Maof - A Farewell to Zionism

My readers know what a totally peaceful person I am. Whenever a conflict allows a non-violent solution, at least in theory, I am all for it. My older brother is a different kind of a guy. That's why I find it difficult to explain the phenomenon he told me about when we were both still attending junior high. According to my brother, if you beat someone up, he will keep trying to greet you first every time he happens to run into you, even if you never respond to his greetings. It doesn't matter whether the beaten deserved the beating or whether the beater defended a righteous cause. Regardless of all accompanying circumstances, the beating instills a great respect for the beater both in the beaten and the witnesses. This could be a manifestation of the Stockholm syndrome. It's very important to remember that the winner, along with all the other spoils, wins the admiration of the public, while the loser's lot is utter contempt, which will inevitably only become stronger if, in all fairness, the loser should have won.

Older Russian immigrants, who during the Six Day War still lived in their old country, told me how that war was reflected in the Soviet media. During the weeks leading to the war, the papers wrote of the righteous wrath of the Arab masses against the malignant Zionist entity. Without details (loose lips sink ships), they informed their readers of the movement of Egyptian and Syrian armies towards the Israeli borders. Every commentator impatiently predicted the imminent demise of the odious country.

During the first couple of days after the war finally began, it looked like it was progressing as planned. The papers described unstoppable advances of the Arab armies and hasty, cowardly retreat of the Zionists. Israel's collapse was imminent. Then the war suddenly disappeared from the front pages, replaced by more urgent matters, mostly the unprecedented successes of Soviet agriculture and heavy industry. Any day now, the Soviet Union was expected to produce more milk and meat per capita than the United States, and that, of course, was more important news than whatever Arabs were at the moment doing to Israel. Meanwhile, the Voice of America and BBC painted a very different picture of current events in the Middle East. Poisoned by enemy propaganda, some Soviet citizens were passing along vicious rumors of the devastating defeat that was dealt to the Arabs. Eventually, the papers had to admit that the enemy voices had told the truth that time. The Soviet people learned that Israel treacherously, without reason or warning, attacked peaceful, defenseless Arab farmers and dispatched them like a national hockey team would dispatch the varsity team of a boarding school for the blind. Sudden funerel notes suddenly penetrated the perennial optimism of the offivial news. Commentators solemnly promised that sooner or later the Jewish Nazis would have to pay a terrible price for their crimes. In the meantime, however, Tel Aviv and Haifa temporarily remained in the possession of the Zionist aggressors.

It was unheard of: Israel, a totally unnecessary country the size of a sparrow's beak, populated with people famous for their cowardice and trickery in commerce, defeated an enemy that not only outnumbered it many times over, but was brainwashed, armed, and trained by the invincible Soviet Union. Cases had been reported where representatives of ethnic majorities with nothing but pure Slavic blood and a tad of alcohol in their veins approached Jewish strangers in grocery stores and other public places to express their admiration for the Israeli victory. And even though most of them didn't use the words victory or admiration, referring instead to kicking those curly-haired butts, their meaning nevertheless was perfectly clear. As always, even those who disliked the winners were showing their sincere respect.

The beginning of the mass exodus of Jews from the USSR was yet another unprecedented phenomenon in the Soviet history, and it was not synchronized with the Six Day War by sheer coincidence. The Soviet policy towards Soviet Jewry had always vacillated between cultural genocide and physical genocide. Most of the time it was almost entirely cultural, but as we can see from the Doctor's Case and the mysterious transformation of Birobijan into the Jewish Autonomous Region, physical genocide was never entirely off the table. Hebrew, the oldest still viable language on the planet, was declared officially dead. According to the definition concocted by Lenin (whose maternal grandfather was a rabbi), Jews constituted not a nation, but an unnecessary ethnicity. Soviet Jews themselves perceived Israel as a foreign country that had absolutely nothing to do with them, like Togo or French Guiana. Israel's victory in the Six Day War demonstrated to Soviet Jews that they had a very good reason to be proud of their Jewishness; that no matter where they lived, Israel was their native land; and, gradually, they came to the realization that they were not some obscure tribe, but a great, even if not numerous, ancient nation that had an inalienable right to self-determination. And the understanding of the Jews' inalienable right to self-determination constitutes the very basis of Zionism, regardless of the opinions on that subject held by Herzl, Jabotinsky, and even the UN.

