It’s Spring!
By Israel Shamir
Spring
has come to our Northern retreat: The snow has melted and
uncovered meadows that somehow managed to stay pale-green; thick
ice on the lake has broken up and crawled up on the shore like
so many white crocodiles; now a warm wind blows and the sun
shines as if it means business. The Spring has come to conclude
the gorgeous winter: our soul needs darkness as well as light,
and here at latitude 60°N, a snowball-throw from the Arctic
Circle, where I am spending a few months far away from the
relentless Mediterranean sunshine, darkness has been provided in
heaps as generous as the mounds of ice cream in a child’s dream.
God knows, I have longed for darkness and seclusion -- for cold,
dark low skies, with plenty of prickly stars -- for snow-bound
fields and snow-embroidered pines -- for low-lying sun, for the
laze of late mornings, for short days and long evenings, for
live fire in the fireplace, for skates on the ice and skis on
the slope -- and it has been given in full. And now radiance
pours into our world, promising the resurrection of Light from
Light, Lumen de Lumine, Φώς εκ φωτός.
This is the time for good news. In London,
Palestinian Solidarity dismissed a motion by Jewish activists to
ban Deir Yassin Remembered, the most dynamic and
non-apologetic of Palestinophile bodies, because of (among
other sins) their association with me.
On Saturday March 10th at the Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Annual General Meeting,
two motions were proposed by Tony
Greenstein and Roland Rance, both extremely long and explicit,
demanding from friends of Palestine that they make the
“fight against antisemitism and Holocaust denial” their main
agenda. Chutzpah is an understatement for such impudence. These
guys are so dishonest that I was not at all astonished when
Greenstein
was outed as a credit card fraudster. Greenstein had
besmirched DYR, DYR Chairman Prof Dan McGowan,
the British Director of DYR, Paul
Eisen and our friend Gilad Atzmon in the Guardian
in a piece called
The seamy side of solidarity, and had attacked me in a long
text called
Anti-Semitism is no response to Zionism. They tried to stop
DYR, though DYR provides scholarships to Palestinian children,
brings awareness to masses and commemorates Palestinian
struggle and suffering. They were answered by
Paul Eisen,
Ramzy Baroud and
Gilad.
Both motions were voted
down by an astounding absolute majority - 95%, reported
Mary Rizzo’s blog. The British
friends of Palestine decided in favor of freedom of thought and
in favor of pluralism, and rejected the Procrustean bed of
narrow social analysis forced by the Jewish activists. If
accepted, the motion would have delegitimized not only Gilad or
Paul Eisen or myself, but Michael Neumann and Jimmy Carter and
Walt and Mearsheimer as well. Anybody referring to the Israel
Lobby would have been deemed an antisemite and banned. It would
have made obligatory belief in the Jewish antizionist myth of
creation: only Imperialism is guilty, while Jewish Lobby is an
invention of antisemites, a view beautifully
deconstructed by M. Ahmad. Preoccupation with holocaust
would have become a duty for any friend of Palestine. But those
who wish Palestine to be free, want to be free themselves: free
to read, write and say whatever is their wont. And so to protect
this sweet freedom they rejected the Jewish diktat.
This is a small thing compared to the wonders
of nature, or even compared with some major fights people have
elsewhere; but do not pooh-pooh it -- this was an important
battle and a great victory, albeit on our turf. As Churchill
once said, it is not the beginning of the end, but it is the end
of beginning. For many long years, they’ve gotten whatever they
wanted. Right-wing Jews attacked Ken Livingstone and Jimmy
Carter for their “antisemitism,” while left-wing Jews attacked
my friends and me for the same reason and with the same
viciousness. One could not mouth the word “Jew” without
worshipful admiration and still retain one’s place in society.
Scared by this onslaught, timid allies would
opt out, partake in the ostracism themselves, stop answering
letters, join in condemnation. Websites, let alone printed
media, wouldn’t publish my essays, conference organizers would
disinvite. Like the leather-coated Commissars of the dreaded
Cheka, Jewish activists would barge into any discussion
enforcing their one and only true discourse, and folks would
stand at attention. Only the strongest in spirit, the most
determined and the most freedom-loving withstood their swarm
assault. Is the London vote a harbinger of change? Could it be
that the long winter of our discontent is finally over?
It is possible, for this is the prevailing
wind from the East. Despite its own wonderful civilization and
creature comforts, the West has always taken its better and more
profound ideas from the East, be it Christianity from Palestine
or Socialism from Russia. And now Russia offers Volya,
unlimited and untranslatable Russian freedom, as its
antidote to the war on liberties otherwise known as the “war on
terror.” Russia is unbelievably free, or rather full of volya:
one may smoke in a restaurant or in a pub, one does not have to
brace a seatbelt, even parking is free if available. More
importantly, one may say and write and publish practically
anything at all. Beside all the freedoms available in the West,
Russians may be gays or sneer at gays, bewail the holocaust or
regret it was over too soon, be feminists or bait them, love
Israel or call for its speedy dissolution. Yes, every liberal
and Jewish-owned newspaper in the West bemoans the lack of
freedom in Russia under the ‘bloody KGB dictator Putin’ (or in
Venezuela under the bloody dictator Chavez, or in Cuba under the
bloody dictator Castro – whoever they do not like is always a
bloody dictator, isn't he?), but Russians are free from
political correctness and Jew-worship, that annoying features of
the post-war West.
