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Irael-Palæstina - om Zionisme, et bidrag til forståelse af konfliktenNation as trauma, Zionism as question: Jacqueline Rose interviewedRosemary Bechler (interviewing: Jacqueline Rose), 18. august 2005 In “The Question of Zion”, Jacqueline Rose applies the insights of psychoanalysis to the inner world of Zionist doctrine and attitudes. openDemocracy’s Rosemary Bechler talks to her. openDemocracy: The Question of Zion is dedicated to the
memory of Edward Said: its title a tribute to his 1979 work, The Question of
Palestine. In what sense is this study a continuation of Edward
Said’s project? Jacqueline Rose: There is a neglected strand in Edward’s work, which
begins with that book’s key chapter, “Zionism from the standpoint of its
victims”, and continues in his 1997 essay, “Bases for Coexistence”. In the
latter, he says: “we cannot coexist as two communities of detached and
uncommunicatingly separate suffering.” He argues that there has to be understanding not just of the others’ history,
but of the others’ history of suffering. He also asserts: “The internal cohesion
and solidity of Israel, of Israelis as a people and as a society, have, for the
most part, eluded the understanding of Arabs generally.” He sees that as a
failure. It is my belief that this same understanding has eluded the critics of
Israel. So my starting-point is the Gramscian exhortation to anyone wishing to navigate history
that runs through Edward Said’s writing also: of knowing yourself as a “product
of the historical process”. He described Zionism as having an “immense traumatic
effectiveness” for the Palestinians. In such comments he is making a plea for
something almost impossible: to hold on to the twin emotions of empathy and
rage. Edward’s work was so often about
just such tugs-of-war. It was central to his work that this was a story of
injustice, but at the same time he believed there must be a certain level of understanding; above all, of why Zionism is
so powerful. How does it command such an apparently intractable allegiance? Zionism – which I think has been traumatic for the Jews as well as the
Palestinians – seems untouchable, so deeply has it entered the hearts of what
people feel about themselves. Michel Warschawski (“Mikado”), the veteran peace
activist and author of On the Border (South End,
2005) implies this in his comment that real change would necessitate the
entire overhaul of an identity. Another, very personal link to Edward’s work again relates to the Gramscian
thread in his thinking. I feel he would have wanted me to revive the story of
internal Jewish dissent. He describes the purpose of critical thinking as “to
make differences where previously there were none.” I like to think that this is
what The Question of Zion has tried to do. openDemocracy: The book begins by clearing the middle ground you wish
to occupy in order to set about making these differentiations. You claim the
right to excavate “one of the most potent collective movements of the 20th
century” against both those quick to see any criticism as anti-semitism and
those flatly opposed to something they scarcely understand. But doesn’t this
almost impossible stance run the risk of pleasing no one? What then are the
prospects for your challenging thesis to be properly debated? Jacqueline Rose: One or two foul reviews accuse me of equating Zionism
and Nazism – a wilful misrepresentation of my project, and something I have
always explicitly ruled out. But Ilan Pappe,
perhaps the most controversial Israeli historian in the west and someone for
whom I have high regard, suggests that I have achieved my intention: to steer a
clear path between an elated identification with the state’s own discourse and a
string of insults. At the same time, the shocking divide between the founding fathers of Zionism
and its later “internal” critics can give the impression that Israel offers to
its citizens (and indeed the rest of the world) only lethal identification or
radical dissent. This is a tragedy. I would not want – especially in talking to you, Rosemary –
to underestimate the growing numbers of Israeli people who are slowly,
painstakingly, working for peace through contacts with Palestinians and other
Arabs. But they don’t have an effective voice in the country, and they certainly
have no political representation. Daniel Barenboim commented at a conference in Budapest
commemorating Edward Said that “there is no opposition (in Israel)” and that
“1967 changed everything”. Religious parties who until then were politically
marginal hailed the victory of 1967 as a miracle, and called in its aftermath
for the cohesion and expansion of the Israeli state. Moreover, the post-1967
occupation and the cheap Palestinian labour it made available destroyed
socialism as an inner motivating principle for building the state. Even in the conditions today that Barenboim describes, the debate about
Zionism is gathering pace. Bernard
Avishai’s extraordinary 1970s book The Tragedy
of Zionism was reissued in 2002; John Rose’s The Myths of Zionism was published in 2004. So I am
with the zeitgeist: many people are thinking that they need to understand this
phenomenon. My central chapters are already being translated into French and
Hebrew. But will the wider discussion that I would like to see develop? The jury
is still out. Zionism and messianism openDemocracy: Your first
chapter addresses Gershom Scholem’s analysis of how messianism’s “strange
inmixing of visionary and political power” influenced Zionism and its leading
thinkers like Vladimir Jabotinsky – who in turn, you argue, may have
inspired Binyamin Netanyahu and “many of today’s Israeli right who are ruling
the country”. Emanuele Ottolenghi and
David Cesarani have rebutted such associations. Jacqueline Rose: Some critics believe that to link Zionism to messianism is to
degrade it. This was long debated amongst Zionists themselves: many early
secular Zionists, and first leaders of Israel like Chaim Weizmann, emphatically denied owing anything to
messianism, and above all to mysticism. Instead, they insisted that they were
rationally constructing the territory to produce a fortified, secure habitat for
the Jewish people. But I could not avoid noticing uncanny resonances between
Gershom Scholem’s religious language and the apocalyptic tone of many of
Israel’s pronouncements about itself. Meanwhile, in the work of secular Zionists I discovered messianic discourse
of an extraordinary kind – including a complex vocabulary of suffering and
redemption, frequent references by David Ben-Gurion and others to the “ingathering of the exiles”
(technically an apocalyptic reference), and notions of “redemption” and the
“rock of Israel” found in Israel’s declaration of independence. The same vocabulary is employed today by those like Ariel Sharon who address
the “demographic problem” by working to ensure the long-term Jewish majority of
the state, including mass immigration of Jews and obstructions to the
naturalisation of Arabs. Such leaders are unapologetic about the fact that they
have a demographic plan with a messianic element. Indeed, they cannot explain themselves on other grounds. They may justify the
right to a secure Jewish state in terms of a permanent, existential threat to
the Jewish people. But they can only justify the right to be a majority ruling
over the Palestinians – who were there when Zionism established itself – by
invoking the Bible as their “mandate”. This allowed the messianic element that
was present from the start of the discourse to become established. As Ben-Gurion
(“every man his own messiah”) said: “Without a messianic, emotional, ideological impulse, without the vision of restoration and redemption, there is no earthly reason why even oppressed and underprivileged Jews…should wander off to Israel of all places…” openDemocracy: What was your purpose in tracing the influence of
messianic thinking in Zionism to its roots? Jacqueline Rose: David Hartman, founder of the Shalom
Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and author of Israelis and the Jewish
Tradition, argues that Israel must shed its messianic identity or else
Israel will not survive and the next generation will become alienated from
Judaism itself. This, he says, is the greatest challenge both face today. Hartman, like Martin Buber, seems to be pleading on behalf of the slow
interstices of historical time and their daily tasks. His work echoes Sholem’s
identification of a struggle for the soul of the Israeli nation between a
mystical, cosmic vindication of statehood and a religion that must detach itself
from notions of national power. Yeshayahu Leibovitz, distinguished philosopher and outspoken
critic of the Israeli state, was a fiercely orthodox religious man who also
argued that the attempt of Israel to justify itself in religious terms is to
come close to fascism. Both Hartman and Liebovitz helped me grapple with the inspiring work of Gershom Scholem, who laboured in Jerusalem while Zionism was
taking shape around him. I needed to know why he wanted to revisit Jewish
mysticism at such a time; as I progressed, it became clearer that this derived
from his fear of messianism and his conviction that the Jewish tradition
contained something both demonic and creative that had been curtailed and
repressed, and could explain the fervour of contemporary Jewish life. Scholem loved the messianic vision, and wanted to restore that tradition. But
he felt that a false, secular messianism in which the state becomes deified as
the emblematic fulfilment of God’s purpose was becoming dominant in Israel. This messianic motif is omnipresent in settler culture. It was evident among
those in Gaza who argued that their allegiance was to the land not the state –
because the land is the beginning of the redemption of Israel. But another
settler, Rabbi Menachem Fruman from Tekoa on the West Bank, told
Ha’aretz that he would stay – because this was the beginning not of
redemption but of peace, and that he would live side-by-side with the
Palestinians. That was a wonderful moment: a messianic discourse turning on
itself and producing a progressive vision willing to shed its militancy for the
