    An Israeli Answers the “Jewish Question”

    Israel Shamir, PaRDeS: an etude in Cabbala (BookSurge,
    www.israelshamir.net, 2004-2005) 192 pp. $11.99 ISBN 1-4196-0601-8

    http://www.booksurge.com/product.php3?bookID=GPUB02699-00001

    My coming upon the Internet writings, a couple of years ago, of Israel
    Adam Shamir of Jaffa, Israel, a Jew and a Christian, yielded the same
    sort of intellectual shock I got when I discovered the American poet
    Ezra Pound back in 1950.

    Reading Pound—poetry and prose—I suddenly realized that here was someone
    who knew all the questions nagging away at the back of my mind—and often
    enough sitting right up front in it—and he was supplying answers that
    were so good that they seemed like a drink of cool water on a broiling
    hot day.

    Pound answered for me the question, What was wrong with the world
    economic system that seemed to almost break my father’s spirit in the
    1930s? And perhaps did kill his body; he died at 57 in 1941.

    Shamir answers for me the question: What is wrong in the world that our
    nation is collapsing—or at least getting ready to collapse—in a welter
    of monstrous, unpayable debt, illegal and unwinnable wars, pornographic
    “entertainment,” grossly corrupt government, ruinous taxation, and
    totalitarian-style police-state encroachments on the activities of
    everyday people, all the while no one seems to be able to do anything to
    stop any of it?

    Pound’s political and economic writings, which were a career sideline
    for a man who was a superb if sometimes difficult poet, are still
    politically incorrect, because he thought the chief architects of the
    extreme folly of the two great European World Wars, which wrecked
    Christendom and murdered millions of human beings, were the money men
    and munitions men, the giant usurers in their role as warmongers. Pound
    made plain that he thought—nay, he knew—that a lot of the biggest of
    them were Jews.

    Shamir comes now with even more serious accusations, and reporting, if
    you will, from the inside, to contend that “the Jews” (defined below)
    are engaged in a monstrous scheme of world control and world government
    that is within an ace of carrying the day.

    Shamir’s sensibility, if I am any judge, is a deeply poetic one, like
    Pound’s (whom he cites in Pardes). A man without some appreciation of
    the poetic, a man who cannot credit, for example, the fact that religion
    is the supreme poetry of the human race—poetry risen to the level of the
    living Truth—is unlikely to credit either Pound or Shamir.

    Both writers are cordially hated by what Shamir calls the Mammonites,
    who, insofar as they pay any notice to either man, about equally detest,
    in each of them, both the poet and the brilliant observer and critic of
    contemporary madness, an observer who is uncannily right about what is
    wrong.

    Shamir is himself a fairly recent convert to (Orthodox) Christianity. I
    find everything that he writes (that I have so far read) illuminated by
    a fine intelligence, a good heart, massive knowledge of world history, a
    truly Christian humility, tremendous sophistication, considerable humor,
    and a determination to speak his piece no matter what.

    Shamir’s primary focus is on the injustice to Palestine, but he sees the
    situation there as a microcosm of what is ahead for the whole world:

    Israel/Palestine is the model of the world the Americans want to
    achieve. It has peasants and their flocks dying of thirst, and on the
    hilltop there are villas and swimming pools for the chosen folk, It has
    a huge army and it has many labourers without any rights. In order to
    turn all the world into Palestine they began now Word War 3 against the
    Third World.

    Notice that Shamir says “what the Americans want.” The sad fact is that
    what Israel wants is what America wants. We have long since hooked our
    national wagon to the Israeli engine, a coupling insisted upon by the
    wealthiest and most powerful élite group in the nation, “the Jews,” a
    term which does not mean all Jews, only certain of them, those who fully
    identify with and foster what Shamir calls the “Judaic spirit.” By this
    term Shamir means that same materialistic, this-world-centered spirit of
    upheaval and revolution that E. Michael Jones has been tracing through
    the history of the last 2,000 years in Culture Wars Magazine, most
    recently in the May issue in his article, “John Huss and the Jews.”

