Buber and those who shared his views sought to cast their stance as the moral, ethical one. But what was moral about the abandonment of European Jewry? What was ethical about Buber’s circle in effect setting up the Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, as the proper arbiter of whether or not Jews should be rescued from Europe?
Their stance reflected a rejection of the moral imperative to save lives in favor of an anti-moral, anti-spiritual idolatry born of the embrace of bigoted, anti-Jewish indictments; it was an idolatry that gave greater weight to supplication of the Grand Mufti than to the obligation to help those being slaughtered.
This is the pedigree of arguments that the Jewish spirituality of the Diaspora has been abandoned for the Zionist dross of nationhood. It is the pedigree of Avraham Burg’s all but equating Israel with Nazism.
In its striving to appease the haters and to cast doing so as morally superior, it illustrates the psychology of all those who respond to the persistence of the Arab siege by blaming Israel and insisting Israeli reform will win relief. It illuminates what drives those who choose to pretend that the siege began in 1967 and returning to the pre-1967 armistice lines will win peace. It casts light on the perversity of those who refuse to listen to what Israel’s enemies declare are their goals, who insist on contorting those goals into something more benign, and who pronounce that to do otherwise is being obdurate and disrespectful of the other side.
It provides a paradigm for those whose answer to the genocidal enmity directed at Israel is to turn away from the legitimacy of Israel’s cause, indeed from the Jews’ right to national self-determination, a right routinely extended to, and thought ethically sacrosanct for, others.
It is the pedigree of those who choose to embrace not any consistently applied measure of ethical behavior to judge Israel, but rather to judge the Jewish state by parroting the indictments of those who would destroy it.
It is the pedigree of those whose “ethics” are derived from the demands of Yasir Arafat and Bashar Assad and Ismail Haniyeh and the potentates of Saudi Arabia and their myriad supporters in Europe.
This is the moral pedigree, the idol-worshipping hypocrisy, of the self-satisfied, spiritually hollow Avraham Burg.
