A Crucial Lesson Israelis Learnt from the Holocaust: Kill (Others') Babies, Paraphrasing Leibowitz Who predicted Israel and Judeo-Nazis Self-Destruction.
"How could those “Judeo-Nazis” be raised here, in Israel? Because they have no other value than patriotism."
Yeshayahu Leibowitz and his wife Greta. (Source: https://hummusforthought.com/2014/12/27/from-humanity-to-bestiality-an-encounter-with-yeshayahu-leibowitz/ )
I am posting only the following excerpts from this long interview from a deeply humanist, honest Jewish Israeli thinker who drew his inspiration from an anti-nationalis philosopher from Austria:
“This post is the first part of the “From Humanity to Bestiality” series in which I discuss the thoughts of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the famed Israeli intellectual known for his outspoken opinions on Judaism, ethics, religion and politics. I first discovered Yeshayahu Leibowitz when I came across an essay he wrote in 1968, barely a year after the Six-Day War, entitled ‘The Territories’ and published in his “Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State” in which he predicted a grim future for Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories:
“The Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police—mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The administration would suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people’s army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations.”
Here we are reading this in 2014 and, clearly, he turned out to be right. I’m hardly the only one to think so given the large response I got when I tweeted the above paragraph.
The following interview appeared in the 37th edition of “Revue d’Etudes Palestiniennes”, the French quarterly version of the Journal of Palestine Studies published by the Institute for Palestine Studies, in 1990. It was done by Eyal Sivan, the Paris-based Israeli documentary filmmaker, for his movie “Itgaber: He will overcome“. Here’s an extract:
Excerpts from a long briliant, honest interview with the late Yeshayahu Leibowitz:
Towards the ruin of the State of Israel. If we continue marching this way. You understand that the key word here is “if”. If we continue marching the way we currently are, if this current situation continues, the situation meaning that which we’re maintaining through violence inflicted upon another people to whom we’re denying independence.
If this continues, the State of Israel will go towards its own destruction.
Are there people in Israel who fit your definition of heroism?
In Israel, we are taught to obey and call that heroism. If obedience is heroism, then Adolf Eichmann was a hero. Because in the end, his whole defense during his trial was that he was just following orders. Just an officer who followed orders. Here as well, we tell each other that the supreme duty of an officer is to follow orders. But Adolf Eichmann was just following orders as well, because whether we want it or not, Hitler’s power was legal since it was supported by the vast majority of the German people. I even think that, if that is the criteria of legality, that Hitler had a more honest support from the German people than any Israeli minister has had in Israel. And we can even say that, if we remain within that logic, Hitler’s power was “more democratic” than ours.
Except that we forget that the essence of democracy isn’t the rule of the majority, but the limitation of the authority of the majority. Democracy is that the majority is not allowed to do whatever it wills. If you define democracy as whatever the majority wills, then the Third Reich was the perfect democracy!
Franz Grillparzer was a dramatist and man of letters and not really a philosopher. To his credit he did point out that nationalism inevitably leads to bestiality.
This guy is critical, and perhaps he's all that the Jews occupying Palestine can tolerate, but he is still telling numerous halftruths, untruths, misrepresentations, elisions, and evasions of responsibility. It's baked in.
He's right that nationalism of the sort he's talking about breeds bestiality. It has been a core principle of Judaism the entire time. In fact Zionism was supercharged by Reform Judaism and by "emancipation" because the fundamentalist Jews of the mid-19th century could not tolerate the idea of giving up the land-greed and the bloody nationalism and turning to a pallid spirit-only presentation stripped of the worship of vengeance (Reform Judaism), and they couldn't tolerate the idea of assimilation ("emancipation"). This is documented in their own writings on the topic.