Kreisky’s Children
by Dexter Van Zile (January 2010)
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The irony is palpable. Kreisky portrayed his fellow Jews and Israeli officials as fascists while protecting bona fide Nazis on his cabinet and downplaying the sins of Yassir Arafat. In short, Kreisky helped short-circuit the collective intellect and conscience of the Austrian people as they contended with their own past and as they confronted the strategic and moral realities of life in the Middle East.
It Happens Here
[14]and by portraying Israel as a monstrous nation intent on genocide or ethnic cleansing and the Jewish state as the cause of most, if not all of the problems in the Middle East.[15]
By proffering this narrative, these Jews achieve, thanks to their non-Jewish allies, prominence and influence they were previously denied by their fellow Jews. In order to legitimize this exchange, these disaffected Jews portray their newfound Christian allies as morally, spiritually, and intellectually superior to the retrograde and hard-hearted (i.e., mainstream) Jews they condemn.
In addition to being the recipients of naked flattery as a result of this exchange, non-Jews experience the frisson of hearing and affirming (and the privilege of repeating) anti-Jewish rhetoric that has been rendered acceptable because it has come out of the mouth of a Jew. It also inoculates them against charges of anti-Semitism and gives them leave to ignore threats or hostility to Jews as unimportant.
Jeff Halper and Mark Ellis
If someone like Patrick Buchanan or David Duke were to speak in such terms, their commentary would be dismissed out of hand as anti-Semitic. (In fact, the Jews-as-Nazis trope is listed by European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia [EUMC] as one example of how anti-Semitism can manifest itself in public discourse.) Nevertheless, when Ellis and Halper used this rhetoric at Sabeel conferences in 2005 and 2007, they enjoyed the applause of large audiences of Christians.
Mark Braverman
event in Iowa, have ignored the teachings of the prophet Amos who warned ancient Israelites of impending punishment for their sins.
During his presentation, Braverman invoked Mark 10 from the New Testament which recounts the story of the young man who asks of Jesus what he must do to earn eternal life. In response, Jesus tells the young man to sell all he owned and give his money to the poor.
factual and moral) of the Goldstone Report, allowing suicide bombers from the West Bank free passage into Jerusalem, denying the overt anti-Semitism embraced by groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and ultimately, and abandoning their commitment to the maintenance of a sovereign Jewish state. For Braverman, Jewish self-effacement and pacifism in the face of Arab and Muslim hostility is not only a religious act, but a strategic gambit.
From the mouths of Christians or Muslims, such magical thinking would elicit guffaws from Jews who fled Europe after the Holocaust or from oppression in Arab and Muslim countries. But when such a message flies from mouth of a Jew into the ears of Christians, it is the reenactment of great acts of prophecy from the Old Testament. Referencing Amos, Braverman looks into the hearts of Israel and American Jews and sees intransigence, indifference and moral blindness:
Neve Gordon
The Kerem Shalom, Karni, Nahal Oz and Erez crossings operated today in order to enable humanitarian movement and convey humanitarian goods in to Gaza.
suicide bombers. (Jerusalem Post, Sept. 25, 2009).
Amos and MLK however, did not stand in solidarity with those who lauded the murder of their fellow citizens. They also got their facts straight.
Zionists are the true manifestation of Satan,” Nevertheless, Silverstein is more offended by those who insist that the Iranian regime has ill-intent toward Israel than he is by Iranian leaders who express this intent.
The contempt with which Hamas holds Israel and Jews is also readily apparent in a statement issued by the organization on the 60th anniversary of the UN vote to partition the British Mandate into a Jewish and Arab state. According to Haaretz, a Hamas spokesperson called on the UN to rescind the 60-year-old vote:
This from the man who Silverstein hopes will bring Hamas into a new era of reconciliation.
Haaretz, Hamas has created a website similar to Youtube (called AqsaTube) that features information about jihad. Haaretz reports:
Oslo Syndrome
In response to this enmity, American and Israeli Jews sometimes embrace the belief that Israeli policies as are the sole source of the conflict, thereby giving Israelis the power to end the conflict unilaterally through self-reform and peace offers. Levin writes:
Both the self-deprecating and the grandiose distortions of reality have a common source: A wish to believe Israel to be in control of profound stressful circumstances over which it, unfortunately, has no real control. Genuine peace will come to the Middle East when the Arab world, by far the dominant party in the region, perceives such a peace as in its interest. Israeli policies have, in fact, very little impact on Arab perceptions in this regard, much less than the dynamics of domestic politics in the Arab states and of inter-Arab rivalries. Israeli strength may deter Arab assaults and fend them off when deterrence fails and assaults occur, but it cannot force peace. This is a painful reality that does cast its shadow over life in Israel. Some Israelis are so pained by it that they prefer to take refuge in delusions of Israeli culpability, the subtext of which is that the proper self-reforms and concessions by Israel can and would suffice to win peace, despite all evidence to the contrary.[17]
The same habits of mind and patterns of speech are clearly evident in the commentary of the writers detailed above. This explains why they are so often welcomed at Sabeel events in the U.S. where Israel and its supporters are portrayed as the cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict and where the religious and ideological component of Arab hostility toward Israel and Jews are downplayed or ignored altogether.
Conclusion
One impact of this exchange between disaffected Jews and their non-Jewish supporters in the U.S. (and Europe) is to help render elites in the West unable to name and confront the threat posed by the authoritarian and expansionist ideology espoused by political and clerical elites in the Middle East and by their apologists in the rest of the world.
By telling the story they do, these Jewish commentators have given false and unreasonable credence that it is Jewish sovereignty (and ultimately, Jewish identity) that represents a threat to world peace.
In fact, it is intolerance toward religious and ethnic minorities of all stripes, Jews especially, that is the source of suffering in the Middle East.
Societies that embrace such a narrative cannot long endure.
Dexter Van Zile is the Christian Media Analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).
[1] Robert Solomon Wistrich, “Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism: The Case of Bruno Kreisky,” Analysis of Current Trends in Antisemitism, The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, (No. 30, 2007), page 2.
[2] Ibid, page 10.
[3] Ibid, page 10.
[4] Ibid, page 10.
[5] Ibid, page 19.
[6] Ibid, page 19.
[7] Fay Willey and Lilan J. Kubic, “Digging up the Past,” Newsweek, Dec. 1, 1975.
[8] Wistrich, 2007, page 21.
[9] Ibid, page 2.
[10] Ibid, page 19.
[11] Ibid, page 21. Wistrich also reports that one poll taken at the end of 1975 “almost 60 percent of the Austria population supported Kreisky’s position at the end of 1975 as against only 3 percent who were in favour of Wiesenthal, with the rest either neutral or unconcerned.”
[12] Robert Solomon Wistrich, “The Kreisky Phenomenon: A Reassessment,” in Austrians and Jews in the Twentieth Century, Robert Wistrich, ed,, (St. Martin’s Press, 1992), p. 243.
[13] Wistrich, 2007, page 25.
[14] Bernard Harrison, The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel and Liberal Opinion (Roman and Littlefield, 2006), pp. 27-28.
[15] Bernard Harrison, describes the “idées reçues [about the Arab-Israeli conflict] among educated people in the universities and elsewhere” as follows: “[T]hat the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the most important international issue facing the world today; that the problem is wholly the fault of Israel, and that no responsibility whatsoever attaches either to the Palestinians themselves or to the Arab states; that Israel by its nature is a “racist” or “apartheid” state; that the crimes committed by the Israelis against the Palestinians far exceed the crimes committed by the Nazis; that although the Israelis use the sympathy generated by the Holocaust both to justify the existence of Israel and to blind people to the iniquity of their treatment of the Palestinians, they have not only “learned nothing from” the Holocaust, but have become Nazis, or worse than Nazis, in their turn, and have turned Israel into a Nazi state; that all Jews are alike in supporting Israel and being ready to justify any act of any Israeli government; and that the “the Jews” are either plotting, or are in the process of carrying out, a “Holocaust”—that is to say, genocide—against the Palestinians.” (Harrison, 2006, page 7.)
[16] The text of this letter appeared on page 81 of the September/October 2003 issue of Church & Society published by the Presbyterian Church (USA).)
[17] Kenneth Levin, The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of aPeople Under Seige (Smith and Krause, 2005),page xv.
[18] Ibid, page XI.
[19] “The inclination to retreat to delusions of transgression, and of salvation through self-reform and concessions, is common, even endemic, within communities under chronic siege.” Oslo Syndrome, page XVI.
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