The thoughts and writings of Prof. Eugene Narret
http://israelendtimes.com/blog/2010/11/06/update-on-the-mandate-or-edom-and-israel.htm#more-320
Update on the Mandate, or Edom and Israel
This extensively revised essay moves from geopolitics to analysis of cultural principles, contrasts and development.
William Hague, the Foreign Secretary of the Great Britain arrived in Israel November 03 and summoned top Israeli Defense and Intelligence officials to share with him Israel’s plans regarding Iran. His attitude reminded observers of the continuing British ambition to rule or displace Israel and make it a stepping stone to its Arab Federation. British arrogance, typified in the frequent correlation of the diplomatic visitations of Israel by Tony Blair and Gerry Adams seems to be inbred.[1]
The outrage in Israel is not only a response to British hauteur and imperial attitudes whose handling it mostly has outsourced to American officials. A key ingredient of British hostility is the danger it poses to top Israeli officials by threatening to arrest and prosecute them for ‘crimes’ against so-called Palestinians and other terrorists or guerillas who prey on Jews. In other words, Britain tries to leverage the ‘peace process’ (expulsion of Jews from Judea and Samaria) by blackmailing Israeli defense officials who at times, even if belatedly and inadequately, order retaliation against enemies. Jewish self-defense, let alone preemptive defense is being rendered illegal, bringing danger of indictment and jail in Britain and some European venues under the rubric of “universal jurisdiction,” a color of law penumbra that great powers decide when and how to apply. High government officials ordinarily grant their counterparts enormous latitude in matters of state policy; — just review the sentences, and all the commutations of sentences stemming from the Nuremberg trials. So the British animus here, and the European deviation from diplomatic norms is particularly striking and familiar. It also raises memories, which left-wing Israelis would like to keep suppressed of those decades when their British controllers did so much to help the Germans achieve the solution to Britain’s problem of how to establish a large Arab protectorate in the Middle East. This was part of the larger solution of Europe-Esau’s problem with the Jews, the witnesses to the fact that Edom’s cult was derivative and irrational.
Hague’s descent from on high makes clear that this policy, and the attitudes within it, have not changed. To the British governing cadres, Israel is a dependency, a nuisance and even an imposter not only in geopolitics. How can this be so? The intense condescension and contempt may reside in a British mania that they are the true Israelites, descendants of the “Lost Tribes.” Some advance the Hebrew-English pun, Brit Ish (“covenant man”) as proof. Indeed, this nonsense once was current in Scotland and appears prominently in a great novel [2]. Further back, it provides cultural-geographic structure for the psycho-history of William Blake’s antinomian epic of unbound imagination, Jerusalem, Emanation of the Giant Albion in which the latter, England, haloed, finally achieves his prophetic status and, as a bearded elder physically presses the nubile Jerusalem, his formerly alienated wife, against his body and loins [3]. It is apt that for Albion this appropriation means “all forms identified” as ‘he’ integrates and absorbs his anima, “the maiden daughter of Zion.”
Was he aware that were his fiction fulfilled the offspring of the union would be Jewish? All of Esau’s games of displacement lead to his self-undoing. He cannot do without his “red, red stuff,” the blood of war and passion of inexorable appetites. A master of trapping with armed might and even more with the mouth, with diplomatic games [4], Esau’s dominion is “the angry red planet,” a game simultaneously of conquest and self-pity, “the outer limit of wickedness” and, in time “a desolation forever.” This is the original source of the Wasteland trope in Western poiesis and cultural dynamics.
In any case, Blake’s famous print shows what Britain keeps doing to Israel, nailing, re-defining, subordinating and absorbing her into its confused identity. This is not only a British obsession but a European one: Esau will never desist from his desire to be Israel despite having spurned his birthright or in historic terms, despite being a derivative and imperial culture whose rites are irrational and based in magical aesthetic transformations of self. Europe-Europa is the fictional nationalism, abducted from the Middle East that seeks to displace its host and model. Ultimately, it is an obsessive and irrational project, an attempt at identity theft and transformation more than economics. It is not only about power but its root: identity confusion and formation whose strivings power sub serves. It will never go away until Europe’s “evening fire”[5] burns itself out. He further denoted the cult of Esau as “a hybrid product of decay.”[6] As Nietzsche surmised, it will burn itself out by pursuing its endless effort to displace the Jews and their book “with the claim that it contains nothing more than Christian doctrines and it belongs to Christians as the true Israel. In this context and specifically in regard to the British role one notes the blatant holocaust denial of Anglo-Catholic Bishop Richard Williamson. Aside from the spurious technical questions, the logic is that if the Jews are not really Israel,[7] how could there be a holocaust. The Church concentrates the West’s identity theft and displacement. But this game destroys boundaries of self and of all coherence thus generating terror. As was noted long ago by both Rebecca and Ishmael, “Esau, he is unstable.”[8] Thus his grand game now impoverishes and scrambles the world and truth itself. The process will end when his fiction, like “appetite, the universal wolf” [9] confronts and consumes its own hollowness and collapses, a parasite that consumes its host; a master or metamorphosis that disdains all boundaries but its own arbitrary imperial ones.
For Esau this displacement is a necessity of its being, it is obsessive as repeatedly shown by unrepentant haters like Williamson and by the tepid or transient response to them. It reveals itself also in the boycotts of Israeli professors by British Universities, a shutting down of discourse that exposes the actual content of Western education: denial of the true source; hatred and hysteria directed at the fathers of whatever is not barbaric or arrogant in Western civilization. The historicity,[10] reason and strong but simple joy are sources of endless envy to the West whose obsession with “fun” barely conceals the desperate that arises from a deep in-authenticity. Envy indeed is a terrible monster.[11] The more attempts to post-date the Tanach by forms of the discredited “documentary hypothesis” the more truth sprouts from the earth demonstrating the antiquity and rootedness of Israel.
Mr. Hague reportedly told M Netanyahu and FM Lieberman that Britain would move quickly to amend the blackmail via “universal jurisdiction” of Israeli officers and diplomats [12]. The British Foreign Secretary acknowledged that it would be a loss for Britain if its ability to partner with Israel’s technology was impaired. Messages sent and delivered but as Nietzsche observed, diplomats are consummate actors [13]. Their natural stance is a pose, a gesture that entraps, “that captures the eyes and steals the mind” [14]: game is in their mouths. For this reason, the Eternal One who embodies all truths “reigns by taking sovereignty from Esau and his offspring.” Freed from the confusion and terror of lies and games, from those who appeal to the senses, “the world will rejoice.”[15]
So much for the European branch of Esau; if Hillary Clinton or Condi Rice who are said to represent Edom’s unique American variant had summoned those Israelis to her office, they would have come promptly if not necessarily with joy. After all, they are free to fly into or out of Washington, New York or Houston anytime as leaders of a loyal and valuable military – technological asset of the Anglo-American leg of the trilateral world system. The orders simply must emerge from Beit Laban, “the White House,” Jacob’s best friend to be acceptable to the perennial client regime squatting in Jerusalem while it represents, mainly, the interests and attitudes of Caesarea. This is a melancholy fact but appropriate to the age of decadence, egoism, fear and Caesarism, when radical relativist democracy sucks tyranny into its moral and intellectual vacuum. The Holy One leaves Esau to the logic of his delusions. The Eternal One’s reign is clear with the defeat of the games and image-work of Esau. As the ephemera, the lies of ‘virtual reality are shattered, “the world will rejoice.” The heavens and the earth, freed of illusions will rejoice as the fictions of aesthetics, — media and geopolitics – “the nonentities will disappear” [[16]. The cult of the Wasteland, its burning evening sky and its glorious apocalypse will dissolve. The mystical cult of alienation in which every person stares into a mirror (or screen) and sees their image-ideal, their replacement or virtual self will dissolve. Inheriting and dispelling the mists will be those who are “straight of heart,” who know themselves in their deeds, sanctified by tradition and resolute memories in its honor and who thus are free of the “bewildering terrors” of arrogant speeches and theories of “oppression,” the mask for those who “know not what they are” and so seek to feed on the identity of others [17].
