Israel Must Not Stand as a Defendant In Front of the World but as a Plaintiff

Pick
Jan. 29 2024
About Ruth

Ruth R. Wisse is professor emerita of Yiddish and comparative literatures at Harvard and a distinguished senior fellow at Tikvah. Her memoir Free as a Jew: a Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation, chapters of which appeared in Mosaic in somewhat different form, is out from Wicked Son Press.

Writing shortly before the International Court of Justice handed down its ruling on the accusations of genocide leveled against the Jewish state, Ruth R. Wisse observes that she has heard several people call the proceedings “Kafkaesque.” But unlike the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Israel knows who is accusing it, what it is accused of, and that it is innocent. That story, Wisse writes, is about angst; Israel’s trial was about evil:

A century after Kafka’s death, there is nothing Kafkaesque about this trial, the falsity of which is plain to all. Israel stands in its own eyes and must stand before the world not as defendant but as righteous plaintiff against “those who demonstrate total disdain for life and for the law.” Unless Israel prevails, the political calculations that have allowed this travesty can only embolden the murderers and their supporters, condemning the world to ever greater evils—and not against Israel alone. . . .

The terrorists exploited the Jews’ desire for peace as a means of entrapment and further opportunity for torment. By attacking on a Jewish holiday and a secular festival, they intended to destroy the Israelis’ joy in life. Anyone reading Dan Senor and Saul Singer’s exhilarating book about the collective strengths that constitute The Genius of Israel will recognize how Hamas turned precisely those virtues into weapons of torture to tear the Jewish people apart.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Franz Kafka, Gaza War 2023, International Law

Donald Trump’s Plan for Gaza Is No Worse Than Anyone Else’s—and Could Be Better

Reacting to the White House’s proposal for Gaza, John Podhoretz asks the question on everyone’s mind:

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?

A Palestinian state in the wake of October 7—and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people? Biden foreign-policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious, and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while. For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: there will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state.

Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza.

And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?

Read more at Commentary

More about: Donald Trump, Gaza Strip, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict