How Contentious is Commentary's Contentions?

Zionist intellectual David Hazony, who received a big boost from Martin Peretz, knocks the characterization of settler violence as a pogrom in Commentary's Contentions blog section.

I put up the following reply. Let's see if it gets through moderation. First I reply to a comment that equated Obama's Jewish supporters with Sabbatians.

There is a fairly direct line from Sabbatianism to Zionism. I call it concretization of the spiritual.

I spent somewhere between 1-2 decades studying pre-Soviet Russian Jews. Hazony does not have a clue. See The Lies of Yiddish Studies.

For the most part the pogroms are exaggerated as part of the anti-Czarist polemic of various political groups and parties. They were not directed only against Jews. The Czarist government considered them a threat to itself and wanted to stop them, but the collision between Czarism and Modernism simply did not leave room for Czarist officials to maneuver to save the Czarist state.

Anyway, here is a discussion of a pogrom that Jews committed: Robert Lindsay: The Zwi Migdal - Jewish Pimps of Argentina.

In More Campus Conflict Over Zionism I discuss Leon Pinsker’s fundamental delusion:

Pinsker’s essay [Selbstemanzipation] constitutes a remarkable work of self-delusion in the Eastern European context, for it attributes general disrespect of Jews to Jewish statelessness even though many Eastern European ethnic groups like the Polish Tatar Muslim community were highly respected within the szlachta (gentry) without having states of their own.

Pinsker and similar Russian Jewish intellectuals were for the most part denying the obvious when they refused to acknowledge that large segments of the Czarist population were becoming enraged at all Russian Jews because the Russian Jewish intelligentsia included a radical group that since the 1850s had engaged in assassination, terrorism, murder, sabotage and revolutionary conspiracy.

The anti-Palestinian violence in Hebron was definitely a pogrom. Such behavior is typical of the ethnic Ashkenazi extremism, fanaticism and racism that characterizes the Neocon Zionist intelligentsia in the USA and Zionist thinking in general.

The Hebron pogrom is hardly atypical of Palestinian life under the jackboot of murderous genocidal racist Zionist invaders, interlopers and thieves.

Christopher Browning correctly points out in The Origins of the Final Solution : The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942 that Germans were generally uncomfortable with violence like Kristallnacht. From my time in Israel and the Occupied Territories as well as my studies of the American Jewish community, I have the impression that Jews on the whole are far more tolerant and welcoming of Jewish violence on non-Jews than Germans in Hitler’s Germany were of German violence on Jews.

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