270 Israel will attack Iran by Nov; it will damage Obama - former deputy defense minister

(1) Israel will attack Iran by Nov; it will damage Obama - former deputy defense minister
(2) 'Jewish national' or 'Arab national' - but there's no common 'Israeli' nationality
(3) A wholly Jewish Palestine? His Majesty's Government has no such aim - 1922
(4) Hilberg accused Arendt of plagiarism - Nathaniel Popper
(5) Mosaic monotheism: an invisible God as an Oriental pitiless tyrant - Ariella Atzmon

(1) Israel will attack Iran by Nov; it will damage Obama - former deputy defense minister

From: IHR News <news@ihr.org> Date: 09.04.2010 06:01 PM

Newsmax
http://newsmax.com/KenTimmerman/Timmerman-Israel-Iran-nuclear/2010/04/02/id/354614

Former Def. Minister: Israel Will Attack Iran by Nov.

Friday, 02 Apr 2010 12:36 PM

By: Ken Timmerman

Israel will be compelled to attack Iran's nuclear weapons facilities by this November unless the U.S. and its allies enact "crippling sanctions that will undermine the regime in Tehran," former deputy defense minister Brig. Gen. Ephraim Sneh said on Wednesday in Tel Aviv.

The sanctions currently being discussed with Russia, China, and other major powers at the United Nations are likely to be a slightly-enhanced version of the U.N. sanctions already in place, which have had no impact on the Iranian regime.

And despite unanimous passage of the Iran Petroleum Sanctions Act in January, the Obama administration continues to resist efforts by Congress to impose mandatory sanctions on companies selling refined petroleum products to Iran.

In an Op-Ed in the Israeli left-wing daily, Haaretz, Sneh argues that Iran will probably have "a nuclear bomb or two" by 2011.

"An Israeli military campaign against Iran's nuclear installations is likely to cripple that country's nuclear project for a number of years. The retaliation against Israel would be painful, but bearable."

Sneh believes that the "acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran during Obama's term would do him a great deal of political damage," but that the damage to Obama resulting from an Israeli strike on Iran "would be devastating."

Nevertheless, he writes, "for practical reasons, in the absence of genuine sanctions, Israel will not be able to wait until the end of next winter, which means it would have to act around the congressional elections in November, thereby sealing Obama's fate as president."

Sneh does not foresee any U.S. military strikes on Iran, an analysis that is shared by most observers in Washington, who see the Obama administration moving toward containment as opposed to confrontation with Iran.

In a recent report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), military analyst Anthony Cordesman concluded that Israel will have to use low-yield earth-penetrating nuclear weapons if it wants to take out deeply-buried nuclear sites in Iran.

"Israel is reported to possess a 200 kilogram nuclear warhead containing 6 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium that could be mounted on the sea launched cruise missiles and producing a Yield of 20 kilo tons," Cordesman writes in the CSIS study he co-authored by Abdullah Toukan.

Israel would be most likely to launch these missiles from its Dolphin-class submarines, he added.

While Sneh is no longer in the Israeli government, his revelation of a drop-dead date for an Israeli military strike on Iran must be taken seriously, Israel-watchers in the U.S. tell Newsmax.

"Ephraim Sneh is a serious guy," said Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. "He was deputy minister of defense and has long been focused on the issue of Iran."

Shoshana Bryen, Senior Director for Security Policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), said that what struck her most about Sneh's comments was the shift of emphasis from resolving the Palestinian problem to Iran.

"For 30 years, he's been saying that solving the Palestinian problem is Israel's biggest priority. Now he's saying, forget about the Palestinians. Iran is the problem."

Sneh "is extremely well regarded on the left and the right," she added. "People respect him enormously."

In his Op-Ed, Sneh argues that the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to mend its bridges with the United States, and the only way to do so is by enacting an immediate and total ban on any settlement activity, including in Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.

"Without international legitimacy, and with its friend mad at it, Israel would find it very difficult to act on its own" against Iran, he argued.

(2) 'Jewish national' or 'Arab national' - but there's no common 'Israeli' nationality

From: Sadanand, Nanjundiah (Physics Earth Sciences) <sadanand@mail.ccsu.edu> Date: 08.04.2010 06:41 PM

Why there are no 'Israelis' in the Jewish state

Citizens classed as Jewish or Arab nationals

By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth

April 06, 2010 "Information Clearing House"

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25153.htm

A group of Jews and Arabs are fighting in the Israeli courts to be recognised as "Israelis", a nationality currently denied them, in a case that officials fear may threaten the country's self-declared status as a Jewish state.

