Thoughtful piece on how to direct our energies on Israel.

Engaging Israel: Beyond Advocacy By Donniel Hartman(09/03/2010)

Since Operation Cast Lead and the subsequent Goldstone Report, there has been an increasing sense that anti-Israeli opinion has moved beyond criticism of some of Israel’s actions and policies to the delegitimization of the Zionist project as a whole. ….

In Israel and throughout the Jewish world there has been a marshalling of forces to develop materials, programs, and new advocates to make the case for Israel. The aim of these programs is to combat distortions and present Israel’s side of the facts. However important and valuable these efforts are, they often fail to achieve their end. When the case for Israel is grounded only on a factual narrative it is often unconvincing to those who hold a counter factual perception. In general, positions are rarely formed purely around facts, but rather by ideological, moral, and psychological propensities which then construct factual narratives to reinforce the preexisting commitment.

The concentration on the above form of Israel advocacy, while valuable in educating the completely uninformed, overlooks an audience which in my mind needs to be a major focus of our efforts, and for whom current Israel advocacy either is unnecessary or ineffective. I am referring to the mainstream Jewish community itself, which has been raised to care about Israel and is now finding that the foundations of its connection is being undermined.

The reality is that the majority of committed Jews, for the most part, lack a language to understand or articulate their feelings about Israel and their desire to continue to support it. This leaves them vulnerable and exposed by the campaign of delegitimization, for they do not possess a framework from which to combat it.

The reason for this predicament is the fact that since its inception the standard arguments for support of Israel amongst world Jewry no longer resonate with most Jews, especially those 50 years and younger. These arguments can be divided into three. We must support Israel either because:

1.
Israel is necessary as a safe haven in the event of a new Holocaust;
2.
The survival of the State of Israel is in danger;
3.
Israel is a central ally in the West’s war against the “Axis of Evil.”

Besides being mutually contradictory, a common feature of all three as stated is that are increasingly irrelevant. Most Jews in North America feel increasingly at home in their societies and do not feel called to combat the urgency of the threat of a potential Holocaust. Secondly, their political consciousness regarding Israel was not formed by the angst preceding the Six Day War, or by the precariousness of Israel’s existence exposed in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Their first war as adults was the war in Lebanon in 1982 and then there was the Intifada. They were raised on the story of Israel’s power and military might. Protecting Israel from its “stronger” neighbors is not a meaningful or persuasive argument. Finally, as voting patterns in the Jewish community in North America have revealed, most do not see the war against the “Axis of Evil” as either central or compelling to their lives and an enterprise to which they want to contribute.

It is time for us to recognize that the Jewish community in general and Israel in particular have failed to develop a new Jewish narrative for the Jewish people around the world on which to base their relationship with Israel. Jewish organizations and Israel have held steadfast to the three arguments above for they were successful in creating a crisis-centered relationship with Israel which was effective in raising money. These actions, however, have mortgaged our future on the altar of immediate and short-term institutional needs. Repayment is now due, and the resources are lacking.

The Jewish community is not in need of an Israel advocacy campaign of facts and figures alone, but also of a new Jewish narrative based on Jewish ideas and values for engaging Israel in a way that will help integrate Israel into a modern Jewish identity. Jews today need to be able to address crucial questions for which they currently do not know the answer. For example: What is the role of “peoplehood” in modern Jewish identity? What is the meaning and purpose of Jewish sovereignty connected to territory rooted in the land of Israel to modern Jewish life? What are the requirements of morality of war, and how can Israel use its power in a way that is consistent with the highest standards of Jewish morality and values? How does Israel balance its legitimate right of self defense with the rights of others? Can a Jewish state be reconciled with the values of Jewish pluralism and freedom? Does the aspiration for a Jewish state automatically define Israel as a racist, apartheid state?

These are just some of the questions that need to be addressed and answered by this new Jewish narrative of Israel and Zionism. If one cannot answer them, there is neither a foundation for connecting to Israel nor the ability to sustain a viable and meaningful relationship. We need to educate and empower the Jewish community to engage Israel in a meaningful way before we can even think about asking them to advocate on its behalf.

Israel has been formed under almost impossible conditions and is still a young and deeply imperfect democracy. Not only are we not beyond criticism, we are in dire need of committed voices within our community who will lovingly challenge Israel to not accept the status quo and to continue to strive higher. If engaging Israel will be successful it will be so only because we will find a way to integrate commitment to Israel within a larger Jewish value conversation and invite people of all political and religious sensibilities to be engaged and participate in thinking about and shaping the unfinished experiment which is modern Israel.

We are surprised!

