaign for "the kingdom of David and Solomon." That instilled in him the

germinal feelings of opposition. By the end of his life, he had produced a scholarly body of

work that showed the indissoluble connection between messianic delusions and racial and

political ones. He had also, during his chairmanship of the Israeli League for Human and

Civil Rights, set a personal example that would be very difficult to emulate.

He had no heroes and no dogmas and no party allegiances. If he admitted to any

intellectual model, it would have been Spinoza. For Shahak, the liberation of the

Jewish people was an aspect of the Enlightenment, and involved their own

self-emancipation from ghetto life and from clerical control, no less than from ancient

"Gentile" prejudice. It therefore naturally ensued that Jews should never traffic in

superstitions or racial myths; they stood to lose the most from the toleration of such

rubbish. And it went almost without saying that there could be no defensible Jewish excuse

for denying the human rights of others. He was a brilliant and devoted student of the

archeology of Jerusalem and Palestine: I would give anything for a videotape of the

conducted tours of the city that he gave me, and of the confrontation in which he

vanquished one of the propagandist guides on the heights of Masada. For him, the built and

the written record made it plain that Palestine had never been the exclusive possession of

any one people, let alone any one "faith."

Only the other day, I read some sanguinary proclamation from the rabbinical commander

of the Shas party, Ovadia Yosef, himself much sought after by both Ehud Barak and Ariel

Sharon. It was a vulgar demand for the holy extermination of non-Jews; the vilest effusions

of Hamas and Islamic Jihad would have been hard-pressed to match it. The man wants a

dictatorial theocracy for Jews and helotry or expulsion for the Palestinians, and he sees (as

Shahak did in reverse) the connection. This is not a detail; Yosef's government receives an

enormous US subsidy, and his intended victims live (and die, every day) under a Pax

Americana. Men like Shahak, who force us to face these reponsibilities, are naturally rare.

He was never interviewed by the New York Times, and its obituary pages have let pass

the death of a great and serious man. ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj.



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