    Shamir makes a vital distinction early on in Pardes between a Jew or
    Jews and “the Jews” or Jewry. Plain Jews are like thee and me, people of
    an ethnicity but not defined by it. Plain Jews, like plain people
    everywhere, are willing to go about expecting no special favors and
    quite willing to identify themselves with their host country rather than
    the one they or they forbears left some years ago, or, in the case of
    the Jews, Israel.

    The oddity of Israel is that it is not really an ancestral homeland for
    any modern Jew but got started only in 1948. Ever since, Zionist Israel
    has issued a call to all Jews to come to it, or at the very least to
    adopt its cause as their cause, and to work mightily to advance the
    Zionist program. All this under the blanket claim that God gave “Greater
    Israel” to the Jews (and only the Jews) in what the Christians call the
    Old Testament, a claim hotly disputed by about a billion Muslims, among
    others.

    It’s as if Ireland had a thing called Erinism, which required all the
    diaspora Irish (60 millions?—recall that Anglo-Irish poet W.B. Yeats
    called the Irish the “Jews of Northern Europe”) to support it in its
    intention to reduce England to rubble, as Israel is reducing Palestine
    to rubble. To be a true Erinist one would have to put Erin’s interests
    above those of the United States or whatever nation one happened to live
    in, send all kinds of money to the Irish government, and be prepared to
    blindly defend Ireland whenever anyone pointed out that the limitation
    of citizenship in the Erinist state to those of the “Celtic race” is a
    retrograde tribal politics of the ugliest kind.

    Shamir on distinguishing a Jew from “the Jews”:

    . . . a Jew rarely knows or understands what the Jews want from
    themselves and from bewildered mankind. This lack of understanding
    causes many fine men and women to proclaim their support (or opposition)
    to the body politic called ‘the Jews.’ Being born and raised a Jew does
    not help at all, just as belonging to the elite troops does not provide
    you with an understanding of the General Staff plans. . . .

    Our goal is to understand and explain what ‘the Jews’ want. This task is
    a hard one, for the Jews have no obvious central command. It is hard to
    swallow that the Jews can have a strategy but no strategist; and the
    Protocols of the Elders of Zion are popular precisely because they posit
    such a supreme (if obscure) strategist. However, ‘the locusts have no
    king, yet they attack in formation’ (Proverbs 30:27) and devastate whole
    countries as if by plan.

    It is possible there are no (or almost no) Jews who fully understand
    what the Jews want. The term ‘The Jews,’ as used in this article, is
    meant to denote a spiritual persona of higher rank, relating to
    individual Jews like the Catholic Church is related to an individual
    Catholic, or a beehive to a bee. Thus, there is no subjective personal
    guilt associated with individual Jews, unless their specific actions or
    inaction are criminal per se. Thus, this discourse should help an
    individual to decide whether he wants to be a Jew or not, in the same
    way one may choose whether one wants to be a communist or a Quaker.
    (Page 7)

    In a sense this book, although offered to the world at large (and
    available on Amazon), is a book by a Jew for Jews, having as a chief
    goal to persuade them to drop their “Jewishness”—their determined
    separateness—and rejoin the human race. Shamir, like Simone Weil,
    contends that the idea that Jews are today still the specially “chosen
    of God” (in exactly the same way Jews and Christians hold them to have
    been in Moses’ time) is a truly mistaken idea, a truly poisonous idea,
    especially poisonous for Jews, but poisonous for the whole world, too. A
    lethal archaism of racial politics.

    Shamir’s political position on the Israel-Palestine contest is that the
    Zionists—in his eyes clearly the aggressors, the invaders—should
    dismantle their racist state, end their murderous hatred of their
    Palestinian neighbors (who it must be admitted return the favor), and
    proceed to melt into the population of Palestine, becoming the friends
    and neighbors of Palestinians.

    The Jews should agree with the Palestinians to devise a single state
    with all on both sides of the present impasse equal and welcome—one
    person, one vote—and end all talk of any group’s being the chosen of God
    with special claims on “The Holy Land.”

    The two-state plan the U.S. has favored will please no one in the end;
    it will move inexorably toward an apartheid state, of which the symbol
    is the new and hideous wall through Palestine that the Israelis are now
    building, and I suppose the U.S. is paying for. (Our contributions to
    Israel since 1948 are over $100 billion. That’s $100,000,000,000, in
    case you were wondering, a sum which all by itself proves the U.S.
    subservience to Israel.)

    As you can well imagine, Shamir’s contentions are calculated to make
    American Jewish and Christian Zionists, the chief supporters of Israel,
    foam at the mouth. Perhaps it is for this reason that Shamir has never
    come (as far as I know) to the U.S., although he has been all over
    Eurasia from England to Malaysia and Japan. He seems to move about
    Israel with freedom and ease. It seems plain that Israel’s intellectuals
    are less constrained by government and political correctness than
    Americans and Europeans.

    In the May issue of Culture Wars, Paul Eisen, director of Deir Yassin
    Remembered, in his article “Speaking the Truth to Jews,” sets out the
    case against Israel’s treatment of Palestine over the entire period of
    Zionist invasion of the Holy Land as coolly and accurately as I have
    ever seen it done in any publication. All praise to Culture Wars for
    carrying this article, first published in a 2004 book, Speaking the
    Truth About Zionism and Israel. The book is available from Amazon.

    My purpose in mentioning this here is to highlight one problem Eisen
    suggests we all have in the West in trying to make sense of things
    Jewish: we have mostly felt we need to speak in codes, or in
    circumlocutions, or simply keep silent on matters Jewish, to avoid
    “being cursed as an antisemite,” as Eisen puts it.

    (Here’s a curious fact: Microsoft Word tells me I have just misspelled
    that word antisemite. It’s supposed to be anti-Semite. Yet that is the
    way Eisen and CW spell it. So I am adopting it: one less keystroke, one
    less capital letter.)

    The “antisemitic” thing is like a thrall thrown down by some magician to
    make us speechless and stupid. I know I have felt its power, and even
    though I have been trying to work my way out of it for years, I still
    approach an article like this with a certain nervousness. And you have
    to ask why, because I am old and (relatively) poor and beyond the reach
    of any presumed Jewish malevolence. Still, the power of the magician’s
    tricks is there, and one looks over one’s shoulder. I know I am not
    “antisemitic”; I have any number of Jewish culture heroes, starting with
    the Lord Jesus Christ; but . . . but . . .

    Eisen writes:

    Jews have never been so secure or so empowered [as now], yet many Jews
    feel and act as if they are a hair’s breadth away from Auschwitz. . . .
    Jews, individually and collectively, use their political, economic,
    social, and moral power in support of Israel and Zionism. In their
    defense of Israel and Zionism Jews brandish their suffering at the
    world, accusing it of reverting to its old antisemitic ways. They claim
    that criticism of Israel and Zionism is in fact criticism of Jews. Just
    as the Jews were, in the past, objects of classic antisemitism, so
    Israel, the state of the Jews, is the object of a new, modern
    anti-Semitism. They will concede that Israel like any other state in the
    world, is not exempt from criticism, but they do claim that Israel’s
    right to exist as a Jewish state is so exempt. In effect, we may
    criticize Israel for what Israel does, but not for what Israel is.”

    However, Eisen’s whole article destroys the claim of Israel to exist as
    it now does, because it is a religiously (that is, racially or tribally)
    exclusive state, a clear instance of apartheid, a cruel, genocidal
    oppressor of the Palestinians, whom it has killed, shoved out, or shut
    in, and an illegitimate rogue state if there ever was one. (With
    ourselves, the U.S., in hot pursuit of the same rogue-nation status, it
    must be admitted).

