[NYRB] Amos Elon (1926–2009)

In his obituary of Amos Elon, Tony Judt clings to the idea that there was once a good Zionism, which had some shortcomings yet was fairly decent before the post-1967 war occupation.

Amos Elon was an exemplar of thinking founded in the cognitive disconnect between Zionism's self-image and its long history combining apparently unbounded mendacity with serially increasing crimes against the native Palestinian population.

The following passage of the article reveals the delusions and false memories of so many "progressive" Jews unable to come to terms with Zionism's dishonesty.

For much of his working life Amos Elon was a journalist, employed by the liberal daily Haaretz. During the 1950s and 1960s he worked frequently as a foreign correspondent ranging from Communist Eastern Europe to Washington, D.C. He seems to have interviewed just about everyone, from John F. Kennedy (with whom he attended wild parties at the height of the Camelot years) to Yasser Arafat. He used to tell a revealing story. In an interview he conducted in the early 1960s in Washington, with a senior Israeli diplomat who was about to leave his post and return home, he questioned his fellow Israeli closely. "What do you think you achieved during your posting here in the US?" Elon asked him. "Oh, that's easy," the diplomat replied. "I believe I have succeeded in convincing Americans that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism." Back in those years, Amos told me, he found the diplomat's assertion simply bizarre; he could hardly then have imagined that this cynical political equation would become received opinion among his countrymen and their supporters.

Yosef Grodzinsky investigates the origin of the equation of Judaism with Zionism (and hence of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism) in his book In the Shadow of the Holocaust, The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II. He found

• that the idea can be traced to Zionist education at least as far back as the 1930s and
• that both the international organized Jewish community and the WW2 Allies acquiesced in this idea when the Zionist leadership of Palestine in concert with Zionists in the DP camps thwarted the evacuation of Jewish children to Britain in 1945 and began drafting adult male Jewish Holocaust survivors as cannon fodder in the Zionist program of stealing Palestine from the native population.

If Elon was being honest about his reaction to the Israeli diplomat, Elon was in as deep denial as Judt seems to remain.

I was surprised that Judt considered Elon's book The Pity of It All to "[display] a fine sensitivity to the tragedy of Germany's Jews." Elon's account of German Jewish history has some value for its anecdotes, but serious historical analysis is absent.

Elon starts with Moses Mendelsohn's entry into Berlin (1743). Why? 1648 would have made more sense because it was the year the Treaty of Westphalia was signed. Then Elon could have explained the economic mess of the German countryside during the 18th century, and its effect on the relations between German Jews and non-Jews.

Elon's book never mentions

• that the Kulturkampf took place or
  
• that it had lasting effects on relations among German Protestants, German Catholics, German Jews, Polish Catholics, and Polish-Ashkenazim right into the period of the German Nazi regime.

Not only does Elon fail to discuss how the Prussian government effectively created a Jewish economic elite by its policy of only allowing the most entrepreneurial of Polish Jews to immigrate into Prussia or Prussian-ruled territories, but he also makes all sorts of tendentious or flat-out wrong claims about Czarist anti-Semitism.

Elon leaves out all discussion of the development of Modern Orthodoxy and its relationship with Zionism. Shimshon Rafael Hirsch and Isaac Breuer definitely deserved some mention. Breuer is very much a Tariq Ramadan-like figure in terms of reconciling Western philosophy and religion. He became an important political figure in New Yishuv but unlike Tariq Ramadan took part in a movement that pursued ethnic cleansing and the murder of unarmed women and children.

Complementing Elon's omissions, Judt fails to note in the very first paragraph of the obituary that the Bertelsmann-Stiftung meetings where Elon and Judt first met left out possible Palestinian attendees, whose mere presence would have facilitated a discussion of the commonality of German Nazism and Zionism (ethnic Ashkenazi Nazism) from the very beginnings of both movements.

Amos Elon (1926–2009)

By Tony Judt

I first met Amos Elon in Germany in the 1990s. We were participants in one of a series of meetings generously hosted by the Bertelsmann Foundation, where Germans, Israelis, and Jews gathered to exchange platitudes. Most of those present sought either to proselytize and grandstand (in the case of Israelis and Jews) or else to avoid giving offense (in the case of the Germans). Amos, uniquely, did neither. There, as on every occasion when I heard him speak, he succeeded in being both outspoken and yet somehow effortlessly sensible—he dominated conversation by force of reason. He had a mordant wit and a dismissive eye; he was contemptuous of fools and pedants; he smiled only rarely but when he did so it was real. He made a lasting impression upon me.

The German setting was altogether fitting. Amos, who was born in Vienna and was the author of an influential biography of Theodor Herzl, never lost his attachment to German culture and history, a subject on which he wrote frequently and with empathetic insight. The Pity of It All, his 2002 study of the Jewish presence in Germany from the Enlightenment to Hitler, displayed a fine sensitivity to the tragedy of Germany's Jews. For good and ill they remained profoundly attached to their cultural homeland, long after they were forced to leave it for Israel or America or elsewhere: more than the Jews of any other European land, they would feel their loss.^[1]

[To read the entire obituary, click here.]

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