sake of another way of living. This redemptive vocabulary is not confined to those Jews who proclaim
themselves messianic. Neturei Karta and at least two other explicitly messianic
groups have been virulently opposed to Zionism from its inception. They see it
as a travesty on the grounds that redemption cannot be performed on your own
behalf, but achieved only through the will of God. openDemocracy: You argue that Zionism is a “wonderful example” of the
work of the psyche in the constitution of the modern nation-state. It imported
to the middle east, you go on to say, “a central European concept of organic
nationhood – one founded on ethnicity and blood – that was in the throes of
decline.” Perhaps it is in crisis but not in decline – then or now – as much as
we might assume? Jacqueline Rose: The collapse of
Yugoslavia taught us that this has not gone away. Theodor Herzl’s
biographer, Amos Elon describes (in A Blood-Dimmed Tide) the
tragic cost of Zionism’s success: “when religion is seen primarily as a quest
for identity, it comes at the expense of its other higher purposes, charity and
compassion”; he adds, “(in) the final analysis, as Karl Kraus warned, every
ideology gravitates towards war.” Ahad Ha’am, the autodidact genius from Odessa, understood this in the 1930s
and 1940s: he asked whether it was possible to struggle for an identity that was
self-defining in ethnic and religious terms while you also recognised it as
provisional and contingent. Here again, Edward Said is an exemplar. When people ask why my book contains
no critique of Arab or Palestinian nationalism, I cite Edward’s late use of
humanism and (crucially) music to
propose a different form of national identity: modulated, subtle, supple, open
and aware of its own provisionality. This surely is the question for our time:
whether or not you can have an identity that knows its limits. The jury is out
on this too. In any case, loose appeals to cosmopolitanism don’t have the answer
either.
Zionism and identity politics openDemocracy: Is your analysis of Zionism a case study in identity
politics? Jacqueline Rose: I have always been sceptical of the concept of identity
politics. In States of Fantasy, I criticised it on two grounds:
that it takes “identity” as a given, something stable; and that it detaches
“politics” from state power. My work on psychoanalysis and feminism is concerned with this problem.
Psychoanalysis declares that your identity is always unstable, on the move,
capable of transformation: it is not something you simply own. This idea is what
motivated my study The Haunting of Sylvia Plath; for someone like Sylvia Plath,
it was essential that she could rail against the injustices of a patriarchal
culture while both analysing her own considerable complicity with male sexual
power and talking about the murkiest depths of visceral psychic involvement with
her mother. In other words, her critique of injustice was inseparable from her
understanding of the complexity of her own psychic life. I would welcome an
identity politics that looked like that. I realised only recently that my work on feminism and on Zionism really are
the same project. Helena Kennedy, the brilliant radical lawyer whom I greatly
admire, wrote in the Guardian about how the far greater number of
female than male victims – of violence, rape, domestic violence – reveals the
incomplete agenda of feminism. This is undoubtedly true, but it made me uneasy.
A short time later, she delivered a Bronowski lecture at London’s Queen Mary College where she
asserted that the problem with “New Labour’s” definition of the public as
consumers is that it turns everybody into a victim: you are passive, always
being put upon, which is why you must be given choice. I noticed that her lecture had identified what had made me feel momentarily
uncomfortable in reading her article. For me, victimhood is an event – something
that happens to you. If you turn it into an identity, you have created a
profound internal problem for yourself. Of course men do things to women, but
feminism must not be a politics based on the notion of the woman as victim;
because this both disempowers women and makes the relationship between violation
and what it is possible to be, too monolithic. It shuts something down. In turn, I realised that this is exactly what I am saying in the third
chapter of The Question of Zion, “Zionism as Politics”. My worry about identity
politics is that it fossilises something, whereas we should be working for
greater mobility about who we can be. The most unutterably terrible things have
happened to the Jewish people; but if this fossilises in the heart and becomes
something to hold onto as an exhaustive account of who you are, victimhood
becomes a prediction that will last an eternity. Zionism and its others openDemocracy: Ariel Sharon used the same formula at the sixtieth
anniversary commemorations of the liberation of Auschwitz, and of the end the
second world war in Europe (“we know that we can trust no one but ourselves”). As you say, this leads directly
to a militarisation of suffering – and there is only one suffering. All
