Operation Shylock: A Confession: A Review

“If arguments were enough to make men good, they would justly have won great rewards.” — Theognis

Spoiler warning for all of Operation Shylock: A Confession.

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post for a Jewish organization about a concert in the Chicago area called We Are Here. The concert’s stated purpose was to commemorate the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht through performing songs that survived the devastation of the Holocaust and the resilience those songs reflected. After so many years, so many tragedies, and so many lost songs, we, as Jews, are, well, still here. It was about the joy and resilience found in the Jewish community in its darkest hour — those who continued to create; who refused to be reduced to the wrongs; who, through song, exhibited their humanity and demanded that we hear it. And so we heard. And so we were there.

The concert was held in one of those exposed-brick, repurposed venues that feels just non-establishment enough to avoid losing credibility among the establishment. That felt right. It was a commemoration of the Holocaust, after all — at once the paradigmatic testament to the perpetually outsider quality of Jewish life, yet also as noncontroversial and decent and normal a sort of commemoration as there is. Sure, we were sponsored by the McGrath of Chicago Lexus dealership, but we weren’t going to hold this in a concert hall.

The concert occurred on November 6th, almost exactly one month after the horrifying terrorist attack of October 7th and the start of the terrible counteroffensive with which Israel responded. As much as the concert reminded me that We Are (Still) Here, it also reminded me, less intentionally, that We Are (Now) Here. We are now in Chicago, Illinois, at a hip venue, supported by the local Christian community,¹ worried about the safety of our fellow Jews, but also — and here the distance to where we once were is most acute — about what their retaliation might hold. We were here as Jews — the alien, the outsider, the estranged — but we could now do violence too. That, I must say, is new.

The concert was a tangled experience. The aching horror of the Holocaust, the sublime echoes of those cruelly murdered by it, and the knowledge that “Never Again” refers almost as much to a geopolitical reality as it does to a sense of moral clarity. The Jews who wrote these songs had no Knesset, no Iron Dome, no IDF.

I do not know geopolitics — I am not quite sure that anyone does. Yet I worry for my fellow Jews in Israel — not to mention the Palestinians. This concert occurred while a subset of the Jewish people has authority over a military capacity with little parallel in historical Jewish memory, and are using it. I do not know what songs are being sung by Jews in Gaza. How many are songs of lament? How many are songs of blood? I don’t know, but I do know that we are not to sing for the death of God’s creatures.

The whole situation reminded me of an old Jewish Anti-Zionist worry, from when the great theories of capital-H History were in vogue and Zionism was a new radical idea bubbling up from the polyglot countries of Central Europe: what if the creation of a Jewish state re-enters us back into History? What if Jews — discontents, gadflies, moralists, dissenters — become just one more people, with an associated government and military doctrines and a national interest? All Israel would do is make Jews legible to the nationalists, the chauvinists, the reactionaries of the world. No, Jews should stand for humanity, for universalism, for our ability to live in tandem not merely despite our differences but out of love for them! Jews must be for everywhere and of nowhere. Jews must be for the God of humanity, not the many gods of many peoples. After the Holocaust, it was a moral impossibility to say that security for the Jews would not be worth that price. Israel is a state. It will protect its people. That is what states do.

Surrounding this geopolitical and humanitarian tragedy and all the impossibly important work to mitigate it is the usual whirlwind of Israel Commentary™ about what land is whose and which betrayals were wronger and who is actually to blame and what the story of Israel really is and…

Operation Shylock is a book about Israel.² It was published in 1993. What concerns me about the latter fact is not so much that it has aged poorly but that what it takes itself as responding to rarely seems to have aged at all.

Zionism, At the Beginning

A long time ago — and, in the perpetually-pitched political combat surrounding the State of Israel, it is difficult to take the time to remember — the Zionist movement had its beginnings not in scripture but in the voguish ideas of 19th century Europe.

Theodor Herzl was not a particularly religious Jew. He was a journalist in a liberal newspaper popular among the Viennese bourgeoisie with a love of European literature and German philosophy. Max Nordau, Herzl’s founding partner of the World Zionist Organization, mostly rejected his modern Orthodox upbringing. He assimilated, married a Christian woman, and felt a deep affiliation to German culture, at one point writing “when I reached the age of fifteen, I left the Jewish way of life and the study of Torah … Judaism remained a mere memory and since then I have always felt as a German and as a German only.”

Once upon a time, nationalism was a fashionable idea among liberal intellectuals: “of course everyone is fighting all the time! We’ve got all these polyglot countries that are leftovers of war and conquest and some nation-races ruling over others. Now all these races hate all the other races because they are forced to live with them. As much as I am a cultured cosmopolitan and know this is all silly,³ what’s even sillier than nationalism is having national blocs who clearly cannot live together mixed up in the same country. What we need is a bunch of ethnically homogenous nation-states and then everything will work out.”

Herzl’s Zionism was fundamentally nationalistic. Antisemitism was a universal constant. It could not be resolved, only avoided. And the only way to avoid antisemitism is to have a nation of Jews. Much like the Serbs or the Croats or the Italians, the Jews must have their own country and huddle around one another vaguely disdaining and avoiding the various peoples of the world. Herzl didn’t need Israel to be in British Palestine — he didn’t even need it to be in the Middle East (though many of his compatriots, it seems, did). Herzl’s Israel was necessary so that Jews could escape antisemitism through geography. It is most productive to view Zionism as one expression of the voguish 19th century European idea that neat, clean, legible nation-states would make for peace. Zionism may be in some sense even the paradigmatic case, due to the intensely diasporic quality of Jews even relative to the other objects of such thought — the various ethnicities of Europe.⁴

Also popular at this time was the notion that urbanization and industrialization were making men effeminate.⁵ Nordau’s inspiration from this particular instance of the long tradition of European skepticism towards growth and prosperity is fairly plain. At around the same time when “Muscular Christianity” was becoming more and more popular, especially in England, Nordau thought that what was necessary to Jewish flourishing was a rejection of the bookish, weak Jew in favor of a new, well, “Muscular Judaism.” This would, of course, require a state where Jews could practice professions outside those they were pigeonholed into in Europe, a state where Jews could escape the antisemitic stereotypes and remake themselves.

So the argument roughly goes: Europe cannot be a home for Jewish people. Antisemitism rages, their communities will never be safe; relegated and suppressed, they will never have the room and experience to grow out of their weak, overintellectual tradition. Do not think of the antisemitism of the Middle East, the plights of the Mizrahi Jews already in nearby countries, the beginning of Ashkenazim being a retreat from war and persecution in modern-day Israel. No, what we have in the Middle East is a chance for a new Jew, a new Jewish nation, to see what Jewish life can look like without the lurking specter of antisemitism. Safety and flourishing, to be found in a Jewish State.

But, um, will it be? Or is that even the right question?

A Challenger Approaches

Operation Shylock tours Israel and its discontents. The narrator is a character named Philip Roth⁶ who, while recovering form the psychologically devastating effects of Halcion, discovers that someone has stolen his identity and is proselytizing a ethno-political project of anti-Zionist ‘Diasporism’ falsely under his name. He eventually, for the sake of having a name for this imposter, begins calling him ‘Moishe Pipik’, a diminutive Yiddish nickname from his youth.

Zionism is not a religious, moral, or eschatological doctrine (unlike Christian Zionism). It is a predictive theory: a nation of Jewish people is the only possible route to safety, security, and flourishing for the Jewish people. It has its propositions — antisemitism is a fundamental constant, Jews will flourish when they govern themselves — and arguments about the way the world is and the way the world would be better if it got its way. So you can contest its consequences.

Are Jewish people safer in Israel than they would otherwise be? Are they flourishing there? Operation Shylock’s Diasporists dissent.

On security:

“I am Israel’s enemy,” he [Moishe Pipik] interrupted again, “if you wish to put it that sensationally, only because I am for the Jews and Israel is no longer in the Jewish interest. Israel has become the gravest threat to Jewish survival since the end of World War Two. … In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Israel was the Jewish hospital in which Jews could begin to recover from the devastation of that horror, from a dehumanization so terrible that it would not have been at all surprising had the Jewish spirit, had the Jews themselves, succumbed entirely to that legacy of rage, humiliation and grief. But that is not what happened. Our recovery actually came to pass. In less than a century. Miraculous, more than miraculous — yet the recovery of the Jews is by now a fact, and the time has come to return to our real life and our real home, to our ancestral Jewish Europe.”

“Real home?” I replied, … “Some real home.”

“I am not making promiscuous conversation,” he snapped back at me sharply. “The great mass of Jews have been in Europe since the Middle Ages. Virtually everything we identify culturally as Jewish has its origins in the life we led for centuries among European Christians. The Jews of Islam have their own, very different destiny. … For those Jews, Israel must continue to be their country. …”

“Sir, what makes you think that the Jews would have any more success in Europe in the future than they had there in the past?”

“Do not confuse our long European history with the twelve years of Hitler’s reign. If Hitler had not existed, if his twelve years of terror were erased from our past, then it would seem to you no more unthinkable that Jews should also be Europeans than that they should also be Americans. … The meanings of the Holocaust … are for us to determine, but one thing is sure — its meaning will be no less tragic than it is now if there is a second Holocaust and the offspring of the European Jews who evacuated Europe for a seemingly safer haven should meet collective annihilation in the Middle East. A second Holocaust is not going to occur on the continent of Europe, because it was the site of the first. But a second Holocaust could happen here all too easily, and, if the conflict between Arab and Jew escalates much longer, it will — it must. the destruction of Israel in a nuclear exchange is a possibility much less farfetched today than was the Holocaust fifty years ago.”

Elsewhere:

“Once again the Jewish people are at a terrible crossroad. Because of Israel. Because of Israel and the way that Israel endangers us all. … The majority of Jews don’t choose Israel. … I repeat: Israel only endangers everyone. Look at what happened to Pollard. I am haunted by Jonathan Pollard. An American Jew paid by Israeli intelligence to spy against his own country’s political establishment. I’m frightened by Jonathan Pollard. I’m frightened because … I would have done exactly the same thing. I daresay, Philip Roth, that you would have done the same thing if you were convinced, as Pollard was convinced, that … you could be saving Jewish lives. … Pollard is just another Jewish victim of the existence of Israel — because Pollard enacted no more, really, than the Israelis demand of Diaspora Jews all the time. … I hold Israel responsible — Israel, which with its all-embracing Jewish totalism has replaced the goyim as the greatest intimidator of Jews in the world”

It goes on. “In Damascus missiles armed with chemical warheards are aimed not at downtown Warsaw but directly at Dizengoff Street.”

On flourishing:

“These victorious Jews [i.e. Israelies] are terrible people. I don’t just mean the Kahanes and the Sharons. I mean them all …. What do they know about ‘Jewish,’ these ‘healthy, confident’ Jews who look down their noses at you Diaspora ‘neurotics’? This is health? This is confidence? This is arrogance. Jews who make military brutes out of their sons — and how superior they feel to you Jews who know nothing of guns! … Jews without tolerance, Jews for whom it is always black and white, who have all these crazy splinter parties, who have a party of one man, they are so intolerant of the other — these are the Jews who are superior to the Jews in the Diaspora? Superior to people who know in their bones the meaning of give-and-take? Who live with success, like tolerant human beings, in the great world of crosscurrents and human differences? Here they are authentic, here, locked up in their Jewish ghetto and armed to the teeth? And you there, you are ‘unauthentic,’ living freely in contact with all of mankind? The arrogance, Philip, it is insufferable! … And what those so-called neurotics have given to the world in the way of brainpower and art and science and all the skills and ideals of civilization, to this they are oblivious. But then to the entire world they are oblivious. For the entire world they have but one word: goy! … Oh, what an impoverished Jew this arrogant Israeli is! … This is their great Jewish achievement — to make Jews into jailers and jet-bomber pilots! And just suppose they were to succeed, … suppose every Arab in the world were to disappear courtesy of the Jewish nuclear bomb, what would they have here fifty years from now? A noisy little state of no importance whatsoever. That’s what the persecution and the destruction of the Palestinians will have been for — the creation of a Jewish Belgium, without even a Brussels to show for it! … I grew up with you people, I lived with real Jews, at Harvard, at Chicago, with truly superior people, whom I admired, whom I loved, to whom I did indeed feel inferior and rightly so — the vitality in them, the irony in them, the human sympathy, the human tolerance, the goodness of heart that was simply instinctive in them, people with the Jewish sense of survival that was all human, elastic, adaptable, humorous, creative, and all this they have replaced here with a stick! The Golden Calf was more Jewish than Ariel Sharon, God of Samaria and Judea and the Holy Gaza Strip!”

