Howard Epstein – LETTER FROM ISRAEL: Morocco
In Israel last weekend, it was announced that Defence Minister Benny Gantz is planning to visit Morocco to sign cooperation deals to develop for them a drone industry. Morocco is, of course a long way from the Arabian Gulf, the seat of the Abraham Accords, but then so is Sudan, and that state signed on to them last January. Pity the poor Palestinian people, stuck in the rut so crudely carved by their revanchist and nihilistic leadership. No less than one trillion US dollars of trade are projected for the Accords over the next decade, and our closest neighbours – the Palestinians, the Syrians and the Lebanese – are shut out of them by their own dysfunction. Chaval!
Morocco is a place of great interest for Israel, not least for demographic reasons. Most people with Israel-awareness appreciate that there are some one million Israelis with Russian provenance; but not necessarily that Israelis who are Moroccan in origin number in their hundreds of thousands. Their antecedents – around 28,000 of them – had no immediate pressing reason in 1948 to mount the wings of eagles, and fly to Israel shortly after the birth of the state. Indeed, successive rulers of the north African kingdom have always made it clear that their return would be welcomed. In preference to turning the clock back, however, the Israeli Moroccan community grew in numbers and stature, until they became recognised as among the greatest contributors to the strength of the nation.
Moroccan culture plays an important role in Israeli society, from music and cuisine to Henna parties, celebrated in the week before a wedding, a barmitzvah or a baby shower, and the observance of Mimouna on the night at the end of Passover, which has become almost a national holiday in Israel.
So, less than 30,000 immigrants in the early fifties swell to well over half a million today. What does that tell us about the loss to Jewry of the unborn progeny of the six million martyrs taken so cruelly from us in Europe, some seventy-five years ago?
Of course, one cannot ignore the Shoah as a catalyst for the birth of the Jewish State, although not the compensation for the Holocaust that Obama grants us in a whole chapter of anti-Semitic tropes in his book, cynically entitled “A Promised Land”. No. It was merely the stimulus to get finished the job that had been started by the Balfour Declaration.
As readers of this column will know, the writer has a fascination with the Declaration, because Chaim Weizmann, who received the all-important letter into his hands directly from the War Cabinet in session, the ink from the pen of Foreign Minister Balfour still wet on the page, is perhaps the greatest unsung hero of the Jewish State. It was his patented synthetic acetone that extricated Britain and the Empire from the “Shell Crisis” of 1915; and it was his celebrity that enabled him to wring three vital concessions from another world statesman, US President Harry Truman, thirty years later.
Do they come any greater than that? Well, yes. Just before the outbreak of WWII another Jewish scientist filed another war-winning patent. Leo Szilard had come from central Europe and imagined a nuclear chain reaction whilst crossing Southampton Row, London W1, in 1933. The Royal Navy adopted it and subjected it to the Official Secrets Act. Just as Einstein worked out the core secrets of Life, the Universe and Everything in his head, so did Szilard, the second greatest physicist of the 20th century, conceive of the route to the atomic bomb, purely cerebrally.
Yet there was a difference, for Szilard, always one step ahead of Hitler, left London for the USA before war broke out, and sat on the tail of the atomic bomb dragon until President Roosevelt was persuaded to sign off on the Manhattan Project (demonstrating that Szilard was as practical as Weizmann and much more so than Einstein). There, then, is the second great Jewish unsung hero. Leo Szilard, a loner and a total genius, without whom the Americans might not have brought to an end the war in the Pacific for a further year and at the cost of millions of lives, with even Japanese children weaponised to sacrifice themselves for their god, Hirohito.
There, readily to hand, is the ammunition to dispel several myths at once: that the use of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki can never be justified; that a single person cannot change the world; and that to assert that the Jewish people are more special than any other is unforgivable Jewish Chauvinism.
It is not overweeningly self-centred so to assert and, should you need bolstering in that view, the writer points to “Genius and Anxiety” by Norman Lebrecht. The work is subtitled “The Jewish Contribution to the World, 1847 to 1947”. That contribution? It is broad, deep and complex, and helps to explain how a country the size of Wales, Israel, with a population smaller than that of London, can attract investment and, yes, even friends now, from all over the world by – in the traditions of Chaim Weizmann and Leo Szilard – the vigour and dynamism of their intellect alone.
© October 2021 – Howard Epstein
Israel at 75: In Weizmann’s Image will be published in 2022