other categories of people targeted by the Nazis – a roll-call of the crisis of
the Enlightenment in our times – seem to have no place in this account. Jacqueline Rose: I would like to see an end to the expression “Jewish
suffering”. I don’t mind “the Jewish history of suffering” or “the history of
the atrocities that have been done to the Jewish people”, but the expression
“Jewish suffering” contains something else. It seems to me that the suffering of
a woman on the edge of the pit with her child during the Nazi era, and a
Palestinian woman refused access to a hospital through a checkpoint and whose
unborn baby dies as a result, is the same. Hannah Arendt said that the fact that Theodor Herzl’s prediction that the Jews would come to see
themselves as surrounded by eternal enemies was hideously actualised by the
Holocaust does not make his vision “any truer – it only makes it more
dangerous”. openDemocracy: Your second chapter, “Zionism as Psychoanalysis”,
attempts to recover the moments that were open to an alternative way forward, in
order to acknowledge choices that we still have today. This possibility of
auto-critique seems to interest you. Jacqueline Rose: This is one of the reasons why I am convinced that
Zionism should not simply be dismissed. Hans Kohn turned away from Zionism, but
Martin Buber and Ahad Ha’am definitely did not. If Zionism can produce voices
such as these, this is evidence of a fermentation of rare value. Discovering thinkers like Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt and Ahad Ha’am was like encountering pieces of
coral from a deep pool. I had read Arendt and indeed some of Buber’s work
before, but I did not anticipate the sheer prescience of their critique of
Zionism. For example, Arendt predicted that the Jewish state would become
utterly reliant on American force, and live “surrounded by an entirely hostile
Arab population” in which all “development would be determined exclusively by
the need of war”; this is so accurate, it sends a shudder down your back. Then there was the romantic, semi-mystical discourse of Buber and Ahad Ha’am, posing the question of who we are at its most
profound. Their vocabulary revolves around spirituality, selfhood,
self-knowledge, truth, understanding, denial. In order to put into words the
perils of Zionism, these thinkers had to explore why people can desire
identities that become ultimately destructive. I found their work an
extraordinary resource. This sort of internal critique of a nationalist identification is not
exclusive to Zionism. The greatest compliment paid to my book so far came from
Paul
Muldoon who attended a couple of my lectures in Princeton; he told me: “We
need to do this for Irish nationalism”. Zionism and psychoanalysis openDemocracy: What is the relationship between your approach to
Zionism and psychoanalysis? Jacqueline Rose: Zionism was a self-conscious, self-created movement
out of nothing – no language, no state, no home. As Jacques Lacan says
about the hysteric: the membrane between the conscious and the unconscious is
drawn so thin that you can look in and see everything fermenting underneath. It
was a phantasmagoria that then came true due to sheer will and determination.
Consequently, Zionism reveals precisely the unconscious determinants of what it is
to try and forge a national identity, including the pain and the costs involved.
So I reject the charge of humiliating the founder figures, Theodor Herzl or
Chaim Weizmann; instead, I argue that they were in touch with the disturbing
nature of what they were attempting, and that this is a form of creativity. I have just finished working on the new Freud edition of Moses and Monotheism (now retranslated as Moses
the Man), in which I discuss Freud’s relationship to his Jewishness. In
this iconoclastic work, Freud argues that Moses was an Egyptian. Edward Said’s little essay “Freud and the non-European”, says that Freud was searching for
a prototype of a national entity which would allow itself to be founded by a
stranger. What a fantastic insight! For me, it is no coincidence that at the
same time as Zionism is importing into the middle east what, for urgent
historical reasons, is a very rigid version of a self-defining, self-sufficient,
monolithic ethnic identity, psychoanalysis was taking apart the fantasy of any
notion of national belonging of that kind. I have just finished an article about the correspondence between Freud and
the novelist Arnold Zweig, who went to live in Palestine in 1933 and hated
it. The correspondence between Zweig and Freud was all about national
identification. Zweig is saying that he could no longer identify with Germany as
a fatherland, but nor did he feel that he belonged in Palestine. He decides to
leave when he goes to a peace demonstration with a leftwing group and they
refuse to talk to him in German. He objected that most of them would have been
speaking Yiddish at home, even while insisting he spoke Hebrew. He wanted
nothing to do with nationalism of this kind. So psychoanalysis was offering a critique of militant forms of national
self-identification at the same time as Zionism was establishing itself: they
