Their ultimate destination appears to be
the 1780s and our dysfunctional government under the Articles of Confederation.
Ellis:
When
matters become extremely dire and disheartening, as they have been in the
blatantly dysfunctional Congress, historians are usually the designated
dispensers of perspective. As bad as things are, we like to say, they have been
worse and the nation somehow survived.
But for
the life of me, I cannot recall an occasion when a minority of elected
representatives with such an absurdly partisan agenda was capable of stopping
the government of the United States in its tracks. To be sure, stoppages have
happened before, but not with a looming debt ceiling decision, which has
threatened to throw the American economy back into recession, send the global
financial markets into free fall and permanently damage America’s fiscal reputation.
Such mindless political and economic devastation is unprecedented.
Clearly,
most of the tea party radicals in the House of Representatives come from
gerrymandered districts, which function as cocoons that resist penetration by
alien ideas, like Keynesian economics, Darwinian evolution, global warming and
yes, the potential popularity of Obamacare. They live in a parallel universe in
which a rejection of any robust expression of government power is an
unquestioned and unexamined article of faith.
Where
does this irrational but obviously deep-felt impulse come from? Talk radio and
Fox News obviously feed the beast. But the seminal convictions of the tea
partiers defy any modern conceptions of government power. How far back in
history do they want to take us?
My
initial impression was that they wanted to repeal the 20th century. Radical
Republicans of the tea party persuasion object to all federal programs that
have an impact on our daily lives, including Medicare, Medicaid, Social
Security and the Federal Reserve Board. Even though tea partiers, like all the
rest of us, are beneficiaries of these federal programs, especially Medicare
and Social Security, ideology trumps self-interest in their worldview, though
one wonders how they would respond if they had their way and their Social
Security checks stopped coming.
Now, I
believe these radicals want to go even further back in time. Though it wouldn’t
be fair to pin a defense of slavery on them, they agree with the states’ rights
agenda of the Confederacy and resist the right of the federal government to
make domestic policy, which is their visceral reason for loathing Obamacare.
But
their ultimate destination, I believe, is the 1780s and our dysfunctional
government under the Articles of Confederation. The states were sovereign in
that post-revolutionary arrangement, and the federal government was virtually
powerless. That is political paradise for the tea partiers, who might take
comfort in the fact that their 18th century counterparts also refused to fund
the national debt. Their core convictions are pre-Great Society, pre-New Deal,
pre-Keynes, pre-Freud, pre-Darwin and pre-Constitution.
This is
nostalgia on steroids, and an utter absurdity, defying more than 200 years of
American history. But this, I believe, is where radical Republicans are really
coming from. It makes comprehensible their deep disregard for the destructive
consequences of their anti-government policies, for they truly believe that
government is “them,” not “us.”
The
heartening news is that their like-minded predecessors over the last two
centuries have lost every major battle, starting with the Constitutional
Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 and ending with the congressional vote and
the Supreme Court decision on Obamacare.
The
historical pattern is perfectly clear. They are going to lose again because
they are running against the main currents of history. But along the way they
are making all the rest of us pay a heavy price for their delusional agenda.
And they really don’t care.
Dysfunction
this deep strikes me as a new low in American history. This is not what the
founders had in mind.
The
findings of the recent report by the Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public
Life Project nailed me. I am one of those 20% of American Jews “of no religion”
and among the 58% of American Jews who have intermarried. The Pew study pegs me
as a “cultural” Jew who honors his ancestors, feels proud to belong to the same
group as Moses, Kafka, Freud and Barbra Streisand, wishes he had videotaped his
grandmother making challah and chopped liver – but would sooner enter a church
to admire the frescoes than don a yarmulke to davan with the faithful.
And
yet, the more I think about it, the more it grates on me to be confined in this
category. Having spent the last three years researching and writing a book
about my ancestors – Orthodox Torah scribes who studied at the famous Volozhin
yeshiva – I can honestly say that I have never felt closer to my religion.
Does
this mean I am going to attend synagogue this coming Saturday? Highly unlikely.
What it does mean is that I spend more time reading books about Jewish history,
visiting Jewish neighborhoods and sites when I travel, discussing family
history and lore with far-flung relatives, pondering the Holocaust, and
studying the Bible.
My
oldest daughter, who was snippily informed by Orthodox classmates in college
that she was “Jewish on the wrong side” and thus technically not Jewish at all,
knows more about Judaism than I do – and I’m willing to wager more than some of
those classmates who excluded her from their community. Her knowledge derives
not from hours spent hidden away in the women’s section of an Orthodox
synagogue, but from reading, studying, thinking, analyzing, traveling and
discussing.
If she
has children, I’m sure my daughter will pass on as much of her knowledge and
reverence as the children are willing to absorb. The Pew study’s “Jews by
religion” will say none of that counts because my daughter isn’t Jewish and
thus her children won’t be Jewish either. I say these are narrow categories
that leave no room for imagination, for curiosity, for inspiration, for true
holiness.
As
Yossi Klein Halevi recounts in his brilliant new book, Like Dreamers, modern Israel was founded by cultural Jews of no
religion – Jews who were fiercely proud of their Judaism but who never set foot
in a synagogue. After the Six Day War in 1967, those cultural Jewish Zionists
were increasingly challenged by the religious Jews who spearheaded the settler
movement in the West Bank. Halevi tells the story of “Israel’s competing
utopian dreams – and how the Israel symbolized by the kibbutz became the Israel
symbolized by the settlement.”
The
clash between these two utopian dreams continues with no end in sight, but the
survival of Israel, the survival of Judaism, does not lie in one camp or the
other. My favorite figure in Halevi’s book is Meir Ariel, a kibbutznik who
became one of Israel’s most highly regarded folksingers. Ariel, a typical
kibbutznik atheist, grew increasingly religious as he aged. He studied Talmud
but sang in clubs on Shabbat when he had a gig. To my mind, he beautifully
straddled the categories of cultural and religious Jew.
On a
recent trip to Rome, I had the privilege of interviewing Riccardo Di Segni,
chief rabbi of Rome’s Jewish community. At the end of the interview, the
subject turned, inevitably, to anti-Semitism. “You know, there are many types
of anti-Semitism,” Rabbi Di Segni told me. “There is one type that does not
allow Jews to be Jews. Another type does not allow Jews to be non-Jews.”
To my
mind, there are many more categories of American Judaism than “Jew by religion”
and “Jews of no religion.” Folksinger Meir Ariel, who tragically died in 1999
at the age of 57, is my model of a good Jew – reverent, steeped in the language
of the Bible, flexible, open to the promptings of the spirit. Cultural and
religious.
Moments
after Hanan Porat and his fellow Israeli paratroopers had crossed the Suez
Canal as spearheads of a furious Israeli counterattack in the 1973 Yom Kippur
War, he was severely wounded in an Egyptian mortar bombardment. The Egyptians
and Syrians had surprised Israel on Yom Kippur, with an atrocious loss of life,
and crushed the country’s post-Six Day War belief in its own invincibility.
As
Porat lay recovering in his hospital bed, his chest ravaged by shrapnel wounds,
he thanked God that he wasn’t in the burn unit. And then, as Yossi Klein Halevi
writes in his new book, “Like Dreamers,” the next phase of Porat’s life mission
was revealed.
He
read, in his hospital bed, an article in a kibbutz newspaper by a writer named
Arnon Lapid, titled, “An Invitation to Weeping.” Porat wasn’t a member of the
secular kibbutz elite; he was a member of a more marginalized group of
religious Zionists, who envied the kibbutznikim, and respected them as well.
He was
stunned by what Lapid wrote: “I want to send you all an invitation to weeping .
. . I will weep over my dead, you will weep over yours . . . we’ll weep . . .
for the illusions that were shattered, for the assumptions that were proven to
be baseless, the truths that were exposed as lies . . . And we will pity
ourselves, for we are worthy of pity.”
Halevi
writes that when Porat read this lament he “felt as if his wounds were being
torn open. He would have shouted if he had the voice. Pity the generation
privileged to restore Jewish sovereignty to the land of Israel? What
small-mindedness, what weakness of character! Where would the Jews be now if,
in 1945, they had thought like this Arnon Lapid? Israelis would do now what
Jews always did: Grieve for their dead and go on, with faith and hope.”
Porat
would soon help usher into existence a new movement, a settlement enterprise
that would be self-consciously modeled on Israel’s original settler movement,
the socialist, Zionist and fiercely anti-religious pioneering formations that
built the original kibbutzim. The early kibbutznikim were the men and women who
laid the foundations for the reborn Jewish state and led that state through the
first decades of its existence, but by 1973 they appeared to be a spent force,
exhausted spiritually, morally and politically.
Porat’s
movement, which would cover the biblical heartland of the Jewish people with
settlements – a heartland the secular world referred to as the West Bank, but
which Jews knew by the ancient names of Judea and Samaria – would be driven by
devotion to God and his demands, not by a secular vision of Jews liberated from
the ghettoes and freed from the fetters of capitalism.
This
movement, which coalesced around Porat’s Gush Emunim – the “Bloc of the
Faithful” – has defined Israel’s political agenda for the past 40 years, just
as the kibbutz movement and its leaders shaped Israel and its priorities
through the early period of its existence. What is so fascinating about these
two movements is that, for all their transformative success, they have both
failed to complete their missions.
The
kibbutzim didn't turn Israel into a socialist paradise, and the hubris and
shortsightedness of the Labor elite, which sprung from the kibbutz movement,
brought Israel low in October 1973.
And the
religious-nationalist settlement movement has succeeded in moving hundreds of
thousands of Israelis into the biblical heartland, but it has never been able
to convince the majority of Israelis that the absorption of the West Bank into
a “Greater Israel” represents their country’s salvation, rather than a threat
to its existence.
The
thwarted utopianism of these two movements is the subject of “Like Dreamers,”
which is a magnificent book, one of the two or three finest books about Israel
I have ever read. Halevi tells the story of seven men – paratroopers who
participated in the liberation of Jerusalem in 1967 – who became leaders and
archetypes of Israeli’s competing utopian movements.
When I
met Halevi in New York recently, I was filled with questions about what this
history augured for Israel’s future. The first one to cross my mind: How did
the Orthodox settlers so easily supplant the leftist kibbutz elite as the
nation’s pioneering vanguard?
“The
left lost its vigor at precisely the moment that religious Zionism discovered
its own vigor,” Halevi told me. “The key here is 1973. After 1967, not much
happened. There were a couple of settlements, but the Labor government kept
everyone on a tight leash, and the religious Zionists were intensely
frustrated. The empowering moment for religious Zionists was due to Labor’s
failures in the Yom Kippur War. A generation of young kibbutznikim came out of
1973 deeply demoralized. People like Porat realized that the left had lost the
plot.”
Halevi
went on, “In Israel, you never naturally evolve from one state of thinking to
another. We careen. So we careened toward religious Zionism and the settlement
movement.”
But in
your book, I said, you suggest that the settlers have failed to gain legitimacy
for their movement among the mass of Israelis. How did they fail? “The
settlement movement failed during the first Palestinian uprising. Israelis
realized then the price of the occupation, that there was no such thing, as
settler leaders promised, as a benign occupation. That kind of illusion went in
the late 1980s.”
Halevi
noted one small irony here: If the first Palestinian uprising dispelled the
idea that Israel could occupy the Palestinians cost-free and in perpetuity, the
second Palestinian uprising – which began after the peace process failed in
2000, dispelled the left-wing argument that territorial compromise with the
Palestinians would be easily achieved once Israel opened itself to the
possibility of peace.
“The
second uprising was the end of the dream of the Peace Now movement, because the
worst terrorism in Israel’s history happened after we made the offer for real
territorial compromise at Camp David, and after the Clinton proposals, and
after we offered to redivide Jerusalem, becoming the first country in history
to voluntarily offer shared sovereignty in its capital city.”
So,
reality has discredited both the right and left. What comes next? The next great
ideological movement in Israeli history is centrism, Halevi said. “The Israeli
centrist believes two things: A. the Arab world refuses to recognize our
legitimacy and our existence; and B. we can’t continue occupying them. I
believe passionately that the left is correct about the occupation, and I
believe the right is correct in its understanding of the intentions of the
Middle East toward the Jewish state.”
I
argued that “centrism” possesses neither the magnetic power of socialist
transformation nor the messianic qualities implicit in the settlement
enterprise. Halevi disagreed. “Centrism is taking a people that hasn’t
functioned as a people, hasn’t functioned as a nation, for 2,000 years – that
is in some ways an anti-people, who have so many different ideologies and ways
of being – and learning how to function as a working nation. That’s a large
cause.”
Will
centrist Israel overcome the power of the right? And what is its program? In a
coming post, I’ll look at the ideological and practical challenges to the
solutions centrism puts forward to the Israeli-Arab crisis. In the meantime, go
out and read Halevi’s book; nothing explains more eloquently why Israel, more
than most any other country, lives or dies based on the power and justice of
its animating ideas.
An
article and map in The New York Times’ Sunday edition two weeks ago examined
the possibility that current upheavals may cause some Arab states to break up
into smaller units. Written by the veteran foreign correspondent Robin Wright,
the article created lively discussion among Middle East-focused circles in the
United States, and in the Middle East it sparked wild speculation that it evidenced
a new plan by Western powers, Israelis and others of evil intent to further
partition large Arab countries into many smaller, weaker ones. The title of the
article, “How 5 Countries Could Become 14,” naturally fed such speculation, as
did the immediate linkage in millions of Arab minds of how British and French
colonial officials in 1916-1918 partitioned the former Ottoman lands of the
Levant into a series of new countries called Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and
Israel, while their colonial handiwork had also created new entities that
ultimately became independent countries such as Kuwait, Bahrain, the United
Arab Emirates and others.
Wright’s
article explored the possibility that Libya could fracture into three units,
Iraq and Syria into five units (of Druze, Kurds, Alawites, Sunnis and Shiites),
Saudi Arabia into five units, and Yemen into two units. Syria might trigger
such fragmentation across the region in stressed multisectarian societies. She
did not advocate this, but only speculated whether sectarian stresses and
conflicts might reconfigure countries that were not designed by the will of
their own people.
Most
critics of the article and map were horrified by the possibility that foreign
powers may once again be at work redrawing the map of the Middle East,
reaffirming two of the greatest lived traumas that have long plagued the Arab
world: the ability and willingness of external powers to meddle deeply and
structurally in our domestic condition, and the total inability of vulnerable,
helpless Arab societies to do anything about this.
I
understand the harsh reactions by Arabs who fear another possible redrawing of
our map by foreign hands, but I fear that this is not really the bad news of
the day; the really bad news is the state of existing Arab countries, and how
most of them have done such a terrible job of managing the societies that they
inherited after 1920.
