Britannia Radio

Apportioning Blame, Saving a State

In an interview in Ha’Aretz, Baron Edward James Rothschild of Paris emphasized that his philanthropic activities in Israel and his personal beliefs meant “advancing the [peace] process.” He decried the “extremists and fanatics on both sides” that make this difficult. He particularly mentioned the Jews that, purportedly, attack the Israeli soldiers who are there to defend them.

There are two errors of inference here aside from the error of fact: Jewish settlers do not attack the army, though criticism is periodic and merited. Attacks on the IDF are almost entirely by Arabs whom the IDF is not permitted to defeat and drive away from the land, thus creating genuine peace.

The Jewish settlers are not “extremists and fanatics,” simply people who wish to live on their land, simple lives of work and raising family. They do not own yachts, Ferraris or palaces. They are used to being slandered and blamed as being the major source of conflict in the world, criticism that justifies physical violence (as well as media polemics) against them.

They are among the most long-suffering people there are; their cause is just and their wish simple. Perhaps that is why an increasingly complex. Incoherent, anxious and post-literate world finds them intolerable. They do not fit into its substance or the plans of it directors for a readily manageable global state in which national distinctions, memory and tradition are erased.

Meetings for ‘advancing the process’ continue to sputter; resumption of ‘talks’ are announced and then their postponement or breaking off. Arab demands never change; the recognition of Israel as a Jewish State is anathema to Esau ( Europe ) as much or more as to Ishmael. The West, after all, from its inception defines itself as “the new Israel .

” Even though it long has entered what is termed a “post-Christian’ phase, still its identity, and the endless metamorphoses that are its principle and substance cannot abide the traditions and memory and history of Israel . Israel is rooted like a tree; the West has an identity that is oceanic, in which abides the oceanic, Dionysian urge to sweep away boundaries and distinctions in search of rapturous communion.

This rage to dissolution and ecstasy cannot abide boundaries, nations or even grammar. As Nietzsche noted, as long as people retain a hold on grammar they retain a connection to a Creator of purposeful history and a rational natural order. The trend toward a post-literate society of screen-rapture, binary instructions and the stimulus-response of ‘push-point-and click’ is the surest sign that the Dionysian impulse persists in a regressive, ugly and, ironically, de-sensitized, two-D form. The physical and sensuous elements of the urge to dissolution and forgetting fall away in a new pure ‘spirit’ of electronic impulses and alienated screen-gazing. The rapture and mystical union has become attenuated but its forms increasingly dominate international technology, trade, advertising and popular culture, -- the way people live and are told they must live to have a place.

In this world, the last era of Esau’s Dionysian impulse, there is no place for a genuine, and that means an integral Israel or for Judaism with its memory and history. The pottery shard with verses paraphrasing Tehillim from the era of David and Solomon must not be discussed and the settlers must be blamed and displaced by a fictional state for a fictional people that fit readily into irrational raptures. This is the “peace process” about which every ‘enlightened’ person professes so much care. Why; because this irrationality is central to the irrational, egotistic Dionysian drive of the culture. Nietzsche also wrote that the exfoliation of an intense and exhausted egotism is the result of the inevitable degeneration of enlightenment and the path to Caesarism.[1] In our hi-tech, semi-literate postmodern world of increasing noise and less articulation, -- of the abrading of the instructive lucidity of creation, and of the Creator’s undeniable truth – this blend of passionate and confused egotism and the perceived, advertised need to ‘integrate the globe’ we approach global oligarchy and fascism, increasingly enhanced integrations of corporate buccaneering and State control.

Caesarism pertains not only to the outpost of upscale enlightenment in Israel but to its history and name as the port developed by Herod to emphasize his fealty to the Empire, and to bind Israel to the source of imperial might and alien gods. He epitomized all that binds Israel “to those who worship idols and pride themselves on worthless gods”; that binds it to HaOlam shotim Rashi comments, “the world of idiots.” It reminds one of Kundera’s remarks about “the President of Forgetting” and “the Idiot of music,” that alliance of client Caesarism and degenerating pop culture that made alliance to subjugate the Czechs, and their history, after the Communist invasion of summer 1968.[2] One might see this, and similar events of the period, like “the summer of love” and intense hyping and support of “hippie attitudes” in all areas of life as counter-movements to Israel’s belated regaining of its heartland and of Jerusalem.

Our historical period is the climax of the conflict between rapturous forgetting and loss of articulation (of which post-literacy is one aspect) and memory; between discrete nations and governments accountable to the people they ostensibly represent and globalism and global managers. In short, it is the era of the conflict between Caesarea and Caesarism and Jerusalem , integrity, freedom and life abundant. As a great writer explained, this is a zero-sum contest: if Caesarea stands, Jerusalem declines or falls and vice versa.[3] The true re-establishment of Jerusalem and its Temple means the restoration of derekh Yehudi and the fall of Esau, Caesarism and its myriad schemes of global rapture and unio mystica.

Blaming the settlers but at the same time keeping them in place serves the purposes of Caesarea . The various powers con-centered and interwoven there recognize that they could not keep their coastal state without the high ground of Israel ’s heartland. They do not want total chaos although their management techniques require constant friction between the non-nation and the Jewish settlers. So they protect them, and the land needed to defend to coastal state just enough to keep the process interminably going and to blame its lack of fulfillment on the Jews.

This is the most conservative impulse of Esau. The settlers, the quintessential Jews serve Caesar by being his scapegoats and reason to protect his process and his economic outpost and engine in the center of the world with its access to the holiest of places which he also craves for what we term ‘psychological’ reasons: so he can feel genuine and not hybrid. Holding on to the land and managing its attrition and ‘peace processing’ enables Esau to satisfy his murderous imperial envy of Jacob and to advance his claim to being the real inheritor of what he threw away and what his historical sequel, Edom, deformed with its Dionysian impulse and aesthetic emphasis.

This is why the process must continue to limp along, to blame the Jews most near to integrity, to alienate, partly the land necessary to Jewish integrity and restoration, -- which would be the downfall of “Caesarea,” and above all to let Esau appropriate and change the nature of Judaism so that, even in its postmodern pagan form, becomes the new Israel and center of the world’s directives. And from this process, cui bono, “who benefits,” a very ancient alliance indeed: Edom and Ishmael, a “game” and a “trap” for which Ishmael once, according to Midrash anyway, had no use. But today the products, promises and emoluments are vastly greater as are its ability to game, to infiltrate and change derekh Yehudi from within. Who would not wish to serve, who can resist such a wealthy and persuasive master?

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[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science Part I, sections 23-4

[2] Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter & Forgetting, Part VI, “the Angels” II

[3] Israel Eldad, The First Tithe, Part III (Tel Aviv 2008, English translation, Zev Golan), 204

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