What's the difference?

Submitted by Yoel Lerner (Israel), Aug 17, 2010 at 21:39

Hazony's conception of reality is undoubtedly fascinating. But reading his essay in full gives rise to a very fundamental question: what is the difference between Hazony's Paradigm Shift and any of a myriad prior attempts to explain away the age-old phenomenon of Gentile Anti-Semitism? The very distinction Hazony notes between the New-Paradigmers' grasp of such phenomena as Iran, on the one hand, and Israel, on the other, leads to the inescapable conclusion that all we are really dealing with is a post-modern application of the only rabbinical adage: It is Jewish religious law (halakha) that Esau hates Jacob.

The European attitude Hazony describes is actually a European reaction to the European stupidity of allowing the Muslim deluge into Europe and undermining their own institutions thereby: "if the indiscriminate result of my applying democratic principles is the undermining of my democracy, then everything I have accepted until now must be in error" - and the first thing to alter, of course, is the European (or Western) perception of the Jewish State.

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