The
ongoing assault conducted by the armed forces of the state of Israel on the
Palestinian enclave of Gaza has, yet again, brought stark images to the world
of the devastating capabilities of the awesome military machinery at the
disposal of the 66-year old Jewish state.
As
occurred in Lebanon back in 1982 and more recently in Gaza during Operation
Cast Lead of 2009, Israel, while insisting that it is acting in justifiable
self-defence and for the preservation of the safety of its citizens, has mounted
a military response which has wrought quite devastating consequences.
Bombs
and missiles unleashed from the ground, the skies and the sea have reigned in
on Gaza destroying swathes of buildings, wiping out whole families and
permanently scarring the overwhelmingly non-combatant victims.
Images
of decapitated babies, horrendously deformed children, and the look of sheer
terror in the eyes of a dishevelled and disconsolate civilian population have
pervaded the media.
It
is a situation unlike that of the past when Israel fought against the standing
armies of surrounding nation states each of whom it routed in the wars of 1948,
1967 and in 1973.
The
Palestinian population of Gaza, hemmed into a blockaded strip of land that is
subject to the constant scrutiny of the Israeli security apparatus, are
effectively a defenceless people in possession of no tanks, no jet aircraft or
naval vessels.
They
are themselves the refugees and the descendants of refugees who were forcibly
removed or who fled from their homes at the time of the war which led to the
creation of Israel.
The
outrage felt by much of the world centres on what many consider to be the infliction
of a disproportionate level of violence on the Palestinian population under the
pretence that the measures are targeted and that any collateral damage -to use
the cruel euphemism- is the fault of Hamas, which callously uses its own people
as human shields.
John
Kerry, the secretary of state of the United States and himself of Jewish origin,
was heard to mutter off-camera that Israel was conducting what he termed “a
hell of a pin-point operation”.
Nonetheless,
the leaders of the United States, Britain and France have remained largely
muted and have insisted that Israel reserves the right to act in self-defence
against Hamas.
In
the belief of the Israeli chiefs of state and the majority of its citizenry,
Israel is justified, and is not, to utilise a useful term, a ‘neighbourhood
bully’.
Israel
as a ‘bully’ is a theme which was once explored through the musical lens of Bob
Dylan. And condensed in its lyrical expressions are a rationale based on the
historical experiences of the Jewish people; riddled as it is with numerous
persecutions, the afflictions of perpetual insecurity and the enduring dream of
Zion.
The
Minnesota-born singer-songwriter, an acknowledged genius and a confirmed legend
when barely into his twenties, has been the purveyor of lyrics which
have consistently provoked debate and detailed analysis among his fans and the
music critics.
Deconstructing
the labyrinth of words and phrases typically employed by Dylan has over the
years become something of a sport.
Yet
few, if any, have succeeded in pinning down a universally accepted explanation
of many of the meanings in regard to which the author has tended to maintain either
a studied silence or to offer a series of bland and imprecise ruminations during
interviews.
Like
the decoding of ancient esoteric texts, they remain a mystery to the masses.
But
if interpreting Dylan’s lyrics have been laborious exercises which have frequently
failed to penetrate the enduring enigma, the words to the song Neighborhood Bully presented a statement
which is largely spared the opacity that is the typical fare of Dylan lyrics.
The
song forms part of the album named Infidels
which was released in October of 1983 on Columbia Records. The record came
after years of discussion about his apparent conversion to the Christian faith
and the gospel inflected albums which had preceded it including Slow Train Coming (1979) and Saved (1980).
Infidels
was seen as a return to a ‘secular’ album with references to love and loss, the
environment, and the United States economy as a battlefield between opposing
union and corporate interests.
Nonetheless,
Dylan’s penchant for the use of religious reference points persisted. The album’s
introductory song, Jokerman, dense
with biblical imagery and pregnant with moral analysis appeared to some to be
about Jesus; the lines “Standing on the water casting your bread” in that song
as well as “news of you has come down the line” and “in your father’s house
there’s many mansions” from Sweetheart
Like You giving some credence to this line of interpretation.
