The chronicles of Tuvia Tenenbom’s ‘Catch the Jew!’ are troubling at times

In “Catch the Jew!” (Gefen Publishing House, 2015, 467 pp.), playwright and journalist Tuvia Tenenbom chronicles the seven months he spent traversing Israel, the West Bank/Judea and Samaria in 2013-2014. During this time, he met with Jews, Druze, Palestinians and a whole lot of Europeans. His assignment, as given to him by his editor, was to conduct a walking study of Israel – which he had left 33 years previously and then visited “only sporadically” and “for extremely short durations” – including its diverse people and their most intimate thoughts.

Tenenbom goes to Israeli cities and towns, Palestinian cities and refugee camps, remote Bedouin encampments and isolated Jewish settlements where he encounters an impressive array of characters from prostitutes and stray cats to Israeli members of the Knesset and Palestinian Authority officials.

Though always informing those whom he interviews that he is an author and a journalist, Tenenbom assumes different accents and adopts various personas depending on his audience, and presents himself at times as Tuvia, Tobi or Tobias and as a Jew, German or an Austrian.

He is an idiosyncratic and amusing narrator, and for the most part maintains a sense of humor even while describing very troubling matters. Perhaps the most troubling and eye-opening sections of “Catch the Jew!” surround some of the more than 100 European and European-funded Israeli non-government organizations (NGOs) operating in Israel and the Palestinian territories that are dedicated to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The primary function of most of these NGOs, Tenenbom contends, is to catch Jews doing something wrong and then broadcast that fact to the world.

His conclusions are somber and depressing. He finds that “the inexplicable hatred of the Jew refuses to die” and in the end leaves Israel dismayed and in despair: “Witnessing the tremendous investments and endless attempts of the Europeans, not to mention the Germans, all geared to undermine the Jews in this land, in Israel, was an extremely unsettling experience.” Not only that, he finds that often the inexplicable hatred is helped along by the Israelis themselves. “If logic is any guide, Israel will not survive,” he predicts. “Besieged by hate from without and from within, no land can survive for very long.”

It is in chronicling this besieging hatred of Israel today that “Catch the Jew!” makes its most valuable contribution to understanding the realities of the Arab-Israeli conflict. For example, Tenenbom accompanies young Italians, brought to Israel by the EU-funded NGO Casa per la Pace Milano, on a trip to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum. The NGO has hired Itamar Shapira, an Israeli citizen and self-proclaimed “ex-Jew,” as its guide. He is a guide with a clear agenda: Holocaust inversion, i.e., portraying today’s Jews as yesterday’s Nazis.

“In Israel today, Africans are being put into concentration camps,” Shapira tells the Italians. Reaching a section of the museum on the Final Solution, Shapira explains to them: “What you see here is all from the eye of Jewish victims, this is after all a Jewish museum. But what you see here, with the Nazis and the Jews, is also happening today, in Palestine. What happens here in Israel is a Holocaust. Today, the Israeli army is doing the same thing, and the American army too.” 

African concentration camps in Israel? Holocaust in Palestine? Israeli and American Nazi soldiers? Could the Italians possibly believe this? But Tenenbom observes: “When you walk with Itamar, seeing the dead of Auschwitz but hearing the name of Palestine, watching a Nazi officer on a video but hearing the name Israel, you can’t deny how effective Itamar’s propaganda is.”

Major General Jibril Rajoub – former head of the Palestinian Preventive Security Force and current head of the Palestinian Football Association and the Palestine Olympic Committee – also realizes the effectiveness of that propaganda, and he makes use of it in his lengthy conversations with Tenenbom, whom he thinks is a German gentile. Rajoub tells Tenenbom that if Hitler woke up from his grave and saw Israel’s brutality, he would be shocked and that Hitler could learn from Israeli soldiers. 

Holocaust inversion, as Jewish British author and journalist Howard Jacobson has explained, is “the latest species of Holocaust denial.” But the older species certainly haven’t died out. In Jenin, Tenenbom (presenting himself as a German gentile) joins Atef Abu a-Rub, a Palestinian journalist and a top researcher for the Israeli NGO B’Tselem, to visit Bedouin encampments. At one encampment, the topic of Germany’s murder of Jews during WWII comes up. Atef Abu a-Rub offers his “historical” opinion of the assertion (“what they say”) that millions of Jews were killed: “This is a lie. I don’t believe it.” B’Tselem eventually fired Atef Abu a-Rub due to Tenenbom’s exposé. 

Tenenbom makes clear Israel’s very difficult situation, but there is room for more than despair and dismay. As one reads “Catch the Jew!” one is appreciative of the book’s idiosyncrasies and humor, and is grateful to its colorful author for the time and effort put into bringing many troubling truths to light. There is even some room for optimism. Its contents may yet lead to more than just the firing of Atef Abu a-Rub.

SHAI AFSAI (ggbi@juno.com) lives in Providence. For his complete review of “Catch the Jew!” see New English Review’s August 2015 issue.