SHYLOCK AT THE HAGUE: Embracing Shylock and Disdaining the International Criminal Court

By Howard Rotberg, NER

“As for legal niceties, the team of august lawyers Israel summoned to the Hague gives a shot in the arm to the ICJ, signalling that Israel concedes the case can be won on legalities. Israel was naive to rely only on jurists to defeat antisemites. One expert on anti-Israel propaganda could be worth a bench full of gowns.”  – Steve Apfel

But, since I am a dog, beware my fangs:”
– Shylock in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice

Anti-Israelism has passed into the realm of antisemitism through its holding of Israel to different standards than any other country, and its focus on the retributive aspects of Israeli reactions, rather than the actions of murderers attacking Israel.

The underlying premise is that modernity and culture itself, whether it was the modernity of a supposedly cultured German society in 1939, or whether it is present day modernity and culture, offers no protection for the well-being and safety of Jewish civilians.   To the extent that modernity has embraced moral relativism, it is by nature hostile to our cause.   And no assertion of a higher morality, be it religious, secular, judicial, or (as the Jews and later the American founding fathers saw it), a type of hybrid where religious notions could be adapted to a liberal, secular, and just democracy will be attractive to post-modern relativists.

The relativists, however, have eliminated the notion of personal and community responsibility from their lexicon.  The severance of rights from responsibilities is the essence of today’s anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism.   If the Palestinians are going to have the right to a sovereign nation, they must accept the responsibility to stop killing Jewish civilians, and the responsibility to create some kind of justice system and some freedoms in their own society.   If the relativists simply critique Israel’s reactions without dissecting the actions that caused those reactions, that is bias, and a rather nasty bias, too. In a world of moral relativism, in a world of violent Islamism where European countries again are sacrificing Jews to aggressive totalitarianism (this time Islamism), we need more than ever a vigilance in our pursuit of justice.  Tragically, the more vigilant we Jews and our homeland are, the more we are labeled “vengeful”, “disproportionate”, “unmerciful” and “extreme”.   In other words, we risk being seen as Shylocks.

At least, Shakespeare gave Shylock the voice to ruminate over his situation (“Hath not a Jew eyes?”); the vast majority of persecuted Jews, including those of the Holocaust, had no Shakespeares to emphasize their profound moral struggles and their ultimate fates, which were certainly no more palatable than Shylock’s.

Jonathan Pollard, about whom I wrote in The Second Catastrophe, stepped outside the law; Shylock tried to have his “contract” enforced within the law.  In fact, Shylock was judged in a sham of a trial, presided over by Portia impersonating a Roman doctor named Balthasar.   Driven to madness by his faith that a Court controlled by anti-Semites could ever dispense justice, Shylock continues to assert his claim for a surety’s pound of flesh, even when presented with the option of taking three times the monetary indebtedness.   Pollard’s greatest error, ultimately, was also his faith in a corrupted Justice system (corrupted by Caspar Weinberger’s secret memo to the Judge.)  He also passed into a form of madness due to the refusal of his superiors to pass on a clear threat to an ally, and so he also ignores justice while he continues to insist on it.   He thought a plea bargain for a charge of passing secrets to a friendly nation would attract the appropriate sentence for that crime, not a sentence commensurate with treason.   Shylock’s fate was forced conversion to Christianity; Pollard’s fate was abandonment by his community – many American Jews would “excommunicate” him if they could.  Finally, after serving his unjust sentence he has been released and is now living in Israel.

If, as American politician Barry Goldwater argued, “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue”, and if there were some severe problems in the administration of justice when it comes to both Pollard and the fictional Shylock, there is a problem, that too many commentators have glossed over.   The actions of Pollard and Shylock can be seen as neurotic responses to travesties of justice, rather than themselves being unjust.  In Shylock’s case, look at what the Duke, who presided over the Court in Venice (before turning it over to Portia’s impersonation) had to say to Antonio, at the very start of the trial, about the other litigant:

“I am sorry for thee: thou art come to answer
A stony adversary, an inhuman wretch.”

A Court this predisposed against him could not render justice to Shylock, and he knew it.  That knowledge more than anything else explains why he turns aside an offer of three times the debt, and instead insists on his contractual “pound of flesh”.  As he states in the quote at the start of this Chapter, having been called a “dog” without any cause, and since he has been pre-judged to be a dog, then, he states, “beware my fangs”.

The Jewish “dog”, says Shakespeare, is forced to seek salvation in justice because he cannot understand Christian concepts of mercy.   Says Portia in the famous speech which starts with the words:

“The quality of mercy is not strained…”:
“And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much

To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence against the merchant there.”

Goldwater disagreed:   Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Goldwater says that the Americans are with the Jews on this one.

This is the key to understanding our current cultural struggle against Islamism, and why the Americans and the Israelis are on one side, and most Europeans are on the other side. It is an issue of Justice and Liberty.  Unfortunately, any Jew in England or France or Israel today who insists on Justice, may find himself descending into that particular madness of Shylock.  Israel avoids this fate only because of its military and other elements of its power and is not as isolated as Shylock.

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Howard Rotberg is the author of The Second Catastrophe:  A Novel About a Book and its Author;  Tolerism:  The Ideology Revealed;  The Ideological Path to Submission; and the forthcoming Second Generation Radical;  The World Through One Man’s Second Generation Lens, from which this essay is excerpted.