This week’s issue of the New Statesman (on the newsstands from tomorrow and available here) features an interview with Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. We covered a range of topics (some that made it into the final cut and some that didn’t) including the Occupy movement, the impact of the internet, the Israeli/Palestinian peace process and anti-Semitism. Here’s brief taste:
Israel
Asked how the Israeli /Palestinian problem should be resolved, Sacks says:
A two-state solution. [Religious leaders] can shape an environment conducive to peace and we certainly have a role to play in protecting each other’s access to holy places, but beyond that, politics should be left to politicians.
A leading Palestinian negotiator said Israeli settlement-building and a two-state solution are “mutually exclusive”. Do you agree?
All I know, having spoken first to Tony Blair, then to Dennis Ross, then to Bill Clinton himself, is that the talks that Clinton convened at Camp David in 2000 and early 2001 came very, very close to agreement. At the end, many of the Palestinian delegation wanted to accept Ehud Barak’s proposed offer. So I have never despaired of a two-state solution.
Anti-Semitism
In his 2009 book Future Tense: a Vision for Jews and Judaism, Sacks described anti-Zionism as a “mutant form” of anti-Semitism. Asked to expand on that view, he says:
Anti-Semitism always mutates because the immune system of the body politics develops an immunity. So a virus must mutate. The new anti-Semitism takes the form of focusing on Jews as a nation rather than Jews as individuals, focuses on Israel rather than Diaspora communities and focuses on the language of human rights rather than the language of race or, in the Middle Ages, on the language of theology.
In the book you appear to imply that the virus of anti-Semitism has penetrated the United Nations . . .
In terms of the condemnation of Israel by the Security Council, Israel has been condemned out of all proportions to all other states put together. That’s a documented phenomenon.
That Steve Jobs quote
Over the weekend, Sacks was quoted in a number of papers including the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail saying: “The consumer society was laid down by the late Steve Jobs coming down the mountain with two tablets, iPad one and iPad two, and the result is that we now have a culture of iPod, iPhone, iTunes, i, i, i … When you’re an individualist, egocentric culture and you only care about ‘i’, you don’t do terribly well.”
But Sacks says now that his words were misinterpreted and that he thinks that Jobs is a “genius”:
It was a joke! I said ‘iPad, iPhone, i, i, i…’ Maybe it wasn’t a very good joke
On the impact of the web more generally, Sacks said that while the “good vastly outweighs the bad”:
the internet through email lists and blogs is, unfortunately, the best disseminator of paranoia we have yet created, and it does tend to segregate people into sects of the like-minded.
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