Why Israel Is Boycotted. By Dror Eydar.
Why Israel is boycotted. By Dror Eydar. Israel Hayom, Decmeber 13, 2013. Also at Writing The Wrongs.
Eydar:
1. What
lies at the root of the European boycott of Israel? What lies at the root of
the anti-Israel statements that various cultural icons are constantly making –
statements that camouflage anti-Semitic sentiment? What lies behind the false
and malicious comparison of Israel to South Africa's apartheid regime?
The
attempts to boycott Israel or mark its products, interfere in its ancient
geography or mark it as racist, fascist or Nazi are the current political
expression of Israel’s ancient characterization as “a nation that dwells alone.”
The return to Zion is the Jewish nation’s return to history, to life as a
sovereign people in its ancient homeland. Calls for boycott were made even
before the establishment of the state. While these calls came from the
extremist factions at the time, they moved toward the center as the years went
by, particularly after 1967. That was when we came back to the cradle of our
nationhood, to the historical places most closely connected with our identity.
Most important, we came back to Jerusalem, which is also linked with the
identity of the world’s nations. The fight against Israel – which is a fight
against history’s law of the return to Zion – is evidence of how hard it is for
Israel’s opponents to deal with the Jews’ return to life after having been in a
state of living death for so long. That is why we and our products are marked,
why the badge of shame is being placed upon us once again, why we are being
isolated and boycotted. This is our adversaries’ way of saying: “You are not
one of us.”
2. As Balaam, the prophet hired to curse the
Israelites, looked out over the Israelite tribes gathered on the plains of Moab
just before they entered Canaan, he had a moment of clarity. It was then that
he said: “Behold a people that dwells alone, that is not counted among the
nations.”
I have
just said that he made this statement in a moment of clarity, but it may also
be seen as a sophisticated attempt to isolate the Jews. The main representative
of world culture at that time marked out, with his words, the boundaries of
life for the new nation. Even at our people’s beginnings, the world marked us: “They”
are a people that dwells alone, and we do not count them among us.
We have
done much since that prophecy was uttered. We founded a kingdom and a temple
and set up prophets for ourselves and for the world. As a political entity we
endured two destructions, and hundreds of individual ones until the most
horrific of all seventy years ago in Europe. But never, in word or deed, did we
abandon the hope of returning home, of restoration, of being a free people in
Zion and Jerusalem.
Except
for brief periods of relative calm, the nations of the world did all they could
do isolate and shun us. Jews also marked themselves by their dress and their
customs. The Jewish people lived outside history, acquiring the image of a
people in a living death, with all the significance of that image, for good reason.
We lived on the margins of history and outside it, running for our lives from
place to place.
The
Jewish Haskalah (Enlightenment)
period in the 18th-19th centuries marked a new development. The Jews made an
effort to integrate into society and become contributing citizens. Berlin
became the new Jerusalem. Many proponents of the new movement, called maskilim, assimilated, but many did not,
even though they abandoned religious observance. But more than a century of the
Haskalah led to disappointment in the end. The Jews’ hopes of integration went
unfulfilled. The surrounding society’s fear and abhorrence of Jews who had
blended in, leaving behind all external signs of their Jewishness, only grew
greater.
Some
foreigners take advantage of a society’s goodness without contributing to it.
Sometimes they even work to undermine it or act openly against it. Not so the
Jews of Europe. They tried to be more German than the Germans, more French than
the French. Thousands of Jews died as soldiers in the wars between the empires.
They made contributions in science, culture, commerce, law and politics. But
none of this helped when crisis struck. Once again Jews were marked with the
yellow badge, and even those whose ancestors had assimilated three generations
before were forced to wear it.
The
Zionist movement was a ripe fruit that fell into the hands of thousands of
young people who had left the Egypt of their day, the Jewish shtetl and had no desire to assimilate.
They wanted only to return to the Land of Israel. Now the Promised Land became
an actual destination, and the return to Zion a practical political plan.
3. What
is the founding myth that the West kept before its eyes for two millennia? What
did they see in the streets, on signs, in books, in churches, in the symbols of
their governments? What was it that Westerners saw from birth to death? A
crucified Jew.
With
the advent of the Haskalah, and all the more so that of Zionism, the Jews
sought for the first time in centuries to leave the role Christianity had
prescribed for them – to serve as a living example of the truth of the
Christian faith and as human fodder for the re-enactment of the crucifixion,
through the terrible violence used against them – and re-enter history. The
Jews came down from the cross and sought to live among those who had seen them,
up to that time, through the founding myth of the crucified Jew. As we saw in
the previous century, the attempt failed, ending in unprecedented disaster.
With
Zionism – the completion of the process of coming down from the cross – the
Jewish people's future changed. Jesus came down from the cross, wrapped himself
in his prayer shawl and went back to being a Jew from the Galilee, leaving his
empty image behind in Europe. The establishment of the State of Israel was a
profound disruption of Christian Europe’s founding myth. As if it were not
enough that Jesus came down from the cross, he also went back to his ancient
homeland and took up arms to keep from being crucified again. Even if the power
of religion had waned, the myths through which it shaped the culture of the
European nations had not. They remained the basis of thought and action, and
they are the basis of the current anti-Semitic and anti-Israel acts such as the
boycott against us, the efforts to delegitimize us and the attempt to put blame
parallel to that of the Holocaust upon us.
The
fight against our possession of those parts of Israel that are the most
important to our identity as an ancient nation is a fight against the return to
Zion. It is a struggle against the normalization of the Jew and attempt to “clean
up” – to put the Jew back on the cross so as to return to the old order. From
this perspective, the Palestinians are the spearhead of the global fight of
those who oppose the return to Zion. From such a profound perspective, the
recent agreement in Geneva can also be seen as sacrificing the Jews for peace
and quiet.
But
even as the Europeans think they are getting peace and quiet, they are on the
verge of a crisis. A mighty force has implanted itself in Europe – tens of
millions of non-Christians unwilling to adopt Western culture. In an act of
historical irony, Europe expelled the Jews and Muslims came instead. Now, Europe
stands helpless. The institution of political correctness has left it powerless
and has paralyzed the West's early-warning system there. The decline of the
West that Oswald Spengler wrote about in the 1920s is in full force. Once the
West has declined and fallen, Spengler wrote then, the fellah waits to take over.
But for
Israel, all is not lost. The West, too, has a mighty force – tens of millions
of people who understand that the danger they face affects not only the Jews,
but also their very existence as a civilization. In this fight, Israel serves
as a front-line post against the collapse of the West. Non-acceptance of the
calls for boycott and refusal to wear the new badge of shame are moral
imperatives for every decent human being. The dispute over the Land of Israel
has nothing to do with territory. If it did, we would have resolved the
conflict long ago. This is a fight over identity. The return to Zion is not our
hope only; it is the hope of the entire free world.