Operation Shylock: A Confession (18 page)

And I said nothing, did not so much as challenge one excessive claim or do anything to clarify his thinking or to take exception where I knew he didn’t know what he was talking about. Instead, employing the disguise of my own face and name, I listened intently to all the suppositions spawned by his unbearable grievance, to the suffering spilling out of him in every word; I studied him with the coldhearted fascination and intense excitement of a well-placed spy.

Here is a condensation of his argument, a good deal more cogent for being summarized. I won’t describe the collisions and the pileups that George only narrowly avoided while he held forth. Suffice it to say that, even without an uprising under way and violence breaking
out everywhere, it is extremely hazardous to sit beside a man making a long speech at the wheel of a car. On the drive that afternoon between Jerusalem and Ramallah, there was not a half-mile without its excitements. George did not always fulminate looking straight ahead.

In summary, then, George’s lecture on that topic I could not really remember having chosen to shadow me like this, from birth to death; the topic whose obsessive examination I had always thought I could someday leave behind; the topic whose persistent intrusion into matters high and low it was not always easy to know what to make of; the pervasive, engulfing, wearying topic that encapsulated the largest problem and most amazing experience of my life and that, despite every honorable attempt to resist its spell, appeared by now to be the irrational power that had run away with my life—and, from the sound of things, not mine alone … that topic called
the Jews
.

First—according to George’s historical breakdown of the cycle of Jewish corruption—were the pre-Holocaust, postimmigration years of 1900 to 1939: a period of renouncing the Old Country for the New; of dealienization and naturalization, of extinguishing the memories of families and communities abandoned, of forgetting parents left to age and die without their most adventurous children to comfort and console them—the feverish period of toiling to construct in America, and in English, a new life and identity as Jews. After this, the period of calculated amnesia, 1939 to 1945, the years of the immeasurable catastrophe, when, with lightning speed, those families and communities from which the newly, incompletely Americanized Jews had voluntarily severed their strongest ties were quite literally obliterated by Hitler. The destruction of European Jewry registered as a cataclysmic shock on American Jews not only because of its sheer horror but also because this horror, viewed irrationally through the prism of their grief, seemed to them in some indefinable way
ignited
by them—yes, instigated by the wish to put an end to Jewish life in Europe that their massive emigration had embodied, as though between the bestial destructiveness of Hitlerian anti-Semitism and their own passionate desire to be delivered from the humiliations of their
European imprisonment there had existed some horrible, unthinkable interrelationship, bordering on complicity. And a misgiving very similar, an undivulgeable self-denunciation perhaps even more ominous, could be imputed to the Zionists and their Zionism. For were the Zionists without contempt for Jewish life in Europe when they embarked for Palestine? Didn’t the militants who pioneered the Jewish state feel an even more drastic revulsion for the Yiddish-speaking masses of the shtetl than did those practical-minded immigrants who’d managed their escape to America without the blight of an ideology like Ben-Gurion’s? Admittedly, migration, and not mass murder, was the solution proposed by Zionism; nevertheless, disgust for their own origins these Zionists made manifest in a thousand ways, most tellingly in choosing as the official tongue of the Jewish state the language of the remote biblical past rather than the shaming European vulgate that issued from the mouths of their powerless forebears.

So: Hitler’s slaughter of all those millions whom these Jews had unwittingly abandoned to their fate, the destruction of the humiliating culture whose future they had wanted no part of, the annihilation of the society that had compromised their virility and restricted their development—this left the unimperiled Jews of America as well as Israel’s defiantly bold founding fathers with a legacy not only of grief but of inexpungible guilt so damning as to warp the Jewish soul for decades thereafter, if not for centuries to come.

Following the catastrophe came the great period of postwar normalization, when the emergence of Israel as a haven for the surviving remnant of European Jewry coincided precisely with the advance of assimilation in America; the period of renewed energy and inspiration, when the Holocaust was itself still only dimly perceived by the public at large and before it had infested all of Jewish rhetoric; the years before the Holocaust had been commercialized by that name, when the most popular symbol for what had been endured by European Jewry was a delightful adolescent up in the attic diligently doing her homework for her daddy and when the means for contemplating everything more horrible were still generally undiscovered or suppressed,
when in Israel it would be years before a holiday was officially proclaimed to commemorate the six million dead; the period when Jews everywhere wished to be known even to themselves for something more vitalizing than their victimization. In America it was the age of the nose job, the name change, the ebbing of the quota system, and the exaltations of suburban life, the dawn of the era of big corporate promotions, whopping Ivy League admissions, hedonistic holidays, and all manner of dwindling prohibitions—and of the emergence of a corps of surprisingly goylike Jewish children, dopey and confident and happy in ways that previous generations of anxious Jewish parents had never dared to imagine possible for their own. The pastoralization of the ghetto, George Ziad called it, the pasteurization of the faith. “Green lawns, white Jews—you wrote about it. You crystallized it in your first book. That’s what the hoopla was all about. 1959. The Jewish success story in its heyday, all new and thrilling and funny and fun. Liberated new Jews, normalized Jews, ridiculous and wonderful. The triumph of the untragic. Brenda Patimkin dethrones Anne Frank. Hot sex, fresh fruit, and Big Ten basketball—who could imagine a happier ending for the Jewish people?”