Such is the message of the Diasporists, a political movement I assumed Philip Roth had made up for the sake of this book but which seems to be a real thing that real people talk about?⁷ But the book’s Diasporism is harder stuff than most of that — not accepting the placement of Jews anywhere they happen to be, but positively pushing for a return to diasporic life for Ashkenazi Jews: a return to Europe.

So who has it? Who is right? Who is the one who will save Jewish lives? The victorious Zionists or the dissenting Diasporists? Operation Shylock seems to argue that these are bad premises to start from.

The Land Flowing with Smoke and Mirrors

Mossad has long been one of the most effective intelligence agencies in the world. It’s strange. Sure, the well of diaspora Jews is a powerful resource, but it is still a small country and, especially at the beginning, not a very rich one. Operation Shylock has a half-answer to why Mossad is so effective: because to be a Jew, to be a Zionist, to live in Israel⁸ is espionage. Not in the way antisemites imagine — there is no Jewish conspiracy, no secret loyalty to a shadowy cabal, no nefarious infiltration for collective ulterior motives. No, to live as such is espionage in its neuroses, tedium, and bouts of paranoia, without the overarching plan. Operation Shylock is a spy thriller, but not in the classic sense. No suave agents or brilliant plans or climactic mission, just the vague, schizophrenic sense of large malevolent machinations at play and a deep well of mistrust and an absolutely tenuous grasp on the minds of other people.

While the fact of spies is confirmed in the later chapters of the book, the paranoia begins early and grows consistently. Philip Roth constantly and desperately tries to grasp reality with contrasting (and usually contradicting) suppositions. Pages upon pages of theorizing: is the fake Philip Roth a fan? A criminal? Is he even a Jew? Is he truly named Philip Roth? To what extent is this opportunism and to what extent is it coincidence? Is someone paying him off? Philip Roth constantly runs through each of these scenarios and more in his head. Who is an agent? Who is an informant? Is anyone a friend? Philip Roth makes no allies in Israel — his only safe harbors are friends from long ago.

One of the events the book is based around is the real-life trial of John Ivan Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk was a real-life Polish-American Ohioan who stood accused of being Ivan the Terrible, a notorious collaborating guard at Treblinka. Philip Roth attends a few of these semi-tragic, semi-farcical, semi-outrageous real-life court sessions in the book. Its proceedings are at times quoted, with the words taken from the court minutes. Throughout, the narration is once again a tug-of-war of suppositions — was he the right man? Was he misidentified? Does his stupid contentment prove his innocence or make it impossible? All these pained and paranoid attempts at practical psychology reflects a precept from Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov: “psychology, … though a profound thing, is still like a stick with two ends.”⁹ Who is an antisemite? Who is a friend?

It is not so much that Philip Roth becomes paranoid in Israel, but that Israel is paranoid, a country which lives in that bitter snarl of a joke: just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean everyone’s not out to get you. And when everyone is out to get you, the only possible response is to defend, to obfuscate and reflect. Of course, enough reflections and you lose the object. What is the difference between 100 and 101 degrees of irony? Imperceptible, yet absolute. Spend long enough in the company of liars and ulterior motives and its not so much that you’ll question what they say but rather that ‘saying’ will mean something entirely different to you. Words die as a method of connection and are resurrected, zombie-like, as pieces in a political game of survival.

People sometimes wonder how we are able to talk so much about Israel without understanding each other. Perhaps the better question is how anyone is able to really say anything about Israel.

Loshon Hora

Smilesburger, a Mossad higher-up (by all appearances) espouses perhaps the lesson from all this talk about Zionism and Diasporism: “words generally only spoil things.” An extended diatribe on loshon hora and the great rebbe Chofetz Chaim, who focused so dearly on the bitter and cruel effects of bad words, rumbles out of this old tragic Jew. And how Jewish this Jew is! All tragedy and resilience, all guilt and misanthrope.

And how words spoil things! How Philip Roth has heard words and words in Israel, and they merely spoil. He speaks, and things invariably get worse. He listens, and he invariably gets suspicious. Paranoia and pain — that is all that words have given him.

It takes an incredible facility with words and psychology to show their emptiness, and Operation Shylock has facility in spades. This bitter worthlessness of words is why the novel bounces between each of its many perspectives — words, words, words, they say so much and tell you nothing. Any explanation can be turned on its head; any justification neither right nor wrong, but worse: impotent. Words are just masks which efface their giver and cheat their receiver. Just games which destroy their victor and poison their defeated.

Operation Shylock very conspicuously makes the arguments for Diasporism mirror those of Zionism. “What is the difference?” the book asks. Turn one on its head, and you get the other. Its the same chauvinism, the same lies, the same games. Just words, words, words.

Smilesburger does away with the language-drenched dreams of Diasporism and Zionism:

[I ask,] “These Jews who may or may not be contributing money to the PLO, why haven’t they a perfect right to do with their money whatever they wish without interference from the likes of you?”

[Smilesburger answers,] “Not only do they have a right as Jews, they have an inescapable moral duty as Jews, to make reparations to the Palestinians in whatever form they choose. What we have done to the Palestinians is wicked. We have expelled them, beaten them, tortured them, and murdered them. The Jewish state, from the day of its inception, has been dedicated to eliminating a Palestinian presence in historical Palestine and expropriating the land of an indigenous people. The Palestinians have been driven out, dispersed, and conquered by the Jews. To make a Jewish state we have betrayed our history… Irrespective of terrorism or terrorists or the political stupidity of Yasir Arafat, the fact is this: as a people the Palestinians are totally innocent and as a people the Jews are totally guilty. To me the horror is not that a handful of rich Jews make large financial contributions to the PLO but that every last Jew in the world does not have it in his heart to contribute as well.”

“The line two minutes ago was somewhat at variance with this one.”

…

“I speak sincerely. They are innocent, we are guilty; they are right, we are wrong; they are the violated, we the violators. I am a ruthless man working in a ruthless job for a ruthless country and I am ruthless knowingly and voluntarily. If someday there is a Palestinian victory and if there is then a war-crimes trial here in Jerusalem, held, say, in the very hall where they now try Mr. Demjanjuk, and if at this trial there are not just big shots in the dock but minor functionaries like me as well, I will have no defense to make for myself in the face of the Palestinian accusation. … And what will I say to the court, after I have been judged and found guilty by my enemy? Will I invoke as my justification the millennial history of degrading, humiliating, terrifying, savage, murderous anti-Semitism? Will I repeat the story of our claim on this land, the millennial history of Jewish settlement here? Will I invoke the horrors of the Holocaust? Absolutely not. I don’t justify myself in this way now and I will not stoop to doing it then. I will not plead the simple truth: ‘I am a tribesman who stood with his tribe,’ nor will I plead the complex truth: ‘Born as a Jew where and when I was, I am, I always have been, whichever way I turn, condemned.’ I will offer no stirring rhetoric when I am asked by the court to speak my last words but will tell my judges only this: ‘I did what I did to you because I did what I did to you.’ And if that is not the truth, it’s as close as I know how to come to it.”

But Smilesburger even, going on about the evil of loshon hora, going on about his own lack of self-justification, is just simply one more performance! What is all this wailing and gnashing of teeth, this high tragedy, this whole misanthropic display,¹⁰ except one more game, one more calculation. Oh yes, how noble you are for doing something you don’t understand, how noble to refuse justification! How noble to refuse justification for something you cannot justify!

And what is this tribal loyalty, this massive obelisk which Smilesburger stakes not merely his life but his pride on? If Operation Shylock is clear about one thing, it is that tribal loyalty is a massive, hulking, thundering nothing. It is a giant nothing whose very lack of thingness — materiality, legibility, anything other than simple scale — gives it the impression of opacity when in reality it is just hollow and without surface, i.e., nothing. Yet nonetheless it compels. It’s the inverse of a black hole: a lack of substance which keeps the same despotic attraction. Does Smilesburger hate loshon hora because it is evil or because talk — communicating, connecting, justifying — is exactly what tribalism cannot do? Even the distaste for words becomes yet one more game! And are any words necessary to explain why we ought to fear the terrors which tribal loyalty's very lackness can compel of us?

The Twisted Fate of the Oppressed, Or, The Cause or the People, Or, Forgetting the Children

Sometimes I worry there is just something cursed in the soil around our holy land. The region simmers with holy retribution; it’s a haze that hovers close to the ground — perhaps not native to that region, perhaps an invasive species (God knows our country has done enough to introduce it), but certainly without its natural predators. It impresses itself upon you, tugs at your chest, gives the illusion of an oasis just beyond the bend. All its counsels are death, all its wisdom is war.

I know this is not correct; I am not a superstitious person. Yet the worry remains.

George Ziad has been ruined by Israel. Not killed, ruined. A suave, noble soul twisted and turned inside out, perverted and distorted. Ziad was a friend of Roth’s in college, a cosmopolitan, worldly Palestinian who fled from his father’s bromides and vengeance. Life was beyond Israel for Ziad, beyond the wrongs left unrighted. Then Ziad’s father died. And somehow, someway, Ziad’s intellect and worldly charisma warped under the weight of his father’s funeral rites.

George’s ruin:

As we drove, embittered analysis streamed forth unabated, … each sentence delivered with an alarming air of intellectual wantonness, the whole a pungent ideological mulch of overstatement and lucidity, of insight and stupidity … — the shrewd and vacuous diatribe of a man whose brain, once as good as anyone’s, was now as much a menace to him as the anger and the loathing that, by 1988, after twenty years of the occupation and forty years of the Jewish state, had corroded everything moderate in him, everything practical, realistic, and to the point. The stupendous quarrel, the perpetual emergency, the monumental unhappiness, the battered pride, the intoxication of resistance had rendered him incapable of even nibbling at the truth, however intelligent he still happened to be. … despite the thin veneer of professorial brilliance, … now at the core of everything was hatred and the great disabling fantasy of revenge.

Yet George is not merely cursed to take his father’s fate, but also to stamp that same fate onto his own son, Michael.

George the son, George the father:

My heart went out to Michael, however callow a youth he might be. The shaming nationalism that the fathers throw on the backs of their sons, each generation, I thought, imposing its struggle on the next. Yet that was their family’s big drama and the one that weighed on George Ziad like a stone. Here is Michael, whose entitlement, his teenage American instinct tells him, is to be a new ungrateful generation, ahistorical and free, and here is another father in the heartbreaking history of fathers, who expects everything blindly selfish in a young son to capitulate before his own adult need to appease the ghost of the father whom he had affronted with his own selfishness. Yes, making amends to father had taken possession of George … But George was out to settle the issue of self-division once and for all, and that meant, as it usually does, immoderation with a vengeance.

And Smilesburger accepts this — accepts creating a nation of Georges and Michaels — with what? A wailing pride? A self-pity which is really just a haze over a self-congratulatory ‘seriousness’? Oh yes, Smilesburger, so hard for you to give up on justifying your actions, never mind the monologue.

Revenge. It kills a man — and not always the one you expect.

So, a question arises: the cause or the people?¹¹ The Palestinian Cause is absolutely deadly for the Ziads. A promising career, derailed; a promising mind, ruined; a promising future, gone. All for something more real than mere peace, or welfare, or prosperity. Ziad wants to right wrongs, he wants justice. Justice for the same great obelisk to which Smilesburger prays. And for that, he’ll kill his own son. What true follower of Abraham would not do such a thing for their god?