The
horror map is not the one published in the NYT two weeks ago; it is the
existing map and condition of the Arab countries that have spent nearly a
century developing themselves and have so little to show for it.
Not a
single credible Arab democracy. Not a single Arab land where the consent of the
governed actually matters. Not a single Arab society where individual men and
women are allowed to use all their God-given human faculties of creativity,
ingenuity, individuality, debate, free expression, autonomous analysis and full
productivity. Not a single Arab society that can claim to have achieved a
reasonably sustainable level of social and economic development, let alone
anything approaching equitable development or social justice. Not a single Arab
country that has protected and preserved its natural resources, especially
arable land and renewable fresh water resources. Not a single Arab country that
has allowed its massive, ruling military-security-intelligence sectors to come
under any sort of civilian oversight. Not a single Arab country that has spent
hundreds of billions of dollars on foreign arms and other imports and found
itself able to ensure the security of its own land and people. And not a single
Arab country that has developed an education system that harnesses and honors
the immense wealth and power of millions of its own young Arab minds, rather
than corralling those minds into intellectual sheep pens where the mind’s free
choice is inoperative, and life only comprises following orders.
This
perverse reality of Arab statehood and independence – not any possible future
map – is the ugly reality that should anger us, even shame us. We have endured
this for over four generations now, unsurprisingly bringing us to the point
today where every single Arab country, without exception, experiences open
revolt of its citizens for freedom, dignity and democracy of some sort, demands
for real constitutional reforms, or expressions of grievances via social media
by citizens in some wealthy oil-producing states who are afraid to speak out
because they will go to jail for tweeting their most human sentiments or
aspirations.
There is
not much to be proud of in the modern era of Arab statehood, and much to fix
and rebuild along more rational, humane lines. I don’t much care about lines on
a map. I do care about the trajectories of our own national management
experiences, which have been mostly disappointing, and in some cases profoundly
derelict.
Behind
these wild exaggerations of both the hatred for Muslims and the threat posed by
Islamists, there lurk political agendas. Islam has effectively been turned into
a proxy for the expression of ideas that might otherwise prove difficult to
articulate. Among Leftish Islamophiles, ratcheting up panic about rampant
Islamophobia has become a PC way of expressing fear of the masses, particularly
the tabloid-reading white working classes. Claims that Muslims are constantly
at risk from ignorant haters is just a more acceptable way of expressing
prejudices about the volatility of the uneducated mob. And among the
Right-leaning panickers about Islamism, bashing extremism is a cop-out from
having a serious debate about the state of enlightened, reasoned thinking in
Britain. How much easier it is to wail “The Islamists are undermining our
values of free speech and tolerance!” than to examine the various homegrown trends, from environmentalism
to multiculturalism, that are really mauling the enlightened, universalist
outlook.
Aryeh
Cohen, a leading voice in the left-wing Jewish social justice movement, has
pointed out a hypocrisy on the left which has baffled some Jewish conservatives
for a while. He doesn’t stand with Women of the Wall–a liberal organization in
Israel looking to establish egalitarian prayer rights at the Western Wall
(Kotel)–because it is seeking to advance Jewish rights in an area not only
“occupied,” but where an Arab neighborhood once stood. In other words: how can
Jewish liberals promote Jewish egalitarianism in a place they don’t even
believe Jews should be?
Beyond
the particular question of egalitarianism, Cohen’s post in fact speaks to the
wider issue of American Jewish liberal treatment of Israel. How are the
competing claims of Jews and Arabs to be decided? “In some other world in which
peace and justice reign, and nobody harbors any agendas aside from bettering
the good of all,” Cohen writes, “everybody would be able to pray together, or
as they wished, at the Western Wall or on the Temple Mount itself.”
Unfortunately, as Cohen points out–and many conservatives would agree–this is
not presently possible. The conclusion seems, then, that for now the will of
one side must prevail over that of the other. The problem is that the American
Jewish left believes the side that should prevail is that of the Arabs. If only
one side of this conflict can pray on the Temple Mount, they say, it must be
the Arabs. If only one side can have access to the Kotel, they say, it must be
the Arabs. If only one side can have sovereignty in parts or all of the Land of
Israel, they say, it must be the Arabs.
This
sentiment crosses the border of self-effacement into the region of self-hatred.
To insist that the Jews owe so much to others and are themselves owed nothing
is to ask of one’s tribe to be nothing more than a doormat. Such an analogy
might describe much of Jewish history, yet now that, thanks to the achievements
of the modern State of Israel, it may no longer be applicable, the American
Jewish left is prescribing it. If
rights are to clash in the Middle East, they declare, the Jews should sacrifice
theirs. This, we are told, is “justice.”
We are
also told it is “peace”–thus compounding the perverseness of these liberals’
recommendations. If the route to reconciliation in the Middle East is through
the elevation of one side’s claims over the other’s, is peace likely to emerge
from Arab hegemony, under which Jews are denied most rights (including, as it
happens, the right to pray on the Temple Mount, which is administered by an
Arab authority), or through Jewish democracy, where Arabs are afforded maximal
rights?
