2 Friday, January 25, - I9130 THE -DEMI/ . JEWISH IEWS Purely Commentary Inhumanities of Czarism Full Heritage of Kremlin Denials of prejudice do not help the Russian oligarchy. Their own spokesmen give credence to every evidence of inhumanities practiced against the protesting forces in the midst of the Communist dictators. Jews are not alone among the sufferers. There are dissidents in all quarters of the Soviet Union. Only the submissive are safe. Jews are usually the chief targets of the Soviet hatreds. In a revealing article in Midstream, "Anti-Semitism and Soviet Mythology," Michael Heller, a graduate of Moscow University, now a teacher of Soviet history and literature at the Sorbonne, Paris, told the following: Soviet anti-Semitism resembles in many ways Russian pre-revolutionary anti-Semitism and that of other countries in the world. But in one thing it is unique. In 1923, a Russian anti-Semite, V. Gladkich, having emigrated from revolution- ary Russia, published a book with a short and striking title: Yids. The book began with a bitter complaint: "In good old Tsarist Russia, people said to me more than once: 'What! An educated man and still an anti-Semite!' This exclamation is quite typical. Our intelligentsia believes sincerely that 'Yids are people like everyone else.' " V. Gladkich main- tains: "I hold the opposite opinion — it seems to me an educated person cannot help but be an anti-Semite." In the Soviet Union today, everyone must be an anti-Semite. Anti-Semitism has nothing to do with choice, taste, or desire. Today it, like everything in the Soviet Union, has become the duty of every Soviet citizen. If you are not an anti-Semite, you are a dissident. It means you think not as you are told but independently, and it is well known that, in the country of mature socialism, this is the greatest crime. This is the legacy of hatred. It is the inheritance from Czarism that is being perpetuated in official Communist ranks. On the record, anti-Semitism is outlawed. In practice, it has remained a means of hating Jews and making them the scapegoats in Soviet society. But as the quoted litany of hate indicated, there is dissidence. There are the rebels who defy the official Krem- lin codes. Whether the latter will succeed in arousing a spirit of humanism remains a test for time. It is a test that is watched with keenest concern by all who are persecuted in the Soviet Union and all outside the USSR who are battling for an end to the terror that is Sovietism. Jacobo Timerman's Credo for World Jewry: His Definition of the Basic Zionist Ideals Jacobo Timerman the Argentinian editor who suffered from his country's oppression in the Buenos Aires jails and has recently gained his freedom and settled in Israel, has become a powerful interpreter of the Zionist ideal. He has a motto: "Only the Jews can save Jews. The others can only help." Every generation produces its advocates of justice. They are urgently needed in Jewish ranks. Israel the state and Israel the people look to these defenders to help strengthen the ranks, to uphold the hands of the builders of Zion. Timerman did not have the Jewish education that is so much a necessity for the training of the youth to be iden- tified with their people. He could have been judged an assimilated Jew. The persecutors trained him to under- stand, to value a heritage he now cherishes. He has addressed his messages of faith to many gather- ings, in Israel and in this country. He tells it eloquently in a "Coming Home" essay in the New Republic in which he offers a lesson in the Zionism he advocates. Here is a por- tion of the "Coming Home" message that should guide the Jewish people, especially the Jewish youth: Through the street of many Western cities I could stroll as a secure citizen, without fearing for my safety as a man or as a Jew. This is true. But when I stroll through the streets of Tel Aviv, I do it as an owner, as the owner of every bit of ground, of every leaf on the trees. And here lies the dif- ference between saving and helping. The Jews made Israel, and they can save me from the passionate complexities and contradictions of my Jewish identity. Outside of Israel the others can only help me to feel no longer persecuted, to live in safety. I do not believe that those countries that offered me refuge, or those individuals and democratic _ institutions that assisted me, should take offense at this attitude. Some consider it patronizing or aristocratic. But it is the aristocracy of freedom, Czarist Inhumanities Being Perpetrated as a Legacy of the Kremlin ... Jacobo Timerman's Credo Assumes a Definitive Aspect as Historic Evaluation of Zionism of total and definitive freedom accepted without reserve. We may approach the issue from another angle. There is a genre of speculative political fiction similar to science fiction. For example, there was a book several years ago about the first black president of the United States. Or imagine a pope chosen by the Kremlin. Political fiction may transport us through many adventures of the im- agination: what if Hitler had invaded Britain?; what if a Nazi were elected to the White House?; etc. One theme of such speculative works often is the consequence such an event would have for Jews. But no political fiction could ever imagine that a Jew could be persecuted as such, as a Jew, in Israel. I believe that I may never find the words that will adequately express what this feeling means to a Jew. But it is what I feel. And it is what democratic people must understand. Perhaps this way they will also under- stand Israel's insis- tence on many mat- ters that affect its se- curity as a state. This insistence — or stub- bornness, if you wish — troubles demo- JACOBO TIMERMAN cratic countries such as France and Germany, which have resolved their border problems after many centuries of constant war. For this reason I again insist that only Jews can save the Jews. That is a simple sentence, nothing original, even boring. But when considered from the perspective I have been trying to explain, it is easy to understand. If certain Jews in the Dias- pora feel uncomfortable with this sentence, it is because they feel obliged to make a great dialecti- cal effort to explain that the Diaspora should con- tinue to exist. And if many non-Jews do not understand this sentence, it is because Jewish and Zionist organizations do not often enough ac- cept the task of keeping alive, and in the open, the fundamental principles of Jewish identity. In those countries where Jews have a clear perspec- tive and firm conviction concerning their identity, as in the United States, this sentence should not arouse anxiety. In other words, I now have my own home, a homeland. This affirmation frightened the Judenrat in Argentina: it may be supposed in the Diaspora that a homeland cannot be found. The historical meaning of my affirmation is greater than the particular events of my own experience. The Israeli newspaper Maariv recently pub- lished letters from Argentinian political leaders pointing out that the annulment of my Argenti- nian citizenship should not disturb me, that it was a decision taken in peculiar political circum- stances. And so in fact it was. And I have no doubt that justice, and the political future in Argentina, will permit me again to obtain Argentinian citi- zenship if I ask. But I will not ask. Never. And this must not be understood as a negation of the Argentinian people, or of the 50 years that I lived there. My act is an affirmation, not a negation. It is the affirmation that there exists a Jewish history that is legitimate, a Jewish historical memory that cannot be discarded. It is the affirmation of that process of national liberation called Zionism which goes beyond my own story. It matters little what happens to me personally. What matters is that in the face of any eventuality that may befall any Jew, in any part of the world, for just or un- just reasons, Israel remains a homeland to which he or she can come without explanations. And here that Jew is as much the master as those thousands of Jews whose families have lived here for generations, many of them as long as or longer than most of the Arabs who inhabit other parts of Palestine. Even those countries that are most open to refugees present certain conditions: they ask to know about background, education, health, and so on. Only Israel presents no condi- tions in its offer of a homeland. Zionism is not a movement of persecuted people; it is a movement of free people. It is in the democracies, in the countries from which Jews do not need to escape, that Zionism develops most strongly, and where it has its best results. This is precisely because Israel offers much more than a By Philip Slomovitz refuge. It offers a unique possiblity for the perfec- - tion of man: the development of his identity to its furthest and most profound conclusions. Our historical memory, the memory of many holocausts past, and the idea that nobody can guarantee the impossibility of holocausts in the future, however remote they seem, is an integral part of Zionism. It is only one part, and perhaps the decisive part. But the crucial feature of Zionism is national liberation, identity. There may be those who wish to portray this as the nega- tion of the Diaspora. But it is something more important: it is the affirmation of the future. I am here in Israel to be part of the future. Not to be the the result u c l ot boofTi j a not exclude non-Jews from the Timerman ranks of libertarians. He does not negate the importance of the just and righteous Christians who are valued by Jewry as the Hasidei Umot HaOlam, as the saintly among the nations of the world. Yet it is primarily the Jew who can help, can protect the Jew. It is in the principle of Self- Emancipation, as defined by Leon Pinsker in his famous essay under that title, written prior to Theodor Herzhs founding of political Zionism and the World Zionist Con- gresses. Let the message of Jacobo Timerman serve as a guideline for action by the youth of Jewry, as well as their elders, everywhere. Patriotism: The Challenge to Conscionable Citizens Samuel Johnson's excoriative definition, "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," may become applicabl e when those who presently burn the flag of their country panic over their loss of faith in their people. Normally, the' patriotic spirit has roots in self-respect. It is true that one must never submit blindly to every- thing that heads of state may dictate. Human values would perish if the people did not strive for improvement, for abandonment of injustice, for the aim to make people free with the right to assert themselves. But the burning of one's own flag means the destru, - tion of the symbolic in one's life. It has happened and is happening again, and what puzzles Americans especially is that at a time when their diplomatic representatives are shackled in Teheran there are the few who take sides with the hoodlums (students:' • and abuse and accuse their elected leaders who are faced with the gravity of a situation that involves the very lives of hostages in the hands of fanatics. It's sad that in a time that required unity George Bail finds a victim in Henry Kissinger. Yet the nation is united in basic principles — that one must never submit te blackmail, that religious fanaticism is not the permissible medium for hatred. Somehow, the people's will will persist. Somehow. pa- triotism will retain the glory of identification in attaining national unity. Some references to patriotism are worth quoting. For example, Joseph Trumpeldor's last words before he was killed by Arabs while defending a Jewish settlement in Palestine were, "It is good to die for our country." In "Rome and Jerusalem," Moses Hess, the eminent Socialist who was a famous precursor of Theodor Herzl in proclaiming Zionism as an ideal for Jewry, wrote in 1862: "The Jewish religion is, above all, Jewish patriotism. - Especially notable is this quotation from "The Song of the Spanish Jews" by the eminent young Jewish writer Grace Aguilar, Avritten in 1850: 0, dark is the spirit that loves not the land Whose breezes his brow have in infancy fanned; That feels not his bosom • responsively thrill To the voice of her forest, the gush of her rill. When Loyalties Conflict and Right to Differ Is Endangered While the current crisis created by Iranian insanities could not possibly relate to the tragedies that made the United States a divided camp during the Vietnamese con- flicts, some have fallen into the error of judging Adminis- tration action as leading this nation into a situation analagous to the horrors of the 1960s. The fact is that President Carter has been very cau- tious in his actions and demands, and whatever criticisms have developed have been on the score that he has been too should have acted more force- patient, too m toothp prudent, t b , tehgi a t n the very beginning. Therefore, that which is called patriotism is now ap - proached as a new sting in questionable loyalties. Yet, there is more of loyalty to presidential policies. greater patriotism than has been experienced in this coun- try in more than a generation. There are times when loyal- of a ties occasion. necessities in the l ife m atii se aacia atriio assertions a a nation.