Israel refused to recognise an Israeli nationality at the country's establishment in 1948, making an unusual distinction between "citizenship" and "nationality". Although all Israelis qualify as "citizens of Israel", the state is defined as belonging to the "Jewish nation", meaning not only the 5.6 million Israeli Jews but also more than seven million Jews in the diaspora.

Critics say the special status of Jewish nationality has been a way to undermine the citizenship rights of non-Jews in Israel, especially the fifth of the population who are Arab. Some 30 laws in Israel specifically privilege Jews, including in the areas of immigration rights, naturalisation, access to land and employment. Arab leaders have also long complained that indications of "Arab" nationality on ID cards make it easy for police and government officials to target Arab citizens for harsher treatment.

The interior ministry has adopted more than 130 possible nationalities for Israeli citizens, most of them defined in religious or ethnic terms, with "Jewish" and "Arab" being the main categories.The group's legal case is being heard by the supreme court after a district judge rejected their petition two years ago, backing the state's position that there is no Israeli nation.

The head of the campaign for Israeli nationality, Uzi Ornan, a retired linguistics professor, said: "It is absurd that Israel, which recognises dozens of different nationalities, refuses to recognise the one nationality it is supposed to represent."The government opposes the case, claiming that the campaign's real goal is to "undermine the state's infrastructure" -- a presumed reference to laws and official institutions that ensure Jewish citizens enjoy a privileged status in Israel.

Mr Ornan, 86, said that denying a common Israeli nationality was the linchpin of state-sanctioned discrimination against the Arab population.

"There are even two laws -- the Law of Return for Jews and the Citizenship Law for Arabs -- that determine how you belong to the state," he said. "What kind of democracy divides its citizens into two kinds?"

Yoel Harshefi, a lawyer supporting Mr Ornan, said the interior ministry had resorted to creating national groups with no legal recognition outside Israel, such as "Arab" or "unknown", to avoid recognising an Israeli nationality.In official documents most Israelis are classified as "Jewish" or "Arab", but immigrants whose status as Jews is questioned by the Israeli rabbinate, including more than 300,000 arrivals from the former Soviet Union, are typically registered according to their country of origin.

"Imagine the uproar in Jewish communities in the United States, Britain or France, if the authorities there tried to classify their citizens as "Jewish" or "Christian"," said Mr Ornan.The professor, who lives close to Haifa, launched his legal action after the interior ministry refused to change his nationality to "Israeli" in 2000. An online petition declaring "I am an Israeli" has attracted several thousand signatures.

Mr Ornan has been joined in his action by 20 other public figures, including former government minister Shulamit Aloni. Several members have been registered with unusual nationalities such as "Russian", "Buddhist", "Georgian" and "Burmese".Two Arabs are party to the case, including Adel Kadaan, who courted controversy in the 1990s by waging a lengthy legal action to be allowed to live in one of several hundred communities in Israel open only to Jews.

Uri Avnery, a peace activist and former member of the parliament, said the current nationality system gave Jews living abroad a far greater stake in Israel than its 1.3 million Arab citizens."The State of Israel cannot recognise an 'Israeli' nation because it is the state of the 'Jewish' nation … it belongs to the Jews of Brooklyn, Budapest and Buenos Aires, even though these consider themselves as belonging to the American, Hungarian or Argentine nations." ...

The government has countered that the nationality section on ID cards was phased out from 2000 -- after the interior ministry, which was run by a religious party at the time, objected to a court order requiring it to identify non-Orthodox Jews as "Jewish" on the cards.

However, Mr Ornan said any official could instantly tell if he was looking at the card of a Jew or Arab because the date of birth on the IDs of Jews was given according to the Hebrew calendar. In addition, the ID of an Arab, unlike a Jew, included the grandfather's name.

"Flash your ID card and whatever government clerk is sitting across from you immediately knows which 'clan' you belong to, and can refer you to those best suited to 'handle your kind'," Mr Ornan said.

The distinction between Jewish and Arab nationalities is also shown on interior ministry records used to make important decisions about personal status issues such as marriage, divorce and death, which are dealt with on entirely sectarian terms. Only Israelis from the same religious group, for example, are allowed to marry inside Israel -- otherwise they are forced to wed abroad – and cemeteries are separated according to religious belonging. ...

