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the "voice of the People." Israel is democratically-religiously
justified.
It
is a justification which becomes problematic when we look at
the actual situation. Which People? The million Palestinians on the
West Bank and in Gaza? The exclusively Christian Arab population
of Nazareth? The many religions in Jerusalem?
It
is, as Steiner says,
all mixed up with force and guns. Perhaps the voice of the People
can be heard, perhaps not. But at any rate the state
exists,
and there
is enough democracy in it to satisfy Abel.
Holding onto the "text" of the Torah, Stein·er would have
this
at
least if Israel should fail- a collection of "meanings" in these books,
even if no great Truth. But if it does fail, Abel, so he seems to
believe, would have nothing left as Jew at all:
If
the establishment of Israel is in any sense unreal, or just tem–
porary, if it can be truly said to be spurious, then too I think that
Hitler has had "the last word" against us.
Is Israel a "false Messiah" or "fake Zion," as communism
proved to be for an earlier generation of so many Jews and others?
Are Jews deceiving themselves about this State, said to be now the
sixth most powerful military nation on earth (some say the fourth
most powerful)?
Abel chooses not to understand Steiner's warning that Israel is
"a nation-state to the utmost degree." What Steiner means is that it
is a religious or quasi-religious nation-state of great antiquity with
nationalist feelings and ambitions.
(If
the United States were, in a
civil sense, a Christian state to the degree that Israel is a Jewish
state, many Jews would refuse to live here.) Is Abel deceiving
himself about this? Does he think that Israel is a pluralistic society?
Or that it will become one in the future? What happens when the
facts begin to conflict with this?
Abel rightly points out that the Hitler of Steiner's
The Portage to
San Cristobal
of
A.
H.
mistakenly attributes the State of Israel to the
Holocaust:
But the State of Israel was not provided by the Holocaust. It was
provided by Jews responding to the Holocaust, and if they had
not provided themselves and their descendents with the State of
Israel, they would have been totally defeated by the Fuehrer.
