For persons knowledgeable about the state of Israel, a conversation with Dr. Israel Shahak, who in June will be making his second visit of 1989 to lecture in the United States, can be extremely informative. But for those unfamiliar with the current state of the Zionist state, Dr. Shahak's candid observations about his troubled and troubling country can be shocking, irritating, and profoundly disturbing.

This Warsaw-born concentration camp survivor, who until this year was a professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has lived in Israel since its creation in 1948. His broad powers of observation are matched only by his ability to convey, in vivid, carefully crafted phrases and anecdotes, arresting and unforgettable pictures of the Israel society in which he lives. His monthly "Translations from the Hebrew Press," painstakingly selected to convey the essence of issues that now perplex a deeply polarized Israeli public, provide the most illuminating reading on contemporary Israel available to non-Hebrew speakers.

In preparing these insights, and presenting them on lecture tours in Europe and the United States, Shahak violates a basic canon of the Jewish diaspora: Don't discuss Jewish problems outside the Jewish community.

This does not deter Shahak, a self-motivated, human rights-obsessed 56-year-old academic turned prophet. He acknowledges no contradictions among his obligations as a loyal citizen of Israel, a good Jew, and a believer in universal human values. He brushes aside suggestions that Israeli authorities may someday devise a way to muzzle his candor.

"Israel is still a democracy for Jews," he explains impatiently The problem is that the civil liberties Israel so zealously protects for its Jewish citizens are not transferable to others. In seeking to change that, Israel Shahak has no doubt that he is serving the best interests of Israel, and that his way offers Israel's best hope to assume its self-appointed role as "a light unto the nations."

Shahak's parents were Polish middle-class, orthodox Jews who became Zionists and forbade their sons from speaking Yiddish. He lived in the Warsaw ghetto from 1940 until the Jewish uprising against the Nazi occupiers in the spring of 1943. Then he was transported with his parents to the Poniatowo concentration camp. His mother escaped with her son just long enough to bribe their way onto a register for Jewish citizens of foreign countries. When they were re-arrested, they were sent to a compound for foreign nationals in the Bergen-Belsen extermination camp. Although not subject to the "selection" procedures which led to the gas chambers, Shahak watched heaps of naked corpses being dragged daily to the crematorium.

He was near death from starvation when he and his mother were liberated by American troops in April 1945. His father had died in the camps. His elder brother, who had joined the Royal Air Force, had been killed in the Pacific. Israel Shahak was 15 when he traveled with his mother to Israel in 1948.

He was 23 when, during Israel's 1956 war with Egypt, he was shocked to hear his erstwhile hero, Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, say Israel had undertaken the campaign (which aimed to draw in Jordan as well) not for "defensive purposes but to establish part of the Kingdom of David and Solomon".

By the early 1960s, he had become critical of Zionism "for both Jewish and general human reasons. " After Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Shahak began publicly criticizing "the suffering that was being inflicted on the Palestinians." He explains:

"After 1967, when I ceased being just a scientist and became a political being, my first reason was that after 1967 the Israeli aim was to dominate is the Middle East, which every rational human being knows i impossible. My second reason was that there must be a Palestinian state. It can come into being with a minimum of bloodshed, or a maximum of bloodshed. Even if the intifada were defeated, it would only cause a delay.

Shahak joined the radical opposition and, in 1970, he was elected chairman of the Human and Civil Rights League, formed by Jews and Arabs in 1937 to support a prisoners' hunger strike against the British colonial administration.

'The platform of my election was that you have to oppose torture, and that whatever you say inside Israel you must say outside," Shahak explains. When he is accused, just as are American Jewish critics of Israel, of being a "selfhating Jew," he responds with first-hand knowledge.

"That is a Nazi expression. The Nazis called Germans who defended Jewish rights self-hating Germans."

Shahak peppers his lectures with such illuminating observations as these:

-Israel's ideological division is made on internal Jewish affairs. The question of opening of Israeli cinemas on Fridays is more important than the killing of Palestinian children.

