A Review of David Solway’s The Boxthorn Tree
Some of the most eloquent and impassioned pro-Israeli essays in existence are to be found in The Boxthorn Tree, David Solway’s new collection. Solway — who somehow also manages to write erudite essays on a wide variety of other topics, as well as poetry — shows a masterful conversance with Israel’s history and current dilemmas, along with a sweeping command of the issues facing the Jewish people in general in a world that retains much of its age-old inimicality toward them.
This collection, which along with polemical essays offers book reviews, accounts-settlings with individual intellectual opponents, parodies, and fables, is written throughout in a dazzlingly urbane, virtuosic, sparkling prose that harks back to earlier literary tradition while remaining firmly attuned to our own morally compromised era. Much of the book is, indeed, a searing indictment of the West’s often cynical and defamatory treatment of Israel, even as it stands on the “frontline…in the war against militant Islam” and “raises…the torch of both dignity and survival.”
One by one Solway takes on the standing calumnies that pervade most of today’s media coverage of the Jewish state: that it is an “occupier” building “illegal settlements” (handily demolished with a historical and juridical overview in “Occupied Israel”); that its security fence is a cruel monstrosity (playfully and brilliantly refuted in “Loving the Wall” and “A Short Meditation on Walls”); that it is the party responsible for derailing the peace process (summarily dispatched in “Is Peace Possible in the Middle East?”); and — most absurd of all — that it is the Middle Eastern country that mistreats Christians (a brazen inversion of the truth definitively trounced in “Israel’s Oppressive Treatment of Christians?”).
Much appreciation, Mr. Hornik, for this very aptly written book review. In fact, the review is so outstanding that I have made a mental note of ordering it at Steinmetzkys’ here in Israel.
Thanks, Mr. Haymond, for the kind remarks.
The Boxthorn Tree won’t be available in Israel for about a half a year, so I’m told at Steinmatzky’s.
Why not order it online?
It should be noted that in the US the anti-Israel Left is strongly Jewish, and there is a heavy representation in Israel.
Israel should have started settlement in 1967, then let the enemy negotiate to make them stop. One might note, that the Grand Mufti was a NAZI ally and in Europe, every place with German ran them off. The Jews should have done the same.
As it stands now, Israeli borders are enough to serve as a tripwire, immigration has fallen off, and many Israelis are making sure their dual citizenship is in order.
I believe, based on my sources that a number of influential but obscure individuals believe that the US could make a better deal with Israel off the stage.
” Is there anything of which a Jew can be guilty that could match the unsavory and contemptible antics of his accusers? Apologies to whom? To that judge with blood-caked hands who sits leering from his bench? to that enfeebled and chaotic brain that calls itself an anti-semite? Or to that smug and highty-tighty bystander, World Opinion- a gentleman who hasn’t been able to find his buttocks with both hands since he was given an alphabet to play with? ”
Ben Hecht, A Guide for the Bedeviled , 1944
While the world has progressed technologically over the last two thousand years there has been little or no improvement in moral behavior. In fact, since Hecht wrote in 1944, their has been a serious decline in moral standards. In fact much of the world has gone from ignoring morality to simply dismissing its relevance.
The lesson we must take is that intellectual argument has little effect and military strength and the willingness to use it are what counts.
As a matter of fact, there has been general moral improvement from the Middle Ages up until the 20th century, and moral regression beginning with the 20th century. No true man of science and learning will dispute this.
Just a partial list for your edification-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_antisemitism
Thanks! And here’s one for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_golf_history_(1353-1850)
What a wonderful review. It is worthy of the Jewish Review of Books.
I can more or less swallow anti-Semitism as expressed by non-Jews. By Jews however, I find it exceedingly painful. In some sense I shouldn’t — they’re motivated in equally obvious ways as non-Jews. Nonetheless, the smarter said Jew’s anti-Semitism is, the more painful I find it.
It would seem from your review that Solway feels similarly given the time he spends on “inside” antisemitism.
From everything I read and hear about the totally “modern” feel of Germany in the 1930′s — the feeling that this was the height of civilization (which, it probably was in many respects) — I fully agree with the sentence you quoted regarding the perpetuity of anti-Semitism. In other words, there is no”magic level” of “civility” or civilization which a society can reach that will make it immune to attempting another Shoah.
Many thanks for your response and your thoughts.
The fact that jews like Chomsky, et. al., makes common cause with those seeking to destroy Israel is no different than those “Americans” (e.g., Alger Hiss, Henry Wallace, etc) who not only made common cause with a nation, the USSR, whose stated goal was to destroy the USA and all capitalist nations, but actively spied for the USSR.
The common thread to all of these reprehensible pieces of sh^t, was their pseudo religious belief in the murderous, tyrannical ideology of communism.
Also common to all of these SOBs is their conceit and arrogance in believing that all that is needed to solve all the world’s problems is for them to assume power and dictate to the masses just how things must be. This totalitarian mindset is a manifestation of the massive egos, arrogance and heart-felt superiority these folks inherently believe they possess.
All totalitarians absolutely hate and despise individual freedoms because they cannot tolerate to see, hear and be exposed to people they abhor; that is, people not as “sophisticated” and “intellectual” as themselves. This is totally analogous to the aristocracy of 17th century Europe who considered the citizenry as cannon fodder placed on earth to serve them.
At its most basic level these totalitarians are driven by hate and contempt of the common person, though for jewish self haters I must add that they are simply embarrassed that their fellow jews in Israel actually may believe in a GOD, and that Israel was founded by jews seeking a RELIGIOUS homeland.
Arabs can commit all sorts of atrocities against jews or their fellow Arabs but a Chomsky and his ilk are totally silent about all of this. The ONLY explanation of this sort of verbal “in-action” is that their depth of hatred and contempt of Israel is so deep seated that they actually believe that the Israelis “have it coming” and the world will be better off if all Israelis are simply slaughtered.
Rest assured that if Israel suffers a massive debacle in which tens of thousands of Israelis perish, that Chomsky, et. al., will welcome this event (though will not say so publicly) and they will provide myriad reasons why the Arabs were “forced” to engage in mass murder.
If you think that no sane person can exhibit such depravity please recall the comments of Walter Duranty, the NY Times columnist upon hearing of Stalin’s mass exterminations; “you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.”
The most dangerous people on earth is the leftist “intellectual” because they have the intellectual heft to justify absolutely anything at all. And when they cannot justify an outcome they welcome, well, they just remain silent.
while I agee with the body of your commentary, JA, I believe you are wrong when you equate Jewish anti-semitism to Americans making common cause with the enemy. In the case of Jewish hatred of Jews, it can be explained by a variant of the Stockholm Syndrome. In other words (thinks the Jewish anti-semite), if I hate my own kind sufficiently, others (Gentiles) will come to accept me as a worthy human being. One views this same psychological characteristic in other peoples such as Canadian Indians who, due to extensive multi-generational hatred and abuse by White Canadians and their governmental institutions, came to believe in their own worthlessness. Therefore the aptly named characteristic of “Apple”, white on the outside and red on the inside. The cure, or healing, has come about due to a twofold process: 1) Governmental institutions altering their diseased views; 2) Native people relearning and resurrecting their own cultures. One also views this psychological effect in Black people in the USA. Being despised for so long, they learned to value everything White while hating everything Black. Many tried to become more “white” than “White”. Again, a wholesale change has come about due to two factors: 1) Alteration of attitudes in the White population and a broad change in American governmental institutions; 2) An interior change in the Black psyche brought about due to the effect of Black heroes such as Martin Luther King.
In the case of the Jew, the difference between him and people from other cultures and ethnic groups is the longterm extent of hatred of the Jew, so much so that the Jew has come to believe that he has no right to exist and must continue to explain himself to others. One way out of this ugly crisis is to identify with the perceived enemy. For Jews, the self-hatred has been so deep and so historically lengthy that to some people it looks like it’s written in their genes. While Jews do not have control (strictly speaking), over what the “nations” think of them and how they are perceived, they do have the wherewithal to change their own self-image from within. A solid and proud Jewish education would go a long ways towards changing self-perceptions. I suspect that the Orthodox Jew tend to experience less Jewish self-hatred amongst themselves (in spite of the fact that Chomsky, himself, was reared in an Orthodox manner). The recent rise in religious Zionism in Israel (traditional Orthodox) and the move to the political Right as I, myself, can well attest residing in a Yishuv across The Green Line as I do, is also a significant sign in the alteration of the Jewish psyche, at least in Israel.
Lastly, I want to mention that this legerdemain on the part of Jewish anti-semites doesn’t actually work. This can be attested to by such personages as Heinrich Heine (who converted (not out of self-hatred, however) who recognized, at the end of his life, that no amount of pretending to be someone else would ever satisfy his own soul nor gain him the acceptance he so ardently desired. One can view these same historical responses to the situation of Marranos and other forced converts and, more recently, to the Kapos in concentration camps who, ultimately, were murdered just like the all the other Jews whom they originally controlled.
I failed tonote that not only Jewish education taught in a proud manner would go a long towards resurrecting a proud Jew but actual victory, just as when the victim beats the bully, as Israel once knew, does an awful lot in supporting the notion that the Jew, himself, is worthy, a mighty and formidable force.