Judith Leder has done us the enormous favor of reviewing and summarizing Peter Beinart's important work, The Crisis of Zionism. There are so many books to be read on many of our lists that this summary may either convince you to read the book or lead you to think you have gotten the the essence from her summary. Judith is a former Catholic nun, now retired English professor, living in Fullerton, CA, and a good friend of EPF/PIN. RCF
Peter Beinart's The Crisis of Zionism is the cry of a voice in the wilderness--a passionate call by a contemporary prophet. Written primarily to and for the Jews of America, it is a devastating analysis of how and why liberal Zionism (Zionism in the tradition of Abraham Heschel) and illiberal Zionism (Ze'ev Jabotinsky's revisionist Zionism) bifurcated. It is Beinart's conviction that American Jews must save liberal Zionism and thereby save Israel as a democratic state.
The Crisis of Zionism has been in the news since its publication, bearing out the truth of the Booklist reviewer's comment that the book is likely to "evoke intense debate." Positive reviews have ranged from the lukewarm ("The sentiment is noble, and the message deserves to be heard." The Economist) to the enthusiastic ("Peter Beinart has written the outstanding Zionist statement for the twenty-first century." Naomi Chazan, New Israel Fund). The New York Times couldn't make up its mind. In April of this year, Jonathan Rosen pilloried the book in his review:
[Beinart] sets out to save [Israel] by labeling many of its leaders racist, denouncing many of its American supporters as Holocaust-obsessed enablers and advocating a boycott of people and products from beyond Israel’s 1967 eastern border. While saving Israel, Beinart hopes with evangelical zeal to save America from a handful of Jewish organizations that in his view have...hijacked American liberalism. (NY Times, 4/13/12; see also the Letters to the Editor 5/26/12.which include Beinart's response to Rosen's review)
Two months earlier, Roger Cohen, Rosen's colleague at the NYTimes, had written a far more thorough and astute assessment.
Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism is an important new book that rejects the manipulation of Jewish victimhood in the name of Israel’s domination of the Palestinians...Beinart, a prominent liberal journalist, is right to invert the treacherous victimhood trope. Israel is strong today...and the Middle East’s only nuclear-armed state...[T]he greatest danger by far to Israel is that it will squander the opportunities of power...through excess of victimhood...[A]s Beinart chronicles, major American Jewish organizations...have in general made uncritical defense of Israel the cornerstone of their policies and [have] viewed deviation from the ever-refreshed victimhood narrative as unacceptable dissent...Such prescriptions worked for an embattled little Israel and a generation of Holocaust survivors; they fall short today. (NYTimes, 2/13/12)
In the words of Rabbi Brant Rosen, Beinart's book is "a passionate effort that came twenty years too late." Still, it is a book that anyone interested in the Israel/Palestine problem should read. Since most of us have too much to read and too little time, I set about summarizing The Crisis of Zionism. I didn't expect to like it at all. (Which tells more about me than about Beinart, perhaps.) The index doesn't mention Pappe, Tutu, Finkelstein, Halper, or other voices I'm familiar with. The only map in the book gives no indication of the current Bantustand character of the West Bank. Beinart's creds (The New Republic and The Daily Beast) put my teeth on edge. As read, I found myself arguing with him about many points. Still, on the whole, I found the book both reasonable and persuasive; with respect to Beinart's riveting account of the 2011 contretemps between Obama and Netanyahu, it was heartbreaking.
