Daniel Gordis vs. Peter Beinart on the “Crisis” in Zionism.
Peter Beinart’s Mis-Identity Crisis. By Daniel Gordis. Jerusalem Post, April 11, 2012. Also at DanielGordis.org.
Daniel Gordis and the Jewish Nation-State. By Sigal Samuel. The Daily Beast, February 18, 2013.
Gordis:
Peter
Beinart is right. The relationship between American Jews and the Jewish state
is indeed in crisis. Beinart and his title are just wrong about what the crisis
is. What we face, as his book accidentally demonstrates, is not The Crisis of Zionism, but a crisis of
American Judaism.
The Crisis of Zionism is, as
countless reviewers have already noted, an Israel-bashing-fest. The second
intifada was Israel’s fault: It “erupted because while many Israelis genuinely
believed that [Ehud] Barak was trying to end the occupation, Palestinians felt
it was closing in on them.” Israel attacks terrorists “nestled amid a stateless
and thus largely defenseless Palestinian population,” as if the terrorists’
decision to lodge there were Israel’s fault. Such myopia abounds.
Israel
is blamed everywhere in this book, often thoughtlessly. The most obvious
example is the one with which the book opens. Beinart watched a video of a
young Palestinian boy wailing uncontrollably as Israeli troops arrested his
father for “stealing water,” and found himself “staring in mute horror” at his
computer screen. He is right, of course, that it is painful to watch a
five-year-old weeping as his father is arrested. But Beinart is so anxious to
blame Israel that he abandons any investigative savvy. Haaretz, not known for its enthusiastic support of the occupation
that so troubles Beinart, reported that Fadel Jaber was actually arrested on
suspicion of attacking the police. Border Police sources also suggested that
the whole scene of the sobbing five-year-old was staged for the cameras. And
everyone admits that Jaber was breaking the law.
Why,
though, does Beinart never even wonder if there is an Israeli side to the
story, never entertain the possibility that Jaber deserved to be arrested? The
mere fact that Israeli actions cause people pain is too much for him to bear.
Here,
then, is the rub, and the central question that I kept asking myself as I read
the book: Why do Beinart and his ilk expect their Zionist bride to be free of
all blemish? And worse, what is the reason for their instinctively blaming the
bride they allegedly love, without asking whether anyone else might bear some
responsibility for the painful realities they witness?
Why is
there not one mention of the extraordinary social organizations in Israel, or
the many cultural, literary and other accomplishments of Jews and Arabs in
Israeli society? Why does one finish the book with the sense that Beinart, his
protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, actually detests Israel? Why are
assaults on Israel described in the cold language of the pathologist, while the
scene with Jaber is so emotional? When Beinart mentions Gilad Shalit, this is
all he has to say: “Hamas was not innocent in all this: it had abducted an
Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, and refused to release him until Israel released
Palestinians in its jails.” That’s it?! No mention of the fact that Schalit was
captured inside Israeli territory? Or that Hamas never once allowed the Red
Cross to visit him? Or that Schalit emerged from captivity emaciated? Or that
he was held in virtual solitary confinement, with no sunlight, for five hellish
years?
Where’s
the Jewish soul here? What kind of Jewish observer weeps over young Khaled
Jaber but has nothing else to say about Schalit? It’s worse than infuriating;
it’s stunningly sad.
Again,
the pathologist: Discussing the March 2011 murder of the Fogel family, Beinart
first says, “[The terrorists] murdered Ehud and Ruth Fogel and three of their
children, Yoav, Elad and Hadas, in their beds. Elad, aged four, was strangled
to death. Hadas, aged three months, was decapitated.” Even about the Fogels, he
can summon no emotion?
Then,
unbelievably, Beinart has this to say: “But what distinguishes Palestinian
terrorism and settler terrorism is the Israeli government’s response.” Really?
That’s all that distinguishes Palestinian and Jewish terror? How about the fact
that there have been very, very few incidents of Jewish terror, while the
Palestinians have turned it into a cottage industry? How about the fact that Israeli
society detests the Jews who do this sort of thing, while Palestinian society
lionizes them? Why does Beinart not mention those enormous differences? His
sort of accusation and absurd misrepresentation is what one would expect from
the enemies of Israel, not someone who professes love for the Jewish state.
When Beinart and I debated some time ago, I actually left the evening believing
that he loved Israel. This book convinced me that I was horribly mistaken.
BUT WHY
does he hate Israel so? Time and again, Beinart seems just bewildered that the
Israel on which he was raised, that “Little Engine that Could” of swampdraining
pioneers and noble soldiers, could commit the acts that he’s now suddenly
discovering. In the War of Independence, Beinart tells us (as if he has
uncovered something interesting), “Zionist forces committed abuses so terrible
that David Ben-Gurion... declared himself ‘shocked by the deeds that have
reached my ears.’”
What’s
truly interesting about this, of course, is not Ben-Gurion’s shock, but
Beinart’s. Does Beinart really expect Israel to have fought 10 wars (depending
on how you count, but I include the War of Independence, the Sinai Campaign,
the Six Day War, the War of Attrition, the Yom Kippur War, the Lebanon War, the
first intifada, the second intifada, the Second Lebanon War and Operation Cast
Lead) without occasional terrible misdeeds being committed? Seriously? How
could someone as smart as Beinart be so naïve? What disturbs him so deeply
about Israel that he suspends his prodigious intellectual capacity and assumes
a stance of consistently stunned disappointment?
Beinart’s
problem, most fundamentally, is that the American liberalism with which he is
so infatuated does not comfortably have a place for Jewish ethnic nationalism.
Throughout
the book, the words “liberal” or “democratic” are always positives. And what
means “negative” or “shameful”? In Beinart’s book, the word is “tribal.” Every
time he uses the word “tribal,” he means “distasteful.” “Liberalism was out,”
he laments early in the book, and “tribalism was in.” Or “ethically, the ADL
and AJC are caught between the liberalism that defined organized American
Jewish life before 1967 and the tribalism that has dominated it since.” “Among
younger non-Orthodox Jews,” he later says smugly, “tribalism is in steep
decline.” What is wrong with the settlers is that they have “tribal privilege”
much “like the British in India, Serbs in Kosovo, and whites in the segregated
South.”
Really?
Israel, in which Beduin women graduate from medical school, is like the
segregated South? Surely Beinart knows better. So why the relentless attack?
BEINART’S
PROBLEM isn’t really with Israel. It’s with Judaism. Bottom line, what troubles
Beinart isn’t what’s happened to Zionism. What troubles him is the dimension of
Jewish life that he can’t abide, but of which Zionism insists on reminding him.
And that element is the undeniable fact that Judaism is tribal.
Judaism,
in its earliest phases, was actually composed of tribes. Even after the tribes
mostly disappeared, a deeply tribal sense continued to color the lenses through
which Jews viewed the world. The Book of Esther is a book about peoplehood
(Esther 3:8) and the dangers of forgetting our tribalism when acceptance by the
foreign majority becomes too tempting (4:14). In the story of Ruth, tribalism
comes before even God when joining the Jews: “Your people shall be my people,
and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16). Other peoples, too, define human beings on
the basis of what people they come from. When the ship on which Jonah has run
away is beset by a storm, the other sailors ask him, “What is your country, and
of what people are you?” (Jonah 1:8) The list is virtually endless.
I don’t
know which kiddush Beinart recited on the first night of Passover, but surely
he knows that most Jews begin the main portion of the kiddush by praising God
“who has chosen us from among all the nations, raising us above other
languages.” Has he noticed that the blessing before being called up to the
Torah thanks God for “choosing us from among all the nations,” or that we end
Shabbat with havdala, noting that God distinguishes between “holy and profane,
light and dark, between Israel and the nations”? What about the Mishna’s claim
in Bikkurim (1:4) that converts may
not recite the phrase that “God swore to our ancestors” because they are not of
our tribe (a position that Maimonides overruled, interestingly) or the Talmud’s
claim that “converts are as burdensome to [the people of] Israel as leprosy” (Yevamot 47b), presumably because the
mere idea of having people join a tribe is counterintuitive?
Does
Beinart’s Haggada not contain the line “Pour out Your wrath upon the nations”?
And does that phrase mean nothing? Judaism is many things, but it is undeniably
tribal. The crisis that Beinart feels stems from the fact that he cannot abide
Judaism’s tribalism; the State of Israel is simply caught in the crossfire
between Beinart and the religion that so deeply conflicts him.
