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David Horovitz: As the Walls Close In

The Palestinians call it the "Apartheid Wall," and many the world over dutifully echo the description. Across the region, Arab leaders complain that the Jews should know best of all not to ghettoize. In Europe, they march angrily in protest and denunciation, demanding trade boycotts and divestment, and those with the time and the passion come to join the Palestinians at the fence, to risk their lives to prevent its construction.

But it is not only the Palestinians who are being fenced in. By skewing the barrier, small-mindedly routing parts of it inside the West Bank, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has helped skew the perception of its primary purpose and effect as well. The expected anti-Israel ruling at the International Court of Justice in The Hague will deepen the distortion. Angered by the thoughtlessness of the route, even President Bush has occasionally resorted to public criticism of a wall snaking through the West Bank.

In truth, of course, it is we ourselves who are being closed off and caged in, as well. Pounded by suicide bombers, we see no alternative but to try and separate ourselves physically and impermeably from hostility to our east -- the better to cling on to our sovereign sliver on the western edge of the land mass, the better to avoid being swept out to sea.

But this shrinking room for maneuver is not the exclusive plight of the Jews in Israel. Jews around the world seem to be running out of space again, physically and psychologically. If anti-Semites had not made enough headway in Europe through their sophisticated misrepresentation of 42 months of intifada confrontation, cowing some in Diaspora communities into hiding public signs of their faith and looking to escape to less hostile environments while alienating others from their historic homeland, now Mel Gibson has arrived to add fuel to the flames.

Gibson�s brutal, pounding gore-fest, with its venal, Der St�rmer Jewish Christ-killers, which I endured out of a sense of journalistic obligation with a predominantly young, black, rapt audience in a Chicago theater almost three weeks after its blockbuster opening, has plenty of North American Jews worried too. They should be. Its calculated anti-Semitism oozes from almost every frame into open, trusting minds, staining their perception of the origins of their faith. Yet debate over its unmistakably hostile agenda is rapidly being superseded in the American media by open-mouthed appreciation for its sheer money-making power, with questions about Gibson�s motives pushed roughly aside by materialistic respect for the self-belief and determination that has scored him such an against-the-odds, dead-language "Crossover Hit" (as Entertainment Weekly headlined an article in its March 12 issue, reserving the headline "Sensitive Issue" for a piece on the new Starsky & Hutch movie). "Among Wednesday openers, ["The Passion" is] the best five-day premiere ever, which was great news for director Mel Gibson and star Jim Caviezel," the magazine reported with trite breathlessness, noting that Gibson�s name "has now been on 11 movies that have banked more than $100 million in domestic box office." Suggesting that the director might have pioneered a new mainstream market for religious films, it added admiringly that he "scores points for risking his own cash ($30 million) on what until recently was viewed as a provocative art flick."

Surveys show high proportions of viewers emerging from the torture -- the teenage black girl three seats along jerked involuntarily and wailed out loud as the nails were pounded through gristle and flesh -- to insist that nothing they had seen affected their attitudes to Jews. As an American Jewish friend observed wryly and anxiously, "That can only make you wonder what they thought of us beforehand." And the lack of condemnation from Israel�s would-be allies in the Christian evangelical movements of Gibson�s malevolently selective use of sources can only reinforce longstanding doubts about the wisdom of such alliances.

Precisely at the point in the Jewish calendar where we are enjoined to gather and retell the story of our glorious liberation, it seems as though barriers are rising again to separate, denigrate, sanction, contain and constrain us. What we crave, in the absence of divine salvation, is unified, invigorated leadership. What we have is confusion -- among Diaspora leaders reduced to talking to themselves about ways and means of responding to anti-Semitism, and among Israeli leaders whose inconsistency and failure of resolve has reduced their people to a state of weary resignation at each new bombing outrage.

Our government is still risking soldiers� lives and killing both Palestinian gunmen and innocents in what are deemed essential Gaza anti-terror incursions, and spending millions to bolster security at settlements there, at the very same time as pledging to imminently bolt the Strip. Our prime minister is citing the security imperative for urgently leaving Gaza (from where March 14�s two suicide bombers came, apparently breaching the fence for the first time) while staying put in the West Bank, source of dozens upon dozens of terror attacks on our sovereign territory. Our multi-party coalition is willing to risk the dangers of unilateral withdrawal from Gaza because of an insistence that there is no one to talk to on the other side, and yet makes not even a token effort to engage with Arab leaders, ahead of the end-of-the-month Tunis summit, on a possible new effort at regional dialogue.

We like to believe that the plagues visited on ancient Egypt, which we recall at the Pesah Seder were a one-time thing. So what we are going through now, we must hopefully conclude, is no modern version of impenetrable darkness. But where then, this Passover, is the light?