Hitchens and the Jews

Slate: Two Elections - Why Iraq's vote is not like Palestine's. By Christopher Hitchens

There is a Grand English Tradition of belittling Jewish claims to peoplehood. Arnold Toynbee's classic twelve volume 'A Study of History', relegates the Jews to the status of a fossilized fragment of a defunct Syriac civilization. Maurice Samuel, in 'The Professor and the Fossil', suggests that the appropriate description of this strategy is 'floccinaucinihilipilification' - every high school Latin students favorite word, so rarely encountered in real writing - eheu! Hitchens, though justly acclaimed for his uncompromising independence of thought, is in this regard no better than the English intellectual tradition he is a member of.

In his latest piece on Slate, he reiterates his position that the Jewish claim to self-determination in Israel is based on religious mania - resting on the irrational belief that "the land was awarded by God to the Jews." He then goes on to obliquely justify Palestinian terrorism, in contrast to the Iraqi insurgency where "No attempt was made to claim that violence was an inescapable option after a long denial of legitimate protest" and which doesn't "have a tithe of the historic justification for the resistance in Palestine."

The argument that Zionism is a movement inspired by the hallucinated commandments of a non-existant god is as comfortable for the British intellectual as it is wrong. The early Zionist leaders were almost entirely secular, and expressed the desire of the Jewish people to once again be constituted as a Nation. Archaeological evidence solidly confirms a national presence of Jews in Israel from ancient times. In his recent book, 'Love, Poverty and War', Hitchens recognizes that this makes it difficult to dismiss Zionism as a crazed religious ideology and gets dirty with some old fashioned floccinaucinihilipilification, citing opinions that the first Jewish State was "at most a small tribal kingdom". Modern Israel of course, isn't so very large itself - on an international scale, it might be considered to have reconstituted itself appropriately ;-)

But what flabbergasts me (and I should note that I do admire much of Hitchens writing - his book on Orwell, for example, is excellent), is that Hitchens, having sallied forth to undermine twin aspects of Jewish self-identity, as a religion and as a nation in exile, then writes in his recent book 'Love, War and Poverty', that "Nonetheless, I like to think that I would be despised or hated by any movement defining itself as anti-Semitic".

Originally I thought that was perhaps a naive statement of solidarity against violence. But after the piece on Slate, I think it is at best disingenuous. He clearly rejects violence directed against "indiscriminate attacks on the citizens of other nations" and seems to regard suicide bombing as a peculiarly odious form of murder. But it's hard to not to conclude that, sophisticated distinctions between varieties of murder aside, Hitchens is sympathetic toward Palestinian terrorism.

So, sad to say, it's unlikely that Hitchens will succeed in attracting the ire of anti-Semites everywhere. He might even have to snub friendly overtures from the gun-toting wing of the Palestinian resistance. I'ts a mad crazy world, when even our best enemies can't be friends.