(3) A wholly Jewish Palestine? His Majesty's Government has no such aim - 1922

From: Sadanand, Nanjundiah (Physics Earth Sciences) <sadanand@mail.ccsu.edu> Date: 08.04.2010 06:41 PM

Rule by Law or Defiance

By William A. Cook

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25154.htm

Unauthorized statements have been made to the effect that the purpose in view is to create a wholly Jewish Palestine. . . . His Majesty's Government regard any such expectation as impracticable and have no such aim in view. Nor have they at any time contemplated . . . the disappearance or the subordination of the Arabic population, language or culture in Palestine. They would draw attention to the fact that the terms of the (Balfour) Declaration referred to do not contemplate that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a Home should be founded IN PALESTINE. . . . His Majesty's Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State.

(Command Paper 1922, from the Avalon Project at Yale Law School, 1996–2000),

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/brwh1922.asp
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/brwh1939.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill_White_Paper

April 06, 2010 "Information Clearing House"

The above statement was approved by the Council of the League of Nations, thus establishing the legal charge for the British Mandate government. Together with the Sir Richard C. Catling papers, held in a Top Secret file in the Rhodes House Archives at Oxford University, to be released later this spring from Macmillan in the Introduction of The Plight of the Palestinians, this declaration recorded by the Avalon Project graphically demonstrates how the Zionist-controlled forces within the Jewish community defied the legally established authorities in Palestine. This defiance continues to the present day.

Today's "spat" between friends, as reflected in the hassle between Obama and Netanyahu, forces reconsideration of America's support of the defiant Israeli government, not because the halting of the settlements is the crucial issue but because America's President has lost face, America's reputation around the world has plummeted, and the dangerous position our military face as a result of Israel's belligerence threatens the United States' security as General Petraeus testified before Congress earlier this month.

It is becoming manifestly clear to everyone that the United States cannot be the broker for peace in the mid-east, but it can be a participant or consultant to an appropriately designed United Nations Policy Committee created to complete the "partition plan" established in Resolution 181 in November of 1947. Because Israel controls our Congress, the President is essentially powerless to confront the forces that maneuver behind the scenes to thwart any U.S. government, Republican or Democrat, from moving toward a just and balanced resolution of the Israel/Palestinian conflict. That means the President must move to hand back to the UN the responsibility to right the wrong done to the Palestinian people, putting before the world communities their organization as the means to achieve this end. Israel would have to accept rule by law or continue its defiance isolating itself not only in the mid-east, but in the world of nations.  ...

William A. Cook is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California. ...

(4) Hilberg accused Arendt of plagiarism - Nathaniel Popper

From: ReporterNotebook <RePorterNoteBook@Gmail.com> Date: 08.04.2010 09:39 AM

A Conscious Pariah: On Raul Hilberg

By Nathaniel Popper

This article appeared in the April 19, 2010 edition of The Nation.

March 31, 2010

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100419/popper

Raul Hilberg was known for cultivating enemies. During faculty meetings at the University of Vermont, where he was a professor of political science from 1956 to 1991, the renowned historian of the Holocaust would unfailingly denounce the consensus position, whether it concerned faculty appointments or vacation policy. "He was an intensely stubborn and contrary person," one of his old colleagues told me. In The Politics of Memory, an autobiography published in 1996, Hilberg dedicated a chapter to attacking fellow historians whose work he considered derivative or misguided. Among those admonished was Lucy Dawidowicz, a popular Holocaust scholar and author of the emotional bestseller The War Against the Jews (1975); Dawidowicz provided "vaguely consoling words" that "could easily be clutched by all those who did not wish to look deeper," Hilberg complained.

But no one who wrote about the Holocaust nettled Hilberg more than Hannah Arendt. Hilberg's anger toward the German refugee and New York intellectual erupted with the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which Arendt told the tale of Adolf Eichmann, the man responsible for implementing the Final Solution, against the backdrop of his trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. (Eichmann was captured by Mossad agents in Argentina in May 1960. His trial in Jerusalem began in April 1961, and he was executed in May 1962.) Arendt's study was serialized in five installments in The New Yorker in the spring of 1963 and then quickly published in book form in May of that year by Viking Press with its now infamous subtitle, "A Report on the Banality of Evil." The work has attained a mythic status. Penguin publishes it in two inexpensive paperback editions--one a "Penguin Classics" and the other a "Great Ideas" version that, with its matte blue-and-white cover, is attractively designed for display next to cash registers as an impulse buy.