What follows is a summary of what I believe to be the meat of Beinart's chapters. I held the summaries--almost entirely direct quotes from the text--to one page per chapter. Anything in brackets is mine. Naturally, cutting out 95% of what a writer has written is unfair and can be lethal. Still, I believe that this exceedingly foreshortened version of the book will give many readers a sense of Beinart's arguments and an adequate overview of what he has written. JRL
The Crisis of Zionism
Peter Beinart
Summarized by J. R. Leder
Introduction
We Jews begin our stories with victimhood and end them with survival. Many American Jews think the lesson of Jewish history is "they tried to kill us; we survived; let's eat." But the Jewish condition has fundamentally changed. The shift from Jewish powerlessness to Jewish power has been so profound, and ... So rapid, that it has outpaced the way many Jews think about themselves. We need a new American Jewish story, built around the idea that we Jews are not history's permanent victims. Today our challenges stem from power not weakness. Perpetual victimhood can't answer two important questions
1. how to sustain Judaism in America and
2. how to sustain democracy in Israel.
Today we are failing both challenges. Ours is a community that builds better memorials than schools. Our message has become "Honor the dead by preventing another Holocaust, this time in Israel' whereas it should be "honor the dead by acting justly toward those non-Jews who live under Jewish rule."
Young American Jews are more conscious than their parents of the degree to which Israeli behavior violates democratic ideals.
Anti-Semitism does exist, but ascribing criticism of Israel to a primordial hatred of Jews fails to grapple with Israel's role in its mounting isolation.
Jewish texts connect sovereignty over the land to Jewish behavior in the land of Israel. Thus, Israel's physical survival is bound up with its ethical survival. I don't want Jewish sovereignty to fail. A nation that pursues "freedom, justice, and peace as envisioned by the Hebrew Prophets" is the patrimony of the Israelis. [It is a] dream that must not die.
Chapter 1: Crisis in Israel
Abraham Herzl, the founder of Zionism, wanted to establish a Jewish state that cherished liberal ideals: "We don't want a Boer state but a Venice," he said. Unfortunately, the conflict between the desire to build a Jewish state premised on liberal democratic principles and the temptation to flout those principles in the name of Jewish security and power runs throughout the Zionist enterprise. The Israeli Declaration of Independence grants "complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex."
The gap between the Zionist ideal of a safe homeland for the Jews and liberalism (respect for all people) was closing [in Israel] before the Six Day War (1967) when the trajectory [toward liberalism] was upended. For the past 44 years, on the land on which Palestinians might establish their state, secular and religious Jews alike have forged an illiberal Zionism that threatens to destroy the dream of liberal Zionism. In part, the disregard for liberalism is the result of the Israelis' refusal to admit that they have been victimizers as well as victims in Israel/Palestine--this is so despite the fact that Israeli historians have documented the victimization of Palestinians.
What has developed since the Six Day War is a vicious cycle in which the illiberal Zionists beyond the green line destroy the possibility of liberal Zionism inside the green line. Today, the boundary between a nation where Jewish power is restrained by democratic ideals (Israel proper) and a territory (the West Bank) where Jewish power runs wild is called the green line. Israel is not unique in its favoring of a dominant ethnic group. Nor is it alone in its misuse of power. No country has any cause for sanctimony. Americans, for example, must reflect on their treatment of American Indians.
Violence is the most obvious way in which antidemocratic culture of the West Bank menaces the culture of democratic Israel. Another is racism. In 2008 Ehud Olmert said "an evil wind of extremism, of hate, of maliciousness, of violence, of losing control, of lawbreaking, of contempt for the institutions of the state is passing through certain sections of the Israeli public."
The terrible irony is that even as Israel's leaders defend the Jewish state against international isolation by invoking its liberal democratic character, their own policies are eroding it. If Israel occupies the West Bank without granting citizenship to the Palestinian inhabitants, it will remain a Jewish state but become an apartheid one.
The Israelis most committed to liberal democracy see Herzl's dream slipping away. The American Jewish Establishment insists on seeing almost nothing at all.
Chapter 2: The Crisis in America
At home in America, we are losing the struggle for Jewish survival and ensuring that Israel loses the struggle for Jewish democracy. The Jewish establishment denies that Jews can use power not merely to survive but also to destroy. By superimposing the Jewish past on the Jewish present the American establishment is failing the challenge of a new age.
