Beyond Betar

...Wisse calls this a strategy of accommodation, and describes two tragic consequences that must be set against its (relative) success...

...But Wisse has pulled it off...

...Jewish communities played the man and not the ball, adjusting their tactics frequently to the whims of local and national authorities...

...But Jewish success merely created a new and deadlier form of Jew-hatred...

...Although the strategy was inspired by and intertwined with the Jewish religion, it was (says Wisse) a political strategy—a method of organizing Jewish communities internally and of managing their “foreign relations” with the local Gentile powers...

...Wisse’s book will occasion other arguments, too...

...When Rome drove the Jews out of Israel after the defeat (at Betar in 135) of the last Zionist liberation movement until modern times, the newly homeless nation developed a novel national strategy...

...Jews in the Diaspora continued to remember their military heritage (classical Rome regarded the Jews as “ferocious”) with at least guarded respect...

...Clearly both explanations are valid, but there’s a third possibility as well: By offering help to the indigenous Arabs instead of requesting help, the Zionists offended a proud people...

...As European nations gradually liberated their Jewish communities from the segregationist laws that shut them out of Gentile society, the strategy of accommodation shot Jews straight to the top...

...The Arabs who fi rst encountered the modern Zionists were immensely proud...

...Jewish accommodationism, Wisse convincingly argues, remains to this day a disaster for Zionism, and continues to feed the Jewish delusion that their Arab enemies merely want peace and fair play, like the Jews themselves...

...Does accommodationism account for post-liberation Jewish brilliance in art, science, and scholarship, or only in commerce...

...In fact, argues Wisse, Jews dismissed from their culture the whole idea of military power: “The Jewish Diaspora,” she writes, “is one of history’s boldest political experiments, an experiment as novel as the idea of monotheism itself...

...so, too, are the connections she traces between the Nazi and Soviet governments and the growth of Arab violence against Jews...

...And because the Jews seemed like European colonialists, whom the Arabs hated already...

...Theodor Herzl, founder of modern Zionism, envisioned just this kind of society in the utopian novel that appeared in English translation as “Hill of Spring,” Tel Aviv...

...When she refers now and then to incidents in her own life, the effect is powerful, like an actor coming suddenly downstage to address the audience out of character and from the heart: “Having fl ed with my family to North America as a stateless refugee (the ship that brought us from Lisbon to New York in 1940 was torpedoed on its return voyage), I know the brunt of involuntary displacement...

...A character in Henry James explains to a friend why he might succeed where she had failed in getting acquainted with some diffi cult old maids: “There’s all the difference: I went to confer a favour and you’ll go to ask one...

...The accommodationist state of mind also had catastrophic results for Zionism...

...The Roman Catholic Church used to hate the Jewish religion, but the new antiSemites who crawled out of the cracks in late 19th-century Europe hated the Jews themselves, and schemed to use Jew-hatred as a battering ram to demolish the liberal order with which Jewish liberation was associated...

...These facts are no secret...

...Wisse adds an important truth to the history of modern anti-Semitism: Not all anti-liberal political parties were anti-Semitic, “but there were no antiSemitic parties that were not innately antiliberal [her italics...

...In fact, “Oslo triggered an immediate escalation of terror not only against Israel but against the West,” Wisse notes...

...A big claim...

...In less than 200 pages Ruth Wisse chronicles the Jewish nation from antiquity to the struggles of today’s Israeli state (or “the Zionist entity,” as it is affectionately known around the neighborhood...

...Of course, David is beloved above all as the psalmist, Israel’s greatest (and Western history’s most infl uential) poet...

...This willful delusion was the basis of the Oslo agreements between Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and terroristin-chief Yasser Arafat of the PLO...

...Among the great monotheistic religions, “Judaism is unique in allowing anyone to become a Jew without insisting that everyone should become a Jew...

...The three greatest heroes of the Hebrew Bible—Abraham, Moses, and King David—are all described as military leaders...

...Its characteristics were a simple but serviceable participatory democracy within the community, and a defense policy based on brains instead of arms...

...She tells her story with authority and restrained passion...

...Some will argue with Wisse’s thesis, at least in part...

...To encompass in under 200 pages the long history of the Jewish nation, along with an eloquent and novel commentary, sounds like an impossible Houdini-act...

...Do Arabs hate Jews because their leaders stand to gain (just as the Nazis did) by giving the masses a license to hate, steal, and kill...

...David, the greatest soldier of all, was and is the most beloved of all...

...David Gelernter, contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is a national fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and the author, most recently, of Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion...

...Sensitive antennae and advanced survival skills allowed Jews to excel in commerce, fi nance, and virtually every other fi eld they entered...

...But her narrative is merely a foundation for the series of related theses that stand forth like pinnacles on a medieval castle, banners fl ying...

...Jewish emigrants to Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries foresaw a benevolent new society living peacefully with its Arab neighbors, raising Arab and Jewish living standards simultaneously...

...Often her writing is eloquent in its plain-spokenness...

...Only with stunned and belated bewilderment did Jews returning to Zion come to realize that their Arab brothers wanted them gone and, preferably, dead...

...Their matchless capacity to read their Gentile neighbors, together with their fi xed resolve to survive as a nation, brought the Jews (if only just barely) through 2,000 years of brutal persecution and made them what they are today: the senior nation of the Western world...

...And she quotes a journalist in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz who wrote, in 2006, that Israelis “deserved” the bloodbath triggered by Oslo: “We earned it honestly as a nation of gullible fools...

...Sometimes they had no sense, but their sensibility was fi nely tuned...

...but the Western world (not excluding the American Jewish community) is blissfully ignorant and needs frequent reminding...

...Rabbi Akiba, the most important thinker of the Talmud, was a dedicated supporter of Bar Kokhba’s rebellion (which led to the fi nal defeat at Betar...

...The 1929 slaughter of unarmed Jews at Hebron and at Safed fi nally induced Jewish Palestine to begin (in defi ance of the British authorities) to organize seriously for armed self-defense...

...Wisse’s discussion of Stalin’s direct involvement in the origins of anti-Zionism is a powerful part of her argument...

...If Jews and Power is arguable at some points, Wisse’s authority, passion, and dignity make it compelling throughout...

...Judaism honors David’s combination of military and poetic genius: One of its most frequently repeated prayers expresses the hope that God will bless Israel with “oz v’shalom,” power and peace...

...after all, pride was all they had...

...If they’re proud you’ll be on the right side...