The Anti-Zionist Complex (Jacques Givet – 1982)

The Anti-Zionist Complex

by Jacques Givet
SBS Publishing, Englewood, N.J. (1982)

“Hostility to Israel, whether unconscious or deliberate, outspoken or dissembled, ultimately derives from a refusal to accept a Jewish national entity, the existence of which is stubbornly opposed in the name of some abstract universalism or on behalf of some other national movement.”

“It is not an accident that the most stubbornly monotheistic of peoples should be the first to attract the wrath of those who would have done with God.

“…Jewish emancipation, as soon as it goes beyond demanding that toleration which is the maximum that can be allowed, represents an intolerable provocation.”

“The game is never lost as long as the wealth of hope is inexhaustible.”

“Hostility to Israel, whether unconscious or deliberate, outspoken or dissembled, ultimately derives from a refusal to accept a Jewish national entity, the existence of which is stubbornly opposed in the name of some abstract universalism or on behalf of some other national movement.”  (p. 6)

The Israeli War of Independence in 1948 was a model revolution, the first successful redemption of an alienated people, and one of the very few revolutions not to abandon democratic processes and devour its own children.  One factor in this was the messianic fervor which has never, throughout the centuries, entirely deserted the Jews.  It is sad that the responsible authorities in the young [1948] State of Israel, as is the way with so many bureaucracies, should remain blind to the profit to be derived from this creative ferment in the ideological struggle.  In this struggle, Israel seems all too often content to play a passive part.  We shall now have to inquire whether there may not be a deeper reason for this passivity; whether or not the fact that Jewish thought has traditionally been bewildered by and unable to account for or come so terms with the persistence of evil may not have anything to do with it.  (128)

In the Christian West, life “here and now” has traditionally faded before the glories awaiting the individual soul in the world to come; in the Communist East, salvation will take the form of rising social standards here on earth.  The result is what I call Edenism – a determined, even if unconscious, attempt to bring about a world in which dreams will coincide with history, plus the optimism required to believe that such a thing is possible.  Edenists believe that they have left Judaism behind, but its very survival is felt as a kind of affront.  (137)

Among the non-secular societies, which constitute the immense majority on earth today, only those entirely foreign to Judaism, and hence to the religions of the Book, can take an attitude of complete detachment towards Judaism.  For Christian and Moslem thought (and this holds good of Marxism, too, in so far as it has messianic claims), refusal to recognize the validity of what Jews hold sacred is all too often a defence of their own religious values, including an inclination to attribute to Judaism an aggressiveness they refuse to recognize in themselves.  (149)

If, then, the very existence of Israel is felt by some to be an aggression, it is because the affirmation of a Jewish existence is felt to be an aggression by the eschatological faiths deriving from Judaism.  For them, Jewish emancipation, as soon as it goes beyond demanding that toleration which is the maximum that can be allowed, represents an intolerable provocation.  (151)

But in the eyes of the country’s sworn enemies this is as nothing compared with the guilt of existing, especially from the date on which it emerged as a real state and with all the attributes of victory – “natural” frontiers, money apparently flowing in, and an army apparently unbeatable.  In fact, these enemies cannot admit the existence of any purely Jewish territory at all, no matter how exiguous, nor any Jewish financial strength, even if the fruit of a natural solidarity, nor any Jew under arms.  They feel themselves threatened by Jewish life as such, no matter what form it may take.  (154)

The game is never lost as long as the wealth of hope is inexhaustible.  (165)

The fact remains that the idea of God is not so easily consigned to oblivion.  In his collection of aphorisms On Religion Nietzsche wrote: “The Jews – the worst of peoples,” and four lines further on: “God completely superfluous.”  It is not an accident that the most stubbornly monotheistic of peoples should be the first to attract the wrath of those who would have done with God.

But I have no more truck with those who theorize about the death or defeat of God than with the zealots of God triumphant.  Rather would I pay tribute to that mythology from which so many philosophers are drawn (it is also a root of the world in which we live), I like to think of Prometheus as being able, unaided, to cast off his chains, and to imagine that from then on no vultures will be sent by Heaven to pick his entrails.  He is no longer will to await deliverance by some deity.  No more than you or I does he foresee the future.  But he knows that the gods, still able to inflict the most fearful torments, no longer, thanks to him, possess the privilege of fire.

He knows, too, that those gods, like him, like all of us, are cast in human form.  (165-166)