Hilberg died in 2007, and among the private papers he left to the University of Vermont library is a box stuffed with materials about his scholarly antagonists. Folders filled with Arendt clippings occupy half of the tightly jammed container. There is also a brown accordion folder holding two crisp copies of each of the five issues of The New Yorker in which Arendt's study of Eichmann was serialized. Hilberg was obsessed with Arendt's dispatches because two years before their appearance, with the Eichmann trial under way, he had published his own magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, a multivolume work that is still widely considered in scholarly circles to be the first great history of the Holocaust and the cornerstone of Holocaust studies. "No other book will ever be, by my hand, annotated to such a degree," Claude Lanzmann remarked in 1993, eight years after the release of his epic film Shoah. "A beacon of a book, a breakwater of a book, a ship of history anchored in time and in a sense beyond time, undying, unforgettable, to which nothing in the course of ordinary historical production can be compared." (Hilberg is the only historian to appear in Shoah, which documents victims' and perpetrators' direct experiences of the Holocaust.)

As Hilberg read Arendt's articles about Eichmann, he noticed a number of striking similarities to his own research. He tallied them on an accounting spreadsheet stored in the accordion folder with the New Yorker issues. At the bottom of the spreadsheet he divided the instances into "cert." and "prob." and penciled hash marks next to each category. Among the flagged passages is Arendt's account of the plight of Bernard Lichtenberg, a Catholic priest in Berlin who was condemned to a concentration camp after speaking out against the deportation of the Jews. Hilberg noted the page on which Arendt's version appeared and next to it wrote, in red ink, "verbatim."

Hilberg had discovered Lichtenberg's story in Nazi foreign office files, and he recounted it in his book in what were, for him, unusually emotional terms: "Dompropst Bernard Lichtenberg of St. Hedwig's Cathedral in Berlin, dared to pray openly for the Jews, including those who were baptized and those who were unbaptized." Arendt told Lichtenberg's tale in the third New Yorker installment as a parenthetical aside in the story of a deported minister: "A similar fate befell the Catholic Dompropst Bernard Lichtenberg, of St. Hedwig's Cathedral, in Berlin." Lichtenberg, Arendt wrote, "had dared to pray publicly for all Jews, baptized or not." In his book Hilberg footnoted the document from which he drew the anecdote; in The New Yorker Arendt gave no indication of her source--one of many similar instances.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem Arendt was a little more forthcoming about her debt to Hilberg. The book includes a note on sources in which she describes The Destruction of the European Jews as "the most exhaustive and the most soundly documented account of the Third Reich's Jewish policies." There are five quotes in the book followed by a discreet "(Hilberg)," including a few she had not sourced to him in the New Yorker series. Still, many facts reported by Hilberg that appeared without attribution in Arendt's magazine pieces remained uncredited to him in Eichmann.

Hilberg stopped documenting Arendt's borrowings on his spreadsheet after he read the third installment, but "verbatim" was not his last word about the series. Years later, in a letter also found among his papers, he explained to one of Arendt's biographers, Elzbieta Ettinger, that he had "noticed what she had done as soon as I read the installments in the New Yorker." He continued, "A lawyer of my publisher at the time asked me to draw up a list of items she had lifted. I found about eighty, but he also said that I would have to prove that she could not have obtained the information anywhere else. That proof I could not supply, except in such instances as an error of spelling that she had copied." In The Politics of Memory, Hilberg dedicated a few pages to Arendt and obliquely mentioned that others had commented on her mostly invisible reliance on his research; he also averred that her work "consisted only of unoriginal essays on anti-Semitism, imperialism, and general topics associated with totalitarianism." Despite his derision, Hilberg declined to publicly air his grievances. As a result, the scale of Arendt's debt to him has remained largely unknown.

Hilberg's indignation, as well as his decision to hold his fire, testify to the complex psychology of a Jewish man whose life had been threatened by the rise of Nazi terror but who managed to escape Europe and the Holocaust and lived thereafter with the resulting burden of guilt and luck. Arendt took a similar path out of Europe and carried much of the same emotional shrapnel. Hilberg and Arendt never met, in part because of his lingering bitterness toward her, but the strands of his research that she wove into her writing are only the most telling instances of the profound ways in which the two thinkers' lives and ideas were intertwined. ...

Raul Hilberg was born in Vienna in 1926, the only child of a cold, stolid mother and a quiet, proud father, whom Hilberg pitied and revered. In his youth Raul was a loner who took up solitary pursuits like geography, music and train spotting. His parents occasionally attended synagogue, but Hilberg was repelled by the irrationality of religion: "Already I was contrary-minded, turning away from religion, which at first became irrelevant to me and then an allergy," he recalled in his autobiography.

