368
PARTISAN REVIEW
to the crying ofa child.
I say the judgement is quite false, noting merely
that Racine, having written
Phedre,
felt obliged to draw up a pro–
gram for the improvement of France. I come now to Steiner's judge–
ment of Israel. Here, too, he has maintained his serious thinker's
stance . He has thought of Israel the grievous, the emotion-disturbing
thought, not the thought which soothes, but the thought which pains,
and not just other Jews, but maybe even Steiner himself. And here is
the thought:
The state of Israel was falsely set up. Its re-establishment in
1948 can on.ly be called "spurious.
"
So the state of Israel has not been a
beginning, and for Jews there has been only another ending. That
ending appears in Steiner's
The Portage To San Cristobal of A.
H.
It is
the speech of Hitler which ends the narrative .
POSTSCRIPT
Very probably the matter for consideration here is more impor–
tant than anything already considered. For here I want to take up
Steiner's judgement of Israel, the re-establishment of which he has
said is "spurious."
In the
Salmagundi
essay to which I referred before, Steiner
makes a number of what might be termed casually pejorative judge–
ments of Israel. The question is : do they add up to the judgement
that Israel- or its re-establishment in 1948 - is spurious? Could they
be true without our having to make that judgement? And I want to
ask this question, too: does Steiner
have
to make it?
Among Steiner's "casually pejorative" judgements of Israel are
these: it is small, and it lies in the Middle East. Now the small size of
Israel might be matter for regret, but certainly not that it is situated
in Palestine, where David and Solomon ruled. Jews do not weep to–
day as did the exiles, in Babylon, remembering Jerusalem. Today, if
Jews want to weep, they can weep right in Jerusalem. Steiner has
also made these judgements of Israel: it is "corrupt in its politics,"
and "shrill in its parochialism." Now I do not know if these remarks
are valid, but even if true, they do not oblige one to think that Israel
is, or its re-establishment was, "spurious." Steiner, of course, has
other charges . It appears that Israel is "... a nation-state to the ut–
most degree ." Now to be anything to the "utmost degree" is hardly to
be "spurious," unless the entity in question is additionally said to be
"spurious" to the "utmost degree," and this Steiner has not said. He
does say this: "It is by empirical need that a nation-state sups on
lies." Apparently this is true of all nation-states which are genuinely
