Israel and the Endtimes, reviewed by Isaac Mozeson
ISRAEL AND THE END TIMES: Writings on the Logic and Surface Turbulence of History, Eugene Narrett, Ph.D. (Authorhouse 2006), 183 pp, Review by Isaac Mozeson
Professor Eugene Narrett has written another strikingly eloquent collection of essays focusing on the Middle East and geopolitics. He follows up Gathered Against Jerusalem (2000) and Israel Awakened (2001) with thirty essays that discuss the situation centering on Israel from summer 2001 to early 2006.
While analyzing a crucial political situation, Narrett is always writing about philosophy and comparative civilization. This explains his unique aerial snapshots of the cultural scene, and why the essays are written in masterfully sculptured prose, with marbling from rich veins of literature: Greek myths to Hawthorne and Orwell.
Instead of growing more cowed by the prevailing political correctness and Israel-bashing, the author has looked more deeply and critically at Western civilization. This third book also reflects deepened reading of and identification with classical Jewish texts, especially the book of Genesis.
Narrett opens with reminders of the problematic pagan and Christian underpinnings of a failing Western civilization, which is betraying its Jewish root and botching the war on terror. Criminally negligent forces around the American government are blamed for faults as large as refusing to see how Jihad is mainstream Koranic Islam, and as small as having Mohammad Atta released from an Israeli jail as a “confidence-building measure.”
The author explains why Israel’s separation barrier is unworkable and a boon to terrorists who would flock to areas ceded by Jerusalem. He likens the “unilateral separation” favored by conservatives like George Will and Charles Krauthammer to the dangerous buffoonery of Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak. Israel’s security wall is compared to the self-made ghetto walls of Pithom and Ramses near the Israelite settlement in Goshen, Egypt, history’s first concentration camps to facilitate Jewish genocide.
The “Land for Peace” pretext for shrinking the historic Jewish homeland began long before Nixon and Carter, feels the author. He dates it from back to the British Foreign Ministry that in 1922 gave away the scarcely-populated Eastern half of the Palestine Mandate to placate their Arab clients. The U.N. Partition Plan of 1947 took away even more land that was to have been part of Israel. Narrett quotes PLO leaders who readily admit that Oslo and the “Peace Process” is their Trojan Horse, their cynical ploy to destroy Israel by a “peace of the grave.”
Narrett has fun with the Moslem riots that plagued Paris in November 2005. Turnabout is fair play, so the author warns Chirac that there “is no military solution” to the riots, that he must not use police lest they further “the cycle of violence” or put up roadblocks to defer the bomb throwers’ rights to protest their insufficient government subsidies. Notre Dame will be a Mosque, and Eurabia is a future fact. Why is this happening to a Western Civilization obsessed with attacking its own Jewish roots? Because it is payback time for centuries of rapine and murder of those other Semites, the Jews.
Professor Narrett could not have known in winter 2005 that Gaza would dominate the news in several months. But two essays discuss Gush Katif, the Jewish enterprise in Gaza, and the biblical past of the area, harking back to the people of Gerar and their hostility toward Isaac and Rebecca. The Arabs of northern Gaza still refer to their location as Gerara. They had warned the Jewish settlers that the area was cursed and would not yield produce. Thirty years of bumper crops later, the 5,000 Gaza Arabs hired by Jews admitted that the curse was lifted, and even rainfall was more plentiful. The forced evacuations are not in this book, but one essay is entitled in part: “How Israel’s Ruling Elites Became Cossacks.”
Always attuned to historical ironies, the author notes that the name “Palestine” was adopted by the Romans to blot out the Jewish history of Judea. Yet the biblical Philistines were not non-Jewish natives, but “invaders” which is what the Hebrew word Pilishtim means. Therefore, when CNN (called by Narrett the de facto sister station of Al Jazeera) touts the Palestinian “people,” they are actually referring to non-Jewish invaders of the land deeded to Jews in the world’s most ancient and widely published texts that comes complete with real estate records.
With the war in Iraq and Iranian uranium on today’s front burner, Narrett’s messages about the threat of Islam and the threat to Israel are astoundingly relevant. A disturbing and compelling case is made that via the “Road Map” the West is on a runaway train to suicide and apocalypse. While Bush and the Neocons are barely applying the brakes a switch to Democratic tracks might only make for an uglier train wreck.
Surely, Narrett must have much to say about the traumatic Gaza disengagement that followed the publication of this collection. Stand by: his fourth collection is being prepared for publication by spring 2007.
Isaac Mozeson is the author of The Origin of Speeches: Intelligent Design in Language (2006)