Professor Ruth Wisse: The Arab War Against the Jews

Mike L.

{Cross-Posted at Geoffff's Joint and the Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers.}

Harvard Professor of Yiddish and Literary Studies, Ruth Wisse, is the author of the very important work, Jews and Power.  I've put a recent video of Professor Wisse on the right side-bar of Israel Thrives and will leave it there for a week or so.  I would very much encourage you guys to give her a close listen because her view is both pristine and correct.  This is someone who is not the least bit muddled in her thinking on the Long Arab War Against the Jews.

This conflict is not a conflict between equals.  It is an aggression from the much larger Arab-Muslim population in the Middle East toward their former dhimmis and slaves.  It represents a hatred toward pluralism in that part of the world by the Arab majority and the refusal to accept the legitimacy of another people on their own land.

She argues, correctly, that anti-Zionism is actually worse than anti-Semitism because it incorporates all that anti-Semitism is while expanding it to deny Jewish sovereignty and Jewish self-defense on the land where Jews historically came from.

She also maintians that the organization of politics around hatred for the Jew within the Muslim Middle East, as well as within the international left, is not really about the Jews, at all, but about opposition to liberal democracy.  The Jewish State of Israel is merely a proxy.  It is a fashionable target through which opposition to liberal democracy, and therefore the United States, organizes itself.

One thing is certain, if political anti-Semitism, which is the very definition of anti-Zionism, means anything it means portraying Jews as a villain, either as Jews, individually, or in the collective, for the purpose of building political bridges with others around a common hatred.

My problem with the international left, and with "progressive Zionists," the political movements that I come out of, is that they accept the fundamental notion of Jewish guilt upon which the entire ideological structure of political anti-Zionist anti-Semitism is built.

In this way, whatever their best intentions, they nonetheless promote the kind of hostility toward us that results in violence and mass killings and war.

Until we recognize that we are not guilty of the charges leveled against us (and we aren't) then we can never convince anyone else of this truth and therefore we can never relieve ourselves of this perpetual hostility.

If "as-a-Jew" you tend to think that the Jews of the Middle East, via the government of Israel, is persecuting the Arabs under an imperialistic "Occupation" then you are promoting hatred toward us based on false grounds.  There is no "Occupation."  There is 6 million Jews surrounded by 400 million Arabs and those Jews want nothing so much in this world other than to be left the hell alone.

What you call the "Occupation" is nothing other than the means of an historically abused minority to finally protect itself from a much larger and hostile majority population in a part of the world where, outside of Israel, itself, very few people share your alleged values of "social justice" and "human rights."