During the UNESCO meeting, Shama-Hacohen -- (his real name was just Shama, but that sounds too Arab, so he added the very Jewish Hacohen) -- got very excited. He started a shouting match with the Palestinian ambassador, rushed to the dais and shouted at the chairman, too.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE might have called all this "much ado about nothing", except for two points.
One is that it shows how easy it is to send all of (Jewish) Israel -- all without exception! -- into a holy rage. Politicians and commentators from left and right, east and west, religious and secular, unite into one raging mass, even when the pretext is false.
Such an eruption can have very serious consequences. It disables all inner brakes.
The other aspect is even more dangerous.
At the height of the tsunami, it suddenly hit me that everybody seemed to be enjoying themselves hugely. And then I realized why.
For hundreds of years, Jews in Europe were persecuted, deported, tortured and killed. It was a part of reality. They were used to it. Anti-Semitism of all kinds, including the murderous one, was a part of reality. The sadism of the goyim was met with the masochism of the Jews.
(As I have suggested in the past, this is a part of Western Christian culture, emanating from the crucifixion story in the New Testament. It does not exist as such in Islam, since the prophet admonished his believers to protect the two other "peoples of the book" -- Jews and Christians.)
Since World War II and the Holocaust, the old vicious European anti-Semitism has disappeared, or gone underground. But Jews have not got used to that. They are sure that it is lurking somewhere, that it can return any minute. When it does, or when it seems to, Jews are apt to feel "I told you so!"
In Israel, this is even more complex. Zionism hoped to rid Jews of their "exilic" complexes. To turn us into a normal people, "a people like other peoples."
It seems that this has not been quite successful. Or that the success is receding under the stewardship of Netanyahu and his ilk.
This episode has made many Jews happy. They say to themselves: "We were right! All the Goyim are anti-Semites!"
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