Then 1967: the Israeli victory in the Six Day War. And with this, the confirmation not of Jewish dealienization or of Jewish assimilation or of Jewish normalization but of Jewish
might
, the cynical institutionalization of the Holocaust begins. It is precisely here, with a Jewish military state gloating and triumphant, that it becomes official Jewish policy to remind the world, minute by minute, hour by hour, day in and day out, that the Jews were victims before they were conquerors and that they are conquerors only because they are victims. This is the public-relations campaign cunningly devised by the terrorist Begin: to establish Israeli military expansionism as historically just by joining it to the memory of Jewish victimization; to rationalize—as historical justice, as just retribution, as nothing more than self-defense—the gobbling up of the Occupied Territories and the driving of the Palestinians off their land once again. What justifies seizing every opportunity to extend Israel’s boundaries? Auschwitz. What justifies bombing Beirut civilians? Auschwitz. What justifies
smashing the bones of Palestinian children and blowing off the limbs of Arab mayors? Auschwitz. Dachau. Buchenwald. Belsen. Treblinka. Sobibor. Belsec. “Such falseness, Philip, such brutal, cynical insincerity! To keep the territories has for them one meaning and
only
one meaning: it is to display the physical prowess that made the conquest possible! To rule the territories is to exercise a prerogative hitherto denied—the experience of oppressing and victimizing, the experience now of ruling
others
. Power-mad Jews is what they are, is
all
that they are, no different from the power-mad everywhere, except for the mythology of victimization that they use to justify their addiction to power and their victimizing of
us
. The famous joke has it exactly right. ‘There’s no business like
Shoah
business.’ During the period of their normalization there was the innocent symbol of little Anne Frank, that was poignant enough. But now, in the era of their greatest armed might, now at the height of their insufferable arrogance, now there are sixteen hours of
Shoah
with which to pulverize audiences all over the world, now there is ‘Holocaust’ on NBC once a week, starring as a Jew Meryl Streep! And the American Jewish leaders who come here, they know this
Shoah
business very well—they arrive here from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, these officials of the Jewish establishment, and to those few Israelis who still have some truthfulness in them and some self-respect, who still know how to utter something other than the propaganda and the lies, they say, ‘Don’t
tell
me how the Palestinians are becoming accommodating. Don’t
tell
me how the Palestinians have legitimate claims. Don’t
tell
me how the Palestinians are oppressed and that an injustice has been done. Stop that immediately! I cannot raise money in America with that. Tell me about how we are threatened, tell me about terrorism, tell me about anti-Semitism and the Holocaust!’ And this explains why there is the show trial of this stupid Ukrainian—to reinforce the cornerstone of Israeli power politics by bolstering the ideology of the victim. No, they will not stop describing themselves as victims and identifying themselves with the past. But it is not exactly as though the past has been ignored—the very existence of this state is evidence of that. By now surely this obsessive narrative of theirs has
come to violate their sense of reality—it certainly violates ours. Don’t tell
us
about their victimization! We are the last people in the
world
to understand that!
Of course
Ukrainian anti-Semitism is real. There are many causes that we all know, having to do with the role the Jews played there in the economic structure, with the cynical role assigned to them by Stalin in the farm collectivization—all this is clear. But whether this stupid Ukrainian is Ivan the Terrible is not
at all
clear, it
can’t
be clear after forty years, and so, if you have any honesty as a nation, any respect left at all for the law, you let him go. If you must have your vengeance, you send him back to the Ukraine and let the Russians deal with him—that should be satisfaction enough. But to try him here in the courtroom and over the radio and on the television and in the papers, this has only one purpose—a public-relations stunt à la the Holocaust-monger Begin and the gangster Shamir; public relations to justify Jewish might, to justify Jewish rule by perpetuating into the next one hundred millennia the image of the Jewish victim. But is public relations the purpose of a system of criminal justice? The criminal-justice system has a
legal
purpose, not a public-relations purpose. To educate the public? No, that’s the purpose of an
educational
system. I repeat: Demjanjuk is here to maintain the mythology that is this country’s lifeblood. Because without the Holocaust, where are they?
Who
are they? It is through the Holocaust that they sustain their connection to world Jewry, especially to privileged, secure American Jewry, with its exploitable guilt over being unimperiled and successful. Without the connection to world Jewry, where is their historical claim to the land? Nowhere! If they were to lose their custodianship of the Holocaust, if the mythology of the dispersion were to be exposed as a sham—
what then?
What
happens
when American Jews shed their guilt and come to their senses? What
happens
when American Jews realize that these people, with their incredible arrogance, have taken on a mission and a meaning that is utterly preposterous, that is
pure mythology?
What
happens
when they come to realize that they have been sold a bill of goods and that, far from being superior to Diaspora Jewry, these Zionists are inferior
by every measure of civilization?
What
happens
when American Jews discover that they have been duped, that they have constructed an allegiance to Israel on the basis of irrational guilt, of vengeful fantasies, above all,
above all
, based on the most naive delusions about the moral identity of this state?
Because this state has no moral identity
. It has
forfeited