Long
before the series of albums which celebrated Christian themes, Dylan had apparently
found in Jesus a figure of inspiration. The
line from All Along the Watchtower, a stand out song from the seminal album
John Wesley Harding, “There must be
some kind of way outta here, said the joker to the thief” is claimed to allude
to Christ on the cross alongside the two convicted criminals as they bleed to
death on Mount Calvary.
Infidels
represented a drift from his excursions into Christian spirituality. And if not
an outright renunciation of Christianity, it did present him as been back among
the fold of the Jewish tribe, as the inner jacket features him crouched and in
contemplation while wearing a yarmulke on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives.
The
song Man of Peace with the line “you
know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace” was interpreted as a
backslap directed at the evangelists who had converted him and the words “Took
a stranger to teach me to look into justice’s beautiful face, And to see an eye
for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” from I
and I seemingly confirmed the breach.
Dylan
the apostate Jew did not sit well with many Jews whose ancestors for centuries
suffered persecutions visited on them by European Christian communities. Indeed,
one Washington-based rabbi felt compelled to ‘excommunicate’ Dylan from his
record collection.
Traditional
Christian doctrine of course held the Jews and their descendants to be
responsible for the execution of Christ, and this antipathy is held out as the
rationale for the numerous incidents of group libels, pogroms and expulsions.
But
the ancient antagonism between Judaism and Christianity was not birthed in
medieval Christian Europe. Nor was it one-sided.
Jesus,
although tutored and practised in the rites of ancient Judaism, was considered
a heretical preacher and according to Talmudic scripture, a sorcerer and
self-idolator who after death, was conjured to life by Jewish priests in order
to face four different executions and as a punishment for his heresies is
boiling for eternity in a cauldron of human faeces.
Later,
credit would be given to the Chasidic scholar Rabbi Manis Freidman for steering
Dylan back to his Judaic origins. He was
reported as attending study meetings with the Lubavitch Hasidim in Brooklyn.
But
although Dylan had claimed in 1985 to still believe in the Book of Revelations,
the following decade, in an interview with Newsweek
magazine, he would claim “I don’t adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists,
all of that.”
Dylan
had long supported the cause of Israel and this support may have played a part
in his break with the political Left in the 1960s. He is said to have reproved
the ‘Black Panther’ Revolutionary Huey Newton for his opposition to Israel, and
his famous ‘comeback tour’ of 1974 was rumoured to have substantially
contributed to the coffers of the Israel Emergency Fund.
Played
in a rockabilly mode and sang with heavy irony, Dylan sets out Israel’s case
amid the accusations of its iron-fisted dealings with its Arab neighbours. It
is a song which is said to be particularly popular with the Likudniks as an
after-party conference boogie-down number, and, according to the Jerusalem Post, “a favourite among
Dylan-loving residents of the (Israeli-occupied) territories”.
The
year before the release of Infidels, tired
of border incursions and other acts of terror directed at settlements on its
northern border, Israel had invaded Lebanon in an attempt to destroy the
Palestinian militias who were based in that country.
A
grand slaughter of thousands ensued as the Israeli Defence Force advanced
through the country and bombs reigned in on the capital city of Beirut where Yasser
Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation eventually became besieged.
The
city was itself reduced to heaps of rubble and became for all intents and
purposes a wasteland. After a negotiated agreement which provided that the
P.L.O. be allowed to depart by ship to Tunis, Palestinian families based at the
Shabra and Shatilla camps on the outskirts of Beirut were massacred by
Christian militias with the connivance of
the Israeli military who were under the direction of the ruling Likud
Party’s defence minister, former General Ariel Sharon.
Under
more valorous circumstances, the Israeli Air force had demonstrated its
professional acumen in destroying a high proportion of its Syrian counterpart
in just a few hours fighting over the Bekaa Valley.
But
the cost of the Lebanese mission in terms of the destruction of human life and
property inspired widespread revulsion and the opprobrium of many from around
the world.
Israel,
the ‘small’ nation which had valiantly defeated combined Arab armies in the Six
Day War of 1967 and whose special forces had contrived an audacious rescue of
hostages at Entebbe Airport in 1976, had fallen markedly in the esteem of wide
sections of world public opinion.
It
had in the eyes of many become a ‘neighbourhood bully’.