How did a Jewish community famed for its liberalism create a communal leadership so reluctant to defend liberal democracy in the Jewish state? Today's American Jewish establishment was born as a reaction against American Jewish liberalism. Most early American Zionist leaders did not focus on how to meld their democratic vision with the national aspirations of the local Arab population. They were too focused on the struggle to help Jews escape Europe. For Brandeis, Wise, and Silver, Zionism was one component of a broad liberal agenda. It seems they saw the direction in which American Zionism was headed, however, for, as early as 1935, Wise denounced Jabotinsky's revisionist Zionism.
After the Six Day War, American Jewish liberalism and organized American Zionism began drifting apart. When Israel occupied the West Bank, American Jewish leaders began insisting that to acknowledge the misuse of Jewish power was to deny Jewish victimhood and thus to victimize Jews anew. By the 1970's, victimhood had supplanted liberalism as the defining ideology of organized American Jewish life. In its embrace of victimhood as a strategy for dealing with gentiles and younger Jews, the American Jewish establishment was turning away from the universalism that had defined it for half a century. Liberalism was out; tribalism was in.
Many American Jews removed their liberalism from an explicitly Jewish context, leaving Jewish organizations in the hands of those who believed that gentiles didn't care about Jews and therefore that Jews had little obligation to care about them. In actuality, the mass of American Jews are to the left of the organizations that speak in their name. Donors to the establishment organizations (they are largely Palm Beach retirees who think there's an anti-Semite behind every door) are inclined to see Israel as perpetually besieged by Jew haters. They are disinclined to wrestle with the occupation's impact on Israeli democracy.
Today there are two kinds of mainstream American Jewish organizations: those whose tolerance for the occupation is warping their historic commitment to democratic ideals and those with no commitment to democratic ideals. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the President's Conference support the Israeli government rather than Zionism as a set of ideals.
One hundred years ago, when America's major Jewish organizations were battling child labor, or fifty years ago, when they were battling segregation, the leaders of American Jewry would have been horrified to imagine a day when the most powerful Jewish organizations were indifferent to whether democratic values governed American life and whether those values governed the Jewish State. For the framers of Israel's Declaration of Independence, Jewish sovereignty was precious not only as a means of Jewish survival but as a means of achieving liberal ideals.
Chapter 3: Should American Jews Criticize Israel
American Jewish leaders offer several arguments when asked whether or not they have the right to criticize Israel:
a) They can't criticize Israel because they don't live there
b) They can't criticize Israel because Israel is a democracy and American Jews should respect the procedural legitimacies of Israel's policies. There is something perverse about citing Israeli democracy in order to condone an occupation that imperils Israeli democracy.
c) They can't criticize Israel because Israel's existence is being delegitimized around the world, and American Jews must stand in its defense, rather than join the lynch mob.
But no government has questioned Israel's right to exist; the American Jewish Establishment should learn that Israel's legitimacy is bound up with its democratic character. The less democratic Zionism becomes in practice, the more will Zionism itself be questioned. Not all critics of Israel are anti-Semitic or anti-Israel. If Israel is held to a "higher standard," it is because it is regarded as a Western nation.
It is important for the Jewish Establishment to realize that Jews not only can use power to survive, but they can also abuse power. It is true that Israel faces threats and that anti-Semitism exists, but Jews today wield power in Israel and the US. With power comes the temptation to abuse it, and using the charge of anti-Semitism to shield Israel from criticism about the way it uses power is the best way to ensure that Israel does misuse its power.
Chapter 4: Is the Occupation Israel's Fault
The Occupation is thought by many Israelis to be either a moral right or a security necessity, a burden Israel would love to relinquish but cannot. This "burden" has drawn Israelis into strange positions; for example, defining Jerusalem as Israel does currently is like extending the borders of Rome all the way to Naples and then insisting that because of the city's sanctity to Catholics, the entire territory must remain under Vatican control.
