Forgetting Israel and its relationship with Jewish history

By constantly repeating that the Israeli government is criminal and genocidal, by constantly concealing the true history of the quest for peace and a fair partition of the former British colonial mandate, by constantly erasing the responsibility of Palestinian leaders for terrorism, hijackings, jihadism and pogroms, Israel vanishes as if by magic from the maps after four wars fought in defence of its independence and survival. Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni, in a dispute with the Vatican, has called for the post-conciliar documents drawn up in the spirit of Nostra Aetate (1965), the declaration drafted by Cardinal Agostino Bea to put an end to the misunderstandings surrounding Catholic anti-Semitism and the accusation of deicide, the special bond—including the religious one—between the Jewish people and Israel, the Promised Land of their ancestors, should not be overlooked or denied.

The recent trend is, in fact, to avoid mentioning Israel altogether; from St Peter’s, when the subject of Jews comes up, it suddenly vanishes from view. Gad Lerner takes issue with Di Segni and, in a letter to the Corriere, accuses him – in a civil yet impassioned and stern tone – of harbouring fundamentalist views. In his view, the notion of Zionism as a yearning for the land of Israel along lines historically and messianically linked to the scriptures, to the Bible, leads to religious fanaticism, biologism, identitarianism, and perhaps to a form of colonialist racism that places Jews on this side of the ‘colour line’, within the white, dominant world – the division proposed by W. E. B. Du Bois, which lies at the origin of postcolonial ideologies. It had even been claimed that at Auschwitz, the issue was the dehumanisation of the ‘other’ rather than anti-Semitism, because, ultimately, the business of the gas chambers was a matter amongst white people. And are we sure that Jews have a right to a separate state, a country of refuge? Much has been said on the matter, and just as much will be said in future. By now, within the Western establishment that considers itself cultured and avant-garde, Jews have the right to ‘exist and prosper’ alongside others, as Bruna Soravia so eloquently put it in a fine piece published here a few days ago; yet a state of their own, a specific homeland, is out of the question – Zionism is a nationalist myth of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the last century. On the other hand, Lerner is also opposed to institutional policies aimed at monitoring and combating antisemitism based on the model of the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance), although I do not believe – given that he describes himself as a Zionist ‘for biographical reasons’ (his family includes Holocaust survivors – his grandparents who emigrated to Palestine) – that he would view Israel as a pariah state, founded on apartheid and racial discrimination, to be boycotted, delegitimised or even destroyed. Jewish dissent, and even the Philip Roth-style “diasporism” – portrayed with a paradoxical spirit and outcome in the novel Operation Shylock – in short, the aspiration to return the citizens of Israel to the European countries from which they came, are mere phantoms and whims, albeit more sophisticated ones than that.

However, one cannot honestly and decently reproach the Chief Rabbi of the oldest community in the diaspora – the Roman community – for opposing the erasure of Israel from the map of historical reality and from the spirituality and millennia-old ritual practices of the Jewish people. Above all, when this erasure – a name consigned to oblivion by a solemn post-conciliar resolution – undermines the effort and the charismatic, prophetic impetus with which two popes, the saintly John Paul II and the theologian Pope Ratzinger-Benedict XVI, sought to overturn the logic of exclusion, hatred, discrimination and ghettoisation that had taken hold for centuries in Western Christianity as it grappled with the Jewish question. On the contrary, Jewish dissidents might draw food for thought from that choice to deny the bond between Jews and Israel. It begins with legitimate yet obsessive criticism of a government; one nurtures it in the name of the clear and pure conscience of the humanitarian West (’Take a circle, nurture it, and it will become vicious,’ wrote Ionesco), and the result is that from the denial of political Islam and the nihilism of pogroms, one arrives at outright denial. This, if anything, is the problem, not the non-existent complicity of Di Segni and Ben-Gvir.