It
was in this context with the reputation and moral authority enjoyed by Israel
being at an all-time nadir since its creation that Dylan wrote the song.
The
song begins by stating two key precepts underscoring the Zionist world view.
The
first that the enemies of Israel “claim he’s on their land” serves as a rebuke
to those who deny the legitimacy of the historic claim to the land of Israel by
the Jewish people insisted on by Zionist ideology.
The
second, that he is “outnumbered by a million to one” posits the frequently
alluded to representation of Israel as the underdog; a small state surrounded
by hostile nations whose sheer vastness in numbers continually present a threat
to its existence.
The
second phase of the song underlines the ages-long reason for the creation of a
Jewish state:
Being
driven out of every land
He’s
wandered the earth an exiled man
Seen
his family scattered, people hounded and torn
He’s
always on trial for just being born
The
Jew is portrayed as a perpetual victim in regard to who, according to Dylan, a
“license to kill him given out to every manic”.
But
there is pride in his survival instinct as “every empire that enslaved him is
gone: Egypt and Rome even the great Babylon”.
Given
this background, Dylan ruminates with heavy irony that he is “not supposed to
fight back and have thick skin, supposed to lay down and die when his door is
kicked in”; this a reference not only to wars fought with Arab armies and incursions
made by Palestinian guerrillas into Israeli territory but also the gnawing
feeling among Jews of the passive submission to a bestial fate which is
suggestive of the Holocaust imagery of Jews being herded into gas chambers
without fighting back.
Thus,
with biting humour, Dylan decries the supposition that “he’s surrounded by
pacifists who all want peace” and recounts how “when he knocked out a
lynch-mob, old women condemned him; said he should apologize”.
In
the earlier decades of the 20th Century, Ze’ev (nee Vladimir)
Jabotinsky, the man acknowledged as the founding father of the Israeli Defence
Force, had sought to create a new species of man; namely that of the “fighting
Jew”.
And
for Dylan the survival of Israel is impliedly predicated on such species of
person who can be directed to neutralise all threats to its existence. The song’s
reference to the destroying of a “bomb factory” alluded to the destruction in
1981 of the Osirak nuclear reactor being built by the regime of Saddam Hussein.
Criticism
of Israel’s right to exist and its ‘counter-measures’ appear to him to be
predicated on anti-Semitism, the basis of which, according to Dylan’s words, is
both inexplicable and irrational: “Does he (meaning the Jew) change the course
of rivers, does he pollute the moving stars?” he asks.
The
Jew after all, he sings, has contributed so much to civilization and special
mention is made of the scientific advances which have been made by people of
Jewish origin via the lines: “took sickness and disease and turned them into
health”.
And
of the achievement of Israel, “he’s made a garden and a paradise in the desert
sand”.
The
following lines are an instructive indication of the Jewish-Zionist mindset:
He
got no allies to really speak of
What
he gets he must pay for
He
don’t get it out of love
What
Dylan appears to be saying is that what the Jewish state acquires is as a
result of hard-bargaining. Israel is ultimately alone and must be self-reliant.
The
advances made towards the establishment and later the sustenance of the Jewish
state have materialised through hard-nosed negotiations as well as the
formation of some bizarre and unusual alliances, a number of which have been
temporary.
The
Balfour Declaration issued by the British in 1917, a 67-word text in which the
war-time foreign minister, James Arthur Balfour viewed with favour the
establishment of a national home for the Jewish people, was as Winston
Churchill later observed not a “mere act of crusading enthusiasm or quixotic
philanthropy”.
It
was issued he continued “with the object of promoting the general victory of
the Allies, for which we expected and received valued and important assistance”.
Such
help and assistance included mobilizing influential Jewish-American figures in
media, industry and politics to bring the United States into the war on the
side of the allies who were facing defeat by Germany in the latter part of
1917.
For
Balfour, a self-acknowledged anti-Semite who recoiled from the idea that
Britain should accept more Jewish immigrants, a Jewish homeland meant perfect
sense. Affecting his view was also the fact that he was what came to be termed
a Christian Zionist.
The
modern alliance between Jewish-Israeli interests and Christian Zionism has
played a major part in fortifying support within the United States for the
state of Israel.
A
fundamental plank of Christian Zionist-Dispensationalist thinking is that
following the creation of the modern state of Israel, the rebuilding of the
temple in Jerusalem must form a necessary precursor to the end days during
which Christ’s chosen will be secretly raptured.
American
evangelical support for Israel is unconditional, and over the years their
members have given millions of dollars to groups in Israel which are opposed to
any form of concessions to the Palestinians.
But
the support granted by John Hagee, chairman of Christians United for Israel,
and the likes of Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell, is not predicated on
a “love” for the Jews.
Their
eschatological doctrine is premised on the belief that the Jews, who rejected
Jesus, will be given a final opportunity to accept Christ and will be put to
the sword if they refuse.
Yet
this bizarre, evidently mutually beneficial, alliance persists with the willing
cooperation of both Diaspora Jews and Israelis. The Christian Zionists
according to a quote attributed to the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu function in the final analysis as “useful idiots”.
The
“he don’t get it out of love” sentiment has a basis when reference is made to
the later discovery that prominent non-Jewish supporters of Israel and Jewish
interests have harboured deep resentments about Jews.
President
Harry Truman, during whose tenure the state of Israel received United States
recognition, noted in a 1947 diary entry discovered in 2003 that he found Jews
to be “very, very selfish”.
“When
they have power”, he continued, “Physical, financial or political, neither
Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the
underdog.”
Similarly,
the discovery of tape recordings between Richard Nixon and Billy Graham; the former
whose presidency staunchly favoured Israel and the latter, the world famous
evangelist whose ministry was pro-Israeli, in which both criticized the
policies of Israel and expressed negative views about the influence of Jews on
American culture documented a scenario in which a gentile supporter of Israel
had an unflattering privately held view.
The
line that “He got no allies to really speak of” may ostensibly be pooh-poohed
by simply recounting the special relationship between Israel and the United
States. It is a relationship which is underscored by the power and leverage
exercised by Israel-Jewish lobby groups in particular that of the America-Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Although
America is seen as the great ally and benefactor of the Israeli state;
demonstrated through its vetoing of resolutions against it in the United
Nations and giving it military aid to the tune of billions of dollars every
year, such an alliance is not necessarily presumed to be an everlasting one.
There
is much truth to the thesis that America has coldly considered Israel to be a
useful asset in the Middle East during the Cold War-era and beyond; as Vice
President Joe Biden said in a speech before AIPAC, “If there weren’t an Israel,
we’d have to invent one.”
The
nagging suspicion is that as has occurred over the ages with the alliances
forged between Jewish communities and powerful figures and nations, the
Israel-America relationship will one day expire.
The
assertion by Moshe Dayan that Israel “must be like a ‘mad dog’, too dangerous
to bother’ was based not only on the presumptive ‘Samson Option’ which means
Israel would utilise its nuclear arsenal to take down the region and beyond if
it was in danger of being defeated, but also spoke to a scenario in which it
would no longer be able to count on the United States.
A
key point of note is that by not specifically once mentioning the terms ‘Jew’
and ‘Israeli’ or ‘Judaism’ and ‘Zionism’, Dylan inextricably binds all
together. His proposition is that Jewishness cannot be separated from Zionist
sentiment and aspiration.
Eretz
Israel is the promised homeland for a rootless nation of people –any and all
who have a right to live there- and the overwhelming majority of Jewry supports
it.
But
Zionism was not always the natural counterpart of Judaism; indeed the strict teachings
of Judaism disavow the man-made recreation of Israel, considering such an
enterprise to be an abomination. Israel, the scriptures provide, can only be
created by the act of God. It had few adherents at the beginning of the 20th
century.
Henry
Morgenthau Sr, a former US ambassador to Turkey portrayed it as “the most
stupendous fallacy in Jewish history”. He felt it to be “fanatical in its
politics” and “sterile in its spiritual ideas”.
The
Jewish English politician, Edwin Samuel Montagu who served in the coalition
government during the First World War was as scathing, describing it as a
“mischievous political creed” which he opposed because he foresaw the trouble
what be believed to be a chauvinist ideology would cause in Palestine with the
indigenous population and also that accusations of dual loyalty would be made
against Jews who lived in other states.
It
was, he believed, a project which would unleash the beast of anti-Semitism.
