American Jews and Israel A Symposium
Never, perhaps, has criticism of the state of Israel by American Jews been so open, so widespread, and so bitter as it is today.
Some of this criticism clearly represents a return of the various traditions of opposition to Zionism that in the pre-state period enjoyed such a lively existence. With the founding of the state forty years ago, these traditions went into temporary eclipse, but lately, and especially since the Lebanon war, they have come back again, couched in updated forms and espoused by people who may or may not be aware of their provenance. They include the old (Orthodox) charge that a secular state in the Holy Land runs counter to Jewish religious teachings; the old (Reform/humanist) idea that statehood represents a betrayal of the supposedly universalist mission of the Jews; the old (socialist) notion that Zionism is a regressive expression of bourgeois nationalism; even the old (assimilationist) claim that by raising the specter of dual loyalty a Jewish state compromises or actually endangers the position of Jewish communities in the Diaspora.
In addition to all this, there has been a marked change even among American Jews whose commitment to Israel has long been unambiguous and steady. Not only have such Jews become increasingly willing to criticize Israel's policies and even Israel itself, they have also been more and more disposed to do so in public. Conversely, it is hard to remember a time when favorable comment about Israel has been so muted and so scanty within the American Jewish community.
This, then, is the paradoxical situation as Israel approaches its fortieth birthday. In trying to determine what justification, if any, there may be for such a state of affairs, COMMENTARY addressed the following questions to a diverse group of American Jewish intellectuals:
- Have your own attitudes toward Israel changed in recent years? Why? Why not?
- To what extent do you believe Israel has fulfilled, or disappointed, the hopes vested in it?
- How do you feel about the upsurge of Jewish criticism of Israel? Is it healthy? Is it dangerous? What does it portend?
The responses—forty-nine in all—follow in alphabetical order.
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Lionel Abel:
Among the supporters of Israel I am a Jonathan-come-lately, for I held back from actively or even explicitly supporting the new state during the 50's and early 60's. My attitude then I would describe as one of tolerant acquiescence in Israel's existence, but this did not change to unequivocal backing until the 70's when I finally became aware of how bankrupt were my previously held Marxist-socialist views. I vividly recall the remark of a close friend during the late 40's—in 1947, I believe—about an interesting piece of Harold Rosenberg's in COMMENTARY [“Pledged to the Marvelous,” February 1947], which argued for the support of Israel in irrationalist terms heavily dependent on Kierkegaardian subtleties. It was an odd piece, and may have prompted the gibe of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, “There are certain Jews who would have quit the Jewish fold had it not been for Sören Kierkegaard.” My friend, who had undergone the same Trotskyist influences I had, said to me: “I can't think of anything worse intellectually than for Harold, who has been an internationalist, to come out for Israel, a nation-state.”
But there is a problem in supporting Israel today, even if one is not conflicted in having to hold both nationalist and internationalist principles. The problem is raised by Israel's political behavior, most recently its invasion of Lebanon, which called down on it the wrath of Jacobo Timerman, Arthur Hertzberg, and the editors of the London Review of Books. Israel's rule over the West Bank has already alienated the British intelligentsia and now threatens to alienate the Jewish intellectuals in America, even those in New York.
What if the Israelis relinquish the West Bank? My hope is that they will finally adopt such a policy. But the fact is that they are still governing the West Bank's Palestinians, many of whom support the PLO. What is proper for someone who is judging Israel from New York City to say about all this?
There is an event in Trotsky's struggle with Stalin which I find pertinent here, possibly instructive. Outmaneuvered by Stalin and about to be exiled, Trotsky, at a party meeting, took this stand: “There are bourgeois politicians who say, ‘My country, right or wrong.’ I say, ‘Even when it is wrong, I support my party.’” Hearing this, Stalin knew he had triumphed, and commented sagely: “Comrade Trotsky is in error. At times it is wrong to support the party, as Comrade Lenin made clear. He was never afraid to break with the party when it was in error.” So there was Trotsky, whom I shall for the moment call Trotsky-Stalin, setting the party above any criticism of it, and there was Stalin, whom I shall refer to—but just this once—as Stalin-Trotsky, setting political criticism above the party. In this reversal of roles, Trotsky was at his weakest, Stalin at his most brilliant.
The incident touches on a dilemma which it might be useful to explore. What value could take precedence over the fortunes of one's country or, for that matter, of a political party to which one has sworn loyalty? One may of course criticize one's country if no risk to it follows from one's criticism, and the same might be said about criticizing a favored political party. However, it should be clear that if a country could never be endangered by some criticism of it, no one would ever have said, “My country, right or wrong.” The meaning I take that statement to have is this: “I shall not set a moral principle (perhaps a prejudice) above the interest of my country, should it be threatened.”
But Israel has always been under threat, and the threat has taken the form precisely of moralizing. A moral consensus after World War II brought Israel into existence; it could well be destroyed by the moral consensus now being prepared against it. I do not believe the assertion of Arthur Hertzberg that in 1967 Israel was ready to take on the whole world, and I am very much afraid that reckless assertions of this sort may lead to the whole world taking on Israel.
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So I come to this question: is it wrong to put the good of one's country above a moral opinion? I use the word “opinion” here advisedly, for those who today assert that moral judgment may be set above the interest of one's country do not also insist that such moral judgments have to be strictly true. They are, I assume, sophisticated enough to know how difficult it is to say of any moral assertion that it is more than an opinion, that it is strictly true.
We have been told by the excellent Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo that, in the twilight of metaphysics we live in, the ideas we cultivate ought to be weak. How in the moral order can we differentiate weak from strong ideas?
A strong moral idea would be (1) universal, and (2) independent of whatever followed from holding it. Kant thought his moral principles universally valid and independent of consequences. He held that property rights were sacred, and condemned the sailors who helped themselves to some figs carried by the ship they were on when the crew's food had been consumed. Pressed as to whether the sailors should have died of hunger rather than consume figs belonging to others, Kant replied without hesitation in the affirmative. Which tells us something about the character of strong moral ideas: they hold universally, and are not invalidated by what might follow from adhering to them. In the case of the sailors, this would have meant death by starvation.
That the moral judgments made against Israel are of the weak variety may be seen in the fact that they are stated as opinions rather than as truths, and are never said to be valid without regard to consequences. In fact they are stated in a manner which suggests that there will be bad consequences for Israel should it not heed them. But can what is presented as of value to Israel really be more valuable than Israel? Or, more generally, can weak moral ideas be more important than one's country?
I am for Israel, which has given me the automatic right to become a citizen of it, and I put its existence above all the weak moral judgments others make of it. I would like Israel's leaders to accommodate my moral feelings and do certain things. For example, I would like them to get out of the West Bank. But if they choose not to do so, I still choose to support Israel. Moreover, whatever they do, I too am doing. For I do not want to claim innocence in New York for what may be wrongly wrought in Jerusalem.
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Edward Alexander:
I believe now, as I did twenty years ago, that Israel represents the best, perhaps the only, hope for Jewish collective survival, and that its security and well-being constitute an end for which American Jews should be ready to suppress their baser impulses—self-righteousness, self-indulgence, self-love—in favor of self-discipline. I believe now, as I did in 1967, that Israel is a country under siege, beleaguered by enemies eager to reduce it to sandy wastes. I am unimpressed by the arguments, crystallized in the American-made slogan “Peace Now,” that Israel's policies or its presence in Judea and Samaria are the sole impediments to peace in the Middle East. The Arabs, on June 4, 1967, had been in possession of these territories for nineteen years, during which time they showed no interest either in establishing another Palestinian Arab state or in making peace.
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Israel has fulfilled many aspirations of the Zionist ideal but, so far, failed to realize others. How could it be otherwise? “Is a land born in one day? / Is a nation brought forth at once?” Enormous numbers of Jews fleeing persecution have been welcomed in Israel. Sephardi Jews, despite many difficulties (caused largely by Israel's European socialism whose demise is now daily lamented by its American Jewish critics), have now been integrated into most areas of Israeli life, especially local government. That valley of dry bones called Soviet Jewry was raised to new life by the very existence of Israel, which then willingly received the best fruits of this renaissance. While the anti-Zionists of the world were castigating “Zionist racism,” the real Israel was rescuing and welcoming 12,000 black Jews from Ethiopia. Some months ago, while walking toward the Bikur Cholim Hospital in central Jerusalem, I was stunned by the sight of close to a hundred Ethiopian Jewish girls resplendent in the blue and white uniforms of nursing trainees out on their lunch break. “Yes,” I said to myself, “in spite of blackcoats, turncoats, Kahane, Aloni, Benvenisti, and even the Haifa Municipal Theater, this is a remarkable country, a great country.”
Among the practicing Zionists of Israel, as among the professing Zionists of America, there are, to be sure, many imperfections, imperfections that the Israelis cannot, like their American cousins, blame on the surrounding Gentile culture: power inevitably taints. The narrow, often religiously illiterate, culture of socialist Zionism produced a system of education that has worked to detach Jews from their Jewish roots and weaken the bonds that most profoundly attach people to life. Despite this, Israel has instilled in the majority of its citizens a national character without which the sacrifices Israelis make cannot be fathomed. I am filled with admiration for a colleague at Tel Aviv University who stays up through the night to mark Shakespeare papers because he must leave early in the morning to do three weeks of reserve duty with what he facetiously calls “our gallant boys in green.” I think always about the courage, the absence of self-pity, the resilience of close friends who, after their sons have fallen in Israel's wars, continue to do their duty in life, often a very arduous duty. I think especially of an old friend who, within a day of his own son's death in combat, was treating wounded soldiers flown by helicopter to the Ram-bam Hospital. And these are the people who make up what one of the most aggressive American Jewish critics of Israel—Jacob Neusner—calls “a Jewish society in which no one gives a damn for anyone else”!
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Although American Jewish groups that specialize in negative criticism of Israel seem to have persuaded their sycophants (see the Wall Street Journal, July 6, 1987) that they came into existence during the Lebanese invasion, the truth is less flattering to their sense of heroic daring and tender conscience. American Friends of Peace Now, for example, first unfurled its banner, as Ruth R. Wisse pointed out in these pages [“‘Peace Now’ & American Jews,” August 1980], in June 1980 in the immediate aftermath of a more than usually foul barrage of anti-Israel invective from the PLO and its European stooges. There is nothing “healthy” in such cravenness or in hallucinating moderation in a murderous enemy when you are not the one who will have to face his attack. Peace Now and the hissing Israel-haters of New Jewish Agenda do not respect the sovereignty of democratically elected Israeli governments, whose decisions they can condemn with impunity because where once the earth opened up to swallow the sons of Korah, the boards of Jewish federations now open to welcome them. On the question of whether withdrawal of American Jewish moral and political support from Israel is as dangerous to Israel as it is safe for its critics, I prefer to save my breath to cool my porridge.
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Yes, the old fear of accusations of dual loyalty is at work among Jews, and could be seen in the more pusillanimous responses to Gore Vidal's anti-Semitic ejaculations of 1986. Arthur Hertzberg expressed his “delight” that Vidal had said (actually, he hadn't) “complimentary things about Peace Now.” Saul Bellow bewailed “the price we have been paying for our solid support of Israel over 40 years” and warned that the Pollard affair might retroactively confirm Vidal's accusations of dual loyalty.
But there is also a real duality that troubles many American Jewish intellectuals. They find themselves uncomfortably situated between recognition that the flourishing of Jewish life here has been dependent upon Jewish rebirth in Zion, and resentment of the faulty, un-American behavior of the people who actually live (and, alas, also vote) in Zion. They need Zion, but wish it weren't in Israel. The lowbrow, leftist version of this need to define oneself in opposition to Israel is found in an Arthur Waskow or a Balfour Brickner, whose contribution to theology is the doctrine that Sandinista Nicaragua is the true Israel, the middlebrow version in Neusner, who tells National Review readers that the very idea of Jewish unity, of the people Israel, is an Israeli concoction, “an ideology of blood.” For this prophet of Jewish disunity, America is “the Promised Land for Jews,” and he cannot abide the fact that millions of American Jews still find in Israel a lodging for the organized memory of Jewish national feeling.
But we must not raise questions about the inalienable right of such American Jews to criticize Israel in public, for they are sensitive plants liable to shrivel at the first question as if it were exhaled by a basilisk. Thus Neusner, after publishing his famous broadside against Israel in the Washington Post and 450 other papers, followed with a plaintive piece claiming that he had been “martyred” by the very American Jewish community he had courageously championed against Israel, made a victim of “murder by silence.” “They won't print you, they won't let you speak, they won't review your books, they won't argue with you.” What parades itself as high idealism turns out to be self-love, not a promising foundation for a new, American Jerusalem, but lethal enough to damage the old, original one.
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Robert Alter:
The most fundamental fact about the state of Israel is that it constitutes a radical turning point in Jewish history. We have not had such an opportunity as a people in 2,000 years—and, indeed, the last instance of national independence, under the Hasmoneans, represented less real autonomy and exhibited far less political decency than Israel does today. We are not likely to have such an opportunity again, and so I find it hard to imagine how one can choose to be a Jew at this point in time without a staunch commitment to the urgency of Israel's survival. I have felt this way ever since I began to think about such questions, and nothing that has occurred in recent years has altered this conviction, including policies and actions of the Israeli government that I view as misguided or self-defeating.
Israel, whatever its imperfections, has certainly fulfilled the hopes vested in it. The most essential of these are the establishment of political autonomy, so that Jews need no longer be passive victims in the historical realm, and the creation through that autonomy of a new secular Jewish culture in the Hebrew language. These are, it seems to me, the reasonable hopes to have been vested in Israel. But the moment one's hopes for the Jewish state are pitched in a messianic key—something that has been done not only by the occasional unreconstructed messianist but more conspicuously by many people who are “attracted” to the messianic idea though they stand at a great distance from both Zionism and the Jewish people—then of course the state of Israel must be a bitter disappointment.
Mismanagement, obtuseness, cynicism, and corruption are variously perceptible in all governments of which I am aware, past and present, and so all governments are vulnerable to criticism. This does not mean, however, that one cannot make sharp qualitative distinctions between, say, Pol Pot's Cambodia and Margaret Thatcher's England, or more specifically to our point, between Syria's massacre of over 20,000 of its own citizens at Hama and Israel's intermittent violation of the civil rights of Arabs on the West Bank. I do not believe in moratoriums on criticism of Israel, and I have from time to time publicly expressed such criticism myself, including in the pages of this magazine. But a great deal depends on the tone of the criticism, the assumptions on which it is predicated, and the contexts in which it is pronounced.
Saul Bellow makes the tart observation in To Jerusalem and Back that what the Alps are to skiers, Israel has become to the moral critics of the world. In part, he means simply that Israel is judged by a more exacting standard. What is more ominous—and I suspect Bellow also has this in mind—is that the criticism of Israel often has a querulous undertone, implying if not actually stating that unless the Israelis can demonstrate unfalteringly that their behavior is beyond moral reproach, the state is a “tragic error,” and has no right to exist.
As Americans, we may view the continuing spectacle of deception, blundering, and borderline criminality in our own government with varying degrees of unease, distress, or anger, but nobody outside the bomber Left construes any of this as calling into question the legitimacy of our national existence. I cannot see why the case should be different for Israel, a country which, like America, exercises various democratic checks on the abuse or inept exercise of power.
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In regard to the context for criticizing Israel in this country, let me offer one experience as a kind of illustrative parable. When the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982, I had some misgivings from the start about the wisdom of the action—misgivings that became much more pronounced during the year following the incursion, which I spent with my family in Jerusalem. Nobody asked me for my opinion, and when the widespread vilification of Israel in the American press became evident, I would in any case have said nothing that might seem to amplify that chorus of hostility.
On the second day of the war, there was, predictably, an anti-Israel demonstration in Berkeley's Sproul Plaza, birthplace of the student revolution of the 60's. Among the placard-bearers I noticed three Israeli graduate students, including one who had taken a number of courses with me. Knowing the vehemence of their political position, I thought remonstration then and there would have been futile, but I would have liked to tell them the following: a protest against Israeli actions in Sproul Plaza means something rather different from a protest on Ben-Yehuda Street in Jerusalem. In this particular American context, whatever the seriousness of the protesters' objections to the policy at stake, protest becomes a way of saying, We are not that kind of Israeli, not that kind of Jew. And to display slogans like “Israel Out of Lebanon” in the same marching circle with people actively disseminating every distorted propaganda release from the PLO as hard fact, people who are known by past actions to be ideologically committed to the destruction of Israel, is to convey to onlookers another message, “Israel Out of the Middle East.”
All this involves a painful dilemma because it is surely unhealthy to renounce the prerogative of criticism, and I would even argue that there is a kind of immorality in American Jews' giving any Israeli government an automatic blank check when they care deeply about the future of the Jewish state and see things that seriously disturb them. But remembering Sproul Plaza in 1982, I think considerable vigilance must be exercised to ensure that the time, place, and manner of the criticism do not conspire to make it an instrument that can be turned against Israel's most vital interests.
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Jerold S. Auerbach:
Even the idea of a Jewish state, to say nothing of the reality of Israel, seldom inspired feelings of passionate attachment in the majority of American Jews. There were some conspicuously exceptional moments of identification; but between Herzl and the Holocaust, as from the Independence war to the Lebanon war, the characteristic American Jewish response was indifference, yielding to evident fear and trembling whenever Jews felt that their loyalty to the United States was threatened. The recent outpouring of criticism surely is unprecedented, but after nearly a century of American Jewish detachment from the Jewish national revival it is not entirely surprising. Now as always, the most vocal American critics, captivated by the siren song of secular liberalism, remain tone-deaf to the resounding national and religious themes of Jewish history.
I recognize the symptoms because I once suffered from the disability. I can recall, vividly if painfully, my own eagerness to superimpose American categories on Israel, and my impatience with such varied forms of Jewish intractability as resistance to Arab terror and Sabbath observance. But living in Israel for two years, I came to appreciate the legitimate imperatives of Jewish history, quite apart from the prevailing fashions on the East Bank of the Hudson. I learned that Yasir Arafat is not George Washington; the hostility between Arabs and Jews is not an instant replay of the American civil-rights struggle; Lebanon is not Vietnam; Isaiah and Jeremiah were not the co-founders of Americans for Democratic Action; and the Torah still says to Jews something even more profound than the First Amendment about their lives, their homeland, and their identity as a people.
Zionism, after all, is not merely the modern Jewish expression of Western liberalism, sprinkled with obligatory references to prophetic justice. It taps the oldest, deepest yearnings of Jews to live in the land that God promised to them. (Even David Ben-Gurion knew that “the Bible is our mandate.”) Judaism and Zionism are too complex, even idiosyncratic, to fit any narrow mold of “enlightened” secularism. As a Jewish state, not the 51st American state, Israel must take seriously the covenantal relationship, originating in divine command, that has bound a people to its land ever since the Exodus. This is a difficult concept for many Jews (even in Israel) to absorb, but if it cannot find expression in a Jewish state, where will it be respected?
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The liberal fantasies of American Jews about Israel were demolished by Menachem Begin. They had idolized Ben-Gurion, embraced Golda Meir, and appreciated the eagerness of Labor leaders (Shimon Peres especially) to submit to American pressure. But Begin, the irascible shtetl Jew, expressed memories, gestures, and priorities that made secular liberal Jews uneasy (a prime minister who wore a kippah and prayed at the Western Wall?). His strident commitment to Eretz Israel was alarming (a Jew who took seriously the divine covenant with the patriarchs?). American Jews ignored the singular achievements of the first prime minister of Israel to make peace with an Arab state; to legitimate the two-party system; to extend political recognition to the Sephardi underclass; to reinvigorate the venerable Zionist principle of settling the land of Israel; and to inflict a military defeat upon the PLO from which it has yet to recover. Once Begin grafted traditional Jewish symbols to the civil religion of Israel, he confronted American Jews with the wicked dilemma that elicited their unrestrained denunciation: would they ride the turbulent currents of Jewish history and destiny as members of the Jewish people or would they, as American outsiders, retreat to the safety of their protected sanctuary?
It is evident that Israel disappointed the hopes of its liberal partisans, who still yearn for the good old days of halutzim in short pants draining swamps by day and dancing the hora at night; repulsing the Arab Goliath with their slingshots while consigning religion to the dustbin of Diaspora history. American Jews tolerated Israel as long as it was vulnerable, responsive to external pressure, and insufficiently Jewish to cause embarrassment. The more independent, and distinctively Jewish, that Israel has become since 1977, the more it has antagonized American Jews. The pre-state critique of Jewish nationalism has yielded to an even more impassioned denunciation of religious Judaism, strengthened by evident discomfort with the determination of Israel to settle and defend the borders of its homeland.
Criticism of Israel is an admission ticket to some respectable Western liberal salons. It also expresses the self-interest of American Jews, who are protected by six thousand miles from any consequences of their op-ed columns. Unless they can bring themselves to voice such criticism from homes in Kiryat Shemona or Kiryat Arba, it is an irresponsible indulgence. It may enhance their comfort as Americans, but it surely heightens the vulnerability of Jews in Israel. Anyone who welcomes a Jewish state that expresses the intricate texture of the Jewish historical experience, rather than the constricted modern liberal rendition of it, should be heartened by the exuberant creativity of Israel as it struggles to reconnect itself to some of the innermost and abiding sources of Judaism. For even as Tel Aviv, the city built on sand, has become a cultural suburb of Los Angeles, we are reminded (by Isaiah) that the word of God will come from Jerusalem, the holy city.
The flight of American Jews from Israel (especially in academic and journalistic circles) is a spiritual emigration of alarming proportions. It is lamentable that American Jews, internalizing the indictments of the most hostile enemies of Israel, should so distance themselves from their own people (even in the caring guise of “protecting” Israelis from their folly). It recalls that sorrowful episode, in 70 C.E., when some Jews fought against the Roman invaders while other Jews fought among themselves—until nothing was left to fight about, except Masada. The Temple was not destroyed by the legions of Titus, the rabbis remind us, but by sinat hinam, “groundless hatred” among Jews.
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Daniel Bell:
Must we not distinguish between criticism of the state of Israel and criticism of some of its policies, much as one would distinguish between criticism of a regime while still being a believer in the society? There is often strong disagreement between Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir. Since 1967, when my emotions about Israel were directly engaged, I have been a supporter of Mapai and thus have also been critical of Likud. I am also a supporter of the Peace Now movement, many of whose active members have been members of the Israeli military. Does opposition to the adventurism of Ariel Sharon or to the annexationist dreams of a Geula Cohen make one “anti-Israel”? More importantly, I do not understand the “thrust” of the COMMENTARY statement, since it leads to the questions: what is wrong with criticizing Israeli policies and doing so in public? I always assumed that such an attitude was a healthy one. (Look at poor Boris Yeltsin, who went “public”) There would seem to be a “hidden agenda” in the COMMENTARY statement; if so, what is it?
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Eric M. Breindel:
The answer to COMMENTARY's first question about whether my “attitudes toward Israel” have changed in recent years is a simple no—assuming that the term “attitudes,” in this context, refers to underlying sensibilities. My affection and concern for Israel are constant and unconditional.
I believe that Israel's existence as a Jewish state is a necessary and normal historical circumstance; that Israel's existence gives meaning to the notion of Jewish peoplehood; and that a world without the state of Israel should—for Jews—be unimaginable.
That there needs to be one place on earth where Jews from every corner of the world can—if need be—take refuge is a proposition whose truth has been amply demonstrated by history, both pre- and post-1948.
There would have been no Jewish awakening in the Soviet Union, and no possibility of a Jewish emigration movement in the USSR, without the existence of a Jewish state (a fact in no way challenged by the inclination of many Soviet Jews to go to the United States). Yet without an Israel, anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union would doubtless have continued, and might even have become more severe.
Jews in Arab lands could well have suffered untold persecution had there been no Jewish state to which they could flee. And anyone who thinks that anti-Jewish sentiment in the Arab and Muslim world is solely a response to Zionism ought to consider not just the pre-Balfour Declaration history of the Jews in the Maghreb and the Levant, but also the fate of non-Muslim minorities under Khomeini and his brethren.
Israel, in other words, has fulfilled its Zionist purpose as a Jewish homeland. And it will doubtless continue to do so: first as a place of refuge for Jews who are, in varying degrees, oppressed, since there is no indication that anti-Semitism is about to disappear; and second as a country for Jews who prefer a Jewish state even to the United States, the most glorious Diaspora in Jewish history, or Western Europe.
This sort of “fulfillment” seems to me the kind that matters most. But it's also a happy fact that Israel is a more pleasant place to live than most countries in the world; a freer society than most; and, for that matter, a more secure and stable enterprise than, say, most of the UN member-states—despite the fact that Israel is surrounded by nations pledged to destroy it.
That all this, plus an extraordinary cultural life and (relatively speaking) a high degree of social cohesion, has been possible in a society permanently under siege leaves one only to wonder what a day or two of peace might bring.
And while peace isn't exactly in the offing, the fact of the treaty with Egypt, the effort by Communist states to reestablish diplomatic ties, and the inclination of many African countries to do the same, all leave Israel in a better position now, from a diplomatic standpoint, than at any previous point in its history.
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So much for the good news. The bad news, of course, is that over the past five years, American Jews have indeed engaged, as never before, in public attacks on Israel—attacks, moreover, that frequently go unrebutted.
The most insidious aspect of these attacks is that they hail from groups and individuals who profess sympathy with the Zionist undertaking—they appear, in other words, disguised as “concern.” There is, to be sure, still unreconstructed anti-Israel agitation carried out by ultra-Orthodox elements—no more than in the past, probably less—and by the few remaining followers of the old “assimilationist” creed of the American Council for Judaism. But the Jewish voices raised in criticism of Israel that are audible to the American public at large belong to individuals and groups which identify themselves as sympathetic to Israel.
Many of these critics had no encounter of any kind with Israel before they began attacking it. Protesting Israeli policies in the occupied territories, or Israeli policy during the war in Lebanon, was an inaugural experience in “Zionism” for a fair number of the writers, artists, and professors who signed the manifestoes critical of Israel that proliferated a few years ago.
Almost always, these documents—and statements issued by groups like Breira—began by expressing disappointment in Israel's failure to measure up to the Zionist ideal, thus implying past enthusiasm for that ideal. But some of the key players in these endeavors have been altogether disingenuous. They come from a staunchly anti-Zionist left-wing tradition—socialist, Trotskyist, whatever. Others in this class of critics have their roots in the contemporary liberal-Left political culture and never gave Israel a moment's thought, one way or the other, until attacking it became fashionable within that culture.
But there is yet another element in this “more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger” school of criticism—individuals who can legitimately claim the title “friend” (or, in some cases, “ex-friend”) of Israel. And this group lends credibility to the entire school.
Are the activities of these critics dangerous? Yes—their efforts help to legitimate the anti-Israel rhetoric of forces blatantly hostile to Israel. No doubt it would be a mistake to exaggerate the importance of these “more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger” critics in the American Jewish community. But they are there—and their numbers may well be growing.
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Joel Carmichael:
The validity of Zionism, the raison d'être of the state of Israel, has certainly been lacerated over the past four decades.
Israel was self-created; an active Jewish (Zionist) minority had succeeded, by the end of World War I, in becoming a factor of world history. Accepted by the League of Nations, the Zionists built up an infrastructure between the two wars that after World War II was expanded into a state recognized, in turn, by the United Nations. Even with the loss of the vast reservoir of Jews destroyed by the Holocaust, especially Polish Jewry, this state has sustained itself after a series of wars with surrounding Arab states.
Propped up by the support of the United States, and with hopes of a substantial aliyah, Israel might have seemed at the outset to be a unique phenomenon—a state revived after two millennia. But the difficulties, pointed out by critics both hostile and friendly, that have emerged since the beginning may reasonably be taken to have eroded the foundation of the new state.
Aliyah, first of all, has been negligible, in terms both of the need and of the response from the Diaspora. The exception, of course, has been the involuntary aliyah from the Arab world after the establishment of the state, which now makes up more than half the population of Israel, without being necessarily Zionist in outlook.
At the other end, the Marxism endemic among the “Left” Israeli parties has remained a potentially doubtful factor in the general world view of Israelis; the kibbutzim, vital in the early phase of establishing the state, retain elements profoundly skeptical of, not to say alienated from, Zionism. In particular, such elements fundamentally contest the validity of the Jewish claim to the land, to say nothing of the zeal required to defend it.
In the Diaspora, countless Jews reflect this same attitude of negation, camouflaged by lip-service to the idea of Israel. “Universalism,” in one form or another, retains its potency as a source of practical hostility to the conduct of any particular Israeli government
Religious frictions, manifest from the outset of the Zionist movement but seemingly accommodated, more or less, for the first few decades of the state, have lately been surfacing with rapidly growing violence. The democratic framework of the state, which enables a swing vote to extract inordinate concessions from the bigger parties, has had the effect of intensifying the civil-war atmosphere commonplace in Jewish communal life since the Enlightenment. Extremist elements on many sides, drawing moral and financial support from the Diaspora, seem to be edging toward the likelihood of bloodshed as though it were a natural consequence of an inherent irreconcilability.
All this is taking place against the background of the most sinister development now looming up within Israel itself: Arab hostility, contradicting the original Zionist optimism about an eventually acceptable community of interest between Jews and Arabs, has now been massively fortified by a fundamental fact—the Arab birth rate.
If we add to this the strategic hostility of the Soviet Union, with its many allies, agents, and puppets, a vast question mark may well seem to overhang the existence of the state of Israel.
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Nevertheless, the foundation of Israel is solid: in foreign affairs the United States is still the guarantor of Israel, for practical as well as idealistic reasons. Domestically, the Israeli economy has realized some of the hopes held out for it by enthusiastic Zionists at the beginning: with all its faults, it is resourceful and productive. Despite the crushing burden of armaments, the economy is viable. And the Arabs, despite all their rhetoric, have proved incapable of uniting in action; or rather, since the bulk of ordinary Arabs are indifferent, practically speaking, to the intransigence of their political elites, for the foreseeable future successful wars cannot be mounted by Arab forces alone.
Thus, if one uses a real-life criterion for judging the fulfillment of early hopes, it must be said that there has been something well-nigh miraculous both about the creation and endurance of the Israeli state.
It is true that the hopes of visionaries have been to some extent disappointed, but visions cannot be realized in full, particularly the visions of those who—soaring above the humdrum reality of Israel's becoming “like all the nations”—require the country to be uniquely moral, uniquely impeccable, before according it their support.
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Criticism of Israel may be helpful; it is in any case unavoidable. But it is generally presumptuous to think that advice from outside will have much effect on people living in Israel, who are bound to trust their own experts, even with respect to “public opinion” abroad.
We must, however, distinguish between honest criticism and the willful nagging generated by the countless enemies of Israel whose true agenda is hidden. It is obvious that those Jews who have become hostile to Israel because it is not perfect project their moral disappointment, genuine or feigned, as a camouflage for active hostility from a wide variety of angles (generally some form of universalism, most often Marxism).
This is all part of the landscape of the recent past: the major problem facing Israel now, in a long run that has become very short, is surely the statistics of Arab demography. It may be necessary, in the near future, to consider practical solutions of the problem and to contemplate an extension of the population transfers that in any case underlie Israeli society, with some 800-900,000 Jews having been propelled into Israel by the various expulsions from Arab countries after 1948.
The five million square miles of total Arab territory, or even the one million contiguous with Israel, could obviate all such problems.
If territorial accommodation to the Arab birth rate could be achieved and there were a serious aliyah at last, and if the United States, and the West in general, survive the current Soviet expansion, Israel (whose fate is surely bound up with the fate of the West) could then serve as a new beacon of hope, both practical and, for that matter, visionary.
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Paul Cowan:
My attitude toward Israel has fluctuated lovingly over the past decades. When I was a boy, the subject was rarely discussed in my parents' house. My very assimilated mother and father seemed to be a-Zionists, not Zionists or anti-Zionists. When I was just seven or eight, my father would rouse me out of bed so that I could see history being made on TV. I remember the night Strom Thurmond walked out of the 1948 Democratic convention, but I have no memory of Israel's War of Independence, no memory of statehood.
Nevertheless, Israel became very important to me. In 1961, I decided to escape Harvard University's very Protestant version of American history and literature and find myself among my people by spending a year in Israel. I believed my visit there would solve the mystery of my family's assimilation, and tell me who I was as a Jew.
I loved the country. The tough sabra arrogance that annoys so many Americans appealed to me from the moment I encountered it. These people were casually proud of the fact that they were Jews. It was an attitude I wanted to adopt.
For four months that year I taught the children of North African immigrants in the town of Beersheba. I was impressed by Israel's efforts to furnish them a decent education, to find them jobs, to provide them with housing. I also knew many Israelis of European background in the city. Many of them had come to Beersheba, a poor, hot town, because the idea of working with new immigrants appealed to their idealistic nationalism. Nevertheless, some talked about North Africans in much the same way white Southerners talked about blacks. So I was acutely aware of the tensions between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews, but so were most Israelis. In Beersheba the subject of immigrant absorption was discussed with a raw, informed passion. It seemed to me the bold, ethnically insensitive, humanly unworkable effort to settle so many people was testimony to Israel's passion for equality; to the prejudices and injustices that passion would always create; and to the creativity and idealism at the country's core.
In those days, I'd meet American college students who complained that Israel was not Zion—not the place they'd dreamed of in their synagogue youth groups. They lived in their American-bred fantasies, not in Israel. I was glad that I wasn't encumbered with those fantasies; they bred a double standard. And I was glad I'd spent time with North Africans in Beersheba, not among other Americans. I felt immersed in Israel, not in ideas about Israel. From then on, I've always distrusted the opinions of well-meaning outsiders who spend a day or two in some newsworthy place, talk to the usual Israeli interviewees (those who speak English), and then discuss Israel in terms of their own preconceptions.
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Like most American Jews, I felt a surge of pride in the Six-Day War. I wanted to go to Israel and fight in it. But those were the Vietnam years, and the peace movement was at the core of my intellectual and social life. Since I was dovish about American foreign policy it seemed logical to be dovish about Israel, too. When I spent the summer of 1979 and some weeks in 1980 there, dovishness seemed like prudent politics. I remember driving through Nablus and realizing—as I still realize—-that there is no way a city of Arab nationalists can be governed without authoritarianism and violence. The newspapers make that clear every day. It doesn't matter whether last December's violence on the Gaza Strip was provoked by Israelis or Palestinians; the occupation itself has become a dance of death.
That's an easy rhetorical flourish, but it's just the beginning of the question. For one has to ask whether the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is soluble at all. Does liberalism—compromise, constructive dialogue—make sense in that situation? Would a return of the West Bank bring about peace? Or (to ask the unaskable of a dove) is toughness now necessary?
How could an American tailor such questions to Israeli reality? Certainly, we have to understand Israeli political categories instead of using terms like liberal and conservative, hawk and dove, that we've developed out of our own culture. I think we have to know much more about North African Jews—the other Israel, the ethnic majority. For example, it's useful for a liberal like me to talk with working-class Sephardi Jews. In doing so one realizes that some of their xenophobic feeling's about Arabs arise out of memories of family experiences in North Africa. One sees as well that their anger at movements like Peace Now has a great deal to do with their resentment of the privileged college students who belong to them.
But what is their vision of the Israel they will soon control? Do they have different ideas about democracy, about justice, from those we usually associate with Ashkenazi Israel? For that matter, is there a “they”—or just a patchwork of people who happen to be of North African descent? In 1979, I realized that these questions were crucial to an understanding of Israel's future, but they are seldom discussed in the American Jewish press. It's one of the reasons we debate the Israel that exists in our head—not the one that exists in the world.
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After that visit, I found I couldn't write about Israel. I knew too little. Oddly, that feeling grew stronger after the invasion of Lebanon. The invasion seemed immoral and imprudent to me, and I signed the usual dovish ads. But they made me uneasy. I didn't care about washing dirty linen in public. If Israel can survive inflation, the problems of absorbing millions of new immigrants, the constant threat of terrorism, it can certainly survive media skirmishes among American intellectuals. But I felt increasingly unwilling to be a participant in those skirmishes. I felt as if most of us (I'm excluding people who immerse themselves in Israeli life) were using a people and a culture we barely understand to fit our liberal or conservative polemics. In other words, whatever our politics, we tended to use Israel as a weapon in the domestic war American Jews are always waging against one another.
I don't want to add my voice to that cacophony of opinions, even though I think the debate itself is a sign of Jewish health and of our acceptance in America.
So let a thousand flowers bloom—a thousand writers and intellectuals disagree about Israel's political policies. But I won't be among them until I have reexperienced the country, in all its marvelous complexity, with a full, informed, and feeling mind and heart.
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Werner J. Dannhauser:
When the UN voted for the partition of Palestine in 1947, I was an enthusiastic member of the Labor Zionist youth movement called Habonim. That night, my friends and I got drunk for the first time. Our dreams of a Jewish state had come true—but I did not really want to live in such a Jewish state, or at least my desire to go to college proved stronger than my desire to go to Israel.
Now Israel is young at forty and I am no longer young, but on a recent visit I realized that my urge to live in Israel threatened to overpower my urge to stay in America.
What caused me to be overwhelmed was not my vestigial Zionism, but simply the living land in its dense “thereness,” a place where so many live heroically without false heroics, a society in which people of all kinds keep fashioning for themselves a real life. I had of course heard and read much about the various tensions that are supposed to be tearing Israel apart. At close hand, they loom large enough, but if they are not of the kind one can solve, they are at least of the kind one can muddle through. Here assertions must serve as arguments: the Left showed itself more patriotic and the Right more flexible than I had feared, and I found a glimmer of hope that Orthodoxy was coming to understand its duty to deal with ultra-Orthodoxy. Moreover, beneath the parliamentary wrangling and media hysteria, I discovered political debate so weighty and thoughtful that it must surely be, I thought, the envy of the Free World.
After forty years, I can say that the only reason Israel has not lived up to my expectations is that it has exceeded them.
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The establishment of the state of Israel certainly failed to solve the Jewish problem, but that should have come as a disappointment only to those so imprisoned by the idea of progress that they mistook Zionism for magic. More importantly, Israel's continuing vulnerability has much to do with the amazingly shallow understanding of anti-Semitism found in early Zionist theory. It is true that Jew-hatred, so very much alive and well, would thrive even if profoundly understood, but a good deal hinges on confronting it soberly and intelligently. To grapple with its demonic depths requires leaving the political realm in which Zionism is most at home and nurturing a philosophical or theological perspective.
But Israel's accomplishments are nevertheless manifold and complex. Jews all over the world walk with greater pride upon the face of the earth because of the state of Israel, and this rivals in significance the haven Israel has offered, and continues to offer, to Jews fleeing oppression in other countries. Beyond that one can point to a vigorous Israeli literature that I, at least, would never have expected. Above all, most of us Zionists, Labor Zionists in particular, underestimated what Israel would accomplish for Judaism. I think of the flowering of Jewish scholarship in Israel, the revitalization of talmudic studies, the flourishing of yeshivas, the aura of a living faith that even agnostic Jews experience in Jerusalem, and not only in Jerusalem. Year by year, day by day, it becomes more hollow to say that one is pro-Jewish but anti-Israeli.
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The upsurge of criticism is sometimes healthy, much more often dangerous, and above all inevitable. Indifference to Israel becomes increasingly difficult to sustain, yielding to love or hate, both of which are voluble (we are a voluble people). Israel's proud independence necessarily means that it does what it thinks best without asking us. Moreover, the problem of dual loyalty, slighted by your questionnaire, seems real enough to me. Those of us who love both the United States and Israel love two nations with different national interests, and if that isn't a problem I don't know what is. Our agony over the Pollard case did not dishonor us, Shlomo Avineri's obtuse remarks to American Jews notwithstanding. We worry and at times we are called upon to speak up, to speak out.
But when we speak, what platforms and forums should we use? I believe in the rule: “Tell it not in Gath and publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon.” But rules have exceptions, especially when applied to exceptional countries like Israel, and reticence in public speech has seen better days. I have but one suggestion in regard to our dilemma. As the saying goes, it is the tone that makes the music, and what accounts for the tone of our criticism of Israel depends on our fundamental stance toward the Jewish state. Genuine love of Israel—which means that one thinks of Israel as one's own—confers a right, and even a duty, to criticize. But when one's own child, say, or spouse, does wrong, one becomes sorrowful, protective; one tries to see the offense in the best possible light. One need not blind oneself to blemishes, but one remains bonded to one's own, attaching no strings to one's willingness to help and no conditions to one's love.
Frankly, Jews who see Israel in what many consider a dispassionate light and what I consider the disingenuousness of feigned neutrality—such Jews appall me. They refuse to grant Israel the sympathy so many other causes call forth in them. And I consider beyond the pale most Jews—too many of them, alas—who harbor ill will toward Israel, the intellectuals who can't forgive the country for failing to heed their advice, the moralizers who are lenient with themselves and strict with others, the high priests of the politics of resentment, the wicked sons of the seder Haggadah who say “you” and not “we” when it comes to Jews.
Criticism of Israel can be legitimate. The possibility that Israel may soon have to choose between remaining democratic and remaining secure can cause heartbreak. In any event, it precludes our silence. Ample opportunity exists for benevolent and heated controversy. The legitimate participants in that discussion will be those who think in terms of our Israel and who know that the children of Israel can no longer survive as a people without the state of Israel.
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Midge Decter:
Without my being aware that it was happening, my feelings about Israel over the years came to be radically altered. You might say that they turned from hot to cold—or more precisely, from a molten mass to a block of granite. You see, I was a young Zionist, born and bred in Zionist theory and Zionist sentiment. And as is the case with all theoretical and sentimental Zionists, most especially young ones, my passion about the necessity for a Jewish homeland was entirely instrumental: the more I loved my commitment to Zion the more I demanded of it. (Purely instrumental passions, calculations of so much moral profit received for so much loyalty given, nowadays travel under the name of “ideals.”) Israel, then, was in my emotional and intellectual economy destined to be a kind of miraculous place. Created out of an act of long overdue international justice, the country was, at once and at last, to be a safe haven for Jews, a model of social existence, and a rich ground for the efflorescence of a new and lovely Jewish culture. Because it needed to be all these in order to satisfy my aspirations, I in turn needed to believe that these aspirations were in fact being realized.
Forty short years later the state of Israel is something far more—or if you insist, far less—than a foolish young woman's pieties allowed for. What it is is an extremely messy (though considering the mess, an astonishingly stable) Western democratic society under constant threat. To say that the Jews are hardly any safer than before is an understatement, though for the first time in millennia they do have weapons in their hands and great skill in using them. As for Jewish culture, Israel has turned out to be a community of 20th-century Jews more or less like any other.
How could it be otherwise? People who live in a real country—never mind that it is still visibly and palpably the Holy Land and, as ever throughout history, a place of holy turmoil—lead real, which is to say ordinary, lives. It is the sin of Zionism to aspire to, not the sin of Israel to fail to achieve, the New Jerusalem.
But of course, the matter does not rest there, not for me and not for any other Jew. Jewish history and the God Who presides over it always seem to have an ace up their sleeve. Because giving up one's youthful Zionism does not free one from anxiety about the condition or the future of Israel. Quite the contrary. It would be so much easier to be the kind of Zionist or anti-Zionist—there are many of both around, and it is no longer so easy to tell them apart—who continues to strike the idealists' bargain: you be good according to my lights, and I will love you.
For those of us whose hearts have turned to stone, love is utterly beside the point. We know ourselves to be bound by ties so deep, so essential, so unconditional, that they are beyond daylight examination. We were spoken for before ever we were born, and before Israel was born. Why? To what end? By whom? I have answers to these questions, or think I do, but neither the questions nor the answers interest me very much. To be a Jew is not an act, it is a fate. The existence of Israel is absolutely central to that fate. The rest is mere details—knowable, unknowable, it makes no difference.
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Which brings me to the problem of whether one may or may not “criticize” the Israelis. The answer is, of course, one may. Who can stop one? Nothing has been so dishonest as the complaint, on the part of Jews and non-Jews alike, that they are somehow being deprived of their right openly to speak their condemnations of Israel. Indeed, it has usually been in the very course of condemning that Israel's critics have complained of being silenced. They do not actually mean that they are being silenced. The true source of their complaint is that they find themselves in turn being criticized by others. They seem to imagine that where it concerns them, the First Amendment guarantees not only free speech but universal moral approval.
The problem is not whether one has the right to attack Israeli policy or conduct but whether one is in the right in doing so. This is complicated, for it depends where and when, by whom, on what issue, for what reason, with what degree of truthfulness, with what intended consequence, and perhaps above all, in what tone of voice. An easy case, however, are those American Jews, self-professed lovers of Zion, who wring their hands in public at the failure of the Israelis to take this or that action, almost always a self-destructive one, which would make Israel and its supporters so much more attractive. These are today's believers in romantic love: they want Israel not only to be good but to look good, at whatever cost. They are exactly like those Americans—are in fact in large part also numbered among them—whose so-called attachment to the ideals of their country impels them to advocate positions inimical to its safety and well-being. With such affectionate critics a country is hardly in need of enemies.
In the end, more than anything else, it is the hypocrisy of all this hot concern that overwhelms one. If these people really knew what Israel should do for itself—or even felt they did—they would be as gods. Israel is for the foreseeable future a country with no safe or satisfactory choices. Simply to name a policy, or its opposite, is to uncover one or another grave peril. Assuming they are not merely disguised enemies looking forward to its destruction, Israel's critics in their self-assurance can know only one thing with certainty: and that is, what Israel is supposed to do to make them feel more comfortable in remaining committed to it. That, plain and simple, is what they advocate. And that is why in my new-found cold-heartedness I feel nothing but contempt for them.
For my part, I am bound by the modern Jewish imperative: Israel must live. Since I do not daily share its danger, it is not for me to reason how.
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Maier Deshell:
First, some (no doubt stock) personal observations, prompted by this symposium: I find myself, almost forty years after the creation of the state of Israel—and a lifelong Zionist—an anomaly and anachronism (what does it mean still to be a Zionist today?). The reborn Jewish commonwealth, to which I devoted my youthful ardor and my more mature support, has been awaiting me, so to speak, for four decades now; and yet, even believing as I do—that only by casting one's personal lot with Israel can one realize an authentic Jewish existence—here I remain in exile, doing whatever it is I do and, from time to time, taking up the polemical cudgels on Israel's behalf (an increasingly necessary activity, alas). Not a unique situation, to be sure, and one that has even produced a modest literature.
Well, over the course of time one comes to terms with the paradoxes of one's fate. At least, I solace myself, I have not notably contributed to the overwhelming s
