Remora

Among the more remarkable purveyors of nonsense about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, surprisingly, Ron Rosenbaum. His Edgy Enthusiast column in the NYObserver has gone over the edge. We'd like to remind Mr. Rosenbaum that Enthusiast was a code word, in the enlightenment, for Bigot. The underground work of connotation is slow, but apparently sure.

In two columns of invective and malignly erroneous analysis, on April 15th andApril 29th, Rosenbaum has been going on about the second holocaust, an idea he cops from that great social commentator, Philip Roth. The idea is that in Europe and the MiddleEast, the dark machinery is clanking that will be put in place to eliminate Jews wholesale. This explains the sympathy of the Europeans for the PLO, and their blindness to the David-like qualities of the present Israeli Commander inChief, Sharon (a man of peace, as our own commander in chief has admiringly opined).

Now to present a thesis like this, Rosenbaum has to overcome a few little problems. One, a big one it would seem, is that Jews per se are not being targeted en masse by any European government or faction -- immigrants are. And guess what? Those immigrants are Turks, they are Algerians, they are Africans, they are Bosnians -- in short, they are the Evil ones, the ones condemned to wallow in the cachots of American prisons as material witnesses, the ones with names like Muhammed. You know the ones I'm talking about. As for the anti-Semitism of Middle Eastern countries -- here, I believe, RR is on firmer ground. Not being a speaker of Arabic, I don't know how to judge the reports that filter in from Egypt, or from Saudi Arabia, and get distributed by right wingers like the ineffable Krauthammer -- reports that speak of widespread anti-Jewish motifs in Arabic media. However, I am inclined to think this is true. You don't have to go far on the web to find Anti-zionist sites that are really anti-Semitic.

However, it is important to note something right away about this. RR's second holocaust has already happened. In Morocco, Yemen, Iraq, and numerous other Middle Eastern countries, pogroms against the Jews broke out in the fifties, and many of these so called Oriental Jews decamped for Israel. This was a great crime, but there's been little attention paid to it. In fact, LI is so smart about these events because we've been reading a lot of books about Israel's history. Those books necessarily mentioned the influx of Yemeni, Iraqui, Syrian, and other Jews into Israel. Standard books about the fifties that don't focus on Israel, however, ignore this displacement. Why? Well, face it, America was allied with many of those places back then. And since the fifties, Israel has maintained disgraceful relations with vilely anti-semitic regimes, from South Africa to Argentina to Morocco. This strategy of calling attention to anti-semitism when it is convenient to do so has rather lessened the credit of the strategy of calling attention to anti-semitism.

What happened in the fifties wasn't, we should say, a holocaust. There is something cheap about this baker's dozen notion of the holocaust. If Mr. Rosenbaum can't distinguish the Holocaust from a pogrom, we can. We can also distinguish the Holocaust from the torching of synagogues by right wing punks; and we can distinguish it from the murder of Israelis by Palestinian suicide bombers, or bombers, period.

But let's grant, for the moment, this truly disgusting degradation of the word Holocaust. Rosenbaum�s thesis is a pretty simple one. That an anti-Zionist can be anti-semitic means, in Rosenbaum's world, that an opponent of Israel, at any time, on any of its policies, is necessarily anti-Semitic. This sounds like exaggeration on LI's part. Surely nobody is that over the edgy. But read, oh read this: RR simultaneously shedding crocodile tears over the Palestinians and wishing them, well, a form of endless night. Call this the Cherokee solution, after Andrew Jackson's decisive mode of dealing with those Native American terrorists in the Southeast:

"I feel bad for the plight of the Palestinians; I believe they deserve a state.But they had a state: They were part of a state, a state called Jordan, that declared war on the state of Israel, that invaded it in order to destroy it�and lost the war. There are consequences to losing a war, and the consequences should at least in part be laid at the feet of the three nations that soughtand lost the war. One sympathizes with the plight of the Palestinians, but one wonders what the plight of the Israelis might have been had they lostthat war. One doesn�t envision spacious homes and ping-pong for their leaders."

