The artist, a goyim, was castigated for his 'anti-semitic' depiction (the star, the remote). It's an example of the kind of drawing Valley might have done for a progressive Jewish newspaper and merely been labeled a "self-loathing" Jew, but not censored (see Google Glass above.) This, of course, is a big part of the problem: ownership of the narrative and reporting on the doings of Israel. The double-standard means that "outsiders" are given no validation for their critical views of Israeli policy, while Jewish reporting, no matter how progressive, can be absorbed as a 'family affair' issue.
For Valley, the contradictions and hypocrisy so clearly evident are for many Jews symbolized by the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising sculptings of Nathan Rapoport, which were unveiled a month before the founding of Israel. Coming upon the works for the first time, Valley relates his impressions:
I'd expected victims, martyrs, something about the people who died. Over 400,000 Jews in the ghetto had been murdered through starvation, disease, and deportations to Treblinka before the nearly month-long uprising began. It ended when the Germans burned, bombed, and gassed every remaining building in the district. Surely there was more to memorialize at this site of absolute devastation--a still-smoldering graveyard when the statue was unveiled--than modern day Maccabees?
Well, as it turns out, there was another side to the story, on the other side of the block. A companion bas relief depicting the suffering of the ghetto residents as they were slaughtered by Nazis. The victims.
"I was shocked. How could they bifurcate heroism and victimhood?" Valley asked himself. It has become "a piece of Jewish art and iconography... a Jewish icon multiplied to the point of definitive self-image." Bifurcation as identity isn't necessarily fatal (think: Hegel), but it can drain the vital forces of a culture, and ensure the very schism wished to be avoided. This seems to be at work in the divide between American and Israel Jews. For instance, one terror that keeps some Zionists up at night is the dissolution of Jewry, according to Valley:
Diaspora Jewry would disappear through intermarriage, spiritual weakness, cultural vapidity and the internal forces of despair.
Valley went on to create a 3-page comic that graphically depicts this fear and trembling, "Israel Man and Diaspora Boy." It's an excellent, hilarious accounting of the internal divide. Diaspora Boy is the ultimate self-loathing Jew. Israel Man is the ultimate Maccabean muscle tough.
For Valley, identity is at the center of the fight for the future of Jewry. Militaristic Hero or diasporic secularist victim? He draws our attention, in a kind of follow-up to the Warsaw memorial, to two museums in Israel. One, the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, which, he contends, sells the bifurcation, filled with miserable figurines:
Diaspora as a hallucinatory nightmare prison theme park. It was like a joke out of Kafka, but nobody was laughing, which is why satire of this ideology can be indistinguishable from stenography.
And, then, the equally problematic Holocaust Remembrance Center:
Inside the memorial, dioramas depict in excruciating detail every stage of the mass murder...The two museums are like Israel's twin pillars of self-conception, drawing an unbroken narrative arc from the ghetto to the gas chamber.
Never forget. Muscle tough. F*ck 'em if they don't like it. And the Zionist coup de grace, "There is no future for Jews in the Diaspora, because of assimilation and intermarriage. The only future for the Jews is in Israel."
All Israelis must serve in the military. Israelis will take no sh*t from anyone. Israelis will encourage American Jews to come Home and settle on land once belonging to a Palestinian, his hovel freshly 'dozed to make room for you. (Have an olive. No, not the branch.) Such Americans are encouraged to live the dual life of American Exceptionalists, all rah-rah about freedom this and freedom that, and also fascists who ghettoize the lives of ordinary Palestinian people. They can't seem to see the contradiction, the disgust, as Valley points out, in Israel's nazification of 'The Chosen Race' theme. Valley draws our attention to this frightening historical dissociation in some Zionists. The insularity can seem arrogant and offensive in a liberally-educated world. And it also strikes one as potentially tragic. (Recall the Zionist plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock in order to start Armageddon, described by Shin Bet in The Gatekeepers.)
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