    Shamir, detested and hounded by Israel fans everywhere, pulls no punches
    in agreeing with Eisen. Shamir, too, is on the Deir Yassin Remembered
    board, and he is an opponent of Israel’s current and past ways. And yet
    he loves the Holy Land, where he immigrated from Russia, and he wants to
    stay there. This love shines unmistakably in Pardes as it did in Galilee
    Flowers, an earlier book. (Both books are available on Amazon.) He has
    written recently (although not in Pardes but in an Internet essay, “The
    New Bund at Old Tricks,” to be found at
    www.israelshamir.net/Left/Left1.htm , a remark that will do nothing to
    lessen the distaste for him among Jews: “. . . [A]cceptance of Christ is
    the Final Solution of the Jewish question, while assimilation and
    intermarriage is the way to undo the vestiges of Jewish separatism.”

    That, when you reflect on it, is a most astonishing statement to come
    from anyone, Jew or Christian, after what the world has been through in
    the last century. It is however, what a Christian is bound to believe if
    he is an honest Christian. What other fate can one want, in charity, for
    a “disaffected one”? But let there be no coercion. God does not coerce;
    man should not coerce. “There are no righteous wars.”

    Speaking of political correctness, I recognize that this article
    violates the prevailing politically correct canon most grievously. I am
    writing favorably about a writer who has been generously smeared by his
    fellow Jews, which is supposed to put the kibosh on him good and well.
    Also I, a goy, am talking about the Jews. That is not supposed to
    happen. I am free to talk about Patagonians, Samoans, Germans,
    Amerindians, and residents of the Falkland Islands, but nobody is
    supposed to talk about the Jews as if they were a “thing” the way
    “Italians” are a thing.

    The big bugaboo that has to get shattered—maybe has already been
    shattered or is in the way of being presently shattered—is the cold pox
    of fear that settles around the possibility that one could be called—“Oh
    my God, my heart! my heart! I’m fainting!”—an ANTISEMITE.

    This is presently a far worse social sin than being called an
    anti-Christian. In fact, that might get you some plaudits; it certainly
    would not get you much active criticism. What’s to like about Christ for
    right-thinking modern people? But to be called an antisemite is to
    crumble into a nothing, become an unman, prove oneself a worthless
    troll, commit a bummer, remove oneself from the ranks of civilized
    people, etc., etc., etc. At least it’s that kind of disappearing act
    that the people slinging the smears really want to help you achieve more
    or less permanently.

    The term antisemite is flung around by the smear artists despite the
    fact that it doesn’t really mean anything. (Arabs are semites, for
    heaven’s sake.) And biological antisemitism, that is, objection to Jews
    because of real racial prejudice, is virtually non-existent, and
    everybody knows it. The objection is to the manifestations of that
    “Judaic tendency” that Shamir (and Jones) are chronicling and which is a
    real threat to all peaceful life on this globe.

    Any non-Jew who makes this point can expect to be vilified, precisely by
    other non-Jews. Shamir quotes Otto Weininger: “The Aryan of good social
    standing always feels the need to respect the Jew; he is displeased when
    Jews [like Shamir] make revelations about the Jews, and he who does so
    may expect as few thanks from that quarter as from over-sensitive Jews.”

    Shamir continues (page15): “His [Weininger’s] words are even more
    relevant now; with the Rise of the Jews, it is the burden of people with
    Jewish roots to undo Jewry.”

    To repeat: “. . . it is the burden of people with Jewish roots to undo
    Jewry.” The thing is quite hopeless if the Jews won’t do it themselves.
    Remember the dominical statement that “salvation is of the Jews.” And
    keep in mind, too, that “Jewry” for Shamir is synonymous with “the
    Jews,” not all Jews, but those possessed of the Pharisaic, that is, the
    “Judaic” spirit, that was evident at the trial of Christ 2,000 years
    ago. For Shamir it is the spirit of Mammon, the evil spirit that Christ
    said was “the other choice.” One may serve God or Mammon, not both.

    Without Shamir and the great cohort of Jews and non-Jews (in which group
    I include the editor/publisher of this magazine) battling so steadfastly
    against the overwhelming spirit of Mammon that rules this age in these
    ruins of Christendom where we dwell, I should feel discouraged indeed.
    But I do not feel discouraged. There is clarity emerging at last. I do
    think the Mammonites (Shamir’s term for all—Jews and gentiles—who
    advance the “Judaic tendency”) will fail ultimately despite the present
    seeming.

