Pun Salad

Back in October, I linked to this Free Press article, which described how an advertisement for this book, Israel Alone, was initially accepted by a booksellers' trade publication, Shelf Awareness. only to be abruptly cancelled. Apparently too pro-Semitic.

My reaction: "I think I'll ask the Portsmouth Public Library to get this."

And I did. And they did. Good for them. It's a valuable counterweight to (for example) Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (which, according to the online catalog is available both at PPL and Portsmouth High School), and similar titles.

The author, Bernard Henri Lévy, centers his book on the Hamas pogrom of October 6, 2023; he calls this an Event-with-a-capital-E; it was "unprecedented in form". And, it is strongly suggested, going back to business as usual is no longer an option. His descriptions of the Event are stomach-turning, and dare you to shudder and avert your attention in horror. In case you missed them the first time around.

We'd like to report that the world came together afterward to aid Israel in obliterating the barbarians of Hamas. That happened to a certain extent. Initially. But what also happened, to a surprising and outrageous extent, was a resurgence of explicit anti-Semitism, both in Europe and America, sometimes leading to violence. And, as the initial shock wore off, the default behavior re-established itself: attempts to hold Israel to impossible and dangerous standards, with (at best) perfunctory requests made of the terrorist organizations and gangster countries to stop being so mean. And the latest indignity: the UN-backed "International Court of Justice" issuing arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

Lévy makes the case for Israel's continued existence as a Jewish state; he has long supported a "two-state solution" for the conflict, and continues to do so, even as that hope seems increasingly forlorn.

The one sour note comes on page 91, where Lévy pooh-poohs "evangelical Christians" who are "nominally 'Zionists'". Ah, but "only to the extent that they expect on Judgment Day to take Israel's place on the very land where the Jewish state presently and provisionally stands."

It's much more common to see this bit of theological trivia deployed as an anti-Israel argument. "You know they were big supporters of moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, right? The better to bring about Armageddon, my dear!"

There's also a drive-by slamming of embassy-mover Donald Trump as a false friend of Israel. Because he (allegedly, over 30 years ago) said he preferred to have "short guys wearing yarmulkes" counting his money. Again, Bernard, that's the best you can do? When the alternative was Kamala "I've studied the maps" Harris?