Last Wednesday night, delivering the keynote address at the Herzliya Conference, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, gave a surprisingly brilliant speech. He spoke of security, saying that Israel “must continue and strengthen its military might,” elaborating that the “weak do not survive in this region [the Middle East], and the weak do not make peace.” Yet, he noted that defending against terrorism is costly. Every state need (including security, health care, education, etc.) requires a strong economy. Israel has a strong economy, with a GDP per capita of around $30,000 a year. But to allow the economy to continue growing, Netanyahu stated that economic impediments must be removed. Israel, he expressed, should become a leading technological power. Mostly, he spoke of education. Education, he said, “is the melting pot for national resilience.” He discussed the need for greater Jewish and Zionist education in Israel, and the opening of two new national trails; one to be the historic Jewish trail of Israel and the second to be the historical Zionist trail of Israel.

I will admit, as I stood there listening to his speech, I was in shock. How could he have wasted this opportunity to address the international community? Yet, upon reflection, I came to see that his speech was ingenious. He was not merely addressing Israel, saying that our youth must be more connected to their Jewish and Zionist past. Rather, he addressed the world. To the international community, he subtly said, enough is enough. Enough with attacking the legitimacy of the existence of the State of Israel. Enough with disparaging the Jewish connection to the land. The land of Israel has been ours from time immemorial; from Jerusalem to Be’er Sheva, Tzfat to Tel Lachish, Tzipori to Massada. Enough with the narrative that the existence of Israel is only the result of the Holocaust. The Zionist enterprise is behind the modern State of Israel; the pioneers and waves of aliyah who built the kibbutzim, raised the modern city in Tel Aviv, established a de facto government in the Yishuv, protected their settlements through organizations such as the Shomer HaTzair and the Hagannah, garnered international aid and support, such as through the World Zionist Congress, and fought a war of independence against five invading armies. Netanyahu said that “the survival of the Jewish people is tied to the State of Israel.” Yet this is no new fact. Judaism has always inherently been tied to the land, and the land is a part of the people and culture. Enough, said Netanyahu. And I say, kudos.

Beit She'arim Menorah - you know, just a little like the one we light 2000 years later because of our vivid imaginations

Some of you may recall our celebration of French journalistic standards which permitted “The Invention of the Jewish People,” a sad, ideologically bent book by Shlomo Sand to win the Aujourd’hui Award, “given to the best non-fiction political or historical work from French journalists.”

That version of Sand’s book, published originally in Hebrew, was the French language version. Unfortunately, the English speaking world is now in possession of this ode to hatred of the Jewish people and it is on sale in England and the US. It’s actually ranked in the mid-2000s on Amazon, which means books are selling.

What kind of person is Shlomo Sand? He is the kind of person who compares Israel in an interview to a child born of a rape.

“Most Israeli Jews believe in a historical right. If there is no such right, what justifies our existence here? Arabs also ask me, after writing this book, how can I justify the existence of Israel. I say to them that even the son of a rape has the right to live. It was a kind of rape in 1947 and ’48 and the Palestinian tragedy continues. But you can say the same about the USA and Australia.”

…“I think Israel belongs to the Israelis, not the Jews. We have a language, a culture, a theatre, a literature, our jokes our football and our politics. We are a people but we are not just a Jewish people. I want to change the borders and definition of the state. I want to make it a more civil nation — to separate religion from its existence, to normalise and democratise Israel. I think that Israel has to belong to all its citizens, not just the Jewish ones. People call me radical but from a democratic perspective this is not so radical.”

Therefore, we glean that he’s a scholar working at an Israeli university which affords him the freedom to attack his country and society viciously and then have his ideas travel the world with him so he can call the country subsidizing his salary, the child of a rape.

And you can imagine he has serious support from the anti-Israel crowd, Jewish especially.

In our previous post, we brought in some scholarly attacks that decimate his book, but my favorite new critique of his book is by prolific and popular historian, Simon Schama, definitely not an intellectual slouch.

Schama writes:

Sand’s self-dramatising attack in The Invention of the Jewish People is directed against those who assume, uncritically, that all Jews are descended lineally from the single racial stock of ancient Hebrews – a position no one who has thought for a minute about the history of the Jews would dream of taking.

…

But, he argues, there actually was no mass forced “exile” so there can be no legitimate “return”. This is the take-away headline that makes this book so contentious. It is undoubtedly right to say that a popular version of this idea of the exile survives in most fundamentalist accounts of Jewish history. It may well be the image that many Jewish children still have. But it is a long time since any serious historian argued that following the destruction of the Second Temple, the Romans emptied Judea. But what the Romans did do, following the Jewish revolt of AD66-70 and even more exhaustively after a second rebellion in AD135, was every bit as traumatic: an act of cultural and social annihilation – mass slaughter and widespread enslavement. But there was also the mass extirpation of everything that constituted Jewish religion and culture; the renaming of Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina, the obliteration of the Temple, the prohibition on rituals and prayers. Sand asserts, correctly, that an unknowable number of Jews remained in what the Romans called Palestina. The multitudes of Jews in Rome had already gone there, not as a response to disaster but because they wanted to and were busy proselytising.

All this is true and has been acknowledged. But Sand appears not to notice that it undercuts his argument about the non-connection of Jews with the land of Palestine rather than supporting it. Put together, the possibility of leading a Jewish religious life outside Palestine, with the continued endurance of Jews in the country itself and you have the makings of that group yearning – the Israel-fixation, which Sand dismisses as imaginary. What the Romans did to the defeated Jews was dispossession, the severity of which was enough to account for the homeland-longing by both the population still there and those abroad. That yearning first appears, not in Zionist history, but in the writings of medieval Jewish teachers, and never goes away.

There are many such twists of historical logic and strategic evasions of modern research in this book. To list them all would try your patience.

…

His assumption that the Jewish state is an oxymoron built on illusions of homogeneity is belied by the country’s striking heterogeneity. How else to explain the acceptance of the Beta Israel Ethiopian Jews or the Bene Israel Indians as Israeli Jews? Certainly that acceptance has never been without obstacles, and egregious discrimination has been shown by those who think they know what “real jews” should look like. Sand is right in believing that a more inclusive and elastic version of entry and exit points into the Jewish experience should encourage a debate in Israel of who is and who is not a “true” Jew. I could hardly agree more, and for precisely the reason that Sand seems not to himself embrace: namely that the legitimacy of Israel both within and without the country depends not on some spurious notion of religious much less racial purity, but on the case made by a community of suffering, not just during the Holocaust but over centuries of expulsions and persecutions. Unlike the Roman deportations, these were not mythical.

Sand would counter that such a refuge for the victims could have been in China, or on the moon, for all that Palestine had to do with the Jews. But since his book fails to sever the remembered connection between the ancestral land and Jewish experience ever since, it seems a bit much to ask Jews to do their bit for the sorely needed peace of the region by replacing an ethnic mythology with an act of equally arbitrary cultural oblivion.

Be sure to read the entire article in the Financial Times.

Very soon, expect to hear on campuses, in news programs on the radio and occasionally in TV programs that the Jewish people are a myth. This stuff used to be said by the neo-Nazi loonies who inhabit this world, but now we have a Jewish, son of Holocaust survivors, professor from an Israeli university, ideologue whose ideology so blinds him to the basic identity of the Jewish people that he has put this lie into the mainstream.

The problem with his argument is that HE’S the one who is touting the biological issue. It is clear to most Jews that their identity stems from our thousands of years of common heritage and that heritage is directly linked to our past in Judea and Israel. It isn’t material whether my genes are directly connected to those of some Jerusalemite from 2000 years ago – although they might well be – it’s that their ideas, beliefs, practices and lives have filtered down to our time and resonate with our identity. They define who we are, and not because of a couple of 19th Century historians, but precisely because our traditions, our shared histories, our literature and even the enduring hatred we’ve suffered, are a part of every Jew. If a prayer was being said 2000 years ago, and then 1000 years later a Jew who descends from a convert says the same prayer and teaches it to his children, and that prayer is repeated 500 years later and again a thousand years later by Jews, even if they are descended from converts to Judaism, that does not lessen their connection to the place where that prayer, language and culture originated. It does not change the fact that they faced Jerusalem when praying and wished that they could visit it and even live there upon the messiah’s arrival.

Whether Sand approves or not, these ideas that form us exist because our ancestors – and here I may mean biological and I could mean ancestry in terms of ideas, faith and religious practice – lived in Jerusalem and Hebron and Shechem and Judea and Samaria.

If his problem is that Israel, a state defining itself as a Jewish state, exist on disputed land that the Palestinians claim as theirs, then that’s an entirely different issue and question. Trying to use questionable history to address this complex situation is reprehensible.

If Walt & Mearsheimer’s “The Israel Lobby” wins TheMiddle’s “21st Century Protocols of the Elders of Zion” Award, Sand’s “The Invention of the Jewish People” wins the “Temple was Never Here, It Was in Nablus” Upside Down History Prize, which I dedicate to Yasser Arafat.

(photo is from this article about the Beit She’arim site)

UPDATE: Shlomo Sand responded to Schama in an interview. We covered his comments in the post Shlomo Sand is Angry at His Critics.

Dear California Secretary of Education Thomas,

The “UC Intifada” at UCI – is raging and Chancellor Drake and the University seem unable or unwilling to act in an effective way to protect the best interests of the student body, and keep intimidation, racism, and anti-Semitism off campus.