Israel's greatest external threats will come from rockets and terrorists. Occupying the West Bank is a poor way to guard against those threats. Sophisticated missile systems are the best way to combat the threats Israel does face. Occupying the West Bank offers less protection at a higher cost.
The less likely the establishment of a Palestinian state appears, the more Palestinian security officers will be seen as lackeys of the Occupation. Palestinians will do a better job of safeguarding security if they have their own state. The more that individuals enjoy the benefits of peace, the easier it is to combat those who jeopardize it.
American Jews say that it is reckless to push Israel to relinquish the West Bank when fury is mounting against the Jewish state; however, the key driver of that fury is the Occupation. Making the Occupation permanent will destroy the dream of a democratic Jewish state.
The settlement issue was probably the single most important destroyer of the Oslo agreement. The Second Intifada erupted because Israelis believed that Barak was trying to end the Occupation, but Palestinians felt it closing in on them. Israel doesn't want to end the Occupation and doesn't want to stop the settlements. According to Israeli scholar Yaakov Or, without tangible steps toward Palestinian self-determination "an explosion could be expected."
The Gaza evacuation was not meant to create a Palestinian state, but to forestall one. According to Dov Weissglass [Ariel Sharon's bureau chief], the significance of the disengagement plan is that it freezes the peace process. "When you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda."
Sharon's preferred solution to the Israeli conflict was drawn heavily from apartheid South Africa. He envisioned ten non-contiguous Palestinian Bantustans [his term] with Israel occupying the rest of the West Bank.
To say that Israel's embargo of Gaza caused the rocket fire of Hamas would be unfair, since Hamas had been killing Israeli civilians since the 1990s, and launching rockets since the start of the second Intifada in 2001. But, while Israel's policies did not cause the rockets, they provided Hamas a rationalization to keep launching them.
Accepting the ethical responsibilities of power requires accepting the way that the Occupation has shaped the behavior of [Israel's] adversaries.
Chapter 5: The Jewish President
If Stephen Wise [one of the founders of American Zionism] were transported to the Oval Office to witness a meeting between the leaders of the American Jewish establishment and the President of the United States, he would find only one person whose view of Jewish identity, and of the Jewish state, approximating his own. He would find only one person who espoused the liberal Zionism that he championed in his own time. And it would be the black man with the Muslim name: Barack Hussein Obama.
Abraham Heschel said "Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible." After serving as Heschel's secretary, Arnold Jacob Wolf followed in Heschel's footsteps and challenged the narrative of perpetual victimhood that underpinned American Jewish institutional life. He believed that American Jewish leaders were using "the Shoah as the model for Jewish destiny" with the result that "Never again" came to mean nothing more or less than "Jews first--and the devil take the hindmost." For Wolf, Zionism was not an alibi for whatever Jews did with power; it was a test of whether Jews love Israel as the prophets did.
When Obama returned to Chicago after law school, he settled in Hyde Park--Hyde Park was intellectual, racially integrated, heavily Jewish and hegemonically liberal. The rabbi of the local synagogue was Arnold Jacob Wolf. When Obama ran for the Illinois state senate in 1996, Wolf was one of his earliest and most prominent supporters. By the time he ran for president twelve years later, the synagogue took a proprietary interest in his campaign. Arnold Wolf stood at the geographic center of Obama's Jewish world. One of Obama's mentors at Harvard was Martha Minow. It was she who urged her father, Newton Minow, a partner at the Chicago firm of Sidley and Austin, to give Obama a job. Obama spend only a summer at Sidley, but Newt became a key mentor. During the Lebanon war, which he opposed, Minow told a meeting of the American Jewish Committee that while American Jews should donate to Israel, they should also "tell Israel our opinions about world affairs. Where did we get this idea we needed to keep our mouths shut?" The crowd almost threw him out. Minow never attended another AJC event. Obama was also profoundly influenced by other liberal Jews like Abner Mikva, Bettylu Saltzman, David Axelrod David Grossman and Amos Oz. He has great affinity for the idea of a social justice that was embodied in the early Zionist movement and the Kibbutz.
During his run for president, Obama's public statements on Israel grew more conventional, and so did the ideological character of his Middle East advisers. Daniel Kurtzer (who had alienated American Jewish leaders by confronting the Israeli government about settlements during his ambassadorship) gave way to Dennis Ross (who believed that reassuring Israel, rather than pressuring it, would prove more successful in advancing Israeli Palestinian peace). Obama muted his criticisms of Israeli policy and the American Jewish establishment. Many of his longtime Jewish backers were euphoric. But theirs was a discordant note. Wolf was somber. "He's going to go very cautiously and not do anything that shakes up the Jewish community... I'm not sure I agree with that, but that's what's going to happen."
Chapter 6: The Monist Prime Minister
Obama, steeped in the Heschel/Wolf tradition of liberal Zionism while Netanyahu is firmly in the tradition of Ze'ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky, the spellbinding, romantic, brutal founder of revisionist Zionism. What Jabotinsky didn't like about Jews was their belief that they carried a moral message to the world. In 1910 he said: "The Bible says 'thou shalt not oppress a stranger; for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.' Contemporary morality has no place for such childish humanism." Jabotinsky denied that there was any universal moral benchmark against which Zionism could be judged.
Herzl, the founder of Zionism had hoped for a Venice, not a Boer state for Jews. Jabotinsky praised the Boers. For revisionists, wielding power without shame was the key not only to building a Jewish state, but to reclaiming the true, long-suppressed spirit of the Jews. By crushing the Arabs, revisionists believed, Jews would also crush a malignant part of themselves. For revisionists, wielding power without shame was the key not only to building a Jewish state, but to reclaiming the true long-suppressed spirit of the Jews.
Benzion Netanyahu (Benjamin Netanyahu's father) served as Jabotinsky's private secretary. Benzion has said that Jabotinsky's greatness lay partly in his willingness to cast off the prophetic shackle and assert the justice of [Jewish] claims irrespective of broader moral concerns. Benzion admired the more radical Revisionists who disparaged the very idea of liberal democracy. While he reviled the Arabs for their warlike "essence," he urged Jews to recapture that essence themselves. By mimicking gentiles and recasting Jewish history, Benzion hoped to realize the revisionist dream: a dream in which Jewish ethics no longer hindered Jewish power. The influence of the father on the son is unmistakable.
Today, Benjamin Netanyahu subordinates external moral considerations to radical Zionism.[1] Maintaining Israel's Jewish majority by whatever means necessary is Zionist and thus beyond reproach. Those who believe in Jewish majority but are restrained in their pursuit by universal principles like non-discrimination are "emasculated by moralism." At Oslo, Netanyahu's plan was to give Palestinians four cantons (equal to about 40% of the West Bank) where they would enjoy not statehood, but autonomy over education, health care, and the like. He was not seeking Palestinian acceptance; he was seeking Palestinian submission. To the question, "Would the Palestinian Arabs accept autonomy?" he answered, "[T]hey would accept it if they knew Israel wouldn't give them an independent state." In other words, once Israel crushes their spirit, the Palestinians will take whatever they get. As a monist, Benjamin Netanyahu is allied to the settler movement and has helped to forge close ties to the American Jewish establishment. Netanyahu destroyed the Oslo trust by demanding that Palestinians meet their obligations while he consistently minimized Israel's own. Netanyahu is his father's son.
Chapter 7: The Clash
The clash between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu began before each was even elected. Obama criticized the pro-Likud approach, and Netanyahu clearly favored Obama's opponent, John McCain. "McCain's priorities are not likely to ruffle the US-Israel relationship, Obama's are liable to strain the alliance,” said Michael Oran, whom Netanyahu later appointed ambassador to the United States.