Oppression twists the oppressed. At one point, George was a man. He could speak, he could think, he could love. Now, his oppression swallows that up whole. George takes part in his own perversion: he is obsessed with his own wounds, with those of his father, licking them so they bleed and so he can yell “look! See how they bleed!” So he can cut the perpetrators and rub their blood with his, whispering “look. See how you bleed the same as me.” So he can delicately pool each droplet into its own indelibly marked saucer — one for my tribe, one for yours — and finally, someday, some distant day, behold at a balanced scale and think, drenched in blood, “look. See how we all bled the same.” Does it really matter how much blood there is as long as the pounds of flesh are equal?

Such bitter talk about the perversity of the oppressed comes in this book not from Philip Roth, not from any Israeli, but from the first victim of Ziad’s obsession: his wife, Anna. Her voice:

“Another victim who can’t forget,” said Anna, meanwhile studying the face of the check with those globular eyes as though there at last she might find the clue as to why fate had delivered her into this misery. “All these victims and their horrible scars. But, tell me,” she asked, and as simply as a child asks why the grass is green, “how many victims can possibly stand on this tiny bit of soil?”

…

“There is nothing in the future for these Jews and these Arabs but more tragedy, suffering, and blood. … There is no trust and there will not be for another thousand years. ‘To live on this earth.’ Living in Boston was living on this earth—” she angrily reminded George. “Or isn’t it ‘life’ any longer when people have a big, bright apartment and quiet, intelligent neighbors and the simple civilized pleasure of a good job and raising children? Isn’t it ‘life’ when you read books and listen to music and choose your friends because of their qualities and not because they share your roots? Roots! A concept for cavemen to live by! Is the survival of Palestinian culture, Palestinian people, Palestinian heritage, is that really a ‘must’ in the evolution of humanity? Is all that mythology a greater must than the survival of my son?”

…

“Palestine is a lie! Zionism is a lie! Diasporism is a lie! The biggest lie yet! I will not sacrifice Michael to more lies!”

Well, which way, Middle Eastern man? The cause or the people?

And it is just so easy to forget the people for the cause.

Philip Roth has two friends in Israel, not counting George Ziad. One is a novelist like himself, Aharon Appelfeld. Appelfeld was a victim of the Holocaust, an example of the few both blessed and cursed to be able to turn tragedy into art. The other, Apter, also a victim of the Holocaust, is not. He is a “resourceless, deformed, infolded spirit on whom the grip of a horrible past was never relaxed, someone who, even without an insurrection in progress, hourly awaited his execution.” “Lonely, fear-ridden, fragile.” Apter constantly tells Philip Roth of the ways he is wronged — how people cheat him, spit on him, curse at him. Are these stories true? Or do they, Operation Shylock wonders, like all fiction “provide the storyteller with the lie through which to expose his unspeakable truth.” Apter is a sad, scared man, under siege from the world, still bearing on his back the long nights he spent in Nazi forests. Apter is the reminder that adversity is not worth the price of adversity. The art and wisdom which explodes out of suffering is so much louder than the lonely, fearful, massive brokenness which slumps softly into the twilight of life. How much mythology is Apter worth?

As Philip Roth flits between one explosive speaker and another, impinging on his spy-games is the serious thought that he is losing time to see his kind, fearful friend. All these words, all this moving and shaking, and somewhere in Israel, Apter is painting and hoping to see his good friend. Philip Roth meets his double, and the clock ticks. He sees the trial, and the minute hand moves. He finds George, the sun sets. Smilesburger’s agents lock him in a room for three hours. Three hours longer Apter is fearful and alone instead of fearful and with a friend. Tick, tock. How many minutes do you plan to spend on these games? How much exposure is required for secondary smoke and mirrors? When does it metastasize? When do you lose everything to it? When do you forget the children? When does the cause eat the people?

Is concern for Apter just one way to justify Israel? Smilesburger accuses Philip Roth of using Appelfeld to try to make legible the nothing that is at Israel’s heart, yet even he forgets Apter. Appelfeld at least has a voice. Does anyone remember Apter? Ziad certainly accuses Israel of justifying itself through the victims of the Holocaust. Yet Israel does not justify itself through the living victims of the Holocaust but rather the dead ones — it is “Never Again,” after all. Israel is supposed to prevent another Holocaust. Apter is a poor excuse; the next Apter, the possibility of another Apter, is what Israel justifies itself through. Any justification of Israel through the living Apter would have to reckon with the actual facts of Apter.

Apter may be in a nation of Jews, but he remains a victim. Nothing can change that. Especially not Israel. In fact, at one point he begs Philip Roth (who is actually, unbeknownst to Apter, Moishe Pipik) to bring him to America. When Philip Roth discovers that Moishe Pipik had met with Apter, had promised him safety in America, had made him weep with joy by offering something that Moishe Pipik did not have to give, he is furious. This fake, this fraud, had played with Apter — with helpless, gullible, paranoid Apter.

An American Jew in Israel

Lurking in the background, only now and again springing out of the subtext, is this constant contrast between Israel and America. Philip Roth is a Jew, sure, but he’s an American Jew. Smilesburger accuses him of sloughing off the responsibility of his people’s history: pathetically safe, pathetically individual, pathetically American. Smilesburger is an Israeli Jew, claiming the people, claiming the tragedy, claiming the war. Operation Shylock begins in America with Philip Roth recovering from a psychologically torturous fog brought on by a botched surgery and bad pills. Before long, though, Philip Roth is in Israel and combating a very different psychologically torturous fog: espionage. Israel, the land of spies and war and tribes, America the land of medication and peace and individuals.

But even this is not quite right, for Philip Roth has a drop of the Israeli in him. As he confesses: “there’s something in Smilesburger that evokes not my real father but my fantastic one — that takes over, that takes charge of me.” The bond still holds. The American, at least for a few generations, keeps a piece of the old country in his heart. And what is one to do about that? In Operation Shylock, it is largely the old country¹² which gets a drubbing — its mystique curdles into paranoia, its magic contorts itself into a curse, all the elegance and tradition drips with blood.

