Dr Anjuli Pandavar is a British writer and social critic who holds a PhD in political economy. She was born into a Muslim family in apartheid South Africa, where she left Islam in 1979. Anjuli is preparing to convert to Judaism. She is one of the staunchest defenders of Israel and a constructive critic of the Jewish state when she believes it is warranted. She owns and writes on Murtadd to Human, where she may be contacted.
Last week Jewish friends and colleagues in Israel and elsewhere wondered whether I was attending a Pesach seder. I was still coming to terms with my conversion interview, which did not go well, and had given no thought to the approaching holiday, even though it loomed large in my calendar. They even looked up the Chabad house nearest to me and advised me to get in touch with them early. I am not sure my friends realise just how important their interest is to me. By asking how my conversion is going, they help me stick to it. What has sustained me, in addition to my friends, is my love for and commitment to Israel. After my last disappointment at the court (four/five months ago; the first in August 2023), I had to face up to a possibility I had not anticipated: if forced to choose between being a Jew and commitment to Israel, which would it be?
On a shallow level, there are enough anti-Israel Jews and effectively anti-Israel rabbis to easily settle this one. On a deeper level, becoming Jewish is about me, while commitment to Israel is about civilisation. In common parlance, it’s a no-brainer: commit to Israel. If it came to it…
At the end of a long and bloody battle in Shakespeare’s Richard III, King Richard cries, “A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!” Richard’s realisation that through losing his horse, he is now losing his kingdom, reminds me of a certain rabbi in Prague who impressed upon his students, fourteen months after the Palestinian Arabs had killed 1200 Jews and taken more than 250 captive and with the war raging, “To get peace, you must give something.”
Because he kept repeating it and so emphatically, it seemed clear he was disapproving of the war, and by extension, the government of Israel. Whatever the “something” was that the rabbi had in mind, there were only two “somethings” that can be given in the current context: the people killed/captured; and land. As the people killed and those captured are already “given,” there should already be peace. Since there is still no peace, clearly, the something is not enough.
It seems not to have occurred to this rabbi that he might not have any say in what that something is, and that that “something” could just as easily be every living Jew and the Jewish homeland itself.
We may superimpose this rabbi’s wisdom onto Shakespeare: “Something, something! Peace for something!” To be sure, like King Richard, the rabbi did not have in mind a mere trinket, but something worthy of not parting with. As was a horse to Richard in battle, so is “something” to this rabbi in war. That is where the metaphor ends, for the loss of his kingdom, that to Richard spells the end, to the rabbi is but the beginning, “give land” (since the Jews already “given” was not enough) in hope of peace,
In other words, give the Palestinian Arabs a state and the Jews will get peace. The rabbi does not see that he had peace, and that this peace was taken in the act of massacring the Jews. He does not see that he wants to “give something” for what is already his, thereby making injustice integral to his condition.
This is the mentality of a slave.
A Jewish friend explained to me that after the Jews had left Egypt, they were kept wandering in the desert for forty years so the last slave generation would die out before they reached the Promised Land, and the slave mentality not be brought into the Promised Land with them. The lesson of Pesach for me, a wannabe Jew, is that this Prague rabbi is still wandering in the wilderness, unfit to be admitted to the Promised Land. No doubt, he will preside over a Pesach seder somewhere.
And so it is with all whose response to the war is, “How do we reach peace?” If this is your aim, then there is nothing you will not give to attain peace. There are all sorts of words associated with that kind of peace: slave, non-person, untermensch, dhimmi, serf, prisoner, etc. This is the peace of submission, of bondage, the very negation of Pesach.
King Richard understood that because he had lost his horse, he will lose the war and through losing the war, he will lose his kingdom. The question is not, “How do we reach peace?” but “How do we reach victory?”