After Hitler marched into Vienna during the Anschluss, the Hilbergs were forced out of their apartment at gunpoint. Hilberg's father's spirit was broken after he was jailed; he told his son, "Hitler will put us to the wall." The family set off on a mad dash out of Europe, which ended a year later when they settled in Brooklyn after stopovers in France and Cuba. In 1944 Hilberg enlisted in the Army and ended up serving in a unit that swept through Germany as it was liberated; at one point Hilberg was in the Nazi headquarters in Munich and stumbled across portions of Hitler's private library. Even before he was stationed in Europe, Hilberg had followed the scattered reports telling of the incipient genocide; in 1942 he made contact with an organization that asked him to call Stephen Wise, a leading rabbi in New York City. "What are you going to do about the complete annihilation of European Jewry?" Hilberg asked. Wise, Hilberg later remembered, hung up. ...

Hilberg defended his dissertation in 1955 and submitted it to prominent publishing houses. It was roundly rejected until 1961, when a young press in Chicago, Quadrangle Books, decided to publish the work, printing it in double columns on cheap paper. From there, the massive tome began quietly and slowly to win over admirers. In a glowing review in Commentary, the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote that Hilberg's book was "not yet another chronicle of horrors. It is a careful, analytic, three-dimensional study of a social and political experience unique in history: an experience which no one could believe possible till it happened and whose real significance still bewilders us." Michael Marrus, the foremost historiographer of the Holocaust, says that it is now generally agreed that before Hilberg "there was not a subject. No panoramic, European-wide sense of what had happened. That's what Hilberg provided." ...

Beyond the mountains of Vermont, however, Hilberg's achievements were generally unknown outside the scholarly community. The Destruction of the European Jews is scarcely mentioned in Peter Novick's acclaimed The Holocaust in American Life (1999), which chronicles the rise of Holocaust consciousness. For Novick it was not Hilberg but the Eichmann trial and Arendt's reporting on it that "effectively broke fifteen years of near silence." After the trial, Novick writes, "there emerged in American culture a distinct thing called 'the Holocaust'--an event in its own right, not simply a subdivision of general Nazi barbarism."

Hannah Arendt was born twenty years before Raul Hilberg, in 1906, the only child of a middle-class European Jewish family. She grew up mostly in Königsberg, and Judaism was not an integral part of her daily life; religious observance was minimal, and anti-Semitic incidents were only an occasional irritant. According to Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's sensitive biography, Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World, Arendt was a moody young woman, particularly after her father died in 1913. She was drawn to books early on, and Goethe was the touchstone of her education. This led her eventually to the universities in Marburg and Heidelberg, where she studied philosophy with Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. ...

Arendt's papers show that she had a complicated relationship with Hilberg's work even before she began writing about Eichmann. When she returned to New York from Jerusalem, in August 1961, there was a letter from Quadrangle Books offering a special discount on The Destruction of the European Jews. In the copy of the letter in Arendt's files, Quadrangle's president, Melvin Brisk, promised that Hilberg's book would provide a very different picture of Eichmann than the Israeli prosecution had in Jerusalem. "Hilberg shows that Eichmann was a bureaucrat worrying about a thousand details rather than a master planner." Brisk explained, "We make this offer (good only until September 30th) because the Eichmann trial--which is still under way as I write this letter--makes the book doubly important in explaining what happened and why." Arendt replied on August 7, enclosing a check for $14.95.

Brisk's sales pitch was not Arendt's first exposure to Hilberg's book. Two years earlier, Arendt had been asked by Princeton University Press to review the manuscript of The Destruction of the European Jews; she advised Princeton not to publish it. In a letter in her archives dated April 1959, which Hilberg himself discovered, Princeton editor Gordon Hubel thanked Arendt for her "invaluable assistance" and tried to assuage any guilt she might have felt about her decision: "after we had rejected this manuscript," Hubel confided, "we learned from Hilberg that he has $10,000 in financial backing toward the publication of this study, so I do not feel that our declining was in any way fatal to its eventual publication." (In the end, a $15,000 donation financed the book's publication by Quadrangle.)

