Israel Matzav

New book: Why Jews make common cause with their enemies

Hear, O Israel!’s chapter titles give a good sense of what preoccupies him: “We Are All Israeli,” “The Darkness of Anti-Semitism,” “A House Divided,” and “The Question” (in a nutshell: why are Jews — not all, but a disconcerting number — so prone to turn on themselves and make common cause with those who would delight in their extermination?).

Solway is an omnivorous researcher, rooting out polemical truffles from ancient religious texts, eminent historians, presidential speeches, imams’ sermons, academic treatises, today’s newspapers, and yesterday’s blog posts with uniform curiosity and a knack for artful synthesis, every debating point issuing from a tidy braid of thematic skeins drawn from a gamut of sources.

He is fiercely critical of intellectuals who permit ideology to trump scholarly integrity, coming down particularly hard on corrupted Jewish and Israeli academics. To illustrate the insanely convoluted lengths to which post-Zionist Israeli ideologues will go to vilify their country, for example, he contemptuously cites a thesis (accepted, even lauded) by Israeli sociologue Tal Nitzan, claiming that “the absence of military rape of Palestinian women is no different from military rape itself, since it ‘strengthens the ethnic boundaries … just as military rape would have done’ — Palestinian women are obviously humiliated and relegated to inferior status in being so loftily shunned by Israeli soldiers.” That this self-loathing perversion of reason — “non”-rape by Israelis equals racism! — today passes for scholarship is a damning indicator of leftist academic culture.

Solway’s high-octane writing snaps, crackles, and pops with savage but disciplined indignation. He’s been criticized for his habit (far more prevalent in The Big Lie than here) of using $50 words where $10 ones would do, but I usually find his more recondite vocabulary has been chosen for precision, not pretension: I found “proprioceptive hatred” a deliciously original and evocative description of an English Jewish academic’s revulsion for Israel.

Solway brings a staggering litany of supportive data and citations to his argumentation, at once a strength and a weakness. It can be argued that because the anti-Zionist juggernaut — academic unions, Israel Apartheid Week apparatchiks — depends so heavily on a seductive cocktail of lies, distortions, and emotive “narrative,” the world needs the strong antidote. On the other hand, his mountains of evidence swathed in fulminatory prose will intimidate sensitive peaceniks, political fence-sitters, and cultural relativists — which is to say, the kind of people who think Obama is The One. Which explains why Solway’s most respectful readers are hawkish Americans who cluster for comfort and motivation around U.S. conservative websites such as Pajamas Media and FrontPage Magazine, where Solway has found a congenial niche.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:05 AM