(Those
who contest this last point are referred to Cohen’s admission that “Nothing in
Israel, or in the Middle East, is disconnected from anything else,” yet these
issues are treated by North American Jews as if they “exist in a vacuum.”)
The
Jewish left may think that the answer to Israel’s problems is to go back to the
1940s. Others, though, think “peace and justice” might come a different way.
In the
coming weeks or months Palestinians will likely put an end to the latest peace
talks, just as they did in 2000 and 2008. Israel will of course be blamed;
however, the reality will remain the same as it has been for the last 20 years:
The so-called two-state solution is far from a solution but rather is a recipe
for disaster.
Even if
by some miracle Secretary of State John F. Kerry and the U.S. administration
are able to push through a historic compromise, it may only aggravate the
conflict, creating an extremist and belligerent entity on the hills of Judea
and Samaria (commonly referred to as the West Bank) overlooking Tel Aviv,
Jerusalem and Ben Gurion Airport.
With
Israel’s major population centers in close missile range, a new confrontation
would be almost inevitable, with dire consequences.
It
doesn’t have to be this way. If we admit the failure of the two-state formula,
we could slowly and realistically move toward peace and reconciliation.
The
time has come to replace the old two-state paradigm with a new and more
achievable goal: the two-stage
solution. The first stage is ensuring security, stability and prosperity for
both Israelis and Palestinians — what I call peaceful non-reconciliation. The
second would be a gradual move toward a final resolution of the conflict,
consolidating peace and political rights by bringing Jordan back into the
picture and dividing functions, not territory.
Stage
one is already under way without the need for lengthy diplomatic deliberations.
In game theory terms, a stable equilibrium is already being forged. The status
quo as it relates to Israelis and Palestinians is not an ideal situation, nor
does it fulfill all the aspirations of either population. But the players on
both sides know that they will not benefit from radically changing the current
reality, given the existing options.
With some
tragic exceptions, security for both Jews and Palestinians prevails. Both
economies have been growing at decent rates over the last decade. A modern
Palestinian city, Rawabi, is being built north of Ramallah, making it the
largest construction project in the area. The Palestinians fly their own flag
over their own government buildings. Their uniformed police patrol their
streets. In fact, about 95% of the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria and 100%
in the Gaza Strip are governed by their own brethren, not Israel.
In
addition, Israel and the international community can and should actively work
together with the Palestinians to improve their quality of life.
As long
as security is assured, checkpoints and even the entire security barrier can
and should be removed. The so-called refugee camps, in which the
fifth-generation descendants of the original refugees still live in squalid
conditions, can and should be completely rebuilt and modernized.
At the
same time, the Palestinians must abandon their policy of hatred, incitement and
glorification of terrorism to give a new generation of Israelis hope that peace
can be achieved.
Naturally,
even an improved status quo in Judea and Samaria would be a temporary
situation. However, if supported by the world, it could prevail as long as a
final-status agreement remains out of reach.
It may
take decades to recover from the last 20 years of negotiations, which raised
premature and irresponsible expectations that there can be two separate states
between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. However, once this has
begun to be achieved, the second stage of the two-stage solution can evolve. It
will have to include Jordan.
Situated
on what was once the eastern side of British Mandatory Palestine, with a
majority of Palestinians among its citizens, Jordan bears a great deal of
responsibility for the creation of the current territorial conflict.
Preventing
the establishment of a Palestinian state, Jordan annexed Judea and Samaria
after taking the area in the 1948 Israeli war of independence.
Then,
in 1967, Jordan joined forces with Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Palestine
Liberation Organization in an attempt to annihilate Israel. Israel prevailed,
liberating Judea and Samaria, but Jordan continued to assert some responsibility
over the Palestinians living there, despite the area being under Israeli
control. Those Palestinians were given Jordanian citizenship until 1988, when
Jordan conveniently relinquished its legal and administrative connection to
Judea and Samaria, thereby reframing the conflict as one exclusively between
the PLO and Israel.
The
strategic hills of Judea and Samaria are the ancient Jewish heartland and the
cradle of Jewish civilization; therefore, no other nation state but Israel can
exist west of the Jordan River. This doesn't mean the process of self-rule of
the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria should regress; it should advance.
For
instance, in what may well be a new and unique political model, Jordan could
take full responsibility for residents of the Palestinian Authority,
effectively replacing it with a Jordanian “functional exclave” while Israel has
overall sovereignty. Israel would continue to be responsible for the hundreds
of thousands of Israeli citizens who would reside in their own communities.
Amman would be the site of the Palestinians’ government, and they would receive
full political rights as Jordanian citizens, able to elect and be elected to
the highest positions of government. Gazans would have to decide if they wish
to join or remain isolated.
In the
rapidly changing Middle East, there are no quick-fix solutions. A new, gradual
approach is needed that takes into account the Palestinian choice of war over
compromise in 1947, 1967 and 2000. Israeli President Shimon Peres used to
advocate for the “Jordanian option” and a functional compromise for Judea and
Samaria, but he abandoned the idea for the sake of the Oslo accords. With the
20 years of hindsight, maybe the younger Peres was right.
