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Another Tack: The Börne identification 



By SARAH HONIG
13/05/2011 

        

Joint Fatah-Hamas venture should persuade even the most diehard peaceniks
that the time has come to finally wise up, lose the illusion. 

 


  


“Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.” – Ludwig Börne
(1786-1837)

One of the wittier and more brilliant satirists ever to have come out of
Germany, Börne identified with characteristic precision that indispensable
preliminary step in Everyman’s quest for solutions to whatever plagues us.
“If you seek wisdom,” he advised, “seek the destruction of the illusions you
hold as true more than you seek new truths.”

This is counsel that should be heeded here and now by our inveterate hawkers
of megadelusion – Israel’s very own proponents of the two-state solution.
Unflaggingly they peddle tattered, intrinsically disorienting delirium.
Incredibly they never seem to tire of pulling the wool over their own and
our eyes. They present themselves as possessors of singular insight, as
harbingers of a greater truth and as wise beyond our plebeian grasp.

They won’t let go of the grand delusion that underlies their self-professed
wisdom and purported truth. Their two-state delusion was certainly sweet –
simplistically and seductively so. It claimed that all conflicts can be
amicably and fairly settled by just dividing up whatever is contested. It
touted idealistic goodwill and seemed compellingly rational. But it was from
the start delusionary.

By all empirical yardsticks, that delusion has finally and undeniably
crumbled into grimy dust. The illusion of a reasonable accommodation with
genocidal foes – which without fail anyhow failed the test of coolheaded
analysis – ignobly disintegrated when Ramallah’s Fatah and Gaza’s Hamas
banded back together, at least pro forma, for the sake of expediency.

Whatever their motives and whatever the long-range plans of the old-new
partners, their joint venture should persuade even the most diehard of our
peaceniks that the time has come to finally wise up and lose the illusion.

The prevalent illusion thus far was that we face two dissimilar Palestinian
entities – negotiation- espousing Ramallah and Gaza, whose unaltered goal is
Israel’s annihilation. Now that the pair has retied the knot, their
deception has been exposed. That should mean that the illusion has been
shattered irrefutably once and for all.

In reality the only distinction between the two always was tactical.
Ramallah excels at propaganda warfare, while Gaza fires rockets. Ramallah is
funded by the Quartet, while Gaza is underpinned by Damascus and Tehran.
Both wish to obliterate Israel, but Ramallah is more cunning and Gaza more
candidly confrontational.

Neither Ramallah nor Gaza was ever a reliable or viable peace partner. Only
our indomitable wishful thinking and obsessive illusion kept conjuring up
interlocutors on whom we could unload slices of homeland, directly atop the
soft underbelly of our densest population centers.

Gaza’s Hamas thumbs its nose at us and glorifies the IslamoNazism of
infamous Second World War-criminal Haj Amin al-Husseini, who from his Berlin
residence avidly abetted Hitler’s Final Solution, recruited Muslims to the
SS and actively foiled the rescue even of several thousand Jewish children.

Conversely, in his Moscow Friendship University PhD treatise, Fatah
figurehead Mahmoud Abbas attempted to dwarf the Holocaust’s proportions
drastically, while simultaneously accusing Zionists of colluding in
Holocaust perpetration – i.e., it didn’t happen, but Israel is guilty. This
history-warping dissertation is compulsory study material in his fiefdom’s
schools.

ABBAS’S FATAHLAND is nothing but a more outwardly decorous version of
Hamastan. All the rest is desperate illusion.

Moreover, our self-imposed hallucination arises from deep desires for
something that far transcends Israel’s well-intentioned, if strategically
misguided, yen for compromise. Our irredeemable devotion to delusion is
inherently Jewish. Perhaps it’s the defensive adaptation of the weak.

Most members of the dysfunctional family of nations indeed advocate the
two-state solution, but we alone are delusional. All the others are
stimulated by cynical vested interests, which impair our self-preservation
prospects. In other words, other states don’t push us into the two-state
abyss for our own good. Quite the contrary.

Nevertheless, too many of our headliners and opinion-molders voluntarily
embrace that detrimental external pressure. They avidly engage in
scare-mongering. If we don’t succumb to what’s dictated from abroad, they
hector, we’ll be left alone, ostracized, vulnerable and on the verge of
extinction.

But are these demoralizers weakening our resolve for altruistic ends? Or,
perhaps, are they identifying with foreigners whom they regard as sources of
clout and influence? Are they obsequiously out to win coveted international
credentials of enlightenment, that would differentiate them from all those
bothersome insular, intransigent and politically incorrect Israelis? 

A cooperatively toadying disposition could secure Israel’s peaceniks the
acceptance they crave, allow them to bask in the limelight of those who
really scorn Israel, win accolades in places Israelis should naturally shun,
and earn approval from the most disapproving sorts.

The illusion is that serving the purposes of powers whose greedy,
shortsighted interests negate one’s own interests will help promote personal
or factional aggrandizement. This isn’t a recently evolved illusion. It has
been with us for at least two millennia, perhaps the manifestation of a
persistent, pesky mutation in the Jewish genome that keeps popping up
exasperatingly in all manner of circumstances, no matter how superficially
different.

Somehow Jews appear to crave acceptance, to seek to bask in the limelight of
those who really revile them, to win accolades in places they should
naturally shun, to yearn for approval from the most inimically disapproving
sorts. Ingratiating ourselves with our enemies – and friends-of-enemies –
seems preprogrammed into too many of us.

The Jews of Germany, who historically comprised one of the most successful
of Diaspora communities, were mind-bogglingly susceptible to the aberration.
The list of famous Germans who were born Jewish yet strove not to stay
Jewish is unbelievably long. For those cursed with Jewish parentage, talent
and brains were never enough to make it in intensely Judeophobic
surroundings.

Too many Jews with both talent and brains deluded themselves that Christian
credentials would secure them the acceptance they craved, allow them to bask
in the limelight of those who really reviled them, win accolades in places
they should naturally have shunned, and earn approval from the most
disapproving sorts.

Razor-sharp Börne was disturbingly typical. He was born in Frankfurt as Leib
Baruch, and that critically was a colossal fly in his ointment. He couldn’t
even keep a bureaucratic public-sector job because of his Jewishness. His
illusion was to ditch said Jewishness by becoming a Lutheran convert with a
suitably Teutonic name.

Gallingly, though, even that failed to erase the original sin of Baruch’s
extraction. Eventually he ended up in Paris banding with other frustrated
Jews to fix up the world.

Börne-Baruch’s illusion of ingratiating himself didn’t pan out. He didn’t
succeed in currying the favor of non-Jews. To them Börne remained who he was
born. Perhaps it was this life experience that led him to conclude that the
prelude to any progress is losing one’s illusions.

Illusions won’t lead any of us anywhere – not to peace with Ramallah or with
Gaza, and certainly not with both. Before we rummage around for yet more
appeasement-expediting supplementary sacrifices, we must rid ourselves of
specious illusion. First things first.




 

 




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