The new foreign minister of The Jewish State™ [1] has has been rapturously received in Hyperzionistal circles, with Pipes Minor takin’ the cake, me judice. His title runs "Avigdor Lieberman's Brilliant Debut" and as to the substance ... well, go enjoy it for yourself. "If you can't say anything nice &c."
To be fair, Dr. Pipesides doesn't spend much time gushin’ nicenesses about his new hero, he mostly quotes from His Excellency's inaugural address to TJS™ Foreign Ministry employees, a document which has to be seen to be reviled. Here again you must not let me, or even D. Richardovitch Pipes, tell you what is in it. [2]
That rapture is what one expected. What one (or this keyboard, anyway) did not expect was to discover the existence of what might be termed a moderate wing of Hyperzionism, as opposed to the mad-dog or Pipesovitchian wing. I detect this phenomenon in an account of A. Lieberman offered by a certain R. O. Freedman under an e-banner emblazoned with the Name of H*rv*rd.
Right or wrong about other matters, Prof. Freedman does insist on one point that appears to be merely factual and was unknown to me before just now:
| Lieberman’s plan to deal with the Israeli Arabs, which some commentators both in Israel and abroad have called ‘racist’, involves giving the Israeli Arabs a choice. Either they can pledge loyalty to Israel as a Jewish State, or they can leave Israel—with their land." |
Did you know about "with their land"? I never heard of it myself, but admittedly I do not follow the Palestine Puzzle with undivided attention. Given the Ivy League credentials, who can doubt that the R. O. Freedman allegation is accurate? Certainly not I!
Though this angle is new to me, I have encountered a number of apologists for Hyperzion who tried to make Gospodin Minister Lieberman look not quite so bad by pointing out that non-Gentile Israëlis who refuse the proposed loyalty oath would be expelled too. If both these mitigations of the Lieberman Plan are true and apply simultaneously, one must wonder whether treacherous soi-disant Jewish expellees would get to take their land along too. (As a practical matter, what land would they take, exactly?)
Prof. R. O. Freedman does not raise that question himself; he does not mention that the shibboleth is to be administered to all of the Tel Avîv government’s subjects. Even more puzzlingly, after introducing that "with their land" as if it made a great deal of difference, he goes on to maintain that, like Gospodin Minister Lieberman, the population transfers of Century XX have been unduly deprecated:
| [T]here have been cases of population transfers following wars caused by nationality conflicts. Indeed, compared to the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia and Poland after World War Two, or even the exchange of Greeks and Turks in 1923 following the failed Greek invasion of Ottoman Anatolia, Lieberman’s idea is far more gentle. |
In the cases cited, there was no question of "with their land" in the Lieberman Plan sense. International boundaries may or may not have been readjusted simultaneously, but that process was quite independent of the ethnic cleansings. R. O. Freedman does not indicate whether he supposes that "with their land" is a qualification that makes the Lieberman Plan for the neo-Levant kinder and gentler than the crude and summary proceedings of Old Europe. The first time through his article, I took for granted that ‘gentler’ only meant that the number of patients to be treated would be far smaller. After re-reading, I see that "with their land" might have been intended as well. But it still seems a bit odd that R. O. Freedman does not say this expressly. His general intention of apologizing for the new Tel Avîv government in advance is unmistakable: I should have expected him to dilate at some length on the gentleness of "with their land," that being, as far as I know, a Liebermanian gentleness that has not been publicized widely. (I apologize if it is really the case that everybody has heard of this but me, but I am not so completely inattentive to the Palestine Puzzle as to think that likely.)
Even "with their land" is not the primary attempted mitigation of A. Lieberman, however. I put it first because it more a factual question than is Gentleness Number One, the mitigation that comes first in R. O. Freedman's own enumeration:
| There are two major challenges which Lieberman poses to the Netanyahu government. The first is the question of how strongly he will pursue the secularist themes that permeated his campaign. Pushing that agenda could lead either his party, or Shas, with which it has been in conflict over religious issues, to leave the government. The second issue is Lieberman’s call for a transfer of territory [&c. &c.] |
From the customer standpoint, this question of secularist themes amounts to this: we are solicited to think of A. Lieberman primarily as a defender of the interests of recent ex-Soviet immigrants to The Jewish State™ and only secondarily of his acccomplishments as a forceful speaker of Arabic, despite the well-known fact that His Excellency and his party campaigned on the basis of the latter. R. O. Freedman elucidates
| Issues of conversion and civil marriage are central to Israel’s Russian immigrant community. A reported 300,000 of the one million Russians in Israel are not Jewish according to Jewish law, and Lieberman put their status at the center of his campaign. |
Here again I defer to R. O. Freedman and the august presumptive authority of "Middle East Strategy at Harvard" as regards the facts. The non-factual aspect preponderates, however: whether the foreign customer prefers to buy A. Lieberman as a gentle defender of self-displaced ethnic Russians rather than ... well, you must know the hostile account of His Excellency in that ‘Arabophone’ capacity of his! After accepting all the facts as alleged by R. O. Freedman, the question remains which set of facts about A. Lieberman is to be regarded as more important, and that is not itself a factual question
Being myself a thoroughly foreign customer with very little interest in the internal squabbles of The Jewish State™ or of universal Hyperzionism, I take Gospodin Minister Lieberman to be defined rather by his declared international enemies than by his local Israëli clientele. It is, after all, foreign affairs that His Excellency holds the portfolio of, a portfolio that seems unlikely to have been his second or third choice. To buy the product that Prof. R. O. Freedman undertakes to vend therefore strikes me as comparable to reassuring the Tel Avîv pols that Secretary Clinton is not likely to give them much grief, because everybody knows that what Hillary cares about most is establishing universal health care in the US of A. That may actually be the case, but even if it is, professional representatives of foreigners would be mad to attempt to conduct negotiations on such a basis.
But God knows best.
Happy days.
___
[1] That ought to be enough recognition-as to be getting on with, surely?
[2] As Schopenhauer remarked of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, don't you know?
Gospodin Minister Lieberman may not fancy himself to be quite so exalted a link as Prof. Dr. Kant in the Great Chain of Intellect, but His Excellency (or ghostwriters) is definitely takin’ a stab at the gold medal: one treat provided is the 132,809th explanation of how what is conventionally called ‘Westphalian’ sovereignty has finally broken down forever. One does not want to reveal the ending and spoil the fun, but many will be able to work out from general principles and previous agitprop why such a collapse as that might gladden the hearts of Hyperzion.
"Galmud@1232" quotes a certain M. Levy of Ha’aretz as welcoming the Advent of Avigdor rather back-handedly: "the veil will be lifted and the nation's true face revealed to its citizens and the rest of the world." True faces had better be left to the Platonist caucus in the Philosophy Department, I'd say, but in another direction M. Levy seriously underestimates the scope of the Lieberman unveilment. His Excellency (or ghostwriters) seems to me to have vouchsafed us mortals a complete novus ordo sæclorum, a panoramic vision of a Weltordnung fit for Hyperzionists to live in. That is to say, His Excellency (or ghostwriters) has ripped the mask off every other nation’s (true?) face, not that of The Jewish State™ alone. Once demasked, a number of nations turn out not to be proper States at all . . . . But hush, I mustn't spoil your fun!
No comments:
Post a Comment