But the book starts not with a healthy, happy Philip Roth in America — it begins with an uncaring surgeon and remote corporate deception leading to a disintegration of Philip Roth’s mental faculties. America is not a solved problem, and (real-life) Philip Roth explores its very intense lack of solvedness elsewhere.

The only works of (real-life) Philip Roth’s which is carry any real narrative weight in Operation Shylock are his short stories “Eli the Fanatic” and “Defender of the Faith.” In Operation Shylock, some Israeli students recognize him by the courthouse and ask him to speak to them and their class about Eli the Fanatic and Defender of the Faith. To get a full sense of their youthful overeager sincerity, one more block quote:

“First of all,” Tal was saying to me, “we would like to know how you live as a Jew in America, and how you have solved the conflicts you brought up n your stories. What’s with the ‘American dream’? From the story ‘Eli, the Fanatic’ it seems like the only way of being a Jew in America is being a fanatic. Is it the only way? What about making aliyah? In Israel, in our society, the religious fanatics are seen in a negative way. You talk about suffering—” …

“We were impressed,” Tal continued, “by the beautiful style of literature you write, but still not all of the problems were solved in our mind. The conflict between the Jewish identity and being a part of another nation, the situation in the West Bank and Gaza, and the problem of double loyalty as in the Pollard case and its influence on the American Jewish community—”

I put a hand up to stop him. “I appreciate your interest. Right now I’ve got to be somewhere else. I’ll write your teacher.”

But the boy had come from the Jordan Valley on a very early bus to Jerusalem and had waited nervously in the lobby for me to wake up and get started, and he wasn’t prepared, having gotten up his head of steam, to back off yet. “What comes first,” he asked me, “nationality or Jewish identity? Tell us about your identity crisis.”

How perfectly naive! To think that an author has solved the problem he has posed. Eli the Fanatic is a story is about the allure of the tribe, but from the other side: an old world Jew in America. In assimilated America, suburban America, Protestant + modern upscale liberal Jews America, in that America an observant school for young Jewish children is established. And Eli is caught in between the two due to a dispute over zoning. Stuck between the myopic, needling, vapid Americans and the serious, obtuse, substantive old world, Eli cracks. Or is made whole. I suppose it depends on where you think he goes at the end.¹³ The students are asking about Eli the Fanatic and asking who is right. The story does not contain the answer, merely the question. The point is the elaboration, the point is the expression, the expansion of your life. The point is saying look, look at this tragedy. What shrill peace, what thundering emptiness — what it is to be a mere human caught in between.

Perhaps Philip Roth himself said it best: in all these works there is “the same glaring pathos: one, that Jews are ordinary; two, that they are denied ordinary lives. … The center of the Jewish dream, what feeds the fervor both of Zionism and Diasporism: the way Jews would be people if they could forget they were Jews. … But this is not to be. The incredible drama of being a Jew.”

When All You Have Is Words

Roth is not a partisan, but a critic.

One of the few other reviews I read of Operation Shylock was written in the wake of Philip Roth’s death. It combined a love for the writer with the sort of frustration with an artist that can only be borne of such love: that against the reviewer’s expectations, Philip Roth would not endorse Diasporism, but instead mocked it and the reviewer’s very expectations.

Moishe Pipik is the Diasporist prophet of Operation Shylock. He is a strange twin of Philip Roth. At first, Philip Roth cannot believe they even seem alike — the voice is overdone, the stature not quite right, the way Pipik writes filled with amateur mistakes. Yet over time, much to his chagrin, the more Philip Roth is in Moishe Pipik’s presence, the more he finds these differences fade from perception. Moishe Pipik proclaims that he is following Philip Roth’s words, that Philip Roth’s books are his inspiration, his guide. Moishe Pipik attempts to conquer his place as the ‘real’ Philip Roth, the Philip Roth in the world, the Philip Roth which is action, the Philip Roth “which is not words.”

Moishe Pipik is Philip Roth in the funhouse mirror of political gamesmanship. Moishe Pipik is Philip Roth when people want to make a political project out of his novels, make an ideology out of Portnoy’s Complaint. He is false, shallow, perverse, impotent (in every sense, as the novel makes very clear). Philip Roth sees this reflection and hates it.

Philip Roth mocks Diasporism because, yes, it is a nationalism. It may be a self-sacrificial, guilt-filled nationalism,¹⁴ but it is one nonetheless. It is about a special mission of the Jewish people, whether one frames it in terms of their survival in Europe or their allegiance to the stateless. Diasporism is not a refusal of ethnonationalism because it is predicated on making a politics out of a tribe. Yes, it may not be an ethnonationalism which wants a state, but tell me, reviewer: do you believe that a Jew must especially be on the side of the stateless? Do you believe a Jew has special political necessities? Do you believe a Jew must move, must leave their family and home to be a Diasporist?

The nationalism of a nation-state is just the most common sort of nationalism. The core of nationalism is the sinking of the individual mind into the troubled unit of the tribe. It is an identification with a group and its mission over people and their troubles. To the extent that Diasporism is a plea to sympathize with the oppressed it is not a nationalism — yet to the extent which it demands one to become unequivocally a Jew, not a person, it is one.

Operation Shylock seems to be the sort of of brilliant book which occurs when an incredible author feels socially compelled to write about a personal subject against their will. I am thinking principally of The Second Sex and de Beauvoir’s reticence to become a philosopher merely of women, rather than the whole human race. The whole book grasps at the uselessness of words. How impotent it must feel for an author for words to be turned into a game, for every sentence to be both what it is and also everything else and also nothing at all.

There is a hole in the center of this review for the same reason there is a hole in the center of the book: it doesn’t have its grand mission. Roth decides to help Israel, but we have no catharsis. The mission exists — it is the impetus for the writing of this book — but we do not see it. Of course we don’t! The mission is what gives the national project its sense of direction. With all its grand conflict and excitement, the mission provides movement to the massive nothing at the heart of the tribe. When you omit the mission, all you have are the people and their voices, their performances.

