I am a solitary angel dancing on the head of a pin.
Actually, dancing is too difficult. Balancing on the head of a pin is all I can hope to achieve at the moment.
The week started with a post here at Substack disputing whether Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians as it waged war against Hamas and ended with a piece for Engelsberg Ideas about the miserable chain of connection from the openly racist settler leader Meir Kahane to Israel’s current Minister for Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir. While the rest of the world is watching the destruction of Hamas in Gaza, Ben-Gvir, whose portfolio includes West Bank security is allowing rampant ethnic cleansing to take place there.
The genocide piece brought criticism from colleagues and social media contacts about playing word games at a terrible time. One regular donor to the FRDH, First Rough Draft of History podcast, canceled his monthly contribution, accusing me of platforming genocidaires. Others unsubscribed from the FRDH Substack.
The Ben-Gvir piece offended a different group of people but oddly, brought me new subscribers here.
Maintaining balance is not easy.
I really don’t think genocide is an accurate word to describe the war. It is also a problematic one because when the pro-Palestinian faction says, “genocide,” it opens the door for them to use the Jewish N-word: Nazi. Genocide was a word invented during World War 2 to explain what was happening to the Jews in the lands briefly conquered by the Germans. The demonstrations against Israel have not lacked for placards equating Israel with the Nazis.
The accurate term for what is happening in Israel’s war is “ethnic cleansing.” While the IDF is engaged in destroying Gaza City in its attempt to root out Hamas, Ben-Gvir is offering protection to his fellow messianic Zionists to drive Palestinians from their villages in the West Bank. The Washington Post reported that 900 people had been displaced in the month since Hamas started the war. That goes along with the 1100 people displaced since Ben-Gvir joined Netanyahu’s latest coalition at the very end of 2022.
The ethnic cleansing of the West Bank has long been the intention of the messianic minority within Israel. They believe that Israel, including the West Bank, the biblical Judaea and Samaria, must be entirely Jewish to usher in the Messiah’s return.
Their minority status was until recently one of the reasons why Ben-Gvir was a political pariah. Another was that he had a conviction for inciting racism against Israel’s Arab citizens and supporting Jewish terror groups.
Netanyahu created the position of Minister of Security especially for him so he would join the coalition. It is also clear that the proposed judicial reform that brought 150,000 people out in protest against the idea every Saturday night from the beginning of 2023 until Saturday Oct 7th, was meant to make it impossible for Israel’s Supreme Court to intervene should the Netanyahu coalition authorize further annexation in the West Bank.
How big the Israeli minority in favor of ethnic cleansing is and in the wider Jewish Diaspora, I cannot say. There has never been, to my knowledge, a really accurate survey of Israeli and Jewish attitudes to the settlement of the West Bank. That’s because my intimate knowledge of the global Jewish community teaches that on this subject people lie. I can add, based on my reporting from the Middle East and outside my front door in London, that Palestinians, the wider Arab community and Muslims also lie.
Many on both sides still—after 75 years of Israeli statehood, 55 years of occupation, four major wars, decades of asymmetric conflict in Lebanon and Gaza—think they can achieve the maximalist aim: the disappearance of the other from the disputed land.
In America very few Jews would endorse Ben-Gvir’s politics openly, just as very few would have endorsed his political rabbi, Meir Kahane. Yet Kahane had plenty of financial support from the US, although much of it came in anonymously. Watching ethnic cleansing get underway the last month has reminded me of a dinner I had with the late Jewish-American comedian Jackie Mason 30 + years ago
I had become friendly with Mason after profiling him for the Guardian newspaper and whenever he was playing a season in London’s West End we would occasionally have dinner after his show. It was part of his post-performance, unwinding process. One evening in early 1990 we were joined by a fellow named Shannon Taylor, who Mason explained was Meir Kahane’s lawyer.
I joked, I didn’t think Meir Kahane would have an Irishman for a lawyer. Taylor explained,
“My parents were survivors. Family name is Schneider (which means tailor in Yiddish).
“I was conceived in a DP camp and after they got their American visas, my parents’ flight made a refuelling stop in Shannon, Ireland en route to the US. So, Shannon Taylor.”
The conversation became political. Kahane’s politics were racist politics. Things got ugly.
“Arabs are dogs” is one choice phrase I recall, another was his confident guarantee that in five years, ten years tops,
“There won’t be an Arab left in Israel.”