It is a plight those Palestinians are in. Always a plight. Have any people been so plighted in the press before? It isn't a crime, it isn't a ghetto, it isn't civil servitude, it isn'tthe denial of the right to property, political sufferage, and all the rest ofit. It is a plight. The phrase Palestinian plight is beginning to sound like the phrase, Jewish problem, in the thirties. It is, well, disturbing.

But not so disturbing as that idyll of spacious houses. Hmm. Gaza? Are we talking about the spacious houses of Jenin? Of Hebron? The spacious houses of those wonderful Palestinian resorts in Southern Lebanon?

Far be it from me to doubt the sincerity, the aching wonder, of RR's bad feelings about the Palestinians. I'm sure it makes him lose his appetite, sometimes. I am sure that the first thing he wants to do, when he goes to Israel, is contemplate the squalor of the Gaza strip. I'm sure I have no gauge to measure RR's heart. But we do have some rough gauges to measure his hypocrisy. For instance: did you notice how cutely shedding tears over the Palestinians edges into taking a position indistinguishable from that of the most right wing of Sharon's cabinet ministers, Ephraim Eitam? Instead of simply saying, let's bus em out, no, there's the infinite pity on these losers of a war. Like our Commander in Chief, RR is a compassionate nationalist on this issue. His heart is full of love. And his advice is full of extermination. In the end, what RR is advocating is: the expulsion of all Palestinians to Jordan. It is a more in sorrow than in anger kind of thing. It is a far far better thing I do than I have ever done before kind of thing. It is a well, it is a dirty job, but somebody has to do it kind of thing. And to those who find it too dirty -- those hoodlums, those distributors of blood libels who dare question the great Sharon's account of the humane treatment of Jenin scum -- well, we know their motives.

But just when you thought the curtain was going down on this kind of farce, it rises again in the second column on the Second Holocaust. Here, here is the spot where RR truly takes leave of his senses, taking the position that Le Pen is campaigning chiefly against the Jews. This is rather like thinking that the KKK? You know, in the sixties, in Mississippi? They were really focused on the Jews. The stuff about the negroes? That was just, well, collateral.

It is hard to describe just how silly RR's idea is. The "'raus 'raus" in Le Pen's speeches is not, as educated readers of this post know, directed against the Jews. Le Pen is no doubt a Jew hater. Jew hating wouldn't get him the percentage that he received. No, what gets him the votes is his Arab hating. His immigrant hating. It isn't the synagogues Le Pen wants to burn, at least not at first. It is the mosques. But here's RR, going out of his mind again:

"And now Le Pen. Its seems as if the mask is coming off European anti-Semitism right and left. I don�t want to say I told you so aboutEuropean�specifically French�anti-Semitism (see my April 15 column on the rootsof the Second Holocaust). It doesn�t afford any satisfaction to have one�s darkest imaginings confirmed.

"But when I heard the news about Le Pen, I was thinking about Amos Oz, theIsraeli novelist and longtime dovish advocate of living side-by-side in peace with a Palestinian state, and how he had been driven by events of the past fewweeks to ask the question (in The Nation), "Would an end to occupationterminate the Muslim holy war against Israel?" This is, of course, the key question that the anti-Israel Euro-idiots don�t get, and here Amos Oz,peace-loving man of letters and friend of many Palestinians, says that "If, despite simplistic vision, the end of occupation will not result in peace," he favors war. "Not a war for our full occupancy of the HolyLand"�he�s against the occupation of the West Bank�"but a war for ourright to live � in part of the land. A just war, a no-alternative war. A war we will win."

RR goes on to doubt the "we will win" line -- without alluding to Israel's nuclear arsenal. I guess the fact that Israel has a greater nuclear weapon delivery capacity than, say, Britain, doesn't matter to RR, who is up there on a much higher, even a metaphysical level. Facts, as one of our great leaders once said, are stupid things. And who needs stupid things to interfere with the higher truths? Among which, for RR, is that it is high time that Jordan was for the Jordanians. Especially those nasty ones in the West Bank and Gaza. Ship em back, but don't forget to shed tears over their dispossession.

I don't know. LI feels bad, too. In general.