Strenger on Carter

Strenger on Carter

Jimmy Carter apologized recently for his harsh anti-Israel position of recent years. The JTA smells politics. Goldblog is guarded, and working on it with his readers. Yourish is dismissive. There's a lot more of that out there if you care to look for it.

Carlo Strenger looks at some of the longer-term aspects. He says nothing new, but most of us generally don't. I"m linking not for the novelty but because he's right.

Israel and the Christian world have been locked in a very complex relationship that has deep historical and theological roots. The theologically based hatred of Christianity towards Jews was transformed in the 19th century, and received its racial formulation from 1873 onwards, when the Austrian journalist Wilhelm Marr coined the term anti-Semitism. This form of hatred of Jews led to the horrors of the Holocaust, and the Western world has yet to come to terms with its refusal to do anything to stop the genocide.

Jews have been the bad conscience of the West for a long time - and even more so since the Holocaust. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy has pointed out that many in the West have never come to terms with the fact that Jews, the perpetual victims, now have a powerful army, and are no longer in the position of having to beg for protection and recognition. But most of all, for many there was relief: now that Jews had become the victimizers rather than the victims, the guilt of the history of persecution ending in the Holocaust could finally left behind. Many in the West used a ubiquitous defense mechanism: humans tend to hate those who induce guilt in them - and finally guilt against Jews could be transformed into hatred against Israel.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations