At the same time, these
young Jews have also intuited that the Palestinians will not change. Therefore,
because they cannot bear a conflict that simply cannot be resolved, they
conclude that something has to give—and if the Palestinians will not
give, then that something has to be Israel. But then, as this thinking goes, if
Israel refuses to budge, it is Israel that is responsible for the impasse. Faced
with a choice between loyalty to their humanitarian values or to their parents’
Zionism, they have chosen the former.
That point, of course,
is not new. Peter Beinart, former editor of The New Republic and author
of the recent book The Crisis of Zionism, has made the point
extensively; perhaps the most quoted line from his much-discussed New York
Review of Books article was
his assertion that “For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked
American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their
horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism
instead.”
True though Beinart’s
comment may be, what is significant is that something else has changed, too.
Many of these younger Jews now also believe they simply do not need Israel any
longer. Having matured in the Shoah’s long shadow, their parents and
grandparents still perhaps feel marginally vulnerable in America. These young
people do not. They feel safe and do not fear anti-Semitism. Why, they therefore
ask themselves, express fealty to a country they do not need and that often
makes them feel ashamed?
As much as this
perspective sounds like a radical shift, it is far more ancient than we might
imagine. Indeed, its seeds were sown many centuries earlier, as early as the
Bible’s redaction. Confronted by the possibility of losing sovereignty in their
ancestral homeland (which is precisely what happened), the creators of the
Jewish tradition taught the possibility of a flourishing Diaspora even without
autonomous Jewish life in the land of Israel. As Jacob Wright of Emory
University write in a much-discussed essay, “A Nation Conceived in
Defeat”:
Anticipating the coming
doom and destruction, these authors set about the task of their people’s
preservation. They did so … by unhinging the concept of “nation” from that of
“state.” Hence, while defeat may have destroyed Israel’s state, it came
to play a key role in the creation of Israel’s identity as
a people.
Wright insightfully
points out that while most ancient national narratives were constructed around
great victories, Judaism took a different route: “It was not the moments of
peace and prosperity, but rather the experiences of catastrophe that produced
the strongest impetus for the composition of the magisterial history found in
Genesis—Kings and the profound, disturbing messages of the
prophets.”
In some significant
way, therefore, the Bible’s take on Jewish history was essentially a preparation
for exile. Even as the prophets warn the Israelites that their state may be
doomed, and the suffering great, they also reassure them that
their people will not end. Thepeople of Israel is eternal, as
Jeremiah proclaims:
For I will forgive
their iniquities and remember their sins no more. Thus said the Lord who
established the … laws of moon and stars for light by night, who stirs up the
sea into roaring waves. … If these laws should ever be annulled by me—declares
the Lord—only then would the offspring of Israel cease to be a nation before Me
for all time.
Is it possible,
however, that that brilliant move by the redactors of the Bible, which once
served a critical purpose, is now undermining Jewish commitment to Jewish
sovereignty? In its time, the Bible’s move may well have equipped the Jews for
survival throughout their exile. Today, however, the Jews do have a
state. And that state is maligned severely and needs the Jews’ support more than
ever. Ironically, this ancient biblical strategy has convinced many Jews that
the Jews could survive even if the State of Israel does not.
***
In many respects,
Zionists have flatly denied that ancient biblical assertion. Zionism’s claim has
been that the Jewish nation cannot survive meaningfully without the Jewish
state, that the ancient biblical strategy has become counterproductive and
dangerous. The Zionists were right.
One cannot understand
this, of course, without some historical perspective. Zionism did not emerge out
of nowhere. Theodor Herzl did what he did and wrote what he wrote because Jewish
life in the Diaspora had become, to use Hobbes’ phrase, “poor, nasty, brutish,
and short.” The Jews were Europe’s victims-on-call. Of course, today’s American
Jews are confident that they have found a home of an entirely different order.
What happened back then, they assert, could not happen today. That newfound
confidence has historical antecedents, of course: American Jews’ confidence
resembles that of the Jews of Cordoba—who were forcibly converted, burned alive
at the stake, and summarily expelled in the Spanish Inquisition. The Jews of
Berlin in 1930 also believed they had found the ultimate enlightened home, that
the dark days of Europe would never return. And in the space of but a few years,
German Jewry was erased.
We cannot know, of
course, what will or will not happen in America. But one thing we do know, even
if it is not commonly expressed (because anyone who says it must expect to be
accused of fear-mongering): The Jewish life that American Jews take for granted
is actually dependent on the existence of the same Jewish state from which many
young Jews now distance themselves.
This is the point that
today’s younger generations of American Jews simply do not understand: American
Jewish life as it now exists would not survive the loss of Israel.
There was an era not
long ago in which American Jews tiptoed around America, nervously striving to
stay beneath the radar. They evoked that image of the spies who reported back to
Moses after surveying the Promised Land: “We looked like grasshoppers to
ourselves, and so we appeared to them.” The American Jews who believe they could
survive the loss of Israel do not remember that era. They take it as entirely
natural that thousands of American citizens confidently ascend the steps of the
Capitol Hill on the lobbying day at AIPAC’s annual Policy Conference. Do they
ever ask themselves why virtually no one ascended those same steps between 1938
and 1945 to demand that the United States do something to save the Jewish people
from extinction?
After all, there were
millions of Jews in America the United States during that horrific period, and
they knew what was happening. But American Jews of that generation lacked the
confidence and the sense of belonging in America that this generation of
students now takes for granted. When some 400 mostly Orthodox rabbis marched on
Washington in the October 1943, President Roosevelt simply refused to meet them
and departed the White House via a rear door. There were no mass protests, no
caravans of buses to Washington to demand help for their European
kin.
Jews today no longer
think of themselves as a tiptoeing people. When Soviet Jews awakened and wanted
out of their national prison, American Jews supported them, and the State of
Israel made their rescue a national project. When an Air France flight filled
with Jews was hijacked to Entebbe, the State of Israel rescued them, and
American Jews were filled with unprecedented pride. When Ethiopian Jews were
caught in the crosshairs of a deadly civil war, the State of Israel whisked them
out, and American philanthropists continue to make them a key priority. Much of
what fuels American Jewish pride is the existence and the behavior of the State
of Israel.
In ways we do not
sufficiently recognize, Israel has changed the existential condition of Jews
everywhere, even in America. Without the State of Israel, the self-confidence
and sense of belonging that American Jews now take for granted would quickly
disappear.
This, then, is one of
the great ironies of our era: The sense of belonging and security that leads
many American Jews to believe that they do not need the State of Israel is
itself a product of that very same State of Israel. And in moving away from
devotion to the Jewish state, occasionally even opposing or undermining it, they
are actually weakening the very source of the confidence that makes their
political activism possible.
***
Yet another irony in
today’s state of affairs ought to be noted: Even as Israel becomes more
controversial among American Jews, Israel remains virtually the sole topic that
can arouse the passions of American Jews.
An overlooked but
important question is this: Without Israel, what would remain to make Jewishness
anything more than some anemic form of ethnic memory long since eroded? About
what else in Jewish life, besides Israel, do contemporary Jews feel outrage?
Even those who are more critical of Israel react swiftly when Israel is unfairly
abused in the international media or when it is attacked. Conversely, many
American Jews feel profound shame and even anger when Israel does things they
consider inexcusable. What else evokes such immediate passions?
In 2011, a proposed ban
on circumcision in San Francisco with clear anti-Semitic overtones did not even
near the stir provoked by a naval raid on a flotilla thousands of miles away the
year before. Do the discussions of whether or not JCCs should be open on Shabbat
arouse nationwide debate? They do not. But the Israeli rabbinate, thousands of
miles away, does.
Though many American
Jews, especially the younger among them, now believe the loss of Israel would
not be tragic, Israel continues to energize them in ways that no other issue
does. When Israel’s chief rabbinate or some Israeli political party threatens to
declare all Reform and Conservative conversions invalid, American Jews become
enraged, even though that policy will affect very, very few of them.
Why?
Despite proclamations
by some American Jews that Israel is no longer central to their identity, and
despite the claim by half of America’s young American Jews that Israel’s
destruction would not be a personal tragedy, Israel still rankles them like no
other Jewish issue. We ought not dismiss that observation lightly. We can
explain it, or we can find it perplexing. But let us not lose sight of this
undeniable reality: Without Israel, the primary energizing force in the Jewish
world would disappear. And without that energy and passion, there is simply no
way that anything remotely resembling Jewish life as we know it could
survive.
Israel, like it or not,
is not just a homeland to Israelis. It is also a “state unto the Diaspora”; the
state that, even from afar, secures the life and instills the passions of Jews
all over the world.
***
To all the above, there
is a commonly recited response: “If the Jewish people survived in Diaspora
without a Jewish State for two thousand years, how likely is it that a mere
sixty-something years of sovereignty have eroded our ability to do so again?” To
be sure, the argument goes, we do not wish to have to survive without a state,
but if we have to, we can and we will.
But with due apologies
to Lord Tennyson, it is not always true that it is “better to have loved and
lost than never to have loved at all.” Often, gaining something and losing it is
worse than never having had it at all. And that is true of the re-created
sovereignty the Jews have enjoyed for nearly two-thirds of a century. The
counter-argument above simply misreads the way Jewish life has developed. Their
confidence is misplaced, and it is very dangerous.
One can easily
understand why American Jews would wish to declare their existential and
emotional independence from the State of Israel. At least at first glance, it
simply makes no sense that U.S. Jews should be dependent on an embattled country
the size of New Jersey across the ocean, with a culture wholly unlike that which
American Jews take for granted. But the dependence is real. The fate of American
Judaism is intimately linked to fate of Israel, just as the fate of Israel is
linked to and dependent upon the survival and flourishing of American Jews. Ours
is the ultimate mutually interdependent relationship.
American Jews thus have
an enormous personal stake in the fight against the de-legitimization of Israel.
This is true even of young American Jews, even of those liberally inclined Jews
who (often legitimately) see much about the Jewish state that bothers them
terribly. A successful campaign to delegitimize –and possibly destroy – Israel
could undo much more than the Jewish state. It could radically alter American
Judaism as we know it.
No one would have to be
killed, or exiled, or dismissed from their job. All that would have to happen is
that Jews would suffer the second enormous blow to their People in the space of
a century. With that, the Jews would become stateless like the Chechnyans, the
Tibetans, or the Basques. They would tiptoe around the world once again, like
Tibetans and Basques still do, waiting to see what history has in store for them
next, with no sense that they can help shape that history. They would tiptoe
around America, too, just like that generation of American Jews that could not
speak out even as European Jewry was being destroyed.
The loss of Israel
would fundamentally alter American Jewry. It would arrest the revival of Jewish
life now unfolding in parts of Europe. And Israeli Jewry would be no more. The
end of Israel would, in short, end the Jewish people as we know it.
The time has come for a
paradigm shift in our conversations about Israel. We need to focus on what
Israel represents, on its contribution to Jewish flourishing, on the importance
of difference, and the human need for dignity. We need to focus on the ways in
which a nation-state addresses the abiding human need to inherit and bequeath
culture. Doing so could well convince the international community that it is
time not to destroy Israel, but to create more Israels, including one for
Palestinians. For Israel is more than a conflict, more than a “mere” country. It
is actually a bold human experiment with great significance not only for
Israelis and the entire Jewish people, but for freedom-loving human beings
everywhere.
Excerpted and
adapted from The Promise of Israel: Why Its Seemingly Greatest Weakness Is
Actually Its Greatest Strength by Daniel Gordis. Copyright © 2012 by Daniel
Gordis. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, John Wiley & Sons. All
rights reserved.