But Obama won 78% of the Jewish vote in the election--a remarkable testament to the gulf between American Jewry and many of its communal leaders. This win led Obama to believe that he could risk a public confrontation with the Israeli government and still retain the support of American Jews. Obama's appointment of George Mitchell as peace envoy was perceived as a break with the Clinton and Bush administrations' deference to Israel.
Netanyahu refused to endorse the idea of a Palestinian state and made it clear that he considered negotiations aimed at creating one to be a waste of time. Netanyahu's hard line helped convince the White House to push for a settlement freeze. When Obama declared "Settlements have to be stopped in order for us to move ahead," Netanyahu was livid. Israeli and American Jewish officials immediately marshaled arguments against the proposed freeze.
Obama and his advisers thought that Netanyahu would simply acquiesce to pressure from the United States, but Netanyahu helped deflect American pressure when he endorsed a Palestinian state by insisting 1) that Jerusalem remain the united capital of Israel 2) that the Palestinian leaders recognize Israel as a Jewish state, and 3) that Palestinians be granted no right of return). Netanyahu's father asserted "[My son] doesn't support a Palestinian state, he supports the sorts of conditions that the Palestinians will never accept."
Under heavy international pressure to utter the words "Palestinian state," Netanyahu had simply affixed those words to his old map. Buoyed by Netanyahu's apparent moderation, American Jewish and right-wing Christian groups pushed back hard against Obama's call for a settlement freeze. Given the response, and the probability that this freeze wouldn't happen, Obama could have exempted settlement goods from the US-Israel free trade agreement, or closed the IRS loophole that allows Americans to receive tax deductions for money they donate to settler groups. But Obama retreated from the views he actually held and Netanyahu saw that Obama was a "paper tiger." The White House then tried to bribe the Israelis. In exchange for a three-month extension of a partial settlement freeze, the administration reportedly offered to sell Israel twenty F-35 jets, to veto a declaration of Palestinian statehood at the UN, to offer long-term security guarantees in the event of a peace deal, and to never request another extension again. In 2010, the Obama administration was focused on making amends for pursuing the policies in which Barack Obama actually believed.
A White House that had taken office determined to take a harder line against settlements than its predecessors was now offering to reward Israel for them in a way no administration ever had. For Barack Obama, the retreat from the liberal Zionism he had learned in Chicago had only just begun.
Chapter 8: The Humbling
By November 2010, both the peace process and the Obama administration's Israel policy had collapsed; the White House abandoned its effort to bribe the Netanyahu government into extending the partial settlement freeze. Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives. The White House ultimately vetoed a UN resolution to cease all settlement activities that echoed Obama's own beliefs. In May 2011, the Arab League announced that the Palestinians [bypassing the US] would go to the UN in September to request international recognition of a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines.
On May 19, Obama made a speech that the White House officials did not believe was saying anything new. The Israelis believed that the speech represented a dramatic shift in US policy. At the heart of the Israel section of Obama's speech lay a classic liberal Zionist formulation: "The dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation." It also included a warning to Israel about the Palestinians' efforts to win statehood at the UN: "The international community is tired of an endless process that never produces an outcome."
Abbas called Obama's speech "a foundation with which we can deal positively." Netanyahu declared diplomatic war. His office announced that “Prime Minister Netanyahu expects to hear a reaffirmation from President Obama of US commitments made to Israel in 2004. … Among other things, those commitments related to Israel not having to withdraw to the 1967 lines which are both indefensible and which would leave major Israeli population centers in Judea and Samaria beyond those lines." This was the beginning of one of the most extraordinary humiliations of a president by a foreign leader in modern American history.
