|
The crux of
coincidence: I began re-reading Saul Bellow’s
novel “Ravelstein” a couple of days ago, perhaps
out of nostalgia for Paris, perhaps out of the
desire for an intelligent reading experience. At
87, Bellow can still write circles around each and
every MFA-pedigreed writer hiding out in the
bughouses of academia. Then the news of the latest
suicide bombing in Israel: in reality, two nearly
simultaneous suicide bombers, killing, as the New
York Times delicately put it, “23 other people.”
Let’s be honest: no one gives a fuck about those
two bombers. They don’t count--except as souls to
be tormented in the fires of hell for eternity.
Now I hate book critics, book reviewers, academic
critics and liberal sympathizers for lost causes
as much as I hate terrorists. So this is not some
academic exercise in tenure padding (otherwise I’d
just use the web’s Random Postmodern Jargon
generator). I’m not going to rehash hackneyed
arguments about Bellow’s book (usually pointing
out the novel is just a thinly-disguised biography
of his old friend Allan Bloom, whose “The Closing
of the American Mind” was positively prophetic in
its predictions of the pernicious influence of PC
and multicult in American universities) and I’m
not here to uncover some hidden layer of meaning
or to use deconstructive demagoguery to promote
some suspect political agenda that Bellow himself
was unaware of.
The crux of the coincidence: after the bombing, as
I continued reading I was simply stunned by the
following sentences:
“I well understood what he [Ravelstein] meant. The
war made it clear that almost everybody agreed
that the Jews had no right to live. Other people
have some choice of options—-their attention is
solicited by this issue or that, and being
besieged by issues they make their choices
according to their inclinations. But for ‘the
chosen’ there is no choice. Such a volume of
hatred and denial of the right to live has never
been heard or felt, and the will that willed their
death was confirmed and justified by a vast
collective agreement that the world would be
improved by their disappearance and their
extinction.”
Well, that certainly gives one pause, doesn’t it?
While there have been roughly 120 terrorist
attacks world- wide in the last few years, there
have been over 8,500 attacks in Israel. And
according to many of the world’s leaders and most
the world press, these attacks have not only been
Israel’s fault but they have been deserved.
This most recent attack, however, has received an
unusual amount of condemnation from those same
world leaders and world press. Why? Re-read the
Bellow quote. Now consider this: most of the
victims of this suicide bombing WERE NOT JEWS.
They were mainly immigrants, many of them illegal.
Nothing will stroke the heart strings of liberal
compassion more than the sufferings of the
displaced and downtrodden. And since these victims
aren’t Jews, it’s okay to condemn the poor,
displaced, downtrodden Palestine murderers who
murdered them.
I’ve always believed the purpose of great
literature is to make you think, on the long
journey to self-discovery and, indeed,
self-fashioning. Literature is not political
propaganda but propaganda for the self. In this,
it is supremely solipsistic. That’s its true value
for us, nothing more, nothing less. Every English
department in America could be disbanded and its
occupants put to honest labor if this were a truth
universally acknowledged.
As a self-fashioned American expat writer living
in Europe, I’ve had to confront and finally accept
the one thing I cannot change about myself: I am
Jewish and many Europeans and all Arabs believe
that I have no right to live. The Europeans made
this abundantly clear in the 20th century (and not
just the Germans, but the French collaborators,
the Italians, the Lithuanians, the Poles, the
Russians, the Czechs, the Hungarians, etc. In the
novel, Bellow himself uses the example of the
Romanian Iron Guard, which took live Jews, hung
them on meathooks in slaughterhouses, and then
skinned them alive. At least the Germans gassed
them first); the Muslims are trying to make this
abundantly clear in the 21st.
The Israeli IDF are not Nazis; Sharon is not
Hitler; Israel is not an apartheid state. The
Palestinian Authority sends 14-year-old boys and
women to do their dirty work and then complains
when these “innocents” are killed. The
Palestinians have a country: it’s called Jordan.
Where else can the Jews go? Saudi Arabia? The sea?
Compare the facts and you will see that odious and
misjudged comparisons like these are not only
moronic but anti-Semitic in intent. Excuse me,
perhaps I should use the new codeword for
anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism.
The Jews in Israel are not just fighting for their
lives but for the right of Jews the world over to
live--a right, as Bellow pointed out, denied us. I
live in Germany, which thanks to Hitler is still
practically Jewish-free and still striated with
the sediment of anti-Semitism. But it’s not just
the Germans; some of the most virulent
anti-Semites I’ve ever encountered are from France
and Britain. Ever read the opinion pieces in the
Guardian? If it weren’t for America, I’m sure the
state of Israel and the world’s Jews would no
longer exist. Re-re-read the Bellow quote and now
ask yourself why 9-11 happened.
While you’re feeling sorry for those poor
Palestinians, go visit the old ghetto in a
beautiful European city like Budapest, stand there
and feel true, moral guilt, not just the
fashionable Hollywood-liberal variety that sends
blank slates like Sean Penn to Iraq. Walk along
the Danube and reflect that thousands of Jews were
lined up here on that same promenade, their brains
scattered by bullets, their bodies dumped into the
Red Danube.
Is peace possible in the Middle East? Do the Jews
have the right to live, in peace and prosperity,
free from the specter of Arab terrorism and
anti-Semitism? Read “Ravelstein” and you’ll be
able to answer that question for yourself.
|