    For long years I have been in the same case as Omar, as reported by
    Fitzgerald in The Rubayat:

    There was a Door to which I found no Key;

    There was a Veil past which I could not see.

    I do not pretend even now to great wisdom and certainly not to great
    learning, but I do think the Key has presented itself, and the Veil is
    lifting.

    I have been rereading the first few chapters of the Gospel of John in
    recent days and it has, newly for me, the air of a dispatch from the
    front lines. The issue was joined back then; it is apparently to be
    settled fairly soon.

    Pardes is a short, deep book. I think anyone interested enough to have
    read this article or to have received this magazine should own the book
    and read and reread it. It is cheap enough to mark up. I have only
    skimmed over a few of the points it makes. It, like good poetry,
    requires frequent rereading and meditation. The first section, PaRDeS
    proper, the “study in Cabbala,” is described (page 16) thusly:

    “But what is the Judaic tendency and why should it be undone? Jewish
    exegesis offers four escalating levels of penetrating into the deep
    meaning of Biblical verses. The four levels are abbreviated as PaRDeS
    (Paradise or orchard), for ‘peshat’, or plain reading, and ‘raz,’
    ‘derash,’ and ‘sod,’—the deepest mystic content. We shall follow this
    scheme to expound the designs of the Jews: while peshat deals with
    money, raz attends to discourse, derash is the political level and sod
    is the theological plane.”

    The 101 pages devoted to “the designs of the Jews,” follow this schema
    and are packed with facts and theses of astonishing range and
    novelty—and one might add, potential for outrage among the close-minded.
    The rest of the book consists of six essays of great brilliance and
    intense moral and social insight. For example, the essay, “A Study of
    Art,” that Shamir wrote with his wife Alice, will tell you more about
    the world of international High Art than I have ever seen set down on
    paper before, and I assert, from some knowledge of the field, that every
    word of it is true. It is the complete explanation of why, in the words
    of poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, “art’s a vagrant, now on the town.”

    Let me close with an extended quotation from Pardes as an example of
    Shamir’s scope and penetration. It was hard to make a selection, so many
    passages offered unique insights. The passage I chose is the close of
    the essay, “Zeno’s Arrow (Or How to Argue Your Case with Jews)”:

    The friends of Palestine have no problem with individual Jews—they could
    be good or bad, our supporters or our antagonists. But the friends of
    Palestine have a problem with “Jewry”—the organized structure of Jewish
    communities. A few weeks ago, Haaretz published a huge page-long ad
    signed by all prominent Rabbis of the land—three hundred of them—calling
    for “Vengeance to the Evil Folk” [Palestinians] and enforcing religious
    obligation “never to surrender a single inch of sacred land to them.” It
    is a call to holy war.

    A call for war usually is met by war. When the Germans declared war on
    France (in 1939) or on Russia (in 1941) all Germans suffered the
    consequences, though the decision was taken by a few persons in Berlin.
    Now the vast majority of organized Jewish communities carry out their
    war on Palestine, but our friends (ostrich-like) try to see no evil.

    The position of individual Jews is much better than that of any other
    national collective. Individual Jews can opt out of the conflict by
    opting out of organized Jewry. Nobody has to be a Jew—every person
    calling himself “Jew” has another identity as well. He is an American,
    or an Israeli, or a Frenchman. Thus the friends of Palestine have to
    confront—not people of Jewish origin, but Jewry consisting of people who
    choose their “Jewishness” as the most important identifier.

    Conclusion: In the present war, Jewry is a belligerent party; this
    polity decided to wage war on too many enemies at once. Individuals of
    Jewish origin could be good or bad; but the organization is hostile to
    us. The victory over it is possible, but we have to pierce its Stealth
    shield manufactured by many skilled hands in many arguments.

    Shamir’s Pardes is a whole quiver full of arrows designed to pierce that
    shield.