Future historians may disagree with my conclusion that Israel's victory in the Six Day War put the first crack in the cast-iron monolith of the Soviet Union. Of course, the aftereffects of the arms race and personal contribution by President Reagan shouldn't be underestimated. And yet, don't forget how it started: the Russians armed the Arabs against the Jews, and the Jews refused to yield; thirty years later, Israel was still there, but the Soviet Union was no more.

Ironically, the very first thing Israel did after winning the war with the Arabs was to lay the foundation of its future defeat by them. That was easy: instead of reclaiming Gaza, Judea, and Samaria and removing their hostile population, Israel turned them into a festering wound that could never be healed. There is no doubt that decisive, righteous actions by Israel would have inevitably caused an international outcry. Israel would have been accused of illegal occupation of foreign territories and eviction of billions of innocent Arabs from the land where their ancestors had lived millions of years before 1948 when the word Israel was first invented by the worst enemies of humanity, the Zionists.

Frankly, even I find it difficult to judge Israeli leaders for such a decision. Gas chambers and crematoriums had been rusting unused for more than two decades. The Holocaust had become a thing of the past, more and more distant with every passing day. Burning shame for the senseless murder of millions of Jews had forever cured all civilized nations of anti-Semitism. If only Jews behaved, all the people of the world, thanks to the innate goodness of every human being, would feel nothing but love and well-deserved respect for the Jews. Wolves and lambs would peacefully, although for no apparent reason, lie together, and there would be peace on earth and good will in all men — pardon me! — persons. And as you all know, this was exactly what Jews had been dreaming about ever since Moses herded them out of Mizraim.

And Israel, almost breathless from its own noble generosity, allowed its mortal enemy to stay on its land.

Putting myself in the shoes of the Israeli leaders of that time, I understand how difficult it was then to imagine that this sacrifice would prove to be in vain; that it would not prevent fellow humans from wrathful protests against the illegal Israeli occupation of the lands that used to belong to Arabs long before the last dinosaur disappeared from the face of the earth. It was hard to see that, unlike the dinosaurs, anti-Semitism has not disappeared and will not disappear as long as at least one Jew and one goy remain alive; that peace-loving humanity will continue to suffer terribly from the unresolved Jewish problem until the final solution is finally found and implemented. And yet, they were elected to lead. They should have known.

In our times, every commentator writing about the Middle East considered it his or her sacred duty to refer to Arafat's death as the beginning of a new era in the “peace process”. This is such a terrible nonsense! Today, anyone can predict the future of the “peace process”. Led by Mahmud Abbas, the “Palestinians” will matter-of-factly, without thanks, accept everything Sharon, hoping to delay the demise of his country, offers to them. Then they will say they want more and produce another list of demandslist. And another. And another. If Israel tries to object, a new intifada will follow, and Zionist atrocities against the defenseless “Palestinians” will stoke the usual wrath of the international community against the Jewish state, while blown-up busses and Jewish kids and pregnant women shot point-blank by Arabs will fail to provoke even mild interest. Determined to live in peace, the planet will once again stand behind the Arabs. The choice Israel is facing — to destroy the enemy or be destroyed — will become even more obvious. In theory, there is a possibility that this desperate situation will produce a courageous leader who will say that after six decades of unsuccessful attempts to achieve peace with the Arabs, Israel is implementing a policy of uncompromising self-defense. There is a clear chance that the international community will, in response, try to kill Israel for its refusal to lie down and die. I don't think, however, that is the most likely scenario. The world will be choking on its hatred of Jews, and the stench will reach the sky, but their hatred will be diluted by the inevitable and well-deserved respect for the winner.

Of course, I hope that Israel will survive as a country, even if the rest of the species will treat Israel the Polish peasants treated Jewish innkeepers. This is much better than the exhibition of trophies of yet another global pogrom in the museums of the future Holocaust. And yet, if Israel is not destined to survive, I hope it dies the way the Jews of Warsaw did rather than the rest of the six million victims of the last Holocaust.

I will not attempt to predict what will happen after the land given by God to the Jews is surrendered to their enemies. Probably, the United States and Europe will decide to punish the Arabs for the new Holocaust, and Israel will continue to exist in the same form in which it existed from the destruction of the Second Temple until 1948 — as an amorphous community of people united by universal hatred towards them, the Torah, and the impractical dream of Jerusalem. It's also possible that the death of Israel will accelerate the Islamization of the planet, and, within a couple of generations, space explorations, beaches, antibiotics, good wine, particle physics, and other things Muslims have no use for will survive only in China. In any case, it's perfectly obvious that God, as He always does, will curse those who curse us; but, also as always, it won't help us.

March 10, 2005

This article was written exclusively for Мы здесь.

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