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The State As A Rootless Transient (Mark Steyn On Israeli Jews As The Pepe Le Pew Of Mankind Alert)
Jerusalem Post ^ | 08/07/06 | Mark Steyn

Posted on 08/06/2006 6:23:12 PM PDT by goldstategop

One of my favorite all-but-unknown books is The Heart Of Princess Osra, written by Anthony Hope in 1896. Hope hit the big time with The Prisoner Of Zenda and its boffo sequel Rupert Of Hentzau, two rip-roaring yarns in which an English dilettante twice contrives to save from usurpers the throne of Ruritania.

The Heart Of Princess Osra is also set in Hope's fictional Mitteleuropean kingdom, but this time a century and a half earlier - the 1730s - and it's not a rollicking adventure but a series of ill-starred romantic vignettes featuring King Rudolf III's younger sister and various unsuitable suitors. Yet it does make you appreciate how fully the author conceived his fictional landscape: Ruritania wasn't merely the setting of a thriller, so why just use it as such? Hope knew its history, its rulers and its laws long before the events of The Prisoner took place. As evidence of that, look no further than chapter one, page one of Princess Osra:

"Stephen! Stephen! Stephen!"

The impatient cry was heard through all the narrow gloomy street, where the old richly-carved house-fronts bowed to meet one another and left for the eye's comfort only a bare glimpse of blue. It was, men said, the oldest street in Strelsau, even as the sign of the "Silver Ship" was the oldest sign known to exist in the city. For when Aaron Lazarus the Jew came there, seventy years before, he had been the tenth man in unbroken line that took up the business; and now Stephen Nados, his apprentice and successor, was the eleventh.

Old Lazarus had made a great business of it, and had spent his savings in buying up the better part of the street; but since Jews then might hold no property in Strelsau, he had taken all the deeds in the name of Stephen Nados; and when he came to die, being unable to carry his houses or his money with him, having no kindred, and caring not a straw for any man or woman alive save Stephen, he bade Stephen let the deeds be, and, with a last curse against the Christians (of whom Stephen was one, and a devout one), he kissed the young man, and turned his face to the wall and died.

Therefore Stephen was a rich man, and had no need to carry on the business, though it never entered his mind to do anything else...

THAT'S PRETTY darn good. There's not another single reference to Ruritanian Jewry in any of Hope's writing, but he's thorough enough in the conception of his fairytale kingdom even to know what the anti-Semitic property restrictions are. The author located Ruritania somewhere between Saxony and Bohemia, though, thanks to the movie versions of Zenda, we tend to think of it as being in the Balkans. But it doesn't matter where you put it, the likes of Lazarus the Jew are long gone from Strelsau's bustling streets. In Romanian Journey, Sacheverell Sitwell recounted his visit in 1937 to the Bukovina, formerly the easternmost province of the Habsburg Empire, then part of Romania, now in the Ukraine. Its capital, Czernowitz, was a melange of Romanians, Ruthenians, Poles, Germans, Armenians and Swabians, but, as Sitwell couldn't help noticing, you'd never know that from a stroll down Main Street: "There is not a shop that has not a Jewish name painted above its windows. The entire commerce of the place is in the hands of the Jews. Yiddish is spoken here more than German."

Not anymore. The Jews of Czernowitz are dead or fled, as they are from a thousand other cities across Europe. For centuries, the rap against the Hebrews was that they were sinister rootless cosmopolitan types unbound by allegiance to whichever polity they happened to be residing in. So, after the Second World War, the ones who were left became a more or less conventional nation state, and now they're hated for that.

But all the hoo-ha about Holocaust denial (and granted, from President Ahmadinejad to Mel Gibson's dad, there's a lot of it about) has obscured the fact that the world has re-embraced, with little objection, an older form of anti-Semitism. Israel is, in effect, subject to a geopolitical version of the same conditions endured by Lazarus the Jew in Anthony Hope's Strelsau.

The Zionist Entity is for the moment permitted to remain in business but, like Aaron Lazarus, it's not entitled to the enforceable property rights of every other nation state. No other country - not Canada, not Slovenia, not Thailand - would be expected to forego the traditional rights of nations subjected to kidnappings of its citizens, random rocket attacks into residential areas, and other infringements of its sovereignty. This isn't about who's right and who's wrong: there are regional flare-ups all over the map and, regardless of the rights and wrongs, for the most part the world just sits back and lets them get on with it. There are big population displacements - as there were, contemporaneous to the founding of Israel, in Europe and the Indian sub-continent - but one side wins and the other makes do with what it can get and the dust settles.

The energy expended by the world in denying this particular regional crisis the traditional settlement is unique and perverse, except insofar as by ensuring that the "Palestinian question" is never resolved one is also ensuring that Israel's sovereignty is also never really settled: it, too, is conditional - and, to judge from recent columns in The Washington Post and The Times of London, it's increasingly seen that way in influential circles - the Jew is tolerated as a current leaseholder but, as in Anthony Hope's Ruritania, he can never truly own the land. Once again the Jews are rootless transients, though, in one of history's blacker jests, they're now bemoaned in the salons of London and Paris as an outrageous imposition of an alien European population on the Middle East.