I have been the campus rabbi at UCI for almost 5 years, under the auspices of an independent Jewish campus ministry. I also serve as the only Rabbi of the UCI Interfaith Center. My concerns are based on long-term, grassroots involvement, which has brought me into contact with thousands of UCI students – Jewish and Gentile.

It is a well established, and sadly, an accepted part of student life at UCI, that Israel and Jews are being singled out, vilified, and targeted for intimidation. It is the same nightmare of previous year’s except much worse and much longer.

Check out a video circulated by the Muslim Student Union on YouTube, which promotes their upcoming “Israel: The Politics of Genocide” nearly-month long campaign.

While some have pointed to the Olive Tree Initiative as the solution, even according to the participants it is irrelevant. It will do little to change the institutionalized commitment for the destruction of Israel held by the hard-line mainstream Muslim group on the campus, and their support for radical anti-Western, racist, anti-Semitic speakers. The OTI is not capable of solving this entrenched problem now, or in the future, even though they have admirable goals and ambition. In addition, the OTI has excluded religious Jews because they hold their major programs on the Jewish Sabbath.

What started as a week of intimidation called Anti-Zionism week, now encompasses nearly the whole month of May and accuses Israel of Genocide. In recent year’s they called the program “Holocaust in the Holy Land”. These outright lies, seem to conflict with the same groups willingness to abide by campus policies.

In 2006, I coined that phrase UC Intifada to describe what I saw.

In 2007, the Muslim Students used that phrase on their t-shirts to describe what they were doing.

The spiritual leader of the UCI chapter of the MSU, Malik Ali, has declared a “Jihad of the Tongue” against Jews, Israel and the West to be waged from here. Malik Ali has spoken many times praising suicide bombers, Hamas and Hizbollah. He is a nationally known racist, inciting hatred against the Jews. Videos of his diatribes are all over YouTube, and many were shot at UCI.

Someone from the UC system needs to provide supervision and protection. The UC System needs to send a message loud and clear that it will not tolerate racist groups from using campus groups to pursue their larger racist, agendas. In addition, it is the students that suffer the most. Theses programs cause anxiety and fear. It disrupts class and homework schedules.

I tried to reach Chancellor Drake, but he is traveling. Funny, they said that last year when we tried to find him during Hate Week.

Please help the students, cancel the events this week, and kick the MSU off campus.

Rabbi Yonah Bookstein
UCI Interfaith Center Associate Rabbi

If I’ve tired of discussing Israel, it’s because I can’t seem to write a post I haven’t already written. When I saw Leonard Fein’s excellent article in Dissent explaining what it means to be a liberal Zionist, I was struck by not only the article’s objective truth, but its tragic hopelessless. If you think Israel as a Jewish state is a good thing, even if your ideal Jewish state would be downright communist, you have no place on the left. I’ve said it before, and I appear to be saying it again. Does this make the Dissent crowd Republicans? Conservatives? No, not necessarily. But it’s telling that when do-gooder Nicholas Kristof defines the bad and good Israelis (a nuanced approach), he opposes those who fight for Jews, albeit from the right, and those concerned with the Palestinians, needless to say from the left. It is inconceivable by a mainstream or marginal Western (and I do not include Israel as Western) liberal standard that a good Jewish liberal might be interested in doing good for Jews, or for Jewish and non-Jewish Israelis alike. If you are a Jewish Israeli advocating for gay rights, redistribution of wealth, and less stringent marriage and conversion laws, that is, causes that are not specifically about the Palestinians, you are invisible as far as the left anywhere but Israel is concerned.

Cross posted from What Would Phoebe Do?

I was reading about the selection of Israel as guest of honor at this spring’s International Book Fair in Turin and how that got all the usual suspects pissed off, when I chanced upon a quote from a flier. The flier in question was distributed by a small group of protesters associated with a local pro-Palestinian group who stormed the book fair offices in Turin, demanding that the invitation to Israel be rescinded. The flier stated that “We are appalled to see the world of culture take the side of those who methodically operate to annihilate Palestine and the Palestinians…”

Methodical annihilation of Palestine and the Palestinians, eh? I tried to understand how this made sense given the recent news regarding Palestinian population numbers. It seems that while this methodical annihilation was taking place, the Palestinian population in the West Bank, Gaza and Arab East Jerusalem grew by about 30 percent in the last decade, an increase of about 1 million people, according to a recent population survey.

This can only mean one thing. The Zionists are really, really, REALLY bad at Genocide. I mean, they totally suck! Hitler needed what? Less than 5 years to kill 6 million Jews (assuming you believe that of course)? Even the Rwandan Genocide was able to kill as many as 1 million people in under 100 days – and that was with spears and machetes and stuff! And the Zionist entity? Significant population growth despite active Genocide? Sheesh. Go figure…