Read Online Those Who Forget the Past by Ron Rosenbaum - Free Book Online

Israeli novelist, has been well known as a founder of Peace Now. And while he still supports the Palestinian right to statehood and has opposed the occupation and the Jewish settlements in the disputed territories, he recognizes that things have changed. That one can’t just look narrowly at Israel, Palestine, and the lovely vision of a two-state solution in isolation.
    Rather, Oz writes that one must take into account the war “waged by fanatical Islam from Iran to Gaza and from Lebanon to Ramallah, to destroy Israel and drive the Jews out of their land.”
    He then asks the difficult question that goes to the heart of the “reasonableness” issue, the issue that is itself at the heart of the mutation of anti-Zionism into anti-Semitism. This is Amos Oz’s question: “[W]ould an end to occupation [of the West Bank] terminate the Muslim holy war against Israel?”
    His answer: “This is hard to predict. If jihad comes to an end, both sides would be able to sit down and negotiate peace. If it does not, we would have to seal and fortify Israel’s logical border, the demographic border, and keep fighting for our lives against fanatical Islam.” (This is why the discussion of the origin and reformability of Muslim anti-Semitism, engaged in here by Bernard Lewis and Tariq Ramadan, is so important: is jihad against unbelievers intrinsic to Islam?)
    Here are Amos Oz’s final words: “If, despite simplistic visions, the end of occupation will not result in peace, at least we will have one war to fight rather than two. Not a war for our full occupancy of the holy land, but a war for our right to live in a free and sovereign Jewish state in part of that land. A just war, a no-alternative war. A war we will win. Like any people who were ever forced to fight for their very homes and freedom and lives.”
    I wish I could share his optimistic certainty about the outcome of such a war. But what is most important is that Oz doesn’t look away from the harsh reality shadowing the easy talk of a reasonable “two-state” solution: the holy war against Jews.
    AFTER NEARLY TWO DECADES of reading the literature of antiSemitism—both the thing itself and the analysis of the thing itself—I have yet to find a satisfactory explanation for its persistence. Not a single-pointed answer, anyway. In
Explaining Hitler
I explored theological anti-Semitism with Hyam Maccoby, who believes it is not so much the Christ-killing accusation that kept the flame of Christian anti-Semitism burning— although it certainly has been a factor—but the more insidious Judas story, the Jew as betrayer and backstabber. (Hitler rode to power on the fraudulent “stab-in-the-back” myth, the one that had the supposedly near-victorious German armies in World War I stabbed in the back by Jewish Marxist Judases on the home front.)
    I’ve explored Daniel Goldhagen’s belief in the primacy of what he calls “eliminationist” anti-Semitism, the racially rather than religiously based anti-Semitism that arose in nineteenth-century Germany and helped mold Hitler. There’s truth there as well. As there is in Saul Friedlander’s contention that Wagner’s fusion of religious
and
racial anti-Semitism was crucial in shaping Hitler’s psyche.
    But why the always ready market for anti-Semitism, religious and racial, medieval and modern, and now postmodern? 18 I gave respectful if skeptical attention to George Steiner’s view that the world continues to hate the Jews for their “invention of conscience”—for what Steiner calls the Jews’ threefold “blackmail of transcendence.” Which is how Steiner characterizes Moses’s demand for perfect obedience, Jesus’s demand for perfect love, and Marx’s demand for perfect justice. Three demands for perfection made by Jews that are unfulfillable by fallible human beings—and thus, Steiner