Recently a group of Russian writers visited
Israel and met there with their readers: there are more than a
million Russian-speaking Israelis. The readers did not beat
around the bush and demanded from the authors that they swear
allegiance to the ruling ideology: condemn Iran, glorify
Israel, this fortress of democracy in the Middle East, denounce
the Russian supply of weapons to Arabs, and slam Russian
antisemitism. Jews usually feel like creditors, and easily come
up with demands.
A Western visitor would deliver the goods,
though he would probably complain to his spouse afterwards.
Denial of omnipresent and eternal antisemitism is not better
than denial of the holocaust. But Russia is free, and when
readers asked the Russian writer Maria Arbatova to tell them how
she suffers from antisemitism and how dreadful life in Russia is
under Putin’s dictatorship, she demurred.
Forget it,
she said. Moscow today is like the Paris of the 1960s: we
have more events in a day than you have in a month. Today,
glorious Moscow is a world center. As for you, we are tired of
you, and the Arabs are tired of you and of your demands. This
failed Western project has outlived its usefulness. If my
children were to even think of moving to Israel, I’d tell them:
over my dead body! Russia never had antisemitism. I never
experienced it in the whole of my fifty years of life. You say
Jews could not find a job? It happened once to my Jewish mother
that she was rejected, but she immediately found another, better
job by using her family connections.
This was the answer a prominent Russian
liberal writer gave to the Israeli readers. Far from being a
Russian nationalist, the leading feminist writer Maria
Arbatova’s grandfather was an important Jewish leader, and her
great-grandfather was a founder of the Zionist movement in
Tsarist Russia. But her reply was universal and paradigmatic. In
the West, Tony Jutt and Harold Pinter could say that -- maybe
Philip Weiss. Others are still scared. But the words that the
German bishops mouthed and then repented can be easily said in
free Russia, by descendents of Jews, or by anybody. The mystic
charm of Jews has worn off in Russia, where Political
Correctness is unheard of, and where the churches are full and
people bless each other with “Christ is Risen”. Instead of
scaring and offending Jews, as American multicultural theory
would have it, so many of my Moscow friends consider themselves
‘just Russians’ despite having a Jewish parent or two, and with
an intermarriage rate of about 80% Russian Jewry is a thing of
the past. Many of them had been misled by Zionist propaganda,
but they had enough time to recognize it and regret their haste.
Israel did much to disabuse them: Even very
wealthy Russian Jews found themselves less than welcome in their
“historical homeland”: The oligarch Gusinsky is under police
investigation, and whenever he comes from his Spanish home he is
taken straight to police HQ; one of the richest Russian Jews,
Gaidamak, had his bank account sequestered. Less prominent
Russians were mistreated and exploited by established Israeli
old-timers and their progeny, just as exiles from Morocco were
mistreated and exploited some forty years ago. Hardly any of
them carved out a career worth mentioning. The eternal war
proposed and advanced by Israeli leaders has little appeal for
them; Hizbullah missiles taught them that Israel is not immune
and invulnerable anymore, and a forthcoming Israeli offensive
against Syria or Iran may cause many casualties among Israeli
civilians. Corrupt even by Middle Eastern standards, prejudiced
to the point of jaundice, Israel is probably the least
attractive place for the upward-mobile and dynamic.
As the result, tens of thousands of Russian
Israelis trek back to Russia and find their real country and
their real home there in their native land. The Zionist idea had
romantic appeal, but such things do not last. In the 1970s, I
met in Tanzania with some American Blacks who moved to Africa on
a wave of romantic search for their roots. The experience rarely
lasted more than five years tops. During that time, they came to
recognize that they are Americans for better or for worse, while
Africans are organized into many nations and tribes, none of
which they could fit into. You can’t “come back” after two
hundred, let alone two thousand, years.
Russian scientist Dan Axelrod from St
Petersburg told me of his Israeli relatives who would dearly
love to return to that city and buy back the apartments they
sold some ten years ago, in Yeltsin’s days. The only thing that
stops them is the sad fact that these apartments’ value has
increased tenfold since then. Axelrod has no worries of this
sort: this son of Jewish parents is a regular church-goer,
observes strict Orthodox Lent, is married to a Russian woman,
baptised their children and loves his country Russia. It seems
Russia has found an answer to the Jewish Question: neither by
German fury nor American submission, but through assimilation in
Christian love. This Russian model is the only one that can
work, and it will eventually work in Palestine, too.
This is an additional reason why Putin’s Russia is much hated
and much denigrated in the official zionist-controlled Western
mainstream, and this is why she is loved by friends of
Palestine. A Swedish friend of mine and of Palestine, Stefan L.,
wrote to me: “You're absolutely right about Putin. That he is a
hostage of the oligarchs is one thing, but when he for one
reason or another speaks the truth - we love him, the little
rat-faced spy with a Kalashnikov accent. And every time we are
reminded of Yeltsin’s existence we swear him eternal loyalty.”
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