Burg Brain

Avraham Burg, scion of a powerful political family. who himself was one of Israel’s most powerful men before retiring from politics, had this to say:

Burg: Defining Israel as a Jewish state is the key to its end

Avraham Burg, former Knesset speaker and former head of the Jewish Agency says “to define the State of Israel as a Jewish state is the key to its end. A Jewish state is explosive. It’s dynamite.” In an interview in Haaretz Weekend Magazine, he said that he is in favor of abrogating the Law of Return and calls on everyone who can to obtain a foreign passport.

Burg, who was interviewed on the occasion of the publication of his book “Defeating Hitler” said “the strategic mistake of Zionism was to annul the alternatives. Israeliness has only body; it doesn’t have soul.”

“Judaism always prepared alternatives,” says Burg, who three years after leaving Israeli politics is now a citizen of France and a successful businessman

“Just as there was something astonishing about German Jewry, in America, too, they created the potential for something astonishing. They created a situation in which the goy can be my father and my mother and my son and my partner,” Burg says.

His book ruminates about Israel and Zionism, compares Israel and Germany, harshly criticizes Eichmann’s hanging, reflects on Judaism in the age of globalization and remembers his father’s house.

Burg said he started his book in mourning for the loss of Israel. “During most of the writing the book’s title was ‘Hitler Won.’ But slowly I discovered the layer of not everything being lost. And I discovered my father as a representative of German Jewry that was ahead of its time. These two themes nourished the book from beginning to end.”

The Roman Empire was not defeated by mighty armies. It was destroyed from within. When in their “sophistication” people no longer identified with the old values, when the emptiness of new ideas, the sophistry of politicians who spoke pretty words while offering no substance, when there was nothing worth defending, no ideals worth pursuing, Rome fell like the house of cards it had become. Rome, the once mighty empire, had become a large, empty, soulless body. It took, however, well over a millennium before Rome lost its soul.

Israel, at 58 is already starting to show signs of emptiness. If it is not too remain a Jewish State, then it lacks purpose, it lacks legitimacy. To merely be a western like enclave in the Levant, was not, is not, will not be sufficient reason to sustain its existence. Almost from its inception, as a careful perusal of Israel’s history will show, the successive socialist governments tried their hardest to do away with the trappings of religion thereby slowly destroying the fabric, the identity, that made Jews different and a cohesive group.

For 2,000 years of exile Jews kept their identity because of the flame that burned deeply within their heart, because of their yearning for ancestral home, because their Holy Days prayers always closed with “Beshana haba’a b’Yerushalayim – Next year in Jerusalem.” Naftali Herz Imber, Yiddish and Hebrew poet, New York drunkard, explained that yearning best, in the second stanza of his Hatikva (the poem that later became Israel’s national anthem):

Od lo avda tikvatenu
Our hope is not yet lost

Hatikva bat shnot alpayim
The hope of two thousand years

Lihyot am chofshi be’artzenu
To be a free people in our land

Eretz Tzyion v’Yerushalayim
The Land of Zion and Jerusalem

I am not a political Zionist, I left Israel disilliosoned at what the Zionist dream had degenerated into, but my heart still swells with tears as I hear the stirring melody and words that express my exact hopes, my exact prayer.

Avraham Burg, who once had a shot at becoming the top man in the Labour Party and possibly Prime Minister, represents the cancer within that is destroying the soul of a nation. It is a good thing he left Israel, it is rather symbolic he settled in France – a country more aligned with Israel’s enemies, a country where antisemitism is rampant. His choice of adopted country speaks volumes, were Israel to adapt his ideas it would immediately cease to exist. Perhaps his book should have kept its original working title of “Hitler Won.”

If Burg’s ideas were to be implemented, then he will singlehandedly achieve what 2,000 years of persecution and murder failed to accomplish. Neither the ancient Greeks, nor the Romans, nor the Babylonians, nor the Persians, nor the Spanish Inquisition, nor the hordes of Bogdan Chmielnicky, nor Adolf Hitler and all the others were able to put a dent in the Jewish spirit in spite of all the killings and forced conversions through the ages. Only Burg and his ilk, only the cancer festering within, can achieve that. To paraphrase Bill O’Riley, Israel is a Jewish State, if you don’t like it move to America… or France!

Chaim