Arendt's evaluation of Hilberg's manuscript is not among her papers. A plausible explanation of why she advised against its publication appears in a 1963 letter she wrote to the German publisher of Eichmann in Jerusalem. In it, she says that Hilberg "worked for 15 years only with the sources and if he had not written a very terrible first chapter, in which he did not understand much about German history, the book would be, so to speak, perfect. No one will be able to write about the topic without using it." Arendt reiterated the point the following year in a letter to Karl Jaspers, offering that Hilberg's book "is really excellent, but only because it is a simple report." In his first chapter, Hilberg provides a brief timeline of anti-Semitism in Europe that begins with the Roman Empire under Constantine and ends with the Holocaust. Hilberg's long view of history clashed with Arendt's strong belief that the Holocaust was something entirely new--a product of modern society and the totalitarian system.

But while Arendt belittled some of its conclusions, she clearly recognized what a gold mine the book contained. Her reliance on Hilberg was apparent to Hugh Trevor-Roper, who reviewed Eichmann in Jerusalem in the Sunday Times two years after reviewing The Destruction of the European Jews in Commentary. Trevor-Roper postulated that, except for the trial, Hilberg's "masterly study" was Arendt's main source. "She acknowledges her debt," Trevor-Roper wrote, "but the full extent of that debt can be appreciated only by those who have read both. Again and again the arguments, the very phrases, are unconsciously repeated." Trevor-Roper's review was largely forgotten, as was his conclusion that "indeed, behind the whole of Miss Arendt's book stands the overshadowing bulk of Mr. Hilberg's." ...

As the negative reviews of Eichmann in Jerusalem poured in, Arendt wrote to Mary McCarthy: "One can say that the mob--intellectual or otherwise--has been successfully mobilized." Arendt alleged in another letter, to a reader, that she was an innocent bystander who had been made a scapegoat. But she also recognized that the cause of the furor was her use of Hilberg's Judenräte material. "That I am now in the center of this campaign is almost an accident. Ever since the publication of Hilberg's book, those organizations have been worrying about what to do," she wrote in response to a particularly vicious review of her work by Lionel Abel in the Summer 1963 issue of Partisan Review.

Arendt was not happy. She felt her ideas were being trampled by the uproar over Eichmann in Jerusalem. ...

But just as Arendt did not give Hilberg the full credit he was due, Hilberg did not properly acknowledge her insights. In writing about Eichmann, she had proposed a bold new way of describing how ordinary Germans had been drawn into the machinery of destruction--a discussion that Hilberg had avoided. On a more immediate level, Arendt, despite having taken liberties with some of Hilberg's facts, had nevertheless acted as a popular interpreter of his research--providing visibility for a book that could easily have fallen down an academic mine shaft. In the process, this kick-started the rise of the study of the Holocaust. ...

Hilberg, like Arendt, remained largely estranged from collective Jewish life. He continued to live in Vermont, far from Jewish havens like New York City, and was twice married to non-Jews. He avoided synagogue and relished taking positions that antagonized many Jews. For instance, he rallied to the defense of Norman Finkelstein, who was lambasted for his book The Holocaust Industry, which argued that American Jewish institutions have exploited the memory of the Holocaust, turning it into shmaltz for financial and political gain. Peter Novick called Finkelstein's work "a charge into darkness that sheds no light." Hilberg not only praised Finkelstein's "analytical abilities" but also noted his strength in defying the establishment. In letters and interviews, Hilberg attacked both the community of Holocaust scholars in the United States and the Jewish organizations that had sprung up to memorialize the Holocaust. What he had warned the Holocaust Memorial council against had come to pass. After drawing such a stark picture of the Jewish collapse in The Destruction of the European Jews, Hilberg was horrified that many American Jews would willingly and eagerly link themselves with the history of victimhood. "Where is our dignity?" he asked an editor at Knopf in 1988.

At the lecture he delivered a few months before he died, a question was put to Hilberg: "Why do you not feel part of your community?" Without missing a beat, he responded, in an even voice, "I don't feel part of anything. I don't feel part of the university I've been a part of for decades. I don't feel part of Burlington, where I've spent all my years since 1956. I think some of us are just destined to be alone." ...

About Nathaniel Popper

Nathaniel Popper is a reporter with the Los Angeles Times.

(5) Mosaic monotheism: an invisible God as an Oriental pitiless tyrant - Ariella Atzmon

From: Sami Joseph <sajoseph2005@yahoo.com> Date: 07.04.2010 11:35 PM
Subject: [altahrir] Fw: Judaism between Law and Ethics   From: Gilad Atzmon <gilad@gilad.co.uk>

Minding the Gap: Judaism between Law and Ethics

by Ariella atzmon

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/minding-the-gap-judaism-between-law-and-ethics-by-ariella-at.html

...  The problem with the Jews is that instead of being the 'Guardians of Being', they turned into the guardians of 'not-forgetting-the-forgotten', distorting justice in the name of 'The Law'[ii]. Hence in fact the 'people of the book' are the 'people of the one and the same book', they are literate but not knowledgeable. Conceiving themselves as the 'light of the nations', they fail to show any eagerness to be enlightened. Judaic zeal for abstract signification, the refusal to supply presentation for the unpresentable interferes with a capacity to speculate with ideas.

The irreconcilable gap between Hellenism and Judaism can be exposed. in the Decalogue where sin is not defined in ethical or moral terms, and ethical wrangling is replaced by dutiful obedience. For more than 2500 years the world was suffused with the myth of justice and social welfare which the Ten Commandments bestowed upon it. From a cautious reading of the Ten Commandments, an all-embracing intention to disconnect human beings from their natural instincts, impulses and natural drives, can be revealed.

To start with the commandment that tells us to respect and love our parents. We love our parents instinctively, but rebel their authority through many life episodes. This ethical intricate burden that was relentlessly reconsidered by Greek mythology and tragedy, is delivered as an imperative, which excludes an ethical battling with the 'given'. To be commanded to respect our parents in exchange for being rewarded with long life in the Promised Land does not sound like a revelation of truth and justice. Likewise with the 'Sabbath': in the ancient world the tillers of the soil had to plough, sow and reap. Once the tears and toils of farming and growing were ended by joy, they celebrated with feasts of wine and dances. The harmony of man and nature was signified by the rhythm of nature's passing seasons, hoping for balance in a soft way. After sweating in the fields, people took a rest to rejoice. To punctuate peoples' lives by six days of 'labour' and 'rest' on the seventh is not such a great socially beneficial legislation. Notably on the Sabbath Jews are not allowed to ignite fire or to move from one place to another; in Judaism things cannot be left alone for a moment. Actually, with pagans as ordinary human beings the values of decency, civility, respect for parents and the elderly, obedience to magistrates, and submission to laws are venerated in most ancient pagan texts.

Jewish monotheism is distinct not only from the Pagan world but also from Christianity. As a tribal cult, regarding themselves as chosen, Jews differentiated themselves from the gentiles whom they held in contempt. Christianity as a universal religion enables ethical contemplation without the interference of supremacist postures. Judaic Law is an impoverished system of justice. Even the six tomes of the Talmud as a collection of behavioral guidance, are scarcely engaged in moral intuitions. Here are some disturbing questions to raise: If Jewish scholarship, should as declared by Jews be accredited as a universal wisdom embracing ethics and morality, why is it that the more the Jews are engrossed in this learning, the more segregated they turn out to be? How can ethical thinking mesh with learning that results in segregation? Is it the Judaic suppression of 'the image' and the submission to the Word, which is recognized as the reign of intellectuality over sensuality that distances its bearers from being in tune with earth and heaven?

Despite Jewish attempts to persuade us to extract wisdom from Talmud, it never evolved into an essential part of western intellectual thought. Its polemic image disguises a tradition of chewing ready-made disputes, in which the views and opinions of previous scholars are faithfully preserved verbatim citing the rabbi who first uttered it. Hence, while grieving the forgotten wisdom of the Talmud, Jewish scholars disguise its formal judicial nature. The Jewish Law is not founded in a moral or an ethical conception of man; but rather as a set of regulations which grew out of social conditions and cultic motives obsolete no longer understood.

The Jews, who praise themselves for rescuing the oriental world from the cruelties of paganism, actually impersonated their own mental picture of an invisible God as a simulacrum of an oriental pitiless tyrant that grounds His power in the Mosaic Law. In fact, this conception of God is the most ingenious device ever invented for cementing a group. It is a mastermind's indestructible strategy, that in combining repression with gratitude, it authorizes a perfect scheme for self-preservation.

Mosaic monotheism always aimed at achieving a complete grip on Jewish daily life. In the shma Israel prayer, Israel is told '…You must love your God with all your heart and soul and strength, when you lie down and when you rise' (Deuteronomy 6:4-8) . This double-bind imperative: loving God coupled with dread, imposes indebtedness for being bestowed with stolen treasures "Your God will bring you into the land which he swore to your forefathers Abraham, , Isaac, and Jacob that he would give you a land of great and fine cities which you did not build, houses full of good things which you did not provide, cistern which you did not hew, and vineyards and olive-groves which you did not plant. When you eat your fill there, be careful not to forget the Lord who brought you out of Egypt (Deuteronomy 6:10-12). The spirit of the Jewish religion was not inspired by ideas, but rather by a covenantal pact of conditional activities which took over all aspects of the peoples' life. Yet, many non-observant Jews, follow the Jewish rites, and maintain the same vague admiration for Judaic wisdom. This brainwashing regarding the intellectual intensity of the Talmudic debate is sustained by a predetermined common ignorance. While Orthodox Jews reject external knowledge, most secular Jews are unfamiliar with the Talmudic text.