On Friday, May 20, Netanyahu bluntly reprimanded the president saying, "We can't go back to indefensible line, and we're going to have to have a long term military presence along the Jordan." Obama was enraged, but publicly the White House had no choice but to endure the abuse. Two days later, Obama went before AIPAC and said "The parties themselves--Israelis and Palestinians--will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967." AIPAC was not responsive. When, on 24 May, Netanyahu addressed the joint session of Congress, he insisted that
Although he said that a Palestinian state must be "big enough to be viable," he did not suggest that it would be contiguous in the West Bank. About 90% of those in the House gallery were AIPAC members. Netanyahu was given 29 standing ovations.
The May 2011 clash proved to be the last time President Obama publically articulated the liberal Zionism that he had learned in Chicago. After that, he effectively adopted Benjamin Netanyahu's Zionism as his own. In 2009, he had said "America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements." In 2010, he had called for "extending the settlement freeze." In 2011, Obama went before the UN and publicly abandoned his critique of Israel's occupation; he did not mention settlements at all. Rabbi Arnold Wolf's prediction about his old neighbor had proven correct. Ultimately, Obama's personal views had proven irrelevant. When it came to Israel, he had accommodated himself to American political reality, a political reality largely created by American Jews.
Chapter 9: The Future
American Jewish politics remain dominated by an establishment that defines support for Israel more as support for the policies of the Israeli government than as support for the principles in Israel's Declaration of Independence. But the American Jewish establishment is dying. The generation-crisis facing Jews today is a product of the different life experiences of older and younger American Jews. Older Jews' beliefs are built on stories of Jewish victimhood. Young American Jews are far less likely to build their identity around victimhood. They are not redefining Zionism, they are abandoning it.
Young American Jews can be divided into three groups: a) the Orthodox, b) the secular, and c) the religious Jews who are not Orthodox.
a) While the Orthodox constitute only around 10% of American Jews, they constitute 21% of families affiliated with a synagogue, and 40% of the children in such families. The massive surprise today is to realize that Orthodox Judaism has the brightest future. Orthodoxy insists upon high standards of both secular and Jewish learning but Orthodox Jews are less likely to define their devotion to Israel as devotion to democracy. While there is no evidence that most American Orthodox Jews hold bigoted views of Palestinians, Muslims, or Arabs, there is ample evidence that Orthodox institutions indulge in such bigotry. Mordechai Eliyahu, a close associate of Meir Kahane, declared, "A thousand Arabs are not worth one yeshiva student." Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira declared it religiously permissible to kill gentile children because of the future danger that will arise if they are allowed to grow into evil people like their parents. This sort of thinking produces a schizophrenic view of the Israeli government that is considered holy when it aids the settlement process and potentially satanic when it impedes it. Some extremist Modern Orthodox rabbis in Israel and the US speculated that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin might be a traitor to the Jewish people [a crime] punishable by death under Jewish law for his willingness to cede parts of the West Bank to the Palestinians.
Many modern Orthodox leaders in recent decades have abandoned intellectual openness in favor of an insularity that bespeaks both fear and arrogance. The fact that some leading rabbis teach that Jews and non-Jews are intrinsically different [engenders] indifference to non-Jewish dignity. As things stand, it is the Illiberal Zionism of young Orthodox Jews that seems increasingly likely to define organized American Jewry in the coming years.
b) Many young American [secular] Jews feel little Zionist attachment at all. This group cares less and less about Judaism. It is common to find older American Jews who rarely set foot in synagogue but feel an intense tribal bond to their fellow Jews. Among younger non-Orthodox Jews, secular tribalism is in steep decline. Secular Jewish culture has become less distinct from broader American culture. What remains of secular Jewish identity is a set of values and tastes that other Americans--especially well-educated, secular, blue-state Americans--share. Young secular Jews don't have one standard for Israel and another for all other countries. The same belief in equality under the law that makes them sympathetic to gays and lesbians in the US makes them sympathetic to Palestinians in the West Bank.
