Since its founding, the State of Israel has presented an obvious problem to the great writers, thinkers and artists of the Jewish diaspora — how would the story of Jewish suffering play out when the culture had its own army and flag? For voices like Saul Bellow, Naomi Klein and Leonard Cohen, the banning of Al Jazeera and the invasion of Rafah were almost inevitable. Unless a new story could be told, they knew history’s victims would become its perpetrators.
Later, it would dawn on me that those 47 minutes — and, specifically, my friend’s insistence that I watch them — were the clearest exemplar yet of Bellow’s trenchant observation.“You call it genocide when I think you know that it’s not,” he continued, “that the Hamas numbers are inflated; that they are themselves complicit in many ways in the reality on the ground; that this is war, as shitty as it is. I’m not washing the IDF , it’s been chaos, I’m just looking at where you’re holding.
“These comments, and the general views around this issue, make it feel to me that you’re very taken up by the views of the South African leadership and media. If so, I get it. Not simple to escape the zeitgeist of the zone. It’s just not the big mind Bloom I’ve known in the past. ”In 1976, Bellow received the Democratic Legacy Award from the Anti-Defamation League , the organisation’s highest honour.
“But my Israeli questioners or examiners were not satisfied,” Bellow told his audience. “They were trying to make me justify myself. It was their conviction that the life of a Jew in what they called the Diaspora must inevitably be ‘inauthentic’. Only as a Jew in Israel, some of them told me, could I enter history again and prove the necessity and authenticity of my existence.”
published in September 2023, mere weeks before the Hamas attack — the Canadian-Jewish writer Naomi Klein offered what were perhaps the most thought-provoking and incisive answers to this distressing question.
As a Jew who had grown up in apartheid-era South Africa, I could easily relate. At my Jewish high school in Johannesburg in the late 1980s, the Holocaust stood elevated and apart — the event that encompassed all of our sufferings, from the Babylonian exile to the Roman sacking of the Second Temple and beyond.
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