The mission could have crystallized the book, put its many parts in firm connection with one another — it could have given the book a direction. But Operation Shylock doesn’t have a grand mission: Roth is a critic, not a partisan.

Hayao Miyazaki’s recent film The Boy and the Heron was called How Do You Live? in Japan. He was asked in an interview what his answer to the question was. He said “I am making this movie because I do not have the answer.” For all his bluster and pride, I am not sure that Philip Roth’s honest answer for Operation Shylock would be so different. Philip Roth loved America, from what I gather. He, like the sentiment in this touching post by John Ganz, may have even believed that America, far more than Israel, could be the promised land for Jewish people. But Philip Roth did not dream of America — he lived it. He lived its complications and its extremes, its successes and its failures. He lived the vapidity of non-national 20th-century America, and it will never be a fault laid at Roth’s feet that he is one to paper over such blemishes. Perhaps he had more hope for America than Israel, perhaps its tragedies seemed more tractable, more humane. I don’t know. At this level of supposition, whatever I say probably says more about me than him. “The greatness,” it was once said, “of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” Perhaps.

Operation Shylock is not a book by someone who knows something about the question of Israel but by someone who knows every answer to the question of Israel and yet for whom the question still remains. Albert Camus once said, “a character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.” So Philip Roth collected voices. And the book, if nothing else, is a collection of these voices, of their problems, their foibles, their wrong turns.

Roth himself does not leave the pages uncriticized. He is a patsy, a performer, unserious, without allegiance, and more. Operation Shylock is a book by someone who doesn’t know how the story ends, and who possibly isn’t even sure that saying the story would matter all that much. After all, he wrote the book and the Palestinians still suffer, Apter still fears, and time marches on.

The Fever Pitch

This book is topical. Tragically topical, both in the current events in the land it is set in and the terrible resemblance its voices have to our own. Everything seen and said in our very important, very new, very now Israel Commentary™ can be found, I am quite sure, somewhere in these pages.

The book contains too much to write here. Someone else will have to think about Moishe Pipik’s self-hatred; about Wanda Jane’s antisemitism and servility in both faith and love; the frank brutality of the Israeli security state; about all the ways each voice in the book cuts at all the others; about the connection between identity and responsibility and what it is like for someone to take your name; about the tragic inability of Jews to lead normal lives; about this and so much more. The book is a scream in every language it knows. It is a tower of babel which contains its own skeleton key, but once you unlock it you discover how silly it was that you once believed God’s wrath was the mere multitude of languages instead of something far deeper, something of which the proliferation of languages is only the scantest glimpse. No, it is not language which breaks humanity’s communion — it is not language which sets us apart, which draws lines on maps or digs trenches in fields. It’s something else.

This book aches. It should not have lived this long in such a state. I’m not sure I leave this book with more clarity on my own politics, but I certainly leave it with more compassion — for the twisted Ziad, for the raging Moishe, for the bewildered Roth. I, a nice liberal American, can call for a two-state solution and believe it is the only possible route to peace. But the Ziads will not want two states, and the Smilesburgers will not care. It is all a tower of babel upon the holiest soil in the world.

Perhaps something has broken. Perhaps this newest bout of bloodletting will lead to a new place. I do not know. Sadly, it is not always true that brutal acts take vengeance on those who enact them, though it often is. I do not know. I am generally of the school that in wars like this, you create more evil people than you are able to kill, but it is not always Demjanjuk and the Mossad agents who are broken — it is quite often Ziad and Apter. Bloodletting has killed many people for little reason, and it is rare that it is the one who cuts that suffers consequences.

In We Are Here, one of the songs performed was a lullaby sung by Brenda Russell. The woman who wrote the song was in a Nazi death camp when she noticed that a group of children, terrified, were being led into a gas chamber alone. She demanded that she join them. To comfort them, she sang that song as they walked and waited to die. She was greater than I or hopefully anyone I know will ever have the chance to be. I know no tribe worthy of causing the creation of even one more such lullaby. Whatever is to occur, let it be remembered that, if not longer then for 75 years, a country stood. Paranoid, protective, and in deep, deep pain. L’shalom rav.

1. A pastor of a local church memorably went off-script to say that “as long as there is a Bright Star church in Chicago, the Chicago Jewish community will never stand alone.”

2. Specifically, it is focused on Ashkenazi Jews and Israel. So, likewise, will be this review.

3. Or am a scientific racist that understands this is all just basic biology…

4. Although, it is sometimes forgotten just how intermixed the many ethnicities of Europe (especially Central and Eastern Europe) were at this time. The scale ethnic cleansing during and after WW2 in Europe gives some sense of the 19th century topography. While many know about the scale of fighting, deportations, and massacres during WW2, it is sometimes forgotten how much population transfer occurred after it. As reported in Postwar by Tony Judt:

What was taking place in 1945, and had been underway for at least a year, was thus an unprecedented exercise in ethnic cleansing and population transfer. In part this was the outcome of ‘voluntary’ ethnic separation: Jewish survivors leaving a Poland where they were unsafe and unwanted, for example, or Italians departing the Istrian peninsular rather than live under Yugoslav rule. Many ethnic minorities who had collaborated with the occupying forces … fled with the retreating Wehrmacht to avoid retribution … and never returned. …

Elsewhere, however, official policy was at work well before the war ended. The Germans of course began this, with the removal and genocide of the Jews, and the mass expulsions of Poles and other Slav nations. … The Soviet authorities in their turn engineered a series of forced population exchanges between Ukraine and Poland; one million Poles fled or were expelled from their homes in what was not western Ukraine, while half a million Ukrainians left Poland for the Soviet Union …

Bulgaria transferred 160,000 Turks to Turkey; Czechoslovakia, under a February 1946 agreement with Hungary, exchanged 120,000 Slovaks living in Hungary for an equivalent number of Hungarians from communities north of the Danube, in Slovakia. Other transfers of this kind took place between Poland and Lithuania and between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union; 400,000 people from southern Yugoslavia were moved to land in the north to take the place of 600,000 departed Germans and Italians. … But the largest affected group was the Germans.

