126
PARTISAN REVIEW
The sad truth is that a significant number of Jews throughout the
Diaspora, many of them sensitive, well intentioned, and by no
means unintelligent, have fallen for this maneuvre and prematurely
rushed to produce their certificates of divorce from Israel.
What appears to have affected suchJews, apart from the audio–
visual spectacular of nightly Israeli bombing raids on color televi–
sion, was the charge, shrewdly if hypocritically laid by the Western
quality press, that the Jewish state was somehow no longer "Jewish."
Suddenly the
idea
of Judaism, its universalist ethics and moral stan–
dards, became a matter of intense concern to non-Jews, insofar as it
could be turned
against
Zionism. An Israel flexing its muscles must
by definition be a betrayal of the Jewish "mission" even if military
might, in the volatile conditions of the Middle East, proves to be a
sine qua non
ofJewish physical survival. Admittedly, the Israel of Mr.
Begin and Mr. Sharon is some considerable distance removed from
the visions of the Hebrew prophets, the ethics of the Baal Shem Tov,
and the prudent maxims of our Jewish sages and rabbinical scholars .
Indeed, not a few people within Israel would also argue that even by
the standards of secular Zionism the present government has
"betrayed" much of what was truly liberal, tolerant, and humanis–
tic in the Jewish national renaissance. Whether this is really the case
is not the purpose of this article to judge. What can be fairly charged
against Mr. Begin is that his demagogic misuse of the Holocaust is
one
(though by no means the only or even the central) reason for the
readiness of many non-Jews (and even Jews) to believe the wildest
charges made against Israel. For many years Mr. Begin has used the
Holocaust as a political weapon, encouraging the equation of Arafat
with Hitler and of the PLO with the Nazis-the kind offalse analogy
that has now so cruelly backfired against Israel. Certainly Arafat
and Hitler have had one aim in common-to kill Jews. But in terms
of their general ideology, the means at their disposal, the balance of
forces, and the basis of their conflict with the Jewish people-all
comparison is gratuitous and an insult to the capacity of the Israel
Defense Forces.
The propagandist inflation of the PLO into an omnipotent
monster is in its own way symmetrical with the anti-Zionist obses–
sion with an occult Jewish power and ironically obscures the central
lesson of the Holocaust for the Jewish people-namely, that the
existence of a strong Israel is the main shield against its recurrence.
From a condition of total powerlessness the Jews have within less
