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.