Jewish history is dead, cannot demand anything

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "Abraham bought the Cave of the Patriarchs for 400 shekels of silver; no one will return it," said Noam Friedman, a 22-year-old fanatic sinking under the burden of 4,000 years of Jewish history, hours after he sprayed Palestinian civilians with gunfire in the town of Hebron.

Friedman opened fire in a crowded Hebron marketplace on Jan. 1, wounding eight Palestinians. He hoped the massacre would ignite widespread Palestinian rioting, and cause the abortion of an Israeli-Palestinian deal returning most of the city to Palestinian rule.

He is a dangerous lunatic, of course. But the problem -- for Palestinians, and especially for Jews -- is that Friedman's reading of history is correct. Abraham actually did buy the Cave of the Patriarchs.

Abraham was a real person. He left the city of Ur around 4,000 years ago -- estimates vary from 2100 B.C. to as late as 1800 B.C. -- to travel first to the city of Haran and then to the land at that time known as Canaan.

Lord knows where the land Abraham bought actually was, but it may have been around Hebron; ancient traditions are often quite accurate about such things. The ancestors of today's Jews certainly lived in the area until famine drove them into Egypt 3,300 years ago. And by 1200 B.C., thanks to Moses, they were back in what is now Palestine, and remained the dominant population there for the next thousand years.

The Jews are not the oldest of the world's peoples. Ur, the world's first city, was already 2,000 years old when Abraham left it. It's now just a huge mound of rubble in southern Iraq, but at that point it still had another 1,500 years of history ahead of it. Compared to Sumerians and Akkadians, Elamites and Hittites, the Jews are newcomers on the world's stage.

But all the rest are gone and the Jews are still here. Among the "civilized" peoples with a written history and a tradition of statehood, the Jews are the oldest surviving group. They were an identifiable nation, ethnocultural group -- whatever you prefer to call it -- 500 years before the Chinese, 1,000 years before the Greeks, over 3,000 years before Americans and Nigerians and Pakistanis.

So what? Does this kind of seniority confer special rights or cause better behavior? Obviously not. On the contrary, all that history can heap special burdens on people, and many Jews live in awe of their own people's very existence. They feel obligations toward it that go beyond any rational calculation of self- interest.

They may also be somewhat in awe of the role Jews have played in shaping the world's intellectual, moral and cultural landscape, from Abraham, Moses and Jesus to Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and Groucho Marx. Not to mention Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, and Steven Spielberg.

The Jewish faith makes up a relatively small percentage of all religions, and apart from Israel there is no country where they form even 5 percent of the population. Their contributions in every field, but above all in those fields involving words and literature, is far greater than their actual numbers might imply.

Why? Perhaps because they are the world's oldest literate community, with an ingrained cultural skill in the manipulation of ideas. Perhaps because they are the world's oldest moral community; the story of the Flood is universal in the historical legends of all the peoples who originated in the plains of lower Mesopotamia, but only the Jewish Bible turned it into a morality tale of bad behavior punished and faith rewarded.

All very well, but once again: so what? How does the peculiar and very long history of the Jews help to make sense of Noam Friedman?

Noam Friedman was drowning in history. It is also likely he is a religious fanatic, a "fundamentalist" in the modern jargon, though to a large extent even the Jewish religion is about history. And while history can tell you a lot, it is a very poor guide to action in the present.

Israel was not founded because of 4,000 years of history. The Zionist movement's purpose was to create a Jewish homeland as a solution to the highly contemporary problem of Jewish persecution in Christian Europe. The historical arguments for putting that homeland in the Levant were secondary -- at one point, Zionists were even willing to consider putting it in Madagascar.

Recreating the state of Israel more or less on its original territory has been a source of immense satisfaction and pride for many Jews, even though it raised difficult political, military and moral issues. But even 25 years ago nobody understood how rebuilding Israel on its original foundations would unleash such powerful historical passions among Jews themselves.

Israel's greatest threat now is not the Palestinians, most of whom have accepted strategic defeat and are hoping to salvage some sort of viable rump state from the wreckage of their hopes. Nor is it the neighboring Arab countries, every one of which is willing to make a permanent peace if only Israel would simply return to its 1948 borders. The greatest threat lays in the huge burden of Jewish history.

Baruch Goldstein, who slaughtered dozens of Arabs near Hebron two years ago, was intoxicated by history. Yigal Amir, who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin 14 months ago, saw himself as an instrument of history. And Noam Friedman tried to kill perfect strangers because he believed Jewish history demanded it.

History (including Jewish history) is dead; it cannot demand anything. What really matters is the present and the future of those alive today, both Israelis and Palestinians. It will be a grim future if the government of Israel cannot get a firm grip on those of its citizens whom history has driven mad.