Which would have given Aaron Lazarus a laugh. The Jews spent millennia on the Continent without ever being accepted as European. But no sooner are the Continent's Jewry all but extinct than suddenly every Jew left on the planet is a European.

In her Impressions From The Road, With Historical Essays (1903), Elizaveta de Vitte witnessed the same phenomenon in the Bukovina Sacheverell Sitwell later noted, but blamed the success of the Jews for the poverty of the Russians: "Out of the 600 students in the Chernowitz University, only 50 are Russian! It is true that admission to the University is open to everyone, but the actual enrollment happens in the following way: on a set day, Jews block the doors of the University..."

The Zionists' "disproportionate" response in Lebanon is merely the latest version of the famous Jewish pushiness.

With hindsight, even the artful invention of the hitherto unknown ethnicity of "Palestinian" can be seen as the need to demonstrate that where there is a Jew there is the Jew's victim.

It's a very strange feeling to read 19th century novels and travelogues and recognize the old psychoses currently reemerging in even more preposterous forms. These are dark times for the world: we are on the brink of the nuclearization of ancient pathologies.


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Editorial; Foreign Affairs; Government; Israel; Miscellaneous; News/Current Events; Philosophy
KEYWORDS: israel; jerusalempost; jews; marksteyn; pepelepew; statehood; uppity
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The Jews are now blamed for being "too European," "too cosmopolitan," "too Western" - in a word, uppity. Uppity for having their own state and having the temerity to insist on behaving like every other nation on earth. There's the irony in the current view of the Jew: once despised as outsiders, they're now despised as the ultimate insiders. Damn them for their pushiness! Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, though eliminating Jewish homelessness would win the Jews more acceptance and esteem. If anything, it earned them more hatred and scorn now that they do have a nationality. No matter what Jews do, it never quite seems to be enough to change their condition as the Pepe Le Pew of mankind. For me personally, Czernowitz is a place that has ancestral echoes. I see my father's family refracted back to that place where they once in lived in Mark Steyn's brilliant essay on how the Jew now extinct there, now in Israel with an independent nationality is still perceived as a subject the world talks about either in drunken rants or hushed whispers and not at all in a sense meant to be complimentary.

(Go Israel, Go! Slap 'Em Down Hezbullies.)

1 posted on 08/06/2006 6:23:16 PM PDT by goldstategop
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To: goldstategop
With hindsight, even the artful invention of the hitherto unknown ethnicity of "Palestinian"

I see that the inestimable Mr. Steyn got my letter.

L

2 posted on 08/06/2006 6:33:35 PM PDT by Lurker (I support Israel without reservation. Hizbollah must be destroyed to the last man.)
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To: goldstategop

I am sure I have asked this before. So please be patient, since I still don't have the answer.

Why are American Jews predominantly democrat/liberal when the American right in general and President Bush in particular are the best friends Israel has ever had ?


3 posted on 08/06/2006 6:33:45 PM PDT by prov1813man
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To: goldstategop

In Moab on a mountain once,
I took my stave in hand,
And gazed out wistfully upon
The hoped-for promised land.
Then bade me Death my eyes to close,
And drew me far away,
Behind a rampant stallion,
In heaven’s formless dray.
When here I stopped, in bonds of flesh,
I bound myself to earth,
Again (who have with Pharaoh walked)
To know the dread of birth.
And have I come thus, far in time,
My bootless rod in hand,
To sigh upon a mountain-top,
For you, my Promised Land?


4 posted on 08/06/2006 6:36:56 PM PDT by Mr Ramsbotham (Laws against sodomy are honored in the breech.)
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To: prov1813man
I'm sure you have. Its that baggage from Europe. Jews carry it like a memory and things are slow to change. Jews are changing but I wouldn't look for a change in partisan identification/political outlook til much of the 60s radical generation is gone.

(Go Israel, Go! Slap 'Em Down Hezbullies.)

5 posted on 08/06/2006 6:37:07 PM PDT by goldstategop (In Memory Of A Dearly Beloved Friend Who Lives On In My Heart Forever)
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To: goldstategop

Interesting. Thanks for posting this.


6 posted on 08/06/2006 6:38:28 PM PDT by Lorianne
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To: goldstategop
Once again, Steyn has made a profound point with grace and wit.

This piece was like the movie which leaves the audience stunned and speechless at the end, resulting in a palpable pause before the audience starts to file out...silently.

Thanks for the post.

7 posted on 08/06/2006 6:43:21 PM PDT by okie01 (The Mainstream Media: IGNORANCE ON PARADE)
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To: prov1813man
Why are American Jews predominantly democrat/liberal...? Here's Don Feder's answer.
8 posted on 08/06/2006 6:54:27 PM PDT by yatros from flatwater (Yeshayahu 26:4)
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To: goldstategop

The situation has flipped. It's now the stateless Muslims who are insinuating their way into European countries. The real threat of Islamism has replaced the imagined threat of Zionism.