-Israelis must choose whether to adopt Khomeinism or imitate the West. Half of society believes very strongly that the land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people. Half the people don't believe this and want to imitate the United States. This is not for the sake of the Palestinians, but because the other way will give too much power to the rabbis.

-Israel is in the midst of its worst economic crisis. The kibbutzim alone now owe $3 billion from bad management and from playing the stock market very badly. Such speculation was not only against all of their socialistic principles, but they went bankrupt in the process. The weight of the crisis has fallen upon institutions connected with the Labor Party. This is the chief reason Labor has remained in the government. The Labor Party sold itself to Likud for money. For its part, Likud needs Labor to obtain money from the US.

-By doing this, Labor has betrayed its own supporters and its own peace policy The Labor Party has collapsed morally and intellectually. It is a dead body that just takes up space. People are voting Labor only from hatred and fear of Likud. The poor vote Likud or the religious parties. Even the majority of the workers in the Histradrut factories vote for Likud.

-To get the money it needs from the United States, Israel can go in one of two ways. It can move toward peace, which it has rejected. Or it can use blackmail. The present government will begin to threaten moderate Arab states. The first state will be Jordan. Israel will say "Jordan is the real Palestine" and tell the US "we will stop only if you give us money."

-Alienation between Israeli society and American Jews has never been greater. The feeling among Israeli Jews that they have to go it alone is especially great. American Jews are not going to have any influence on Israel except for those who support right-wing fanatics like Meyer Kahane, who draws most of his backing from the United States. Israelis will not be upset about anything that upsets American Jews.

-What will trigger expulsion is a cold-blooded decision by the Israeli government. No excuse is needed but if one is sought it will be provided by the Israeli death squads and settler underground ... We will hear that troublemakers are being expelled to "establish quiet." We will hear that we are not expelling Palestinians because "Jordan is Palestine. We are only transferring them. " Every Palestinian will be obliged to sign a declaration that he is moving of his own free will.

As Israeli society has become increasingly polarized, many of Israel Shahak's formercritics now agree that Israel cannot remain a Jewish state, a democracy, and an occupying power. The dispute now is over which two of the three incompatible elements Israel should retain.

Characteristically, Shahak, who realized all this 20 years ago, is presently concerned with reaching what he considers the inevitable two-state solution.

"What is the future for Israeli-Palestinian contact?" he asks rhetorically. "The long way is through change in Israeli society. The quick way is pressure by America, which provides $5 billion a year to Israel."

Richard H. Curtiss is chief editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

Von Marc Dow

It is not easy to unravel the political brainwashing that complicates one's emotional response to the photo of Palestinian policemen, many of them in riot gear, storming protesters at the Islamic University in the Gaza Strip in early October. The students were protesting the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, which of course followed in the wake of attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. If you look at the policemen's grimacing faces, you may think of young Palestinian stone-throwers; if you see their uniforms and helmets and rifles, you might think instead of young Israeli soldiers.

Below the photograph, in what the New York Times so arrogantly and preposterously calls "News Analysis" -- presumably to distinguish it from the Straightforward Objective Reporting elsewhere in the paper -- correspondent James Bennet writes a sentence which could only be penned by someone "analyzing" the world through the filter of official government logic.

Referring to what he calls Arafat's willingness to use "deadly force against Palestinians to suppress a demonstration in support of Osama bin Laden," Mr. Bennet writes: "It was the most dramatic evidence to date that the terrorist attacks on the United States have dented the entrenched thinking of the enemies in the conflict here and created a new chance for peace at the same time as causing a spike in violence." Who would have suspected such dialectical thinking from the Times, praising the killing of a few Palestinians as a paradoxical step toward peace? The catch, of course, is that the "peace process" has never been about co-existence but rather about institutionalized domination.