When the great hunter and trapper, “the universal wolf” that craves “red, red stuff” consumes itself, taking with it its signature myth of the grail with its symbolic avatar and concealing of Israel as the abused host that displaces Israel; when the fiction and images consume the humanity that is Edom’s host and the culture, the West that generates them it will vanish and reveal the unclouded truth of Israel and its sublimely simple, everyday joys, wonder and faith. Israel puts if faith and deeds not in chariots, not in horses [18], above all not in imagery or idols of the mirror, stage or media distraction machine but in their antithesis: in the glory of life abundant. Replacing the “foul, cold monster” and “burning evening sky” of “the new idol” of the therapeutic State whose true goal is control and de-humanization will be the restored Jewish people whose “history constitutes a wealth of passions, virtues, decisions, renunciations, fights, and victories of all kinds” that flows “into great spiritual men and works…such as the European peoples cannot produce and never could…”[19]. Then the true Eternal One of wonder and reason, not an eidolon of man, will reign and the world will rejoice. Where the controlling State that, like Esau, traps and games ends; the “corporate and collective body” that absorbs the individual into its abstract but police-enforced General Will, leaving the human a persona ficta who “will be forced to be free”[20] only when these idolatries and “those who boast by them” dissolve “begins he human being who is not superfluous” and who is the “rainbow” for humankind, the Jew and Jewish model for mankind.
[1] Debkafile, “Hague’s Visit Sparks UK – Israel Clash on Iran, Mid-East, Palestinians” http://www.debka.com/article/9123/ ; Reports in 2009 suggested that the IRA was infiltrated at high levels by British Intelligence which may have had some role in direction in IRA policies.
[2] Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped in which Captain Hoseason (itself a take-off of a fine Hebrew name) commands the doomed brig, “The Covenant” and considers himself a “Covenant Man.”
[3] William Blake, Jerusalem: Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804-20), plate 99
[4] Genesis 25:27-8, “Esav, ish yodea tzayid…” The next quotes are from Malachi 1:4; see also Rashi on Tehillim 120:2-3 and referencing the Genesis verses on Esau’s trapping, gaming and deceit.
[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886; NY 1966, translated and with commentary by Walter Kaufmann), page 185 [section 250]
[6] Nietzsche, The Antichrist (1888), section 19 in The Portable Nietzsche (NY 1968, translation Kaufmann), p. 586
[7] Nietzsche, The Dawn sections 84 & 68 in The Portable Nietzsche op cit, 80, 77
[8] Midrash HaGadol and Baba Kama 92 on Genesis 27:41 & 28:6-9 re Esav’s ‘war-gaming’ with Ishmael to murder Isaac and Jacob.
[9] William Shakespeare, Troilus & Cressida 1.3.120-6
[10] http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/135432 Avi Yellin, “King David Era Pottery Shard Supports Biblical Narrative” see Tehillim 82:3-4 and 72:3 among many parallels, of the verses found.
[11] Herman Melville, Billy Budd, chapter 12, on Claggart’s conflicted envy of Billy; like the West’s grand judicial games, “his conscience was a lawyer to his will” and “his reason…an instrument for effecting the irrational.” Melville comments on Claggart, and his culture, “such men are insane.”
[12] Elad Benari, “Hershkowitz to Hague: Academic Boycotters Hurt Britain,” A-7, 11-05-2010, http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/140471
[13] Nietzsche, Die Frohliche Wissenschaft, Part V, section 361, 368 (NY 1954, Kaufmann translation), 316-17, 324-5
[14] Rambam Sefer HaMitzvoth, negative commandment (lo ta’aseh) #32; Genesis op cit
[15] Rashi on Tehillim 97-1-2, passim; Rashi on Tehillim (NY 2008, translation R Yisrael Herczeg)
[16] Ibid. Rashi on 97:7; See also Ezekiel 35:14, 38-9, inter alia and Isaiah 2:18.
[17] Quoting Tehillim 97, 73 and in closing the sentence, the 3rd stanza of Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium.”
[18] Tehillim 20:8; “chariots and horses” are understood to refer respectively to Esau and Ishmael.
[19] Friedrich Nietzsche on “the New Idol” of the State, Thus spoke Zarathustra, Part I; on the triumph of the Jews, The Dawn, section 205, both in The Portable Nietzsche, op cit, 162,-3; 89; on “burning evening sky” of European apocalypse, hastened by Jewish leaven see Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, Part VIII, section 250 (NY 1966, Walter Kaufmann translation), 184-5
[20] Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract Book I, chapters 6-7, “The Social Compact” and “the Sovereign” (London 1973, translation G.D.H. Cole), 173-77, passim
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