Since Rabbinic tradition does not supply an intelligible moral meaning for the Law, decision-making is authorized by tribal needs or personal greed, whilst moral issues are approached in terms of profit/loss calculations. Relations with God are conceived in contractual terms: good deeds are measured against bad, as in a business balance sheet. Bultmann points to the disturbing nature of obedient ethics where the realization of the ideal man is replaced by the glory of God. Differing from Greek thought, Jewish morality is perceived in terms of action and not as one of the virtues of the 'ideal man'[iii]. The people who are inspired by the god within differ from those who are led by the pillars of 'cloud and fire'. Devotion based on fear, leaves the trembling Jew to propitiate 'God authority' by ostentatious obedience[iv]. But then, what is moral satisfaction when based on dread rather than love? What does God's 'Love' means, if it is associated with intimidation and fright? Thus, whilst Hellenism inspired Westerners' thought through 25 centuries, the Old Testament's contribution can be entirely dismissed. Any attempt to highlight the rift between Athens and Jerusalem, is immediately denounced as anti-Semitism.

The Law flourishes on the ruins of ethics. Heidegger opined that the more people are immersed in legalism, the more they quit the embrace of 'Being'. While legalism is anchored within rules, justice is an object of an idea. While an ethical judgment is a game without rules, the Law is a linguistic 'fashioning', elevated to a supreme sacred stage of secular fundamentalism. If ethics manifest itself in the inexpressible twilight zone where  universalism surrenders particularism, how can Judaism, which resist 'pluralism', make an ethical act happen? Is it the subservient choice which forbids theological reflection. 

In the book of Job which is the only biblical-theological text regarding God's justice, we find out how Job's children are killed, his servants slaughtered, Job himself is brought to the brink of death, his wife and his friends deny him any support and understanding. Thus, from the depths of his misery, Job meets with a stone wall, to discover that his complaints cannot obtain a hearing from the judge who is so much praised for his justice. The denial of fair trial is the worst of all. If this is a lesson God teaches us about fairness; why are people in court asked to swear upon a book which presents us with such heartless injustice? Jung justly asserts that God is far more preoccupied with a manifestation of His might than sustaining His right.

The view regarding human beings as granted with the ability to make rational judgment divides mainstream Enlightenment approaches from Judaism and Islam in a non-negotiable clash. Conceiving the human subject as spoken rather than self-defining individuals, reject the notion of democracy. Yet, while Jews are bestowed with a special status in the eyes of God, Islam is not a tribal religion. Judaic righteousness is motivated not by love but by the fear of a jealous power. The bible commands: In the cities of these nations whose land the Lord is giving you as patrimony, you shall not leave any creature alive. You shall annihilate them all(Deuteronomy 20:16). Among incompatible groups who resist western thought Judaism is the most uncompromising. A quest to decipher the triumph of Jewish monotheism over western civilization is yet to come.

In this paper I focused on Judaism, as dichotomous from Hellenism and from the other two monotheist religions. Judaism celebrates the primacy of the ear over visual representation. But despising the vividness of the referent leaves the Jewish subject sealed in a segregated bubble, impelled into an incurable detachment. The Jews are homeless; but frightened by uncanniness. Although regarding themselves as 'citizens of the world', they feel most secure within the walls of their mental ghetto. In the no man's land, between Law and Ethics, Is it not much too dangerous for people who lack the care for Being, to manifest itself as a political-national entity?

[i] Heidegger, M. (2000), Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory fried and Richard Polt, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 159-176

[ii] Lyotard, J. F. (1988 a), Heidegger and "the Jews", Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

[iii] Bultmann, R. (1958), Jesus and the Word, Fontana Books, pp. 57-8

[iv] Bultmann, R. (1960) , Primitive Christianity, The Fontana Library

*Ariella Atzmon. Israeli born. Senior lecturer in the School of Education and the School of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. (retired on 2002). Author of "Multiple Amnesia: a poststructuralist gaze".