There are a handful of thinkers and writers who help us to see what is happening in the world, and, ultimately, to see with our own eyes, even while teaching us not to depend blindly on what they are telling us. Israel Shahak was one of those. Consider the following, which he wrote nearly a decade ago, and which still serves to clear the fog of New York Times "analysis." Shahak begins by quoting (in translation) from Yediot Ahronot: " ' . . . Rabin said, "I prefer the Palestinians to cope with the problem of enforcing order in the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians will be better at it than we were, because they will allow no appeals to the Supreme Court and will prevent the [Israeli] Association for Civil Rights from criticizing the conditions there by denying it access to the area." ' " (The related Times news article about the protests succinctly noted, "Foreign journalists were not permitted into Gaza today," without saying whether it was Palestinian or Israeli authorities that blocked them.)

Shahak continues with the Rabin quotation: " [The Palestinians] will rule by their own methods, freeing -- and this is most important -- the Israeli soldiers from having to do what they will do. All Gaza Strip settlements will remain where they are. The Israeli Army will remain in the Gaza Strip to defend them..."

It is quite clear [this is Shahak himself now] that the most important point for Rabin is that Arafat's faction in the PLO will become, or already is, a part of Shabak in order to perform its work better than Israel can by itself. The main point is that the PLO is expected to be more immune to criticism than Israel. The parallel with the methods employed by the US in countries dependent on it, such as El Salvador or Guatemala, in which the worst kinds of oppression are entrusted to local forces, is inescapable."

It is significant that my quotation of Shahak becomes his quotation of an Israeli paper quoting Rabin. For one thing, Shahak often expressed his view that it was easy to see the realities of Israeli policies if one looked at what Israeli leaders did, and what they said locally, as opposed to what they said for foreign consumption. (He would add, certainly, that this is not true only of Israel.) In addition, many journalists and others, myself included, benefited enormously over the years from Shahak's English translations "From the Hebrew Press," and his reports based on them, so generously distributed to us here -- before everybody was on-line -- by Shahak's friend Frank Collins. Shahak also published three books in English: Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years (1994); Open Secrets: Israeli Nuclear and Foreign Policies (1997); and Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (co-authored with Norton Mezvinsky, 1999), all available from Pluto Press. As the quotation about Oslo demonstrates, these works will not seem dated any time soon.

When I interviewed Shahak at his Jerusalem home in 1995, he used the word "liberated" twice. The first was when I asked him about his time in Bergen-Belsen.

He answered very, very briefly, wanting to say little beyond the dates of his internment, in 1943, and his liberation by the American army in 1945 after a week of transport. This is the place to note that I am as guilty as other commentators in feeling the need to frame Shahak's dissent from Israeli policies within the skewed contemporary discourse -- and to point out that he was a Holocaust survivor. When I asked him about this phenomena, he said: "I dislike this, but I also don't like to quarrel with my friends who are sometimes my only distributors. . . . But you also have seen that when I distribute my work, I don't add any biographical detail."

He continued: "If I add something for my protection, I am adding only the fact that I am an Israeli citizen . . . who lived in the country from '45. . . I may even add sometimes that I served in the Israeli army all the time that I had to serve." He further explained that by pointing out his military service and his willingness to fight if Israel were to be invaded, he wanted to distinguish himself from the pacifists.

Shahak could not tolerate any ideology, left or right, because he believed in pragmatism and reason. If this made his views, or, in any case, his method, seem frustratingly strident itself sometimes, for those of us wanting some understanding of the human motivations of the oppressors around the world, his insistence on pragmatism served to teach us the limits of our understanding, and the ways in which those very limits are part of our understanding. In the introduction to Open Secrets, he writes that "the very act of 'looking for specific reasons' for political behavior . . . is a suspicious form of activity. . . .What is the 'reason' for the Law of Gravitation or for the Second Law of Thermodynamics? There is no reason except that they happen to predict what is actually observed. . . . Thus, while I regard it as a proven fact that the aim of Israeli policies is to establish a hegemony over the Middle East, if someone asked me why Israel behaves in this way a part of my answer would be that this behavior is 'natural' to all or most states, as experience has shown. The question of why such behavior is 'natural' to most states we must leave until the time when our knowledge of human nature is greater."

Shahak is careful to note, even in passing, that he is not writing about Israel as an exception; indeed, he is trying to counter commentary about Israel which depends on Israel's supposed uniqueness, whether seen as positive or negative. Likewise -- and this point will have particular resonance for many readers of this magazine -- Shahak never confused his defense of the Palestinian people with either a defense of Arafat or a romanticizing of the victims. When he told me in 1995 that any state run by Arafat (though he did not believe any such state would come into existence) would be "a worse dictatorship than Assad's in Syria," I asked him about the longstanding claim that the PLO was a democratic body.

"Well, I never said it," he replied, and then gave me evidence of the PLO's authoritarian functioning.

What does this do to the Left's claim or some Palestinians' claim that the PLO was the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people?
"I never said it," he replied again. "Very many leftists all over the world have a tendency to beautify the victims. I, on the contrary, say that while supporting the rights of the victims, and certainly trying to prevent suffering as much as one can, one has to say the truth." The point is worth repeating now as the Left struggles to respond to the World Trade Center attacks and the US military action that has followed.

Perhaps Shahak is best known for his ongoing criticism of Zionist ideology, and of the notions of religious exclusivity which underlie not only the Right's positions but, more insidiously, more silently, and more hypocritically, the Left's. I said that he used the word "liberated" twice when we spoke. The second time was in this context. He explained that he "was a complete Zionist . . . a Ben Gurionist, I should say," when he came to Palestine in 1945. He believed in co-existence with the Arabs, but on the premise "that the Land of Israel belongs to Jews. That Arabs should be given only personal rights and limited by security considerations, but should not have national rights, nor any rights which hinder Jewish settlement." He mentions the confiscation of Arab land for the benefit of Jews, a subject to which he often returned, seeing it as being at the heart of the discriminatory policies inherent in Israel's being a "Jewish state" rather than a state of all its citizens.

Then he said of these early views: "It took much, much time until I liberated myself from those principles, which I fully professed."

Israel Shahak died on July 2, but he left us with crucial lessons about liberation -- of victims from their oppressors, and of ourselves from blind belief. He will be missed.

Mark Dow
October 12, 2001

Copyright Between the Lines © 2000

von Christopher Hitchens

In early June I sat on a panel, in front of a large and mainly Arab audience, with Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. Our hosts, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, had asked for a discussion of contrasting images of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The general tempo of the meeting was encouragingly non-tribal; there were many criticisms of Arab regimes and societies, and one of our co-panelists, Raghida Dergham, had recently been indicted in her absence by a Lebanese military prosecutor for the offense of sharing a panel discussion with an Israeli. However, it’s safe to say that most of those attending were aching for a chance to question Friedman in person. He was accused directly at one point of writing in a lofty and condescending manner about the Palestinian people. To this he replied hotly and eloquently, saying that he had always believed that "the Jewish people will never be at home in Palestine until the Palestinian people are at home there."

That was well said, and I hadn’t at the time read his then-most-recent column, so I didn’t think to reply. But in that article he wrote that Chairman Arafat, by his endless double-dealing, had emptied the well of international sympathy for his cause. This is a very Times-ish rhetoric, of course. You have to think about it for a second. It suggests that rights, for Palestinians, are not something innate or inalienable. They are, instead, a reward for good behavior, or for getting a good press. It’s hard to get more patronizing than that. During the first intifada, in the late 1980s, the Palestinians denied themselves the recourse to arms, mounted a civil resistance, produced voices like Hanan Ashrawi and greatly stirred world opinion. For this they were offered some non-contiguous enclaves within an Israeli-controlled and Israeli-settled condominium. Better than nothing, you might say. But it’s the very deal the Israeli settlers reject in their own case, and they do not even live in Israel "proper". (They just have the support of the armed forces of Israel "proper".) So now things are not so nice and many Palestinians have turned violent and even – whatever next? – religious and fanatical. Naughty, naughty. No self-determination for you. And this from those who achieved statehood not by making nice but as a consequence of some very ruthless behavior indeed.

I am writing these lines in memoriam for my dear friend and comrade Dr. Israel Shahak, who died on July 2. His home on Bartenura Street in Jerusalem was a library of information about the human rights of the oppressed. The families of prisoners, the staff of closed and censored publications, the victims of eviction and confiscation – none were ever turned away. I have met influential "civil society" Palestinians alive today who were protected as students when Israel was a professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University; from him they learned never to generalize about Jews. And they respected him not just for his consistent stand against discrimination but also because – he never condescended to them. He detested nationalism and religion and made no secret of his contempt for the grasping Arafat entourage. But, as he once put it to me, "I will now only meet with Palestinian spokesmen when we are out of the country. I have some severe criticisms to present to them. But I cannot do this while they are living under occupation and I can ‘visit’ them as a privileged citizen." This apparently small point of ethical etiquette contains almost the whole dimension of what is missing from our present discourse: the element of elementary dignity and genuine mutual recognition.

Shahak’s childhood was spent in Nazified Poland, the Warsaw Ghetto and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; at the end of the war he was the only male left in his family. He reached Palestine before statehood, in 1945. In 1956 he heard David Ben-Gurion make a demagogic speech about the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt, referring to this dirty war as a campaign for "the kingdom of David and Solomon". That instilled in him the germinal feelings of opposition. By the end of his life, he had produced a scholarly body of work that showed the indissoluble connection between messianic delusions and racial and political ones. He had also, during his chairmanship of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, set a personal example that would be very difficult to emulate.

He had no heroes and no dogmas and no party allegiances. If he admitted to any intellectual model, it would have been Spinoza. For Shahak, the liberation of the Jewish people was an aspect of the Enlightenment, and involved their own self-emancipation from ghetto life and from clerical control, no less than from ancient "Gentile" prejudice. It therefore naturally ensued that Jews should never traffic in superstitions or racial myths; they stood to lose the most from the toleration of such rubbish. And it went almost without saying that there could be no defensible Jewish excuse for denying the human rights of others. He was a brilliant and devoted student of the archeology of Jerusalem and Palestine: I would give anything for a videotape of the conducted tours of the city that he gave me, and of the confrontation in which he vanquished one of the propagandist guides on the heights of Masada. For him, the built and the written record made it plain that Palestine had never been the exclusive possession of any one people, let alone any one "faith".

Only the other day, I read some sanguinary proclamation from the rabbinical commander of the Shas party, Ovadia Yosef, himself much sought after by both Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon. It was a vulgar demand for the holy extermination of non-Jews; the vilest effusions of Hamas and Islamic Jihad would have been hard-pressed to match it. The man wants a dictatorial theocracy for Jews and helotry or expulsion for the Palestinians, and he sees (as Shahak did in reverse) the connection. This is not a detail; Yosef’s government receives an enormous US subsidy, and his intended victims live (and die, every day) under a Pax Americana. Men like Shahak, who force us to face these reponsibilities, are naturally rare. He was never interviewed by the New York Times, and its obituary pages have let pass the death of a great and serious man.

© 2001 The Nation Company, L.P.

di Norton Mezvinsky (*)

(italienische Übersetzung aus: Against The Current, September 2001)

All'inizio degli anni settanta Israel Shahak comprese che all'estero non erano sufficientemente note sia la negazione dei diritti umani sia l'oppressione dei palestinesi nello stato di Israele, in tal senso si impegnò a diffondere quante più informazioni possibili, specialmente negli USA. Sperava che ciò potesse condurre molti americani ad opporsi a ciò che il governo israeliano stava facendo e che la pressione da essi esercitata potesse spingere il governo USA a influenzare il governo israeliano nel temperare, se non far cessare, alcune delle sue forme di oppressione.

Anche se tutto questo era un desiderio che non avrebbe prodotto la maggior parte dei risultati sperati Shahak riteneva che il fornire informazioni poteva comunque avere un valore. Io concordavo con la sua analisi e decidemmo di operare insieme. La nostra campagna di informazione negli USA iniziò in maniera attiva nel 1972 quando organizzai una serie di conferenze di Shahak. Tour seguenti pianificati da me e da altri si svolsero durante gli anni settanta, ottanta e primi anni novanta. Durante questi tour Shahak tenne lezioni in università, college, chiese, istituzioni, organizzazioni ed altre istituzioni, inoltre parlò privatamente con molte persone inclusi alcuni membri del congresso e funzionari del dipartimento di stato.

Israel Shahak denunciò chiaramente la negazione dei diritti dei palestinesi di Israele e dei territori occupati. Denunciò inoltre le limitazioni di libertà, pensiero, espressione, le ordinanze sulla terra, le restrizioni di vita, le retribuzioni ineguali, le restrizioni lavorative, la confisca della terra, la distruzione di case, l'incarcerazione gli arresti domiciliari sotto provvedimenti di emergenza, tortura dei prigionieri, punizioni collettive, omicidi, discriminazioni nell'educazione, limitazione dell'attività politica privazione della cittadinanza e molte altre misure. Lui forniva documentazione precisa per ognuno di questi punti spesso distribuiva la traduzione inglese dei suoi articoli, in cui criticava queste misure.

Shahak sosteneva che l'oppressione del popolo palestinese derivasse dal carattere sionista dello stato di Israele. Comprese, in quanto sopravvissuto alla shoah, che coloro che sono stati oppressi possono divenire a loro volta oppressori.

Il suo saggio "Sionismo come movimento recidivo", contenuto nel libro "Anti Zionism: analitical reflections" (Amana, 1989), è una brillante esposizione della sua teoria secondo cui il sionismo ebbe origine come reazione al progressivo cambiamento e venne a dettare la maggior parte delle scelte relativamente alla politica estera ed interna di Israele. Il sionismo unito al militarismo di stato crea le condizioni per aspirazioni territoriali e per una politica interna discriminatoria verso la minoranza non ebrea di Israele.

Shahak sosteneva che il sionismo non è motivato da valori ebraici positivi ma che piuttosto è il desiderio creare un ghetto ebraico pesantemente armato. Sionismo come reazione ma simultaneamente immagine riflessa dell'antisemitismo sciovinista.

Per Shahak l'ideologia sionista potenziata dalla sovranità di Israele costituiva la causa delle negazione dei diritti umani e nazionali dei palestinesi e delle iniquità nello status di cittadini palestinesi dello stato ebraico. In ciò Shahak differisce da alcuni ebrei israeliani di sinistra che criticano specifiche misure oppressive nei confronti dei palestinesi ma che si rifiutano di criticare il sionismo definendosi essi stessi sionisti. Shahak definì questa sinistra sionista ipocrita. Sebbene non sia mai stato né socialista né comunista (fu critico rispetto a queste ideologie) lavorò in stretto contatto sulle questioni dei diritti umani con alcuni marxisti israeliani inclusi membri del Rakah (Partito Comunista Israeliano) ed alcune di queste persone con cui fu spesso impegnato in dibattici politici erano ancora suoi stretti amici.

Subito dopo il ciclo di conferenze tenute negli USA, Shahak ed io ritenemmo che fosse utile promuovere la regolare distribuzione negli USA di traduzioni in lingua inglese degli articoli critici prodotti dalla Hebrow Press (nelle loro conclusioni vicine al pensiero di Shahak).

