Four years after 1982 the Israeli armed forces had demonstrated in Lebanon how far fascism had spread across the country and its authorities, Amos Oz, one of the country's best-known authors, felt obliged to write about this phenomenon, and warn the Jews in Israel as well as in the so called 'diaspora.' In a number of in-depth essays he analyzed, why his Jewish country had taken this road. The essays are bundled in the book The Slopes of Lebanon, an absolute masterpiece. I chose this time the essay "Amalek Week": THE EARLY ZIONISTS were fond of the phrase “the rustle of history’s wings.” The inauguration of an agricultural cooperative in a Jewish village was brushed by the wings of history. A meeting between the secretary of a kibbutz and the mukhtar of a neighboring Arab village was always a historic milestone.
THE HYPNOSIS OF THE PAST
This historical inflationism of the early Zionists was not a sign of spiritual self-effacement vis-à-vis the past. On the contrary. The first furrow after two thousand years betokened pride that the present could provide a fitting response to the past. The historic plow was historic in the eyes of the plowmen precisely because they viewed it as a symbol that the Jews, who had existed outside history for two thousand years, attempting to float above it, to flatten themselves beneath its feet, or to hide behind its back, had decided to reenter history, to become an active force within it, shaping and influencing it—no longer to be a passive, submissive victim. The Zionist credo, in a nutshell, was the aspiration “to become masters of our own fate.”
Now it turns out that the major obstacle to our reentry into history is, ironically, our enslavement to the horrors of history. The addiction to memory has debilitated the addict. “History poisoning” is an obstacle to making history. Precisely the paralyzing intensity of the past is the most dangerous threat to the Zionist future. Zionism drew enormous motivating power from the historic past. But the past is also a stagnating force, stultifying and contradicting the very purpose of Zionism. “The rustle of history’s wings” thus expresses the drawn-out, covert struggle between two powerful impulses: the obsessive wish to relive the historical experience over and over again, and the desire to break out of the stocks of the past in order to try to shape the present and the future as free men. On the one hand, Zionism had to relate unceasingly to the collective memory of the Jews in order to draw from it inspiration, justification, and ardor. On the other hand, Zionism had to destroy without mercy what the writer Yosef Haim Brenner called “the hypnosis of the past.”
SPAIN, GERMANY, RUSSIA, AND VARIOUS OTHER AMALEKS
These reflections have become particularly relevant in recent days. The president of Israel has paid a state visit to the land of Hitler. At the same time, Israel’s foreign minister was in Spain, from which our ancestors were expelled and whose soil had been consistently ostracized by the Jews for five hundred years. From Spain, our foreign minister went straight to Rome, the city of Titus, destroyer of Jerusalem, to meet with official representatives of Russia, which persecuted Jews both before and after the 1917 revolution. All this was done with the aim of promoting an international peace conference under the auspices of “the evil Gentile world,” in the hope that such a conference would further the peace process with “the inheritors of the seven biblical enemy nations of Canaan.”
Voor de niet ingewijde in de wereld van de Joodse God der Wrake die in het Oude Testament optreedt:
After Joshua became leader the new generation of Israel entered in to the new land of Canaan as our Lord promised. God gave them an important commandment "When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you—and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons." (Deut.7:1-3 NIV)Deuteronomium 20:16 HSV
Maar van de steden van deze volken die de HEERE, uw God, u als erfelijk bezit geeft, mag u helemaal niets wat adem heeft, in leven laten.
Amos Oz: It is no wonder, then, that the air here has been thick these days with the rustle of history’s wings, or, to be precise, with the rustle of wings of history hatred. It is no wonder that the guardians of the commandment to “Remember” have raised a clamor and tried to turn the week before Passover into “Amalek Week.” Indeed, for them every day of the year is Amalek Day, and Amalek lies beside them every night. Amalek is my rock; an Amalek in every pot. Amalek is a code word betraying a psychic urge to walk out on history and to view the world as ongoing theater, in which, again and again, everywhere and at all times, seventy Amalekian wolves, their fangs dripping, surround one snowy-white lamb. One lost sheep. One kid led to the slaughter. And there cannot be, nor will there be, any change in this scenario until the coming of the Messiah. Anyone who tries to change it is an enemy of Israel and a servant of Amalek.
The issue is not whether the president of the State of Israel should have paid an official visit to Germany and, if so, when and how, with or without traveling in a special Luftwaffe aircraft, with or without loud declarations about “the triumph of the six million.” Nor is the issue the benefits or dangers of an international peace conference, the value of the visit to Spain, the balance sheet of the Soviet meeting, or the question of whether there is an Arab partner with whom to make peace, and at what price. These are weighty questions indeed, but they are all ephemeral in comparison with the fundamental question: Is Israel permitted to send its president to Germany or is it not? to shake hands with Spain? to talk to Russia? to make peace with its enemies? to become part of “Gentile” world history? Are we or are we not permitted to do things our ancestors never did? In other words: What is the weight of the past as opposed to the needs of the present and the future? Apart from the obligation to remember, is there also a right to forget? Are we allowed to try to shape history, or only to drape ourselves in it, like sackcloth and ashes, and to sit forever mourning for our dead? to sit behind barred doors and shuttered windows, telephone disconnected, our backs to the wicked world and our faces to the awful past, our backs to the living and our faces to the dead, to sit thus, day and night, and to remember what was done unto us by Amalek, until the coming of the Messiah—or until the second coming of Amalek?
THE THEORY OF THE GHETTO
Israel’s president visits Germany, its foreign minister visits Spain, and Russia and Arabia and Rome are in the headlines. Such headlines touch our primal experiences, those from our individual and collective nursery-school days. One could almost speak of a Jewish identity composed of the collection of injustices inflicted on us by our enemies over thousands of years. Virtually every one of our holidays reminds us of “what was done unto you by Amalek”: Rome, Spain, Russia, Arabia, Greece, Germany, Babylonia, Egypt, England, and all the others. Behind the invective of the past week, behind the hysterical accusations of betrayal and sellout of national honor, the hypnosis of the past flickered once more. And, as usual, it was the voices of those who define themselves as “ultra-Zionists,” preaching to us about our Zionist flabbiness, who ironically betrayed their fear of the outside world, their hatred of all Gentiles, their anti-Zionist urge to break off all contact with the world and lock ourselves, once and for all, in the museum of our calamities, among the ghosts of our martyrs, in the cellar of the humiliation and insult we have suffered. Only in that cellar, in the suffocating ritual incense for the dead, in a brackish cloud of grudges, self-righteousness, and self-pity, only there do they feel truly safe and warm. Thus some professional Jewish hard-liners offer us an Israel, not as a home for Israelis, but as one big museum of martyrdom, populated, not by citizens, but by a perpetual assembly of prayer, of perpetual mourners commemorating the perpetual Amalekian pogrom. Hiding behind all this is great misery. And also the urge to flee from history—which compels us to make constant choices between various shades of gray—and to retreat into a simple, comfortable world divided, without nuances, into a handful of children of light, on one side, and hordes of children of darkness, rising up in every generation to destroy us and be done with us, on the other. Pure and simple. To disengage ourselves from history, to return to the ghettos, to wait for the next pogrom. To escape from Zionism into the hypnosis of the past. To abandon the chance to mold history, and, instead, to return to our old habit of lying down and flattening ourselves under its wheels.
BUZZARD OR DOVE
Beyond the legitimate argument over the appropriateness of the president’s trip to Germany, over the purpose of the visit to Spain, over the effectiveness of an international peace conference or the price of peace, we can sense the fateful debate over the rustle of history’s wings: Is the rustle of wings that of an eternal buzzard swooping down, time and again, on the carcasses of every generation—the same buzzard, the same carcasses, ever since the exodus from Egypt and down to this very day? Or may we sometimes send out a dove to see whether the waters have receded? In political terms: Are we to behave like a nation-state, or act like a ghetto? to be Zionists or ultra-Orthodox? None of this is new, of course. What is new, perhaps, is only the carnival tendency of the anti-Zionist camp to disguise itself in an ultra-Zionist mask, to hide its traumas behind arrogant nationalist slogans. Davar, April 13, 1987
Oz, Amos. The Slopes of Lebanon: Essays.
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