9 posted on 08/06/2006 6:54:51 PM PDT by AZLiberty (Creating the <a href="http://clinton.senate.gov">straddle</a> Google bomb one post at a time.)
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To: goldstategop
For me, it comes down to these three facts...
1. Israelis make good neighbors
2. Members of Hizb'allah don't make good neighbors
3. It's a small, small world.
10 posted on 08/06/2006 6:56:46 PM PDT by syriacus (It's a small world after all. I'd rather have Israelis as neighbors than have Hizb'allah as neigbors)
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To: Mr Ramsbotham

Who wrote that?


11 posted on 08/06/2006 6:57:47 PM PDT by expatpat
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To: yatros from flatwater
There's also the fact most secular American Jews are liberal and for them liberalism is their religion. Its replaced Judaism and they do not think for the most part, first and foremost as Jews. They think as liberals and that explains the continued voting loyalty of most American Jews to the Democratic Party, even when it runs counter to Jewish interests in both continued Jewish survival and in Israel's welfare.

(Go Israel, Go! Slap 'Em Down Hezbullies.)

12 posted on 08/06/2006 7:06:27 PM PDT by goldstategop (In Memory Of A Dearly Beloved Friend Who Lives On In My Heart Forever)
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To: prov1813man

There is no rational basis for it that I can think of other than that a democratic administration was in charge of fighting WWII. That was the dawn of 20th century democratic party power, and it probably had a lot to do with Jewish support of democrats, and then liberals, and then socialists.


13 posted on 08/06/2006 7:10:23 PM PDT by xzins (Retired Army Chaplain and Proud of It! Supporting the troops means praying for them to WIN!)
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To: prov1813man
Why are American Jews predominantly democrat/liberal when the American right in general and President Bush in particular are the best friends Israel has ever had ?

Some American Jews see the religious right as Jew-hating fanatics.

14 posted on 08/06/2006 7:12:56 PM PDT by TChad
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To: goldstategop
This isn't about who's right and who's wrong: there are regional flare-ups all over the map and, regardless of the rights and wrongs, for the most part the world just sits back and lets them get on with it.

You can pretty much throw a dart blindfolded at a map of subsaharan Africa and find a spot in crisis or warfare or upheaval but that's no crisis, as far as Europe or the rest of the world is concerned. No UN-sponsored cease-fire agreements, no wall-to-wall coverage on CNN. It's apparantly just the Israel question that needs to be decided by outsiders.

15 posted on 08/06/2006 7:21:25 PM PDT by garbanzo (Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem.)
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To: TChad

Upwards of 70% of the religious right are fully supportive of Israel in the current conflict. With enemies like that, who needs friends?


16 posted on 08/06/2006 7:28:47 PM PDT by caspera
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To: goldstategop
Indeed, the Democratic Party is THE secularist party. So, that secular Jews find a political home there is hardly surprising. If one no longer trusts G-d, then one builds a 'god' of the state.
17 posted on 08/06/2006 7:30:12 PM PDT by yatros from flatwater (Yeshayahu 26:4)
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To: prov1813man
I think this is changing.

When I was 14 years old (I'm Jewish), my grandparents got me a subscription to The Nation, which, as you may know, is a far-left publication that is sacred to many liberals.

By the time I was 19, I was a College Republican, and an assistant editor for a conservative monthly campus paper.

Now, 14 years later, I have convinced my dad and other members of my family to vote GOP, at least in the national election.

Socialism runs deep in Jewish families. It's not an antisemitic slur when someone mentions that Marx and Trotsky and many others were Jews. The concept of the kibbutz, of communal living, of sharing and working in family units once drew many Jews to the left. Moreover, there was a strain of conservative that, up until 20 years ago, wasn't very friendly to Jews.

The net result is that the left has benefited greatly from Jewish volunteers and from money from Jewish donors. We tend to be very active politically (we have to be), and with a lot of successfully Jewish professionals and businessmen (and women), there are a lot of financial resources there.

But in the last 15 years, things have changed. A rabidly antisemitic left that has found common cause with radical Islam means that, except for the most deluded, this love-affair between the Jews and the left is over.
18 posted on 08/06/2006 7:37:06 PM PDT by Civ
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To: 1st-P-In-The-Pod; A_Conservative_in_Cambridge; af_vet_rr; agrace; albyjimc2; Alexander Rubin; ...
FRmail me to be added or removed from this Judaic/pro-Israel/Russian Jewry ping list.

Warning! This is a high-volume ping list.

19 posted on 08/06/2006 7:40:41 PM PDT by Alouette (Psalms of the Day: 66-68)
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To: caspera
Upwards of 70% of the religious right are fully supportive of Israel in the current conflict. With enemies like that, who needs friends?

I don't think that the viewpoint is particularly rational, and I don't know how widely held it is. The other side of the coin is that Jews know that they don't have to vote Republican to receive Republican support for Israel.

That said, I wonder how many American Jews really give a damn about Israel. I've known quite a few Jews who didn't seem to care about Israel, or even about Judaism.

20 posted on 08/06/2006 7:48:56 PM PDT by TChad
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