That was too much for me. I got up from the table, turned and walked out. As I was leaving, I heard Jackie say to Taylor: “For a while, it was a beautiful friendship.”
I remembered the lawyer’s guarantee about the expulsion of Arabs a few months later when Kahane was gunned down at a fund-raising dinner in New York by an Egyptian-American and bled out at Shannon Taylor’s feet.
The Golden Rule may be, “Do unto others, as you would have others do unto you”, but in the Israel-Palestine conflict it is, “Do unto others first, before they do it unto you.”
Another part of my angelic pinhead balancing act is trying to remind public intellectuals to act their age AND their IQs in social media. I feel like a third grade teacher in the school-yard trying to separate squabbling 9 year olds during recess.
I won’t name names but there are a couple of best-selling historians with huge social media presence who seem to think they have cracked the 280-character code of Twitter and can be as profound, comprehensive and nuanced in a tweet as they are in their 600 page long books on the French Revolution and Indian History.
They can’t. All they do is incite ridiculous commentary in the threads that trail under their pronouncements.
A month into the war it is time to repeat a call from the first week of the conflict:
Those of us in the respective Diasporas and partisans of either side who are living in safety need to maintain calm in our pronouncements rather than enflame the dire situation.
After a month the need to start paying attention to other things in life became necessary to maintain my pin-top balance.
So, went to visit my daughter who started university a week before the crisis began.
We had lunch and did a little shopping. I had brought up some of the Kid's cds: a couple of Taylor Swifts and a James Taylor compilation. She loves him. Sweet Baby James was a lullaby I sang to her (so was the Sisters of Mercy, but she doesn't have a thing for Leonard Cohen for some reason). She dragged me into a record store.
"I need some Joni Mitchell."
'You know, she turned 80 yesterday."
She didn't know.
We find the Joni section on the rack. I was hoping they might have the Rhino Records 5-disc compilation of the late 60s songs and I'd get her an early Christmas present. Instead there was something I didn't know existed: a BBC session recorded in 1970 with James Taylor playing additional guitar and singing harmony on some songs. Bingo.
After a truncated tour of the university we went back to her room, took Carole King's Tapestries out of the cd player and listened to the new purchase.
It was amazing to think that the session took place the same month I began my junior year abroad in England. More extraordinary to think that these songs and performers which I listened to a lot when I was an undergraduate are still around half a century later.
I assured the kid that in 1968 when I started Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. I wasn't listening to pop music from 1918.
"You guys were sooo lucky, you had the best music."
I wasn't going to disagree.
I asked her to skip ahead to The Circle Game, another song I lullabied her to sleep with. This rendition starts with the chorus.
"And the seasons, they go round and round/the painted ponies go up and down ..."
“Yesterday, a child came out to wonder ..."
I started to cry.
After I'd composed myself we passed the afternoon talking about interesting things.
"Were you around for the second wave?"
"Are you shitting me? The second wave broke over my head. But it was a strange time because for people my age the Second Wave of feminism was happening at the same time as sexual liberation became a key part of the lifestyle revolution and it wasn't always possible to reconcile the two. Very confusing when you are 18."
We also spoke about the Israel-Hamas war and her surprise at finding how many of her friends took the Hamas side with all the anti-Semitic rhetoric that goes with it. She seems to be handling it alright. Patiently explaining to friends who seem willing to listen that, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free,” is not just a slogan for liberation but a call for the elimination of Israel, the only Jewish state. Those who aren’t interested in discussion, she blocks.
I didn’t tell her that the first time I heard the expression, “From the River to the Sea” it was spoken by a messianic Zionist at his Jerusalem yeshiva explaining how Palestinians would be driven from the West Bank, and all the land of ancient Israel would be for Jews and Jews only.
And on the train back to London I thought “From the River” etc is a two-edged sword, like the Roman gladius. Which made me think of the Jewish sect, the zealots, who revolted against the Roman presence in Judea which led to the Romans destroying Jerusalem and the second temple in 70 CE; and this made me think of the last Jewish revolt against them led by Simon Bar-Kochba in 135 which led to the utter destruction of Judaea and its being renamed, Syria Palaestina or Palaestina for short, and deepening diaspora as the place became unlivable for Jews; which led after 1900 years of wandering and suffering to return to the land and which is now being led by Jewish zealots towards …
It really is lonely and difficult maintaining balance on the head of my pin. How are you doing on yours?
“Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right” comes to mind, that’s how I am experiencing it.
I had a book on Kahane but lent it out and never got it back.