This
new form of bigotry against Israel has been called the “new anti-Semitism,”
with “Israel” replacing “Jew” in traditional anti-Semitic imagery and canards,
singling out and discriminating against the Jewish state, and denying the
Jewish people alone the right to self-determination. The new anti-Semitism is
packaged in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign (BDS), which claims
to champion Palestinian rights though its real goal is to erode American
support for Israel, discredit Jews who support Israel, and pave the way for
eliminating the Jewish state. One of BDS’ central demands is the “complete
right of return” for all the descendants of the original Palestinian refugees,
subtle language that means the end of Israel as the Jewish homeland because it
would turn Israel into a Palestinian-Arab majority state. It is
surprising that an extremist group like BDS is ever taken seriously, but BDS
advocates have found receptive audiences in some circles. Their campaigns are
well organized and in many cases, well financed. They have lobbied
universities, corporations, food co-ops, churches, performing artists, labor
unions, and other organizations to boycott Israel and companies that do
business with Israel. But even if these groups don’t agree to treat Israel as a
pariah state, the BDS activists manage to spread their anti-Israel
misinformation, lies and prejudice simply by forcing a debate based on their
false claims about Israel. To give
you a taste of the viciousness of the BDS attacks, let me cite just a few of
the many shocking experiences I have had. At a BDS event in Portland, a
professor from a Seattle university told the assembled crowd that the Jews of
Israel have no national rights and should be forced out of the country. When I
asked, “Where do you want them to go?” she calmly answered, “I don’t care. I don’t
care if they don’t have any place else to go. They should not be there.” When I
responded that she was calling for ethnic cleansing, both she and her
supporters denied it. And during a presentation in Seattle, I spoke about my
longing for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. When I was done, a woman
in her 60’s stood up and yelled at me, “You are worse than the Nazis. You are
just like the Nazi youth!” A number of times I was repeatedly accused of being
a killer, though I have never hurt anyone in my life. On other occasions,
anti-Israel activists called me a rapist. The claims go beyond being absurd –
in one case, a professor asked me if I knew how many Palestinians have been
raped by IDF forces. I answered that as far as I knew, none. She triumphantly
responded that I was right, because, she said, “You IDF soldiers don’t rape
Palestinians because Israelis are so racist and disgusted by them that you
won’t touch them.” Such
irrational accusations are symptomatic of dangerous anti-Semitism. Yet, alarmingly,
most mainstream American Jews are completely oblivious to this ugly movement
and the threat it poses. They seem to be asleep, unaware that this anti-Jewish
bigotry is peddled on campuses, by speakers in high schools, churches, and
communities, and is often deceptively camouflaged in the rhetoric of human
rights.
The three steps that could rescue it from endless conflict and international ostracism.
Gorenberg:
I write
from an Israel with a divided soul. It is not only defined by its
contradictions; it is at risk of being torn apart by them. It is a country with
uncertain borders and a government that ignores its own laws. Its democratic
ideals, much as they have helped shape its history, or on the verge of being
remembered among the false political promises of 20th-century ideologies.
What
will Israel be in five years, or 20? Will it be the Second Israeli Republic, a
thriving democracy within smaller borders? Or a pariah state where one ethnic
group rules over another? Or a territory marked on the map, between the river
and the sea, where the state has been replaced by two warring communities? Will
it be the hub of the Jewish world, or a place that most Jews abroad prefer not
to think about? The answers depend on what Israel does now.
For
Israel to establish itself again as a liberal democracy, it must make three
changes. First, it must end the settlement enterprise, end the occupation, and
find a peaceful way to partition the land between the Jordan and the
Mediterranean. Second, it must divorce state and synagogue—freeing the state
from clericalism, and religion from the state. Third and most basically, it
must graduate from being an ethnic movement to being a democratic state in which
all citizens enjoy equality.
Proposing
these changes provokes several reflexive objections, inside Israel and beyond.
First, many Israeli Jews translate any call for full equality of all citizens
as a demand that Israel cease to be a Jewish state. The supposed choice is a
false one. Israel can be a liberal democracy and still fulfill the justifiable
desire of Jews, as an ethnic national group, for self-determination.
The
liberal meaning of self-determination begins with the rights of individuals. As Israeli political
thinker Chaim Gans argues, it expresses the justifiable desire of members of an
ethnic group to maintain a basic aspect of their humanity and personal
identity: their culture. To live in their culture and preserve it, they need a
place where that culture shapes the public sphere. The natural and must
justifiable place for that to happen is their homeland, or in part of it.
But in
the real world, in contrast to utopias, individual rights clash. The classic
metaphor for this is the man crying fire in a crowded theater: Dogmatically
preserving his right of expression robs others of their right to stay alive.
Nation-states can be liberal democracies, but each faces the constant challenge
of balancing the right of self-determination and other rights.