Riuscimmo a convincere alcune persone a lanciarsi in questa avventura. Ad esempio il National Council of Churches supportò la pubblicazione di Swasia, ed anche io fui coeditore e distributore di alcune di queste pubblicazioni. In aggiunta a tutto ciò, Shahak scrisse articoli, molti dei quali tradotti da riviste e giornali inglesi ed americani, in cui presentava alcune sue analisi, spesso tratte da articoli di Hebrow Press.

Shahak non amava i leader, secolari e religiosi, di organizzazioni ebree con base negli USA, li criticava severamente per la loro attitudine a seguire ciecamente la politica ufficiale del governo israeliano circa i palestinesi e gli arabi in generale. Spesso credette che la società ebrea di Israele fosse più aperta rispetto a quella degli ebrei americani rispetto ad un serio dibattito circa gli arabi ed Israele.

Shahak additò i leader ebrei americani per la loro mancanza di apertura accusandoli di esercitare pressioni per soffocare il dissenso. Sosteneva che costoro fingono di sapere molto più di quel che effettivamente sanno della società israeliana e di utilizzare l'olocausto per raccogliere denaro e sostegno politico.

Negli anni settanta ed ottanta Shahak venne criticato a più riprese dai suoi antagonisti e ricevette anche delle minacce di morte. Non scoraggiato continuò ad indirizzare al suo pubblico discorsi e scritti. Negli anni novanta il suo pubblico divenne più ricettivo. Il suo rifiuto di definire accordi di Oslo come accordi di pace, la critica all'attuale leadership politica palestinese, la critica del giudaismo classico e del fondamentalismo ebraico in Israele gli procurarono dure critiche.

I tre libri di Israel Shahak furono pubblicati tra il 1994 ed il 1999. Con Jewish History, Jewish Religion: the Weight of Three Thousand Years (Pluto, 1994) realizzò, grazie una ricerca e un analisi che ripercorreva almeno quattro decenni, un pungente attacco al giudaismo classico ed al suo più recente sviluppo il giudaismo ortodosso.

Commentando questo libro Noam Chomsky scrisse: "Shahak è uno studioso prominente con una conoscenza profonda e di vedute notevoli. Il suo lavoro è ben informato e penetrante, un contributo di grande valore".

Il libro "Jewish fondamentalism in Israel" di cui sono stato coautore è uno studio ancora più profondo di un importante aspetto del giudaismo classico e ortodosso. Questo libro rimarca l'importanza della crescita dell'influenza e del potere del fondamentalismo ebraico in Israele. Traccia la storia e lo sviluppo del fondamentalismo ed esamina le sue diverse correnti. Il libro colloca l'assassinio del primo ministro Rabin all'interno del contesto di una tradizione di punizioni e omicidi di ebrei considerati essere eretici od informatori. La natura antidemocratica del fondamentalismo ebraico è evidente nella nostra analisi entrambi i libri sopracitati sottolineano le connessioni tra alcuni degli aspetti negativi del sionismo e i filoni del giudaismo ortodosso classico.

In Open Secrets: Israeli Nuclear and Foreign Policies (Pluto, 1997), Shahak presentò un'analisi della politica estera israeliana sulla base di una serie di articoli che scrisse tra il 1992 ed il 1995 (tratte per lo più dalla Hebrew press). Argomentò che Israele stava conducendo una politica segreta di espansionismo su molti fronti con l'obiettivo di ottenere il controllo non solo della Palestina ma dell'intero Medio Oriente. Una traiettoria che lui considerava essere un profondo pericolo sia per gli ebrei che per i non ebrei.

In questo contesto è appropriato ciò che Gore Vidal scrisse nella sua introduzione a Jewish History, Jewish Religion descrivendo Israel Shahak come "l'ultimo, ma non l'ultimo dei grandi profeti".

___________________

Friday July 6, 2001
The Guardian