Jostein Gaarder’s profoundly confused attack on Israel contains an Orwellian lie that is breathtaking in its audacity but dismayingly common.
the state of Israel, with its unscrupulous art of war and its disgusting weapons, has massacred its own legitimacy.
This assertion makes no sense unless there is something particularly repellent about the way Israel practices war that should single it out from all the other bloody handed states in the world – the states that should remain legitimate. The obvious question is why the US and the UK remain legitimate states in light of their current adventure in Iraq. And while there are many criticisms of the US in Europe, it’s Israel that is “illigitimate” even though there is absolutely not one single atrocity committed by Israel in the last 50 years that has any advantage in either originality or scale over the common practice of the European nations and their colonies over the last 300 years or more. (Please note, I’m attacking European ideologies, not defending Israeli atrocities – even in Haaretz you can see too much.)
What accounts for this singling out of Israel is Europe’s legacy racism and denial. Gaarder’s lie is part and parcel of the anti-semitic constructs of his essay but it cuts to the heart of the colonial past and present and the way Europe and its settler states have refused to come to terms with how they came to the top of the heap on this planet.
Although essays like this are common in Europe, an example from a Norwegian is particularly illustrative because Norway has relatively clean hands. The same type of essays written by English, Germans, French, or Belgians show us that double-talk truly has no limits.
Like the American conservatives who he echos although he would undoubtedly gag at the comparison, Gaarder makes a rushed and grudging admission of some unclear unpleasantness in the past before recycling classical racism. In the US we hear exactly the same story from racists who want to condemn what they imagine to be the especially violent and criminal nature of African-Americans.
We acknowledge and pay heed to Europe’s deep responsibility for the plight of the Jews, for the disgraceful harassment, the pogroms, and the Holocaust. It was historically and morally necessary for Jews to get their own home. However,…
Yes, it was a bitch, but that was in the past, we gave them everything because we are generous to a fault, and still they behave as it is in their low natures to behave:
We do not believe that Israel grieves more for forty killed Lebanese children than it for over three thousand years has lamented forty years in the desert. We note that many Israelis celebrate such triumphs like they once cheered the scourges of the Lord as “fitting punishment” for the people of Egypt. (In that tale, the Lord, God of Israel, appears as an insatiable sadist.)
In America, racists complain that someone is “playing the race card” when they are called to task for their racism. In Europe, we hear about the unfair accusations of anti-semitism raised against pure humanists who are beyond that. But anyone familiar with European anti-semitism will recognize this pattern. The start, “Israel grieves”
as “it for over three thousand years …” shows us that – despite any pretence- the target here is “it” – the Jews – not the state of Israel. And then we get the predictable slap at the barbaric and violent religion of the Jews (when a Norwegian finds your ancestral myths barbaric, you must be bad indeed.). One could immediately predict the reference to Christs new revelation and its rejection by the stubborn evil doers and we are not disappointed
We do not recognize the spiral of retribution of the blood vengeance with “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” We do not recognize the principle of one or a thousand Arab eyes for one Israeli eye. We do not recognize collective punishment or population-wide diets as political weapons. Two thousand years have passed since a Jewish rabbi criticized the ancient doctrine of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”
He said: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”
That’s very nice. The Jews, as is well known, have rejected Christ’s mercy. Did you know that Norway was consituted as a Lutheran nation? When Martin Luther advised the Princes of Europe to burn all the synagogues and the books of the Jews kill, torture, and expel the Jews themselves, he wrote
That is the kind of Messiah we Christians have, and we thank God, the Father of all mercy, with the full, overflowing joy of our hearts, gladly and readily forgetting all the sorrow and harm which the devil wrought for us in Paradise. For our loss has been richly compensated for, and all has been restored to us through this Messiah. Filled with such joy, the apostles sang and rejoiced in dungeons and amid all misfortunes as did even young girls, such as Agatha, Lucia, etc. The wretched Jews, on the other hand, who rejected this Messiah, have languished and perished since that time in anguish of heart, in trouble, trembling, wrath, impatience, malice, blasphemy, and cursing, as we read in Isaiah 65:14: “Behold, my servants shall sing for gladness of heart, but you shall cry out for pain of heart, and shall wail for anguish of spirit. You shall leave your name to my chosen for a curse, and the Lord God will slay you; but his servants he will call by a different name.” And in the same chapter we read: “I was ready to be sought by those who did not ask for me; I was ready to be found by those who did not seek me. I said, ‘Here am I, here am I,’ to a nation that did not call on my name (that is, who were not my people). I spread out my hands all the day to a rebellious people.”