Israel
does not have to give up being a Jewish state. It does need to establish a very
different balance of rights. In a country with a significant Jewish majority,
it is reasonable for the usual language of the public sphere to be Hebrew. It
is reasonable for offices to close on Jewish holidays, because most people
would not show up for work on those days anyway. It is also reasonable for the
kitchens in government institutions—such as the army—to be kosher, since this
preserves the right of Jews who observe religious dietary laws to participate
fully in society.It is not acceptable
for the government to favor Jews in allocation of jobs, land, or school
buildings, or for it to prevent Muslim citizens from maintaining a mosque in a
mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhood. Nor is it acceptable for the government to
condition the rights of non-Jewish citizens on their swearing fealty to this
particular balance of rights.
A
second objection is that creating two states between the river and the sea is
no longer possible. Settlements are too large, Israel and the occupied
territories too entangled; the tipping point has been passed. All that is
possible now is a one-state solution. Especially outside of Israel, this
practical argument often hides a psychological tendency: even progressives
sometimes fight the last battle, especially if it was a heroic fight for which
they were born too late. One person, one vote was the answer in South Africa,
they say; therefore it is the solution for Israel.
In
fact, a one-state arrangement would solve little and make many things worse.
Imagine that tomorrow Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip were
reconstituted as the Eastern Mediterranean Republic, and elections were held.
With the current population, the parliament would be split almost evenly
between Jews and Palestinians. One of the first issues that the parliament and
judiciary would face is the settlements that Israel built on privately owned
Palestinian property, whether it was requisitioned, stolen, or declared state
land over Palestinian objections. Palestinian claimants would demand return of
their property. The problem of evacuating settlers wouldn’t vanish. Rather, it
would divide the new state on communal lines.
Likewise
for refugees. Palestinian legislators would demand that Israel’s Law of Return
be extended to cover Palestinians returning to their homeland. Jewish
politicians would oppose the move, which would reduce their community to a
threatened minority. Palestinians would demand the return of property lost in
1948 and perhaps the rebuilding of destroyed villages.Except for the drawing of borders, virtually
every question that bedevils Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations would
become a domestic problem, setting the new political entity aflame.
Issues
not at the center of today’s diplomacy would also set the two communities at
odds. Israel has a post-industrial Western economy; The West Bank and Gaza are
underdeveloped. Financing development in majority-Palestinian areas and
bringing Palestinians into Israel’s social-welfare network would require Jews
to pay higher taxes or receive fewer services. But the engine of the Israeli
economy is high-tech, an entirely portable industry. Both individuals and
companies would leave, crippling the new shared economy. Meanwhile, two
nationalities who have desperately sought a political frame for cultural and
social independence would wrestle over control of language, art, street names,
and schools. Psychologically, it would be a country with two resentful
minorities and no majority.
Even in
the best case, the outcome would be the continued existence of separate Jewish
and Palestinian political parties. And even the more liberal-leaning parties of
each community would be hard-pressed to bridge the divide to form stable
coalitions. Israel would become a second Belgium, perpetually incapable of
forming a stable government. In the more likely case, the political tensions
would ignite as violence. The transition to a single state would mark a new
stage in the conflict. For a harsh example of the potential fluctuation between
political stalemate and civil war, Palestinians and Jews need only look
northward to Lebanon.
A
single state could easily be the result of Israel failing to make any choices.
It would not be a solution—even a workable arrangement, which is what politics
normally offers in place of solutions. It would be a nightmare: another of the
places marked on the globe as a country, in which two or more communities do
battle while the most educated or well-connected members of each look for
refuge elsewhere.
A third
objection to a two-state solution, from the Israeli right and its overseas
supporters, is that it requires Israel to sacrifice too much for peace. This
reflects an old habit of thought in which territory is the coin that Israel
reluctantly pays for a peace agreement.
It’s
true that peace is an essential end in itself. But Israel must also give up
land to reestablish itself as a state and a democracy. It needs to put a border
back on the map. Within that border, the government needs to rule by the
consent of the governed. It needs to restore the rule of law and end the ethnic
conflict.
Peace
with the Palestinians is a means for
achieving these goals. It provides the way for Israel to end its grip from
outside on the Gaza Strip and to leave the West Bank safely. “Hold too much,
and you will hold nothing,” the Talmud says. If the state of Israel tries to
continue holding the West Bank, there will be no state.
Nationalism is alive and well in Europe. Expecting Israelis and Palestinians to abandon it is a fantasy.
Gorenberg:
From
the balconies above the narrow stone-paved streets of Girona hung gold-and-red
striped flags. A blue triangle and white star adorned most of them,
transforming the banner of the autonomous region of Catalonia into the standard
of Catalonian independence. Here and there a legend emblazoned a flag: Catalunya, Nou Estat D’Europa—“Catalonia,
A New State in Europe.”
In
Catalonia, as any visitor to Girona or Barcelona will know, nationalism is
alive and very 21st-century. In mid-September over a million and a half
people—a fifth the region’s population—formed a chain the length of Catalonia
to demand independence from Spain. Since the end of the Franco era, Catalonia
has been on a long march toward ever greater autonomy from the central
government in Madrid. The Franco regime repressed the Catalan language. Today
the regional government works in Catalan, schools teach in it, and a language
law requires businesses to use it. That menu, fair visitor, is in Catalan, not
Spanish. The restaurateur does not get to choose.
