After
writing my blog about Miriam Margolyes I was very happy to have
received emails from her in response. In one of them she told me that,
after the Daily Mail attack on her ‘savage remarks’ about Boris
Johnson she had received some vile messages.
This
has left me wondering how many of these messages are a reflection of hostility to her for criticising Israel. An early example was Howard
Klineberg’s personal attack on Miriam in the Jerusalem Post. “There
is much that sickens me about you
including,
your blatant attempt to self-publicize your limited talents. Miriam
it’s people like you, especially the Jewish people like you, who
are to blame for the rise in UK anti-Semitism.”
Wrong
on two counts, ‘limited
talents?’ and ‘blame
for
anti-Semitism.’
Miriam,
you are in good company and join the following -
Sigmund
Freud:
“I
concede with sorrow that the baseless fanaticism of our people is in
part to be blamed for the awakening of Arab distrust. I can raise no
sympathy at all for the misdirected piety which transforms a piece of
a Herodian wall into a national relic, thereby offending the feelings
of the natives.”
Albert
Einstein:
“The
(Israeli) state idea is not according to my heart. I cannot
understand why it is needed. It is connected with many difficulties
and a narrow-mindedness. I believe it is bad.”
Erich
Fromm:
“The
claim of the Jews to the Land of Israel cannot be a realistic
political claim. If all nations would suddenly claim territories in
which their forefathers lived two thousand years ago, this world
would be a madhouse.”
Primo
Levi, Auschwitz survivor:
"Everyone
has their Jews. For the Israelis they are the Palestinians."
Marek
Edelman, One of the leaders of the 1943 Warsaw uprising who wrote in support of the Palestine resistance, comparing them
to ZOB, the Jewish fighters in Warsaw. He opened with, "Commanders
of the Palestine military, paramilitary and partisan operations - to
all the soldiers of the Palestine fighting organisations.”
Isaac
Asimov, novelist:
“I
find myself in the odd position of not being a Zionist ... I think it
is wrong for anyone to feel that there is anything special about any
one heritage of whatever kind. It is delightful to have the human
heritage exist in a thousand varieties, for it makes for greater
interest, but as soon as one variety is thought to be more important
than another, the groundwork is laid for destroying them all.”
Hannah
Arendt, political scientist:
“The
trouble is that Zionism has often thought and said that the evil of
antisemitism was necessary for the good of the Jewish people. In the
words of a well-known Zionist in a letter to me discussing the
original Zionist argumentation: 'The antisemites want to get rid of
the Jews, the Jewish State wants to receive them, a perfect match.' “
I.F.
Stone, US journalist:
“Israel
is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry. In the
outside world the welfare of Jewry depends on the maintenance of
secular, non-racial, pluralistic societies. In Israel, Jewry finds
itself defending a society in which mixed marriages cannot be
legalised, in which the ideal is racial and exclusionist.”
Noam
Chomsky:
“In
the Occupied Territories, what Israel is doing is much worse than
apartheid. To call it apartheid is a gift to Israel, at least if by
"apartheid" you mean South African-style apartheid. What’s
happening in the Occupied Territories is much worse.”
Gabriel
Kolko, historian:
“The
large majority of Israelis are not in the least Jewish in the
cultural sense, are scarcely socialist in any sense, and daily life
and the way people live is no different in Israel than it is in
Chicago or Amsterdam. There is simply no rational reason that
justifies the state’s creation.”
Uri
Avnery, ex-Israeli army officer:
Avnery
wrote that after an Israeli military victory, “What will be seared
into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a
blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and
not prepared to abide by any moral restraints.”
Henry
Siegman, Rabbi and director of the U.S./Middle East Project:
“Israel
has crossed the threshold from ‘the only democracy in the Middle
East’ to the only apartheid regime in the Western world.”
Richard
Cohen, US columnist:
“The
greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that
Israel itself is a mistake … the idea of creating a nation of
European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has
produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing
now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but
its most formidable enemy is history itself.”
Rabbi
Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Magazine:
“If
a Jew today goes into any synagogue in the U.S. or around the world
and says, 'I don’t believe in God or Torah and I don’t follow the
commandments,' most will still welcome you in and urge you to become
involved. But say, 'I don’t support the State of Israel,' and you
are likely to be labeled a 'self-hating Jew' or anti-Semite, scorned
and dismissed."
Richard
Falk, the former UN special rapporteur on human rights in the
Occupied Palestinian Territories:
Israeli
policies in the Occupied Territories are
“a crime against humanity.” Falk has also compared Israel’s
treatment of the Palestinians to the Nazi treatment of the Jews. Falk
has said, “I think the Palestinians stand out as the most
victimised people in the world.”