NOW, WE
can surely debate whether or not Jewish tribalism – a view of the world that
says that we are not just like everyone else, that we are distinct and ought to
remain that way – is one with which we are comfortable. We can debate whether
or not this element of Judaism invariably leads to illegitimate Jewish senses
of supremacy. But what we cannot debate is that that is what Judaism has always
been. Had Beinart argued that a tribal Judaism has outlived its usefulness,
that would not have been very new (Reform Judaism made that claim a long time
ago, though it has largely retreated from that position), but it would have
been interesting. And honest. And fair.
Some of
us, myself included – as in my forthcoming book The Promise of Israel – would then respond that the very tribalism
that so troubles Beinart is actually essential. Why? Because it is tribalism,
the very opposite of the universalism that so enthralls Beinart, that is key to
our being someone, of having something to contribute to humanity. No one has
said it better than Michael Sandel, who wrote in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice:
“We
cannot regard ourselves as independent . . . without . . . understanding
ourselves as the particular persons we are – as members of this family or
community or nation or people, as bearers of this history, as sons and
daughters of that revolution, as citizens of this republic. Allegiances such as
these are more than values I happen to have. . . . They go beyond the
obligations I voluntarily incur and the ‘natural duties’ I owe to human beings
as such. They allow that to some I owe more than justice requires or even
permits, not by reason of agreements I have made but instead in virtue of those
more or less enduring attachments and commitments which taken together partly
define the person I am. . . . To imagine a person incapable of constitutive
attachments such as these is not to conceive an ideally free and rational
agent, but to imagine a person wholly without character, without moral depth.”
One can
surely disagree with Sandel. That is the debate that Peter Beinart wants to
have; he just doesn’t know it. He believes that a tribal Judaism is one of
which we should be ashamed. A Judaism of which we could be genuinely proud
would be a universalist Judaism that taught Jews to be “sympathetic to the
rights of Palestinians. . . at least as [much] as global warming, health care,
gay rights and a dozen other issues.”
In the
universalized Judaism for which Beinart yearns, however, there would be no
place for Israel. Jews would not need a refuge, for they would fit in
everywhere. They would not reside in the Middle East, for the creation of the
Jewish state (like the creation of every other state) required the displacement
of people. So the only way for this basically-unnecessary-Israel to be
tolerable is for it to be perfect. If people are arrested and their children
cry, Beinart cannot bear it. If Israel fights 10 wars in 65 years and there are
terrible incidents, Zionism is in crisis. So he will discuss Jewish losses with
the frigid pathos of a pathologist, but weep at the pain that Israel causes. He
will hold Israel accountable to standards that are utterly unreachable and
unrealistic, because in a world in which tribalism is the real problem, Beinart
can feel the love only so long as the bride is utterly beyond reproach.
WE
DON’T marry perfect spouses, though, and we don’t raise perfect children. Love
is tested in the messiness of life, in the thick of triumphs and
disappointments. Israel fails us all in many ways, but it’s also an astounding
story of the revitalization of the Jewish people, of a democracy built by
people who for the most part did not come from democracies.
Beinart’s
real problem is that Israel is not, and was never meant to be, a
felafel-eating, Hebrew speaking version of the United States. It is not
ethnic-neutral. It was created, and our children die for it, not simply so
there can be another democracy in the Middle East. Is one more democracy worth
my soldier son’s risking his life? No, it’s not. Israel is about the
revitalization of the Jewish people. It is, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, “of
the Jews, by the Jews and for the Jews,” all while protecting and honoring
those who are not Jewish. Are we perfect? Hardly. But do we aspire to America’s
ideal of a democracy? Not at all. We’re about something very different.
As
Beinart himself admits, his cadre of mostly young American Jews is essentially
Jewishly illiterate. They know nothing of Judaism’s intellectual depth, can say
nothing about the classical Jewish canon, have no sense of what great ideas
Judaism has brought to the world. They are thus utterly incapable of
articulating what a Jewish state not committed to America’s ideals might be
about. Confused and disappointed, they grow ashamed of us. For us to fit their
universalistic world, in which nothing Jewish is of supreme value, they need us
to be perfect. When we’re not, they cannot abide us.
We Jews
have been here before. Until recently, it had typically been the enemies of the
Jews who demanded that we drop our differentness in order to be accepted.