We, indeed, have such a Messiah, who says to us (John 11:25): “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.” And John 8:51: “Truly, truly, I say to you, if any one keeps my word, he will never see death.” The Jews and the Turks care nothing for such a Messiah. And why should they? They must have a Messiah from the fool’s paradise, who will satisfy their stinking belly, and who will die together with them like a cow or dog.
And when Joostien Gaarder also became exasperated with the Jews he wrote:
There are limits to our patience, and there are limits to our tolerance. We do not believe in divine promises as justification for occupation and apartheid. We have left the Middle Ages behind. We laugh uneasily at those who still believe that the God of flora, fauna, and galaxies has selected one people in particular as his favorite and given it funny tables, burning bushes, and a license to kill.
Oh those funny tables, not like virgin births or God dictating books to merchants in the desert or any of the things in serious religions. Well we don’t have to go back to the middle ages – in 1851, the Norwegian constitution expressed it quite clearly:
Paragraph II – stated “the Evangelic-Lutheran religion will remain the official State religion. Jesuits and Monastic orders are not accepted. Jews are furthermore excluded from the Kingdom.”
My goodness, as Don Rumsfeld might put it. Good thing this was so far in the past, or we’d have to question the legitimacy of the Norwegian state. And then if we consider that 1850 was the beginning of a major escalation of the slaughter and land theft from the Sami (Lapps), a theft that was continuing in 1980 when the Norwegian state violently suppressed Sami protests of the theft of some of the last of their land for a power plant. Do we realize that until the 1970s, the Swedes had laws limiting the size of houses that could be built by this despised minority?
Why are there not teeming camps of angry Sami firing Silkworm missiles into Oslo or Stockholm? Is it because of the good treatment they received when enslaved and forced to work in the mines? No. It’s because they were so thoroughly slaughtered and suppressed that the remnants are like the Apaches and Dakota, too close to the fate of the Tasmanians to be able to resist. But the morality of “legitimacy” has an amazing statute of limitations that is very beneficial if you have been thorough in your ethnic cleansing. You see, it was all so long ago that it has been washed out in the blood of the lamb. That’s why the condition of the Dakota or the Tasmanians or the Jews of Europe or the Congolese or any of the other recipients of the tender mercies of Christian Europe is not relevant. It was a long time ago – at least a few decades or months if we consider the Brits in Basra.
I can’t move past this without referencing Gaarder’s invocation of sacred international laws that have been ignored by the Jews because I find this commonplace of Colonial Morality to be especially telling. It is not a secret that international laws are routinely violated by every state that thinks it has an advantage in doing so. Europe recently collaborated with US illegal “extraordinary rendition”. I don’t notice any officials going to jail. And even Norway showed us that when a vital, a critical, a life-and-death matter such as the right to butcher whales is at stake, international laws can be ignored. Amazing how these violations of international law do not create issues of legitimacy either.
So finally, we come down to the core meaning of Gaarder’s argument, stripped of all the pious bullshit and fraudulent “international standards”. That core meaning was expressed by (allegedly) Sharon in the famous interview with Amos Oz:
I personally don’t want to be any better than Khomeini or Brezhnev or Ghadafi or Assad or Mrs. Thatcher, or even Harry Truman who killed half a million Japanese with two fine bombs. I only want to be smarter than they are, quicker and more efficient, not better or more beautiful than they are. Tell me, do the baddies of this world have a bad time? If anyone tries to touch them, the evil men cut his hands and legs off. They hunt and catch whatever they feel like eating. They don’t suffer from indigestion and are not punished by Heaven. I want Israel to join that club. Maybe the world will then at last begin to fear me instead of feeling sorry for me. Maybe they will start to tremble, to fear my madness instead of admiring my nobility. Thank God for that. Let them tremble, let them call us a mad state. Let them understand that we are a wild country, dangerous to our surroundings, not normal, that we might go crazy if one of our children is murdered – just one! That we might go wild and burn all the oil fields in the Middle East! If anything would happen to your child, God forbid, you would talk like I do. Let them be aware in Washington, Moscow, Damascus and China that if one of our ambassadors is shot, or even a consul or the most junior embassy official, we might start World War Three just like that!”
Because 20 years later, it will all be long in the past. And here is the real sorrow. As long as Europeans wish to live in a fantasy world in which “international standards” and humanitarian rules apply to only others, there can be no world progress. The rich nations sit on top of the heap of bones and explain loudly to everyone in a transparent code that if you get your looting and murder done quickly and tidily, you can join the club. That is the way the world works. If you don’t like it, you can either be honest or live in a fantasy, as long as the world let’s you be comfortable there.
