dirt on dirt

An excellent impassioned article on current anti-Semitism in the form of anti-Zionism or Israel bashing:

In a critical passage from The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James associates evil with the concept of “dirt.” Evil, he says, is “an alien unreality, a waste element, to be sloughed off and negated, and the very memory of it, if possible, wiped out and forgotten.” It is “diseased, inferior, and excrementitious stuff,” which can only be considered “so much irrelevance and accident — so much ‘dirt,’ as it were, and matter out of place.”

[...]

The final irony, however, is that if dirt, generally speaking, is matter out of place, then modern Israel, founded in its ancestral homeland where it historically and legitimately belongs, is exactly in the right place, the place where it is meant to be.[...]

The fact is that Israel’s cadastral address is also its ordered and ritually authentic locus between the river and the sea. To use James’ terms, it will not “be sloughed off and negated, and the very memory of it, if possible, wiped out and forgotten.” The “evil” lies elsewhere. The “dirt” on Israel is shoveled from the European and Islamic rubbish heap. For despite the calumny and dishonesty to which it is regularly subjected, Israel is the one place where Jews are truly not out of place.

from David Solway: Treating Israel like Dirt
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