Once
upon a time a distinction could be made between ‘Spiritual’ Zionism as espoused
by Ahad Ha’am on the one hand and Theodore Herzl’s ‘Political’ Zionism on the
other.
Herzl’s
creed would eventually carry the day; and although it once, to paraphrase
Churchill, contended with Bolshevism for the soul of the Jewish people,
‘Political’ Zionism became the universal doctrine for world Jewry after the Shoah.
For
the likes of Morgenthau and Montagu, Zionism served as a rejection of the
Haskala, the 18th Century Jewish Enlightenment movement which
posited the solution to anti-Semitism as being the assimilation of Jewry into
Western secular culture.
The
contention by Jews who opposed it was on the premise that Zionism represented a
weary, doom-laden, pessimistic philosophy that Jews can never be assimilated into
‘foreign’ societies and need to live apart in a nation of their own.
It
accepts the inevitability of anti-Semitism among all non-Jews. Ideally, all the
world’s Jews should live in the state of Israel, although the reality is that
most of them do not. In fact, there are more Jews in America than there are in
Israel.
The
line “He’s got no place to escape to” is not correct since there have been
periods when more Jews have left Israel than have settled in it.
But
it does represent the belief among many Jews that Israel is a home which would
serve as a last refuge from the persecutions which have dogged its people
throughout history.
It
would be remiss to fail to mention the influence of the Revisionist Zionism as
espoused by Jabotinsky on the formation of Israel as well as on the doctrines
and policies of contemporary Israel which gives insight into the manner in
which it deals with the occupied territory of the West Bank and the besieged
Gaza Strip.
In
his book The Iron Wall, Jabotinsky
called on Zionists to drop all pretence about reaching an accommodation with
the Arab population of Palestine, insisting that in attaining the goal of
transforming Palestine “from an Arab country to a country with a Jewish
majority” a militaristic policy of colonisation must be pursued.
In
his words:
Zionism
is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or it falls by the question
of armed force
He
was aware that there would have to be opposition from Palestinian Arabs:
Each
people will struggle against colonizers until the last spark of hope that they
can avoid the dangers of colonization and conquest is extinguished. The
Palestinians will struggle in this way until there is hardly a spark of hope
This
reality has underlain Israeli policy whatever the spin given to the purportedly
defensive wars fought in 1948 and 1967. The heirs to Jabotinsky are the
founders of the ruling Likud Party through which its hardliner leader, Menachem
Begin –a mentee of Jabotinsky- first came to power in the 1970s.
Begin
often referred to the occupied West Bank as historically Jewish, namely the
regions of Judea and Samaria. The father of the current Israeli Prime Minister,
Benjamin Netanyahu, served for a time as Jabotinsky’s secretary.
Likud
and other parties simply will not accept any form of Palestinian statehood
which would have the semblance of an independent country.
While
the Israeli government continues to permit the building of settlements on the
West Bank in contravention of international law, Gaza is effectively blockaded
by land and sea and cannot conduct business relations with the outside world in
a conventional manner.
The
importation of items ranging from certain forms of concrete to crayon are
banned and whatever is allowed through by Israel is subject to a tax payable to
the Israeli state. It is deprived of clean water while at the same time in the
West Bank access to natural water springs is the preserve of illegal settlers.
The
line “Does he change the course of rivers” has some resonance although not in
the way Dylan intended.
One
often understated reason for the war of 1967 relates to the acquisition of
water resources. And under the auspices of the conquered territory, Israel
utilises over 70% of the aquifers. The Palestinian population use less than 20%
while the Israeli settlers, always growing, but proportionally far less than
the Palestinians use more than 10%.
To
much of the world, the Palestinians hold out; valiantly refusing to succumb to
what they perceive to be the crumbs offered by Zionism while the Israelis
insist that a failure on the part of Palestinian leadership has been the
impediment to achieving a two-state solution.
While
Israel continues to argue that it acts in self-preservation in actions vastly
disproportionate to the damage caused by mainly home-made Palestinian rockets,
much of the world community sees it as aggression posed as self-defence, and
that the historical accounts of victimhood are cynically utilized in order to camouflage
the contemporary reality of the Jewish state as an oppressor.
