“Brutal and imperialist, confrontational and insular. A shallow place, thuggish, lacking spiritual inspiration.” That is how columnist Ari Shavit, in a long interview with Avraham Burg published recently in Haaretz, describes the characterization of Israel in Burg’s new book, Defeating Hitler. It also captures Burg’s dark, cartoonish depiction of Israel throughout the interview.
Among the all too populous community of Jews, including Israelis, who routinely demonize Israel, Burg stands out for having been a highly successful Israeli politician, a leading Labor Party figure who served as chairman of the Jewish Agency from 1995 to 1999 and then speaker of the Knesset from 1999 until early 2003.
Burg has been indulging in rabid attacks on the Jewish state for some years. In 2003, not long after he left his Knesset leadership post and at a time when Israelis were still being murdered at an unprecedented rate in the terror war unleashed three years earlier by Yasir Arafat, Burg was publishing articles declaring that the fault was all Israel’s.
In a piece in Britain’s Guardiannewspaper, for example, he wrote: “They spill our blood… because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated . The leaders come from below – from the wells of hatred and anger, from the ‘infrastructure’ of [Israeli] injustice and moral corruption.”
Burg’s indictments of Israel have ranged from criticism of what he claims has been Israel’s moral turpitude since the 1967 war to broader attacks against the Zionist enterprise, and his new book expands on the same distortions of Israeli reality.
In the recent Haaretz piece, interviewer Shavit writes that he was “outraged by the book” and challenges Burg on many points. Burg responds with a smug certitude about his denigration of Israel. But his retorts to Shavit are almost invariably non-answers and most often incoherent or bizarre and nonsensical.
Examples of the latter in Burg’s anti-Israel litany are manifold.
When, for instance, Shavit questions Burg’s romanticizing of Jewish life in the Diaspora and, more particularly, his “describ[ing] a thousand wonderful years of German Jewry” prior to the Holocaust, Burg – whose father fled Dresden – defends his stance.
The reality of those “thousand wonderful years” includes the vast slaughter of German Jews in 1096, at the start of the First Crusade; subsequent mass murders that accompanied later crusades; the annihilation of myriad Jewish communities in the fourteenth century in the context of Jews being blamed for the Black Death; and many lesser slaughters. It includes the Jewish presence in German territories being reduced for centuries to small, remnant enclaves, as those not murdered migrated eastward and provided the foundations of what made Poland, at the start of the modern era, home to perhaps 40 percent of all the world’s surviving Jews.
In the same bizarre vein, Burg praises contemporary Europe as a worthy alternative to Israel for Jews. In a period when attacks on Jews have reached a level not seen since World War II and Jew-hatred has won a new constituency across the political and economic gamut in Europe, Burg declares, “I see the European Union as a biblical utopia . It is amazing. It is completely Jewish.”
The details of Burg’s indictments of Israel are likewise nonsensical flourishes. He insists that Israel is a paranoid state, seeing Hitler everywhere, and dismisses any genuine threat as either overblown or manageable by Israel’s adopting more pacifist and less distrustful policies.
To the extent that he acknowledges, at Shavit’s prodding, a threat from Iran, he criticizes Israeli policy toward Iran as too militant and solitary: “Would it not be more right if we didn’t deal with the problem on our own, but rather as part of a world alignment…?”
