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and not "spuriously" nation-states. So if the state of Israel "sups on
lies," how does it differ at suppertime from the state of Switzerland,
which Steiner does not tax with "spuriousness"? He might argue,
though, that whatever its other faults Switzerland must be granted
this: It is not, like Israel, "armed to the teeth" and is not like Israel
"... compelled to make other men homeless, servile, disinherited, in
order to survive from day to day ...". Now in this charge there is
more propaganda than truth. The Arabs who fled Palestine in 1948
refused the separate state the United Nations had offered them, and
to which the victorious Zionists had agreed .
But the charges so far considered are just ancillary; they are not
fundamental to Steiner's judgement. His real charge goes like this:
The imperilled, brutalized condition of the present State of
Israel, the failure of Israel to be Zion, prove the spurious, the
purely expedient temporality of its re-establishment in 1948.
There were then armed men about and politicians. The Messiah
was nowhere in sight.
But having made this charge, Steiner goes on to grant that he
personally has no right to make it. "I have no right," these are his
own words. Why does he have no right to make a judgement of
whose truth he is trying to persuade others? Again his own words: "I
have no part in the beliefs and ritual practices which underwrite it."
And then he contradicts himself once more. Of his own judgement,
he writes, "... its intuitive and evidential strength can be felt to be
real." But if that were so, he would have every right to his judge–
ment, and would have felt no need to apologize for having made it .
Not sure that he has a right to make his real charge against
Israel, Steiner is nonetheless sure that Jews everywhere should not
regard as their "Homeland" the nation-state set up in Palestine in
1948. There is an alternative "Homeland," according to Steiner, for
Jews. This alternative "Homeland" he tells us is "the text." One
might think that what he has in mind is the Torah, but how can the
Torah be identified with anything called "the text"? That term
Steiner has taken from the writings of contemporary French critics
who are radically skeptical and, in their permanent exile from any
criterion of truth, have set up what they call "the text" as a pseudo–
absolute. They may mumble, "There is only the text, and nothing
but the text, so help us Text." But no religious Jew could join that
minyan.
In calling the text a "Homeland" Steiner has simply added to