The
actions of Hamas in firing a largely non-descript collection of projectiles
which are referred to as ‘missiles’ most of which by the Israeli army estimates
penetrated the so-called Iron Dome are the actions of desperate people.
The
projectiles are largely ineffectual and only give Israel the excuse it needs to
mete out a collective form of punishment with its large array of sophisticated
and highly deadly arsenal.
If
it need be reminded, all peoples are entitled under international law to resist
occupation, and the designations of ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ are used by
Israel without a trace of irony given the nature of its creation by the terror
actions of the Irgun and Stern gang as well as the legacy of ethnic cleansing
notably by the massacre perpetrated at the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin –
the site of which stands ironically approximately 2000 feet from the Yad Vashem
Holocaust Museum.
When
Begin formed the Herut Party, the precursor of Likud, in 1948 Jewish luminaries
including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt wrote an open letter to the New York Times describing it as an
ominous portent; that Israel would head down a path which legitimized
“ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority”.
In
the Israel of today, a mainstream politician can advocate the killing of
Palestinian women on the basis that they give birth to “little snakes” while a
university professor seriously suggests the use of rape as a weapon of war
against Palestinian sisters and mothers; positing the culture of the Middle
East as the justification.
Under
state policy Ethiopian Jewish women have been surreptitiously sterilised, and Sudanese
and Eritrean refugees are referred to as ‘infiltrators’ and are casually vilified.
Edicts are issued banning the sale or renting of apartments and homes to
non-Jews.
Israel
is a racially exclusive state where immigration is subject to DNA testing and
where a non-Jew cannot legally marry a Jew.
The
linkage of Judaism with Zionism is one which creates uneasiness in an
increasing number of Jews and non-Jews. The bombs which kill and maim scores of
innocents, the policies which constrict the everyday lives of millions and
which condone the theft of Palestinian land are done in the name of the Jewish
state.
David
Goldberg, a London-based rabbi once wrote that the time may have come for “Judaism
and Zionism to go their separate ways”. But this would be a difficult task to
achieve given the aforementioned philosophical shift which took place among
world Jewry over the course of the 20th century.
Further,
rabbis in Israel have given religious sanction to the idea of inflicting terror
on the Palestinians. The recently deceased Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, once the chief
rabbi for Israel’s Sephardic community and when the spiritual leader of the
ultra-orthodox Shas party which over the
years has formed coalition alliances with Netanyahu’s Likud, called for the
annihilation of Arabs during a Passover sermon delivered in 2001.
It
is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and
annihilate them. They are evil and damnable...waste their seed and exterminate
them and vanish them from this world.
And
during the present crisis, the Jerusalem
Post reported a rabbi’s claim that Jewish law permits the destruction of
Gaza in order to bring safety to Israel.
It
echoes an uncompromisingly brutal counsel from Rabbi Friedman, the charismatic
Chabad figure who redirected Dylan towards Judaism, in response to a question
posed in Moment magazine’s “Ask the
Rabbis” feature.
The
only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill
men, women and children (and cattle).
Yet,
Israel seems largely impervious to criticism; wrapped up in what it views as a
justified self-righteous mentality.
It
is a mindset which some have compared to those of Afrikaner settlers in
Apartheid South Africa and the European settlers in Algeria: The outside world
simply does not understand. The methods employed may seem harsh and bullying but
they are done in the name of self-preservation.
What
the Zionist mindset cannot demonstrate as being moral it has nonetheless
imposed through force and given the history of suffering by the Jewish people
it has been a case of Zionism ‘right or wrong’ so far as its lobbying agents
are concerned.
As
things stand, the two-state solution has for years been an all but dead
proposition, and a one state solution would negate Zionist aspirations and equate
to national suicide.
The
resilience of the Israelis, their tenacity and ferocious resolution to hold on
to the state which they have carved out is evident in Dylan’s final verse.
Neighborhood
bully
Standing
on the hill
Running
out the clock
Time
standing still
It
is an explicit statement that Zionist Israel is determined to outlast its
enemies and its critics and intends to persevere literally until the end of
time.
(c)
Adeyinka Makinde (2014)
Adeyinka
Makinde is a writer based in London, England.