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No Apologies for Being a Jewish Nation
(Wall Street Journal) Ruth R. Wisse - In the 20th century, some modern European thinkers and political leaders began singling out the Jews for their alleged racial or religious or social culpabilities. No sooner had the politics of Jew-blame reached its genocidal apotheosis in Europe than it was taken up in the Middle East. Rather than accepting the principle of co-existence and concentrating on improving the lives of their own subjects, Arab leaders refused Jews the right to their homeland in a war that they, the Arab leaders, had initiated. Forcing almost a million Jews from their ancient communities in Arab lands, the same leaders blamed Israel for Arab refugees whom they themselves refused to resettle. This calumny is by now the basis of political coalitions not only at the UN and in Europe but on campuses here in the U.S. So ingrained are the assumptions of Jew-blame that newspapers will often devote more coverage to the shooting of one Palestinian Arab by an Israeli, often unintentionally or in self-defense, than to the murders of Jewish civilians by Arab and Muslim terrorists. For its obsession with Israel's putative misdeeds to the neglect of the unspeakable crimes committed by so many UN member states, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently declared at the General Assembly that "the UN, begun as a moral force, has become a moral farce." He is surely right that ending the obsession with Israel would benefit the entire world. The Jewish nation is owed the unconditional respect of its fellow nations and must demand of others what it expects others to demand of themselves. The writer is a former professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard.