Noah Yuval Herari talks about wars being fought and empires being created and destroyed with Stories
The Jews are a story we tell ourselves about who we think we are.
Without our story, there is no Judaism.
We are living in a world where there are global demonstrations - with chants of the annihilation of Israel !
How has it come to this?
- How is it possible that Israel, rather than radical Islamism, become the villain on liberal campuses?
- How is it that thousands of students would be chanting “from the river to the sea” even as the Hamas massacre revealed that slogan’s genocidal implications?
- How is it that the most passionate outbreak of student activism since the 1960s would be devoted to delegitimizing the Jewish people’s story of triumph over annihilation?
- How has a story of a dispossessed people re-indigenizing in its ancient homeland have been transformed into one more sordid expression of European colonialism?
- How has the story of the birth of Israel in 1948 been reduced to the Nakba, or catastrophe - a Palestinian narrative of total innocence that ignores the ethnic cleansing of Jews from every Muslim country?
- How is it that the ease with which anti-Zionists have managed to portray the Jewish state as genocidal and a successor to Nazi Germany?
- How is it that Israel has been cast as an apartheid state – turning Zionism, a multi-faceted movement representing Jews across the political and religious spectrum into a racist ideology and reducing an agonizingly complex national conflict into a medieval passion play about Jewish perfidy.
And now, with the Gaza War, we have come to the genocide card, the endpoint in the process of delegitimization.
- How is it that the World sees Israel as the world’s arch-criminal ?
It requires three forms of erasure says Yossi Klein Halevi in the Israeli Times
The first is disassociating the connection between the land of Israel and the people of Israel.
Delegitimising a 4,000-year connection that has been the heart of Jewish identity and faith is irrelevant, if not contrived outright by Zionists.
The second is the erasure of the relentless war against Israel, placing its actions under a microscope while downplaying or entirely ignoring the aggression of its enemies.
Erasing Hamas’s atrocities making Israel m the villain of this war. Denying or legitimising the October 7 massacre .
The atrocities didn’t happen, you deserved them and we’re going to do it again (and again).
The third form of erasure is dismissing the history of peace offers presented or accepted by Israel and uniformly rejected by the Palestinian side.
So what is Anti semitism ?
Antisemitism is turning the Jews into the symbol for whatever a given civilization defines as its most loathsome qualities.
- For Christianity until the Holocaust, The Jew was Christ-killer;
- for Marxism, the ultimate capitalist;
- for Nazism, the defiler of race.
- For Muslims, the epitome of evil
- And now, in the era of anti-racism, the Jewish state is the embodiment of racism.
Unlike the Iranian regime, which clumsily tries to deny the historicity of the Holocaust, anti-Zionists in the West are coopting and inverting the Holocaust as the Jews being the perpetrators of a holocaust!
Many, perhaps most, of the campus protesters are likely not antisemitic. They may have Jewish friends or be Jewish themselves.
But that is irrelevant: They are enabling an antisemitic moment.
This is our story
It is a story of a people rejecting the self-pity of victimhood and fulfilling its most improbable dream: renewing itself, in its broken old age, in the land of its youth.
The shift from the lowest point Jews have known to the reclamation of power and self-confidence being one of the most astonishing feats of survival not only in Jewish but world history.
The distortion
The story has been distorted and trivialized and demonized on liberal campuses.
There is a pervasive atmosphere of hostility toward Israel, even among many otherwise apolitical students.
Linking the name “Israel” with racism and genocide.
The vulgar protesters are a small minority, but they are shaping the attitudes of a whole generation.
How do we, the Jews defend the story we inherited from the survivor generation?
How do we to tell that story with moral credibility, in all its complexity, frankly owning our flaws even as we celebrate our successes, acknowledging the Palestinian narrative even as we insist on the integrity of our own?
The Jews are a story we tell ourselves about who we think we are.
Without our story, there is no Judaism.
How do we tell and share our story that we can be proud of , which continues to sustain us as a people?
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