The War In Gaza And The Crisis Of Zionism

The war continues at a hellish pace, threatening to kill and wound tens of thousands more, and tempting other nations to intervene to stop the slaughter.

By Richard Rubenstein, CounterPunch

Thirty years ago, Philip Roth wrote a profound, funny, disturbing novel about Israel, Palestine, and antisemitism called Operation Shylock. In this story an American Jewish writer named Philip Roth discovers that another writer who also calls himself Philip Roth is giving people in Israel fits by preaching “Diasporism” – a doctrine calling on Israel’s Jews to return to the mostly European lands from which they or their parents originally came. Roth #2 considers Europe and America to be the Jews’ true homelands: places where a humane, creative Jewish culture once flourished, and which are now needed as sanctuaries because of Israel’s failure to make peace with the Palestinians and the Islamic world’s hostility to Israel. The heretical idea given voice by the Roth doppelganger and discussed pro and con by a galaxy of other characters in the novel is that the Zionist experiment – the attempt to establish a just and secure Jewish State – has failed.

Operation Shylock, which I assigned to graduate students in a course called “Conflict and Literature,” was clearly more than a joke – but not even Roth expected it to be prophetic. One wonders what the novelist, who died five years ago, would say about the current war in Gaza, which began with an attack by Hamas fighters who murdered, raped, and wounded some 900 Jewish civilians and 350 soldiers and took more than 240 people hostage, provoking a series of retaliatory bombings and ground assaults by Israeli forces that have so far killed more than 16,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, and at least 5,000 of them children. That war continues at a hellish pace, threatening to kill and wound tens of thousands more, and tempting other nations to intervene to stop the slaughter.