are reverse sides of the same coin. openDemocracy: Theodor Herzl’s evolution as a founder of the Zionist
state is equally tormented and complex, according to your account. In 1895 he
declares to the Rothschilds that he “can never be anything but a German”; by
1898 he is eliciting support from the German Kaiser by promising to
“take the Jews away from the revolutionary parties”. Jacqueline Rose: In my final chapter I touch on the anti-semitic
aspects of Herzl’s stance, one that resurfaces even more clearly in Ben-Gurion’s
response to the Holocaust. Even in August 1939, David Ben-Gurion wrote: “Call me
an antisemite, but … we are choking with shame about what is happening … We do
not belong to that Jewish people … We do not want to be such Jews.” But I am also concerned in my book to give Herzl the respect due to him as an
analyst of anti-semitism. Even though his pronouncements could often be
construed as anti-semitic, his understanding of that phenomenon in Der
Judenstaat was extremely subtle and anticipates that of Hannah Arendt. Theodor Herzl was a complex and incredibly disturbed depressive whose highly
creative but nearly impossible life-mission seems to have wreaked a terrible
effect on himself and his immediate family. Arendt once described him as “in
touch with the subterranean currents of history”, and less generously as “a
crackpot”. But Herzl is also the author of a surprisingly alternative, cosmopolitan
narrative in his 1902 novel, Altneuland. This portrays Jewish
settlement in Palestine as a stateless form of “autonomy and self-defence”
working to the benefit of Jews and Arabs alike – a belief strongly held by many
of the early Zionists. At the time, the multi-faith future Herzl envisaged was
far too progressive for many. The novel was much criticised for not being
sufficiently Jewish. Ahad Ha’am objected to Herzl’s suggestion in the novel that
the liberation of the Jews will be followed by the liberation of black Africans
– with which he wanted nothing to do.
openDemocracy: Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in his book To Heal a Fractured
World: The Ethics of Responsibility (2005), also discusses the central messianic concept of
tikkun (mending). He emphasises the fact that Lurianic Kabbalah, while it is “a vision of cosmic
catastrophe” is “also a healing vision”. In Israel, healing is precisely what
seems deferred by a quest for military impregnability that has ensured the
reverse. This may be a normal impulse among the nation-states of the world, but
here it is surely taken to an abnormal extreme. Doesn’t that quandary have to be
the starting point for any attempt to salvage the state or the tradition? Jacqueline Rose: I do believe – and David Grossman has analysed this more fully than anybody –
that the consequence of the shame at the passivity felt by the Jews in the face
of their Nazi oppressor has been a hardening and militarisation of their
identity which is indeed explicable in terms of Jewish history. On this point,
some of my critics should revisit Freud’s concept of over-determination, because
it is perfectly possible to have both a concrete reason for something and other,
less tangible, reasons as well. But that rigidification of identity which the state justifies in terms of
such a history, ensures that every catastrophe that happens to Israel becomes a
confirmation of its view of itself. It leads to a fortification of the soul.
This distressing overlap between the need to feel safe as a nation and the need
to believe in yourself takes on the form of a repetition of trauma. Here you really need a psychoanalytic distinction. Israel is now the fourth
most militarily powerful nation in the world. It is a nuclear power. It is not
in danger. The fear that Israel will be destroyed is groundless. But that does
not mean that it isn’t real. The fear is real and it is understandable. This is the difficult territory: you have to
say both things at once. But, as I said earlier, when the fear becomes an
identity that justifies itself by a violence that cannot acknowledge itself as
violence, something has gone terribly wrong. The best example in my book is the commandant in Gaza who steels himself in
the battle against Palestinian children by remembering as he says, “the flames
of the Holocaust”. This fortress mentality that Israel cannot relinquish means
that it cannot see itself as the agent of violence. That is one of the effects
of trauma: you can’t then see what you are capable of doing. You are always
repeating a situation in which you are threatened and potentially destroyed.
openDemocracy: Many Christian evangelicals and “Christian Zionists” in the United States
seem to have bought into this apocalyptic discourse wholesale. How do you deal
with this craziness? Jacqueline Rose: The Christian fundamentalists who helped win the
November 2004 election for George W Bush are indeed the most passionate
supporters of Israel. They did not support the Oslo accords. They now do support
Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza, though reluctantly and with complex provisos.
I once asked Binyamin Netanyahu why he accepted the support of the
Christian fundamentalists, since they believe that at Armageddon all the Jews
will be destroyed or converted? He said that he tells them that he welcomes
their support and that when they get to Armageddon, they can argue about it
then. But all this is frightening rather than crazy. One of the things psychoanalysis does is to allow you to understand how
identifications can go to an extreme of themselves. Freud describes the superego
as violent. The instance of the law is perverse and pulls on the unconscious in
order to enforce its will on the psyche. You have therefore an internal
perversion inside the mind at the point where it submits to the law. From
Freud’s perspective, the fact that people can identify with persecuting, vicious
instances of authority to which they must subject themselves, is written into
the constitution of the psyche in ways which are truly troubling. Zionism and politics openDemocracy: How does your deeper understanding of what motivates
this particular concept of nationhood impact upon your approach to politics?
Jacqueline Rose: With Freud – whose later work was about civilisation,
religion and Jewishness, the application of psychoanalytic terms to collective
life – I believe that psychoanalysis can help us understand better how
identities are formed and make and break themselves. What you learn, at the risk
of sounding woolly, is simply that you must open up points of dialogue wherever
you can. Psychoanalysis also asks us to believe that the carapace breaks: that the
symptom cannot hold. You hit the wall of your own defences and the symptom
becomes too costly in terms of the energies of the mind. It becomes too
expensive in terms of that economy. The same questions that concern me now in relation to Zionism exercised us as
feminists. You don’t have to be a harmonious political subject. You can work in
different ways and at different levels, according to the needs of the time. In the present conjuncture, I have little doubt that Sharon’s pull-out from
Gaza is a subterfuge masking the consolidation of the West Bank settlements. This
is becoming clearer by the day. The occupation must end. Beyond that, the
question of what a Palestinian nationalism and indeed a Jewish nationalism can
be remains open, and indeed must be kept open. openDemocracy: If dialogue is needed, don’t people who are thinking of
a political response have to consider what impact a tactic like academic boycott
has, in terms of hardening the parameters of an identity, or deepening a
complex? Jacqueline Rose: I think there should be economic and military sanctions
against Israel, and an academic and cultural boycott as well. In face of the
complete destruction of freedom of speech in Palestinian educational
infrastructures, to point to the forms of creative dialogue that might take
place across academe is evasive. This
is a time for deciding which side you are on, and what you can do to prevent the
deterioration of the situation. True, there is a risk of boycott hardening the identity you are trying to
open up. But at certain moments you must recognise that you are involved in
different kinds of political calculation, and ask: what is being done to end
this situation? What forces are being brought to bear? The answer is: none. That
is why I feel that it is beholden on academics as a matter of conscience to do
something about this, even if it creates something of a mess. Ilan Pappe
at Haifa University has a vision reminiscent of Herzl’s Altneuland, of
an eventual one-state solution, of cooperation and creative engagement between
the peoples. But he also supports an academic boycott. I don’t think it is
inconsistent to say: “This needs to be done now, at the same time as an effort
to make it possible for as many people as possible to talk to each other”. The boycott decided, then rescinded, by the Association
of University Teachers in Britain sought an end to the normal, formal
situation in which academics representing the Israeli state wander around the
world giving papers which are nothing to do with the political situation and
which simply accrue prestige to the state. But it absolutely did allow all
contacts related to the struggle, the occupation, justice and peace – all
contacts that at least recognise what is actually happening to the Palestinians
– to continue. openDemocracy: So an academic boycott should be part of an attempt to
bring into the open something which has been in denial, so that healing can
begin? Jacqueline Rose: We are talking about acknowledgement. It is important to
understand that the academic boycott is
saying: “Boycott the institution – and yet keep the lines open, not just to the
people who you think are OK, this is not about blacklisting – but to anybody at
all, if the point of the contact is to address the injustice of the situation in
Israel/Palestine.” This may also play its part in helping the Palestinians, whom Edward Said
characterised as “the victims of the victims”, and whom Primo Levi described as
“the new Jews”. This particular boycott may have been overturned, but Israeli
friends have told me that it has had the profoundest effect in Israel, in
focusing and drawing attention to the issues.
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