what? In Israel there are Jews too!" He meant, of course, orthodox Jews, those who wear black gowns and hats, as they have done for centuries in Eastern Europe.
This Pole had probably never before seen a Jew, but in many folklore shops in Poland you find, among other wooden figures of Polish types, Jewish musicians dressed in black gowns and hats.
This sounds like a joke, but isn't. Everybody understands that there is a huge difference between Jews and Israelis.
Only the orthodox think that religious Jews are the same all over the world, because for them religious beliefs are more important than worldly nonsense like state, nation, and other such pagan notions. For this reason, Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist Movement, was cursed and damned by all the "Torah greats" of his time. Non-religious Israelis who identify themselves primarily as Jews consider themselves "new Jews" and look down with the utmost contempt upon Jews in Brooklyn and Berlin. Even a casual observer perceives that over the last generations, Jews in Palestine/Israel have become a new people. (By way of a metamorphosis, perhaps a mutation.)
The religion, too, has changed. The ultra-nationalist, messianic tribal religion of today's settler movement, which plays such a big role in Israeli politics, bears little resemblance to the humanistic Jewish religion of Western Europe.
The main link that ties Israelis to the Jews everywhere is the memory of the Holocaust and preceding persecutions. Indeed, the great orthodox philosopher Jeshayahu Leibowitz alleged that Jewish religion had died 200 years ago, and that the Holocaust was a kind of ersatzreligion, the only one that Jews around the world have in common.
There is a certain danger in this remembrance. It corresponds to a deep urge. One cannot, one should not, forget this monstrous chapter because that would be treason to the memory of the victims, our relatives, our flesh and blood. But this remembrance comes with the conviction that not only the Nazis, not only the Germans, were to blame, but all the other peoples too-all who did not raise a finger when the industrialized mass murder was in progress. This is a notion that comes naturally, nearly inevitably, to Jews. But for Israelis it is dangerous. (A few years ago entertainment groups of the Israeli army used to sing to a jolly melody the words: "All the world is against us / But we don't give a damn. / It was always that way ...")
If one grows up with the conviction that the whole non-Jewish world wants only to annihilate the Jews-indeed, that the whole of human history is nothing but a chain of anti-Jewish persecutions-and that Israelis are Jews like any other, then the logical conclusion is that