There are Jews who justify potential anti-Jewish violence. And there are those engaged in the contemporary anti-Zionist effort to deny Israel its right to self-defense and to assure the state’s future from Arab terror and the Iran-led “ring of fire” strangulation. This needs to be understood in historical context.
A new book published last month, The Ideological Lie, has its title based on a 1974 manifesto by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. The Soviet dissident called on his readers to evade lies and to walk out of a meeting, lecture or play as soon as he hears the speaker utter “a lie, ideological drivel or shameless propaganda.” Its author, Daniel J. Mahoney, deals with how “modern revolutionaries replaced the age-old distinction between good and evil with the illusory distinction between progress and reaction.” In his perception, “in the name of progress, evil was called goodness, and goodness in the form of wise restraint was labeled evil, backward, racist, colonialist, etc.”
I am unaware of anyone walking out of the Kneecaps sets at the Coachella Festival. Nor those of Saint Levant. For sure, the atmosphere of lies about Israel, Zionism and the situation in Gaza’s Hamastan would have found a home at such a venue. After all, if Harvard, Brown, Cornell, the University of California, Berkeley, and other locations of academic wisdom have become theaters of the absurd, halls of pop music and theaters are surely not immune to false messaging and the ideological lies being spread.
(As a historical aside, the poet Uri Tzvi Greenberg published a poem in early 1924, just four months after arriving in Eretz Yisrael from Berlin. In it, he describes a young chalutz, or “pioneer,” hungry and weary in his tent after a hard day’s work. He is writing to his mother in Europe. Despite the deprivation from which he suffers, he informs her of the beauty of the homeland, flowing with milk and honey, and of the moon over the vineyards. He will not tell her of his poverty, his pains—that he is burned by the day’s heat and at night, he will wash his one shirt for the next day. No, he will write her a “sacred lie” of how all is well and good.)
Israel today is suffering from an onslaught of ideological lies originating, in the main, from an academia captured by a new “true believer” sect. Israel, the state and its Zionism, the philosophy and evidence that provides Jews with their sens de l’existence, in Ludwig Stein’s term (the sociologist who saw that the first stage of social evolution was the period of community) are denied as being possible or justified. Stein saw in the prophetic-biblical dynamic world view of Judaism, with its idea of messianic redemption, utopian society, and the perfectibility of man that lies in the future and not in the remote past, as the ideal of a motive force of progress, as Jacob Haberman asserts. Those touting anti-colonialism place Zionism outside the pale.
What one German observer described as the “devastation of university spaces” from Berlin to London to New York is the result of a quarter of a century of the conquest of academia. Pro-Palestine professors who generated Middle East Studies courses worked to corrupt the minds of students with a warped thinking framework, not to mention a purposeful dearth of facts and either hidden or corrupted historical narrative from the opposing side.
Arguments steeped in propaganda have become irrefutable truths. Misrepresentations have become rational perspectives. Nonsense claims have become principled credibility. Moreover, the participation of Jews in this campaign—from Peter Beinart to Judith Butler, from Naomi Klein to Norman Finkelstein and so forth, as if to provide an imprint of validity—brought to my mind an inverse of the post-World War II Eastern Bloc show trials during 1948 to 1954.
Many of the trials’ targets, as with the Jews accused along with Hungary’s László Rajk, Rudolf Slánský trial in Czechoslovakia, and others in Poland and Germany, included the historic national characteristics of the Jewish people and their national liberation movement: Zionism. There was also the infamous Doctors’ Plot in Russia in 1953 that was planned as an excuse for the mass deportation of Jews of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which would have led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews.
The “crimes” included disloyalty, cosmopolitan imperialism, Zionist espionage and organizing to overthrow the democratic state order, all based on fabricated charges. For Stalinists, Jews were responsible for every reactionary force possible, including capitalism, imperialism, even antisemitism and Nazism. This framework, with an alteration of a term or two, can apply today’s charges by the “ruling ideological elites” against Israel and Zionism.
For example, Communist prosecutors claimed, ridiculously, that a “Zionist-Imperialist” summit had taken place in Washington, D.C., in April 1947 with President Harry S. Truman, undersecretary of state Dean Acheson, former treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett in attendance. The prosecution charged that the defendants were acting to commit espionage and sabotage against Czechoslovakia for the United States in exchange for American support for Israel. We are reading similar fabrications at this moment.
This system’s ideological lies replicated themselves in the 1970s when the USSR began an ongoing “anti-Zionist” campaign over the years, which was actually very antisemitic. The themes were Zionism equals racism; Zionism equals imperialism; Zionism equals South African apartheid; Israel is the USA’s “watchdog” in the Middle East; and Zionism itself is complicit with, or even promotes, antisemitism. These themes and parallel ones are being repeated at this time, prominently trumpeted by Jews, Jews of Jewish Voice for Peace, T’ruah and all the other radical progressive turncoats.
During his court interrogation in Czechoslovakia, prominent Israeli leftist Mordechai Oren was asked if he had met two individuals. When he denied meeting them and then raised the point that, even if he had, it would not have been a crime. He was then informed, “He’s a Jew, and you too, and both of you are Zionists.” Jews at Columbia, the University of California, Los Angeles, and many other American campuses, as well as at universities in Europe, found themselves accused as “Zionists” and physically assaulted, berated, banned and besieged without trials.
An item at the Babylon Bee satire site may, at first, appear just simply funny. It reads: “Sad: This Guy Spent $500k on Ivy League Education and All He Knows How to Do is Chant ‘Free Palestine.’” But it actually is a sad reflection on America’s universities as well as many abroad. It also sums up the danger of progressive, liberal and woke ideology: the shutting down of the American brain with the assistance of Jews who have adopted an apostasy of rejecting Jewish national identity.