As one who advocates formally and informally for Israel, I have heard the full gamut of misconceptions and slanders that are aired by those opposed to the Jewish state. Over time, my skin has thickened; people can throw whatever baloney they want my way.
Except… there is still one anti-Israel argument that makes my jaw drop. And it is one that is made with unfortunate frequency. It is the “they-of-all-people” argument: the suggestion that the Jews, having faced extraordinary persecution, should know better than anyone not to be oppressors.
Put aside for a moment that the “oppression” which proponents of this argument are accusing Israel of committing is usually imaginary. When directed by gentiles towards Jews, the “they-of-all-people” argument is in its very essence so fundamentally ill-judged and unjust, and voiced with such a breathtaking lack of self-awareness, that my spirit flags when I hear it.
Where to begin in response? The heroic Howard Jacobson made a fine start when he proposed that “they of all people” is the natural successor of Holocaust denial. He wrote that the argument leaves the Jewish people doubly damned: to the Holocaust itself and to elevated moral scrutiny as a result of it.
I agree, and I would go further. I contend that, as a result of the Holocaust and what preceded it, it is we gentiles who should know better. The Holocaust followed centuries of slander, persecution, violence and murder committed by gentiles against Jews. So it is not you who have an increased responsibility to behave morally, but us.
For instance, something that we gentiles should know better than to do is lazily accuse Jewish people, or the Jewish state itself, of any misdemeanour. We have seen what centuries of slander against the Jewish people led to during the 1930s and ’40s. We see the hatred, heartbreak and bloodshed that such anti-Jewish libels continue to provoke, particularly in the Middle East.
Yet much of the world still continues to delight in damning Israel with indecent haste. From Al Dura (the false claim that Israeli forces murdered a boy in Gaza) to Jenin, from the Goldstone Report to the Gaza flotilla; time and again the world has found Israel guilty of a particular crime before all the evidence was available. When the full picture emerged and exonerated Israel it was too late to undo the damage. We gentiles, of all people, should know better.
It is also us, of all people, who should know better than to expect Israel to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat alone.
The world’s ceremonies and gestures of regret over what happened in the Holocaust would carry an increased weight of sincerity were they to be matched with robust support for Israel as the countdown to a nuclear-armed Iran, whose leader denies the Holocaust while promising to commit a second one by wiping out the Jewish state, continues.
World leaders should be sincerely standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel’s government as it decides what to do, not dawdling on the sidelines, waiting to wag their collective, condescending finger yet again.
Let us strip the “they-of-all-people” argument down to its very basics: gentiles telling Jews that we killed six million of your people and that as a result it is you, not us, who have lessons to learn; that it is you, not us, who need to clean up your act. It is an argument of atrocious, spiteful insanity. Do not accept it; turn it back on those who offer it. For it is us, not you, who should know better.
(The above is my latest column for the Jewish Chronicle) Follow me on Twitter.
Powerful article. Thanks. Hadn’t thought of it like that, but you’re right.
Yes, Chas, that’s one well expressed rebuke to the “anti-Zionists”, but it applies as well to the Jewish anti-Zionists pretty much as well.
Thank you Chas. You couldn’t have expressed any more clearly exactly how I feel.
I could not agree more. This is best thing you have written.
Cheers Chas – spot on !
I find the “they-of-all-people” argument is often coupled with the “after-all-they’ve-suffered” argument. In other words,
“We expect you Jews to behave better because you’ve suffered. We can’t expect the Palestinians to behave decently because they’ve suffered.”
And yet they’re totally oblivious to the glaring contradiction.
Superb article! This should be rquired reading, especially for ‘as-a-Jew’ critics of Israel and Christian boycotters of Jewish settlements in the disputed territories.
Really good piece Chas – thank you for writing it.
Welcome back Chas! Oh so well said.
I am speechless! I do not know where to begin to thank you for this blog. You being a Gentile and having stated what you did and how you did it is truly encouraging.
Today marks the saddest day of the year for Jews. It is called Tisha B’Av. It is a day in Jewish history marred by many tragedies. However, having read your blog this evening, has raised my hopes that a better future is possible when there are people like you with the insights, vision and wisdom to help build it.
Hi Chas, it’s ‘Simon’ here. As a proud gentile, I do actually know better. Your obsequious philosemitism is truly getting the better of you. You’re pushing the Jewish victimhood number to its limit this time. Sure, the ‘they of all people’ line is offensive. Why? because it is patronising and innaccurate. The jews have by no means always been passive victims and as God’s chosen, they indeed should be standing on the moral high ground as an example to the world. But they have failed to do that. And throughout their history it’s always been the same story. Just consider all those prophets berating them and predicting dire consequences. Did they listen? Well, they sawed poor old Isaiah in half for his trouble. And if any prophet turns up today reprimanding Israel for its misdemeanours and sins, they’d hound him out of town I’m sure.