Today, it’s the Jews themselves, or some of them. Wise Jews, however, will know
better than to believe that becoming just like everyone else will do us any
good. Leaving aside the fact that such a move would mean abdicating the very
essence of Judaism and that it would produce an anemic ethos incapable of
attracting anyone of real substance, it will also never succeed in getting the
world to like the Jews. As Israel Zangwill, the famed British Zionist, wrote
scathingly a century ago:
“The
poor people of Kishinev tried to save themselves by putting in their windows
sacred Russian images. It is our history in a nutshell. In moments of danger we
put up the flag of the enemy. And it avails nothing in the long run – the
image-imitators at Kishinev were the people particularly chosen for
crucifixion.”
It is
no accident that Beinart’s book is among the most discussed – and reviled – in
recent memory. For the book is not really about Israel. It is about the
unsustainable new Judaism of which he is a selfappointed prophet, and to which,
sadly, many young American Jews seem to be attracted, its self-consuming
malignant core notwithstanding.
I can
think of no reaction more apt than that of Deuteronomy 13:12: “Let all of
Israel hear and be filled with fear.”
The State of Righteousness. By Michael Walzer. The Huffington Post, April 24, 2012.
Walzer:
So what
is this half-way Zionism?
It is
first of all the emotion-laden belief of someone who grew up during World War
Two that the Jews need a state, and that this need is so critical and so urgent
that it overrides whatever injustices statehood has brought. We still have to
oppose the injustices with all the resources we can muster, but we can't give
up the State. So I participate vicariously in Israeli politics by supporting my
social-democratic and peacenik friends. I want the state to be as good as it
can be, but above all I want it to be.
My
Zionism is also a universal statism. I think that everybody who needs a state
should have one, not only the Jews but also the Armenians, the Kurds, the
Tibetans, the South Sudanese – and the Palestinians. The modern state is the
only effective agency for physical protection, economic management and welfare
provision. What the most oppressed and impoverished people in the world today
most need is a state of their own, a decent state acting on their behalf. I
feel some hostility, therefore, toward people who want to “transcend” the state
– and I am especially hostile toward those who insist that the transcendence
has to begin with the Jews.
My
Zionism is a secular nationalism. The Jewish people have a twofold character:
We are a nation – Am Yisrael, the
people Israel – and we are what Americans call a “community of faith.” This is
not a common combination; it is shaped by the peculiar history of the Jews. But
statehood requires separation: the Jewish state should be an expression of the
people, not of the faith (which many of our people don’t share, at least not in
its orthodox form). We know from our history that the world can get very nasty
when religious faith and political power are joined. Zionism should empower
citizens; it should deny power to all those who claim it on religious grounds;
it should not empower zealots. State schools in Israel, it seems to me, can
legitimately promote Jewishness – in the same way that state schools in Norway
promote Norwegianess – but they can’t promote Judaism. And of course minority
groups, in Israel as in Norway, must have every opportunity to associate for
the promotion of their own culture.
My hatzi aliyah obviously doesn’t commit me
to “the negation of the exile.” Jewish history is too complicated to support
the idea that it can have only one continuation in one place. There are many
ways of being Jewish, and many places, given emancipation and democratic
citizenship, where Jewish life can flourish. But we will flourish more
securely, with greater self-respect, and with greater cultural depth, if we are
connected not only to our diasporic states but also to a Jewish state. The
Zionist project is central to Jewish life because it has led to the revival of
the Hebrew language and the creation of a modern Hebrew culture – novels,
poems, plays and films of remarkable power – and because it makes possible the
enactment of what many of us have always imagined to be Jewish values: justice,
above all.
This is
a test that we shouldn’t want to avoid: can this people, our people, stateless
for almost 2,000 years, create a state that men and women around the world will
look at and say, as in Deuteronomy 4:8, “And what nation is there so great,
that hath statutes and judgments so righteous?”
Needless
to say, we are not there yet, not even close. High ambition requires a long
life, and Israel is a very young state.
Daniel Gordis vs. Peter Beinart on the “Crisis” in Zionism. Video. Tablet Magazine, May 2, 2012. Livestream. At Israel Matzav. At Tablet. Highlights of the debate posted by Daniel Gordis on YouTube.
Beinart, Gordis Debate In Front of Packed House. By Dan Klein. Tablet, May 3, 2012.
Daniel Gordis: Beinart, Realist on Israel, Romanticist on Palestinians. Video. Daniel Gordis, May 20, 2012. YouTube.
