This editorial in yesterday's Jerusalem Post reflects yet another perspective on 'The Passion.' One that's very sober and disconcerting but nevertheless uplifting. For those who don't have access to the JPost for whatever reason, I've included the full text in the extended entry.
Feb. 26, 2004
The passions
Readers outside Israel may be surprised to learn that The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson's new film about the final hours and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, has inspired some curiosity, but little outrage, among Israelis.
Next to Sunday's Jerusalem bus bombing, or proceedings at the International Court of Justice at The Hague, a movie that might or might not have an anti-Semitic coloration just doesn't arouse this country's passions.
Perhaps it should. From the end of the Second World War until September 2000, it was widely assumed that anti-Semitism was effectively dead in Western Europe. Wrong there. And ever since Vatican II (1962-1965), it was also assumed that the Church had at last put its old teaching about the Jews as Christ killers behind it. The danger of Gibson's film, in which Jewish characters are made to seem more guilty than Pontius Pilate in condemning Jesus to his fate, is that it may reawaken this old anti-Semitic strain, too.
This is a development to which Zionism itself, and therefore Israelis generally, cannot easily be reconciled. For Zionism is more than just a political prescription. It is also a diagnosis. Why were the Jews hated? Because, Herzl said, they were a stateless nation in a world of nation-states. Statehood for Jews, he reckoned, would put paid to the accusation that Jews were "rootless cosmopolitans"; indeed, it would rip out the roots of anti-Semitism itself.
Zionism has done no such thing. The State of Israel has given Jews political self-determination, great cultural freedom and a margin of physical safety. But anti-Semitism is a beast of many faces. If Jews are not parasitic capitalists they are revolutionary socialists. If they are not rootless cosmopolitans they are ethnic chauvinists. If they are not suspect liberals they are suspect neoconservatives. And so on.
Jew-hatred, then, has no end of justifications. It is an irrational phenomenon, yet unlike other irrational phenomena it defies rational explanation. And this has political ramifications. It tells us that Jew-haters will not be mollified by the creation of a Jewish state, as Herzl supposed, or by its destruction, as modern-day binational state advocates such as Tony Judt suppose.
It means that no amount of Jewish charity will erase the charge of Jewish greed. It means that no amount of Israeli political moderation will persuade Israel's critics that it is, in fact, acting moderately. It means that every Israeli strategic concession will be viewed as an act of weakness, not magnanimity or even choice.
It means that Jews are hated for who they are. What they do, whether for good or ill, is quite beside the point as far as Jew-haters are concerned.
Of course, it is in the Jewish interest that Jew-haters be few in number, which is why a movie such as The Passion, with all its didactic power, raises justifiable alarms. But it's an open question whether Jews and their interest lobbies ought to do much about it. Ultimately, it will be up to Christians to take what lesson they will from the film and to read their scriptures in a philo- or anti-Semitic light. Vatican II, after all, was not an idea hatched in Tel Aviv.
It's a frightening thought: anti-Semitism is beyond our power to cure. But frightening thoughts can also be liberating ones.
"It doesn't matter what the goyim say, what matters is what the Jews do," Ben-Gurion said. It is enough to contend with our own problems. Let our enemies contend with their own.