… As early as 1942 the British had privately acceded to Czech requests for a post-war removal of the Sudeten German population, and the Russians and Americans fell into line the following year. … Germans (as well as Hungarians and other ‘traitors’) were to have their property placed under state control. … Nearly three million Germans, most of them from the Czech Sudetenland, were then expelled into Germany in the course of the following eighteen months. Approximately 267,000 died in the course of the expulsions. …

From Hungary a further 623,000 Germans were expelled, from Romania 786,000, from Yugoslavia about half a million and from Poland 1.3 million. (24-27)

And none of this is near the scale of the 39 million who died in the course of the war, a little over half of which were civilians. As distasteful as the nationalist theories of the 19th century were, in a sense they were acted out in the wake of what they had attempted to avoid.

5. Why yes, it is interesting that at one time an increase in manufacturing jobs was believed to have been feminizing. There is probably something one could say about masculinity and changing definitions here, but I will leave that to someone else, I suppose.

6. The main character of Operation Shylock is named Philip Roth and is a writer with the stature, works, and, well, character of our own world’s Philip Roth. The book’s plot also includes excerpts from a real trial that occurred in Israel and a real interview that the real Philip Roth conducted in Israel while the real trial was ongoing. The book is quasiautobiographical. Did the events of the book happen? Does it matter? It’s postmodern — unless you’re going to write a dissertation, just read the thing.

7. Religious anti-Zionism also has a long history in ultra-Orthodox communities.

8. All three different things, with different relationships to the claim here, but nonetheless correlated.

9. This was stated by the sympathetic character of the defense attorney in his closing remarks. He means to say that the wealth of possible psychological explanations can lead to any situation interpreted in any way dictated by the whims of interest or prejudice. In his own words:

“The defendant, at night, in the garden, climbs the fence as he is fleeing, and strikes down with a brass pestle the servant who has seized him by the leg. Then he at once jumps back down into the garden and for a whole five minutes fusses over the fallen man, trying to see whether he has killed him or not. Now, not for anything with the prosecutor believe in the truthfulness of the defendant’s testimony that he jumped down to the old man Grigory out of pity. ‘No,’ he says, ‘how could there be such sensitivity at such a moment; this is unnatural; he jumped down precisely in order to make sure that the only witness to this evil deed was dead, and thereby testified that he had committed this evil deed, since he could not have jumped down into the garden for any other reason, inclination, or feeling.’ There you have psychology; but let us take the same psychology and apply it to this case, only from the other end, and the result will be no less plausible. The murderer jumps down as a precaution, to make sure if the witness is alive or not, and yet, according to the words of the prosecutor himself, he had just left in the study of his father, whom he had murdered, a colossal piece of evidence against himself in the form of a torn envelope on which it was written that it contained three thousand roubles. ‘Were he to have taken this envelope with him, no one in the whole world would have learned that the envelope existed, or the money inside it, and that the defendant had therefore robbed the money.’ These are the prosecutor’s own words. Well, so you see, on the one hand the man was not cautious enough, he lost his head, got frightened, and ran away leaving evidence on the floor, but when two minutes later he strikes and kills another man, then all at once the most heartless and calculating sense of caution comes to our service.”

10. The most cutting of Operation Shylock’s barbs for Smilesburger: “the misanthrope whose misanthropic delight is to proclaim loudly and tearfully that it’s hatred he most hates.”

11. The specific framing of this question is somewhat inspired by Matt Yglesias’s writings on Israel and Palestine. Most specifically:

The Palestinian cause or the Palestinian people

Zeroing-in on the refugee question is particularly important if we’re concerned about the state of Arab public opinion.

Guyer writes that “Palestine is so central to the Arab Middle East that even US military leaders historically understood the peril of ignoring the Palestinian cause.” And I think it’s important to understand what that turn of phrase means.

You might think it means Arab public opinion is extremely sympathetic to Palestinians and eager to see Arab governments help Palestinians have better lives. Were that true, you might expect to see Egypt opening its doors to refugees fleeing the carnage in Gaza. Of course that would be a logistical and economic burden on Egypt. But countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates are right there and could help out with money. You can, of course, understand from general immigration politics why Egypt might not want to do this and why the richer Arab states might not want to help out with money. Generally speaking, “you should do stuff to help foreigners” is a hard sell in politics.

What’s peculiar about the Palestinian issue, though, is that this normal level of indifference to the welfare of foreigners coexists with what we’re told is a profound level of preoccupation with their fate.

The key is that their concern is the success of the Palestinian Cause (the reversal of the Nakba) rather than the welfare of the Palestinian people.

Note that Amnesty sort of glossed over the fact that Palestinian refugees living in Jordan and Lebanon lack full access to employment rights and social services. And in this context, “Palestinian refugees” does not necessarily mean someone who fled from settler violence six weeks ago. If your great-grandparents were kicked out of their village near Acre when they were kids and fled to a refugee camp in Lebanon, and then had children in the 1950s, who had kids in the 1980s, who had you in the 2010s, then you are not a citizen of Lebanon. You are a stateless Palestinian refugee. And the Palestinian cause means fighting for your right to return to that village near Acre, not fighting for your right to enjoy citizenship in the country where you and your parents and your grandparents were born.

To be clear, this is a population of a few hundred thousand people out of millions of refugees, but the fact that pro-Palestinian advocacy generally does not mean advocating for the right of people born in Lebanon or Jordan to become citizens of those countries is relevant to understanding broader dynamics.

12. I include Israel in ‘the old country’ even though the term is usually reserved for Europe. I do this because it seems to me that while Europe largely takes a backseat in the book, it is linked to Israel through the machinations of Diasporism as the geographical subjects and objects of national projects, while America stands apart. For a generally laudatory (in the direction of America) exploration of this distinction, see My Country Is Not a Nation.

13. In “Eli the Fanatic,” the only children around are the children of the old world Jews. They laugh and play, but cringe from Eli’s American visage. Other than them, no children are mentioned. There are no children in the rationalized, neat world of the Americans.

14. Or, as Philip Roth accuses it via the character of Moishe Pipik, even a self-hating nationalism.