its moral identity, if it ever had any to begin with. By relentlessly institutionalizing the Holocaust it has even forfeited its claim to the Holocaust! The state of Israel has drawn the last of its moral credit out of the bank of the dead six million—this is what they have done by breaking the hands of Arab children on the orders of their illustrious minister of defense. Even to world Jewry it will be clear: this is a state founded on force and maintained by force, a Machiavellian state that deals violently with the uprising of an oppressed people in an occupied territory, a Machiavellian state in, admittedly, a Machiavellian world, but about as saintly as the Chicago Police Department. They have advertised this state for forty years as essential to the existence of Jewish culture, people, heritage; they have tried with all their cunning to advertise Israel as a no-choice reality when, in fact, it is an
option
, to be examined in terms of
quality
and
value
. And when you dare to examine it like this, what do you actually find? Arrogance! Arrogance! Arrogance! And beyond the arrogance? Nothing! And beyond the nothing—
more arrogance!
And now it is there for the whole world to see every night on television—a primitive capacity for sadistic violence that has finally put the lie to
all
their mythology! ‘The Law of the Return’? As if any self-respecting civilized Jew would
want
to ‘return’ to a place like this! ‘The Ingathering of the Exiles’? As if ‘exile’ from Jewishness begins to describe the Jewish condition anywhere but
here!
‘The Holocaust’? The Holocaust is over. Unbeknownst to them, the Zionists themselves officially declared it over three days ago at Manara Square in Ramallah. I will take you there and show you the place where the decree was written. A wall where the soldiers took innocent Palestinian civilians and clubbed and beat them to a pulp. Forget the publicity stunt of that show trial. The end of the Holocaust is written on that wall in Palestinian blood. Philip! Old friend! All your life you have devoted to saving the Jews from themselves,
exposing to them their self-delusions. All your life, as a writer, ever since you began writing those stories out at Chicago, you have been opposing their flattering self-stereotypes. You have been attacked for this, you have been reviled for this, the conspiracy against you in the Jewish press began at the beginning and has barely let up to this day, a smear campaign the likes of which has befallen no Jewish writer since Spinoza. Do I exaggerate? All I know is that if a goy publicly insulted a Jew the way they have publicly insulted you, the B’nai B’rith would be screaming from every pulpit and every talk show, ‘Anti-Semitism!’ They have called you the filthiest names, charged you with the most treacherous acts of betrayal, and yet you continue to feel responsible to them, to fear for them, you persist, in the face of their self-righteous stupidity, to be their loving, loyal son. You are a great patriot of your people, and because of this, much of what I have been saying has angered and offended you. I see it in the set of your face, I hear it in your silence. You think, He is crazy, hysterical, reckless, wild. And what if I am—
wouldn’t you be?
Jews! Jews! Jews! How can I not think continually about Jews! Jews are my jailers, I am their prisoner. And, as my wife will tell you, there is nothing I have less talent for than being a prisoner. My talent was to be a professor, not a slave to a master. My talent was to teach Dostoyevsky, not to live drowning in spite and resentment like the underground man! My talent was to explicate the interminable monologues of his seething madmen, not to turn into a seething madman whose own interminable monologues he cannot stifle even in his sleep. Why don’t I restrain myself if I know what I’m doing to myself? My poor wife asks this question every day. Why can’t we move back to Boston before the stroke that killed the ranting father kills the ranting son? Why? Because I, who will not capitulate, am a patriot
too
, who loves and hates his defeated, cringing Palestinians probably in the same proportion that
you
, Philip, love and hate your smug, self-satisfied Jews. You say nothing. You are shocked to see debonair Zee in a state of blind, consuming rage, and you are too ironical, too worldly, too skeptical to accept with graciousness what I am about to tell you now, but, Philip,
you are a Jewish prophet and you always have been
.
You are a Jewish
seer
, and with your trip to Poland you have taken a visionary, bold, historical step. And for it you will now be more than just reviled in the press—you will be threatened, you will be menaced, you may very well be physically attacked. I wouldn’t doubt that they will even try to arrest you—to implicate you in some criminal act and put you in jail to shut you up. These are ruthless people here, and Philip Roth has dared to fly directly in the face of their national lie. For forty years they have been dragging Jews from all over the world, making payoffs, cutting deals, bribing officials in a dozen different countries so as to get their hands on more and more Jews and drag them here to perpetuate their myth of a Jewish homeland. And now comes Philip Roth to do everything he can to encourage these same Jews to stop squatting on somebody else’s land and to leave this make-believe country of theirs before these unregenerate, power-mad, vengeful Zionists implicate the whole of world Jewry in their brutality and bring a catastrophe down upon the Jews from which they will never recover. Old friend, we need you, we all need you, the occupiers as much as the occupied need your Diaspora boldness and your Diaspora brains. You are not in bondage to this conflict, you are not helpless in the grip of this thing. You come with a vision, a fresh and brilliant vision to resolve it—not a lunatic utopian Palestinian dream or a terrible Zionist final solution but a profoundly conceived historical arrangement that is workable, that is
just
. Old friend, dear, dear old friend—how can I serve you? How can
we
serve you? We are not without our resources. Tell me what we must do and we will do it.”