c) The third camp [consists of] young Jews who care deeply about being Jewish and find Israel's policies agonizing. Outside of the Orthodox world, it is these young women and men who will lead American Jewry in the coming decades. They are not assimilating; they are reconciling liberal values and Jewish commitment in remarkable ways. They are creating institutions that fuse religious commitment and liberal values. Minyanim, for example, are communities of Jewish prayer and study that are led by the participants. Many participants grew up Reform or Conservative but they want a style of worship that is more demanding and more participatory than is found in many synagogues. Independent minyanim also attract young men and women who have been raised Orthodox but wish for greater intellectual openness and equal participation for minorities. As second kind of institution to which committed young non-Orthodox Jews are flocking is to Jewish social justice groups. The minyanim seek religious commitment that honors liberal ideals; the social justice organizations see their good works as an outgrowth of religious commitment.
Young Jewish leaders accept the reality of Jewish power and its ethical responsibilities. Their efforts to meet the moral challenge of Jewish power are proving more effective than the holocaust rhetoric. What ensures Jewish continuity is not victimhood, but Jewish knowledge as a vehicle for Jewish meaning. Outside the Orthodox group, young Jews are finding that meaning by not evading the obligations that come with power but by facing them head on. Acting ethically in an age of Jewish power means confronting not only the suffering that gentiles endure but the suffering that Jews cause.
Chapter 10: Conclusion
In its founding document, Israel pledged not merely to safeguard the Jewish people but also to cherish democratic ideals. The document promised a Jewish state that, in the shadow of the greatest assault on human dignity in Jewish history, promised equal dignity to all of Israel's inhabitants. The day of the death of that state is not far off. We tell ourselves that Israel is a democracy, but the West Bank is an ethnocracy.[2] We have evaded this painful truth by evading Palestinians.
In the past, the character of the Jewish state mattered less than the fact that, at the end of the day, a despised and threatened people had somewhere to go. Younger American Jews are less likely to see Israel as a refuge. They are more likely to believe that what justifies Zionism is Israel's democratic character. For young American Jews, Zionism is what Israel does. The less democratic Israel becomes, the less liberal American Jews will support it.
Resisting [illiberal Zionism] will require a deepening of two different kinds of commitments: the commitment to universal principles of democracy and human rights and our particular commitment to the Jewish people.
Defending Israeli democracy requires ensuring that the American Jews most committed to democratic values remain Jews and pass Judaism on to their children. The biggest reason that American Jews care less about being Jewish is that we are ignorant of Judaism. The best antidote to assimilation is education. Better Jewish education is essential to American Jewish survival, but its impact will be slow, perhaps too slow to stop the settlement process that menaces Israel's future.
In the short term, preserving Israeli democracy will require direct action against the occupation. [Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) is such an action.] As a nonviolent movement, it turns the world's attention away from terrorism, which has long undermined sympathy for the Palestinian cause. The Israeli government is trying to stop the BDS movement by improving Israel's image. But Israel doesn't have a public relations problem; it has a moral problem. The challenge for Zionists who cherish Israeli democracy is to delegitimize Israel's occupation while legitimizing Israel itself. A boycott of the Israeli settlements is not enough. A boycott must be twinned with an equally vigorous embrace of the people and products of democratic Israel. We should oppose efforts to divest from all Israeli companies with the same intensity with which we support efforts to divest from companies located in the West Bank. Boycotting anything inside the green line invites ambiguity about our ultimate goal, about whether we oppose Israel's occupation or Israel's existence.
The struggle to help the Jewish state return to its founding ideals is not a struggle for Israelis alone. It is a struggle that calls all Jews because Israel is the great test of Judaism in our time. If Israeli democracy falls, it will fall for all of us. No matter where we live, we will spend our lives sifting through the political, ethical and theological rubble. If, on the other hand, we help Israeli democracy survive, we will have met our obligation to those who come after and those who came before. And like Stephen Wise, we too will be able to say, when we take the full measure of our lives, "I have lived to see the Jewish state. I am too small for the greatness of the mercy which God has shown us."