Media
reports on demands for independence often stress finances: Better-off Catalonia
is tired of paying more to Madrid than it gets back. Regional President Artur
Mas includes that problem in his case for secession. But let’s not fall into
lazy economic determinism. If giving more to a federal government than you
receive in return was reason enough to demand self-determination, you'd see
million-person rallies for independence in California and New York.The economic argument resonates in Barcelona
because so many Catalans feel that their shared language, culture and history
give them a national identity separate from Spain, and want to express that
identity in their own state. This is nationalism, and it’s the platform of
Catalan parties on both the left and the right.
North
of the Pyrenees, there’s further evidence that post-nationalist pluralism hasn’t
progressed quite as far as Judt claimed. On a Paris street, a young Muslim
woman can choose to wear fashionably color-coordinated pastel pants, blouse,
and hijab. But a 2004 law requires her to take off her headscarf to attend a
public school, or to teach in one. This year’s controversies include an
unpopular court decision that permits a woman wearing a hijab to work in a
private nursery school, and the question of whether a headscarfed mother can accompany
her child’s class trip. Calls to extend the legal ban on the hijab have come
from politicians on the left as well as the right.
In
France, the principle of a state based on shared national identity has worked
in the opposite direction from Catalonia. The state came first, and has engaged
in a two-century project to forge a common national culture, language, and
historical memory. The Third Republic successfully imposed French as the
national tongue, marginalizing other languages. Taking the long perspective,
the headscarf ban is the newest stage in the old process.Formally, the 2004 law that bans headscarves
in public schools prohibits wearing other religious symbols as well, in the
name of shared secularism. But the hijab was the target. France is arguing
about whether a woman who is publicly Muslim is a true Frenchwoman, or merely a
citizen.
It’s
ironic that Malala Yousefzai, the heroic 16-year-old Pakistani advocate of
education for girls, would have to remove her hijab to attend a public school
in France, and that Egyptian human-rights activist Dalia Ziada would have to do
the same to teach a class. But my point is not to defend language laws or
condemn veil laws, or to take a stand on Catalonian secession, or for that
matter whether Scotland should choose independence in next year’s referendum. I
am merely reporting: Working out how a nation-state should function is still a
basic issue in Europe. Nationalism isn’t over in the democratic world. Jews are
not atavistic in wanting their national self-determination, nor are
Palestinians. Judt knew this. His call for a one-state solution expressed his
personal, painful disappointment with the particular way that the Jewish
nation-state had turned out. (I share the disappointment and have other ideas
about the solution, but that’s a separate story.)
Advocates
of the one-state answer today are an odd mix. They include Israeli rightists so
opposed to giving up land that they’d rather annex the West Bank and give
citizenship to its Palestinian residents—but who expect Israel to remain “the
state of the Jewish people, with a large Arab minority.” As individuals,
Palestinians would have full rights; as a nation, none. Some Palestinian
one-staters have a vision that, at best, is a mirror image of this: The state
of Palestine, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, would have Jewish
citizens—defined as a religious rather than national minority, because
Palestinian nationalism has always had a hard time with the idea that Jews
constitute a nationality. Among American proponents of a single state, quite a
few speak only of how it will provide individual civil rights to all. That
position reflects a natural but deceptive inclination to fit foreign events
into American analogies. Civil rights battles are basic to American history;
the ideologies of national rights are largely a foreign language.
The
one-staters with whom it’s easiest to sympathize are those who have lost all
hope for negotiating the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank
and Gaza. Their most common claim is that Israeli settlements are too large to
evacuate, and a Palestinian state is impossible if they stay put. Though
Lustick speaks of “one mixed state” only as a possibility, not a program, he is
an effective spokesman for despondency. The Israel and Palestinian visions of a
two-state agreement are too far apart, he writes. The current
Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are “negotiations to nowhere.” They provide
cover for Israel to build settlements and for the Palestinian Authority to
survive on aid from abroad, he says.
Lustick
is right that, so far, the talks appear to be producing nothing—except for talk
in closed rooms. But his alternative to diplomacy—“outcomes [that] develop
organically”—is a very soft euphemism for outcomes that come about violently.
Independent Ireland didn't just “emerge,” as Lustick writes; it was born in
bloodshed. His description of potential partners in creating a single state is
a lovely fantasy. But contrary to what he writes, “Tel Aviv’s . . . non-Jewish
Russian-speaking immigrants” are not post-Zionists. “Global village Israeli
entrepreneurs” are just as Zionist as the other Israelis who served with them
in elite army units. On the other side, Palestinians committed to democracy are
no less committed to their national identity and the hope for independence.
The
challenge to one-staters is to explain how two national groups, Jews and
Palestinians, will peacefully put together a single state, live together in
that state, and prevent it from ripping apart. Expecting that their nationalism
will disappear is even less realistic than expecting the gold, red and blue
flag to vanish from Catalonia.