You seem to think Jewish history started in 70 AD…yes that’s AD…Anno Domini..after Christ..bollocks to political correctness. Have you read the Tanakh? The Jews regard it as history. Well in that case they have a lot to answer for. Or be proud of. Depending on how fascist and supremacist you want to be. The first genocides in recorded history were perpetrated by the Jews….they wiped out the Canaanites, Midianites, Amalekites, and plenty of other tribes, urged on by Moses.. and oh I nearly forgot, God himself. Thousands and thousands of men, women and children…slaughtered.When Joshua, after sacking and murdering the population of Jericho,and then returning from Hebron to say he killed the men and spared the women and children, Moses told him to go back and finish the job. Elijah murdered all 480 of the Baal prophets for no other reason other than the fact that they didn’t believe in his God. At the end of the Book of Esther, she solicits the mass murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children. This part of the story is conveniently ignored every year during Purim, which is a gentile hate fest in disguise anyway. The Hasmoneans (including the oh so heroic Maccabees who mercilessly persecuted and killed any collaborators with the Greek Seleucids…..Jews of the time who may have actually yearned for freedom of belief, conscience and, art, culture and liberal philosophy) were brutal proselytising dictators who forced other tribes to convert on pain of death. Yonathan Hycurnus, a nasty piece of work, totally destroyed the Samaritan Temple, which by all accounts was as magnificent as the one in Jerusalem. An unprovoked act of wanton destruction. He was the Titus of the Jews. The Samaritans were persecuted and terrorised by the Judeans. King Herod was the grandson of an Edomite forced convert so it’s no wonder he hated the people he ruled over. Strange that the very stones people pray to at the Kotel were placed there by a mass-murdering psychopath who built the second temple.Where’s the holiness, the sacred in any of that?. The Sicarii…those great ‘heroes’ of Massada were vicious killers…terrorists…who fought in the temple, murdered a Temple priest on a high holiday, assassinated anyone they saw as collaborating with the Roman occupiers. They were eventually booted out of Jerusalem by their own people…took refuge in Massada, sacking, plundering and looting local villages for supplies and then killing their own women and children before the Romans took them as slaves. And these psychos are revered as great Jewish heroes with today busloads of Taglit and other groups flocking there to be brainwashed with myths and lies.
Don’t even get me started on the brutal oppression of the European Jews by Talmudic Rabbis until the Emancipation in the late 1700s which freed many from the religious tyranny of the previous centuries. Get that. Christians freed Jews from their own rabbinical masters. It is thanks to the Emancipation that Jewish intellects, artists and writers flourished…the Freud’s and the Einsteins of the world. Otherwise they would have still been in their shtetls and slaves to Halakha. Just look at what happened to Spinoza, a great free thinking philosopher…excommunicated and almost assassinated by the rabbis. Get this right Chas. Those communities dealt with dissenters, heretics, ‘informers’(Yigal Amir saw Rabin as a rodef), infringers of Halakhic rulings, with floggings, expulsions and executions. The Yigal Amirs and the Baruch Goldsteins were the norm of that Talmudic gentile hating culture.
So all in all to regard the Jews only as passive victims of Christian antisemitism is ridiculous. Jewish Christophobia predated Christian antisemitism. But that’s another story.
In the meantime, I object to your comment that we gentiles should know better. You are a self-hating gentile…..bro. It is in fact many of the Israelis who should know better than treat the Palestinians the way they do with their crude chauvinism and ‘God-given’ supremacism. Primo Levi, perhaps the most important writer to come out of the Holocaust, wrote that the Palestinians are the Jews’ Jews. Coming from him, I take that pretty seriously. Reflect on it. Read up on what exactly has been going on in the Occupied Territories since 1967. I can recommend some material if you’re interested. Cheers.
I’ve seen how your selective provocations have dragged Richard’s blogs discussion down and I’m not up for that here any more than I’m up for the personal attack about ‘self-hating’ above.
I’ve approved your comment above because you obviously put time into writing it and I didn’t want you to have wasted that time. But you will be wasting time if you write any further comments, so have a nice day.
It’s really sweet of you to allow this sort of contribution for once, Chas. However, I hear enough anti-semitism in daily life to want to plough through this kind of rant on your blog too often.
To be fair, the author roger/Simon may not realise that his argument is ad hominem.
On a lighter note Chas, from one Goy to another, a warm welcome back to the blogosphere.
Chas it looks like Roger has a real Hafuch view of history.
Thankyou Chas for your unusually balanced stance on anti-Israel and anti-Jewish thinking that exists today in our society. I was accosted recently in a small choir by a church-going gentile who had a small rant at me re Israel, when he heard that I was Jewish. A gentile pointed out to him that I was not, as a Jew, responsible for Israel’s behaviour.
On another note, re Roger, though his attitude is repugnantly antiJewish, has adduced some accurate facts. At a Limmud study session I once raised the matter of God’s ethnic cleansing instruction to Moses re the 7 tribes occupying Palestine which they were to conquer. Deut.20.16ff – kill everything that breathes he instructed Moses. My words were greeted in deathly silence. Noone wanted to know. Our right to the land of Israel is based by many on “God’s words” in the Torah. I have never appreciated that this embarrassing fact is not faced by rabbis or Jews generally. It is one of many powerful reasons that made me reject the Jewish faith (not my Jewishness) which I consider morally untenable once the facts and the absence of any semblance of Godly merciful hegemony (a root belief) are acknowledged and faced. On the other hand, to rubbish Roger, the grotesque victimhood of the Jews down the centuries is patent (and hardly lessened by Jewish misdemeanours) and has been delineated in the recent book by Phyllis Goldstein “A Convenient Hatred”. A forward by (gentile) Harold Evans attests his shock at discovering the poisonous enduring hatred that antisemitism has always represented amongst the nations of the world.
Regrettably, despite the well-documented horror of the Holocaust, there remains a defiant worldwide tendency to believe in stinking antisemitism which Jews everywhere experience. Such is undoubtedly a stain on human society. (This is not to whitewash Israel or Jews generally.)
Great article, Chas. Keep writing and advocating and don’t let the negatives drag you down. Am sharing on mine.
So good I’m going to steal it!
Dear Chas – Great content and brilliantly written!
Thankyou for this acknowledgement which feels like water on parched ground. For me this is also the most nauseating of all accusations
Yes, there are awful things in the Torah. Perhaps you have not noticed that Jews no longer stone people to death? That these texts are not taken as models for behaviour and are struggled with around the world by scholars and thinkers (despite one Limmud experience). The Torah also describes the Hebrews engaged in disputation with God, at times pleading with him to restrain His hand (at Sodom and later slaughters.) In the narrative it is usually God who is barbaric, I understand the same one as the Christian God.
There is dreadful Jew hatred in the New testament and the Koran; it is how these are taken, how people actually behave, that is vital.
So I take it, Simon, that yours is a justification for religious persecution, actual and highly damaging over about 1500 years, as punishment for a historically questionable religious narrative about events from 3000 years ago? For the accusation about a contribution by a few people for an execution 2000 years ago that the Pope has thrice withdrawn (out of mortified realization of Christianity’s preparation for the Holocaust.)As to the Talmud, every religion thinks it is special; at least Judaism does not declare there is only one way to heaven.
Please add.
Simon demonstrates that Christian based anti-semitism is alive and well.
What gives you the impression he is a Christian, Lea?
Chas,
I am grateful that you exist,and more grateful that you write with such passion and such logical clarity. My favorite sorrowful putdown of Israel is: “How is it possible that any people with such experience of persecution could persecute others in way they do?” My answer is always “It’s not possible–from which you may infer that it isn’t true.”
Excellent. Great post, Chas. It’s all so simple really.
” I’ve approved your comment above because you obviously put time into writing it and I didn’t want you to have wasted that time.”
You are too good for this world Chas I have always thought so.
Haha, loving the sarcasm!
What a beautifully written, right to the heart of the matter article.
You have hit the bulls eye, and done so eloquently. Thank you.
“Let us strip the “they-of-all-people” argument down to its very basics: gentiles telling Jews that we killed six million of your people and that as a result it is you, not us, who have lessons to learn; that it is you, not us, who need to clean up your act. It is an argument of atrocious, spiteful insanity.”
Indeed. We have learned our lesson, we have learned to never go down without a fight, to never give in to the attempts of annihilation, regardless how big or small. We have learned to hold our heads high and do whatever is necessary to make sure that the past is not repeated. Ever.
As for “Simon”, you handled it much better than I would have, but having said that, I would suggest that “Simon” sit back and reevaluate “what exactly has been going on in the OT since
1967″. Maybe then, “Simon” can “Reflect on it. Read up on it.”, and familiarize himself with *why* the occupation came into existence.
“I can recommend some material if [Simon] is interested. Cheers.”
What a brilliant article Chas. Thank you so much for this. I can honestly say I’d never thought of putting it like this, of turning the argument on its head, even though it’s so clear now that you’ve written it.
You’ve hit the nail on the head with breathtakingly simple clarity. This can’t be topped.
Kol hakavod and thank you again.
I remember Elie Wiesel putting it in similar terms: Not all the victims were Jews, but all the jews were victims. Not all non-Jews were perpetrators, but all the perpetrators were non-Jews.
The anti-semitic undertones that are clearly present when holding Jewish people accountable for everything that goes wrong in life with the raised double standard is nauseating and it is entirely right to speak up about it, as we all should. Thank you Chas.
Thank you so much for your well thought out article.
A fine piece.
[...] details of that discussion, but I mention this because there is an exceptional article written by Chas Newkey-Burden that I highly recommend reading. It sums up exactly why this line of conversation is so [...]
Just came across this article, Chas. A fine effort.
have just tweeted it to a couple of people inc. pam geller and Robert Spencer.
I’m sure they won’t mind that i got to it late!!
Shana Tova and a fab new year!!
And I’ve just met another Matisyahu fan!! You guys are everywhere!
By the way, this article is very interesting: http://greatersurbiton.wordpress.com/2012/08/13/alan-mendozas-putsch-in-the-henry-jackson-society/
Just found this article. Thank you so much for it.
Excellent post, Chas, thanks. It is politically incorrect to say so but the Palestinian/ Arab campaign to destroy Israel, coupled with Islamist/ Muslim Brotherhood/ Hamas genocidal intentions are the natural successors to Nazism.
and now the Sunday Times has overtaken all this to lower levels of infamy