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The Election In Israel and The Future of Zionism

Passover 5775/4 April 2015

April 7, 2015

L’shana ha’ba-ah b’yirushalayim. Each year at the seder we conclude with this fervent hope that next year we will be in Jerusalem. It is only one example of the centrality of the land of Israel to Jewish consciousness. It is, therefore, particularly appropriate that we consider the current state of affairs regarding our relationship to Israel. Obviously this consideration is prompted by the recent Israeli election and the consequences flowing from it.

In the interest of time, I will delineate the main points of concern to most American Jews. First, beginning with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to address a joint session of Congress, is the concern about the seemingly severe deterioration of the relationship between the American administration and Israel and the impact that this might have on the United States military and political alliance with Israel. This concern also includes the apparent gap between the United States and Israel as regards any agreement with Iran on its nuclear capability.

The second point of concern is the perceived impact of the Netanyahu campaign rhetoric on Israeli democracy. Specifically, his exhortation to Jewish voters to go to the polls to counter-balance the fact that Arab voters were “flooding to the polls.” Also, Netanyahu’s seeming abandonment of the two state solution.

There is also a growing concern regarding the seeming mandate given to a now more consolidated right-wing government to both entrench the Orthodox hegemony on Israeli life and similarly entrench the so-called occupation leading to the impossibility of a two-state solution.

Finally, these concerns raise the more general concern regarding the nature of Zionism. What does it really mean to argue for the legitimacy of a Jewish State and can such a state be truly conceived as being democratic? Or is there an implacable division between the Zionist idea and the democratic ideal?

This last concern is the one that worries me the most, so I will return to it after addressing the first concerns I mentioned.

I believe Netanyahu’s speech to Congress was ill-conceived because it potentially drove a wedge between the Republicans and Democrats and potentially made support for Israel a partisan rather than non-partisan issue. At the same time, it threatened to further divide the left and the right among American Jews. On the other hand, I believed then and I believe now even more, that from a content perspective Bibi was right. Almost any deal the administration works out with Iran is undesirable. The sheer lunacy of negotiating with a regime which has repeatedly threatened to destroy Israel, which is the leading sponsor of terror around the world and with whom we are already in an active war with in Yemen, makes Chamberlain’s negotiations with the Nazis at Munich pale by comparison. Not only did I believe that then and now, I believe it so strongly that in retrospect I can only applaud Netanyahu for taking the bric bracs thrown at him and applaud his courage in coming to Washington to speak truth – not truth to power, but truth to weakness.

But what of the consequence of the rift between the administration and Israel? I believe it was and is a risk that had to be taken and that the overwhelming support of the Congress will last longer than the temporary pique of the administration. As far as dividing American Jews along party lines – the inevitable return of the bi-partisan congressional support for Israel will soon return that to the status quo ante. It shouldn’t and won’t matter whether you are a Republican or a Democrat. Israeli security was and will be a non-partisan issue.

That includes the clamor for a two-state solution. I would be happy for the administration or the European community to push the Israelis and Palestinians back into serious negotiations for a peace agreement. For as long as that agreement includes the recognition of the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish State, the present Palestinian leadership will reject it and the world will learn who is the impediment to peace — though this has been demonstrated previously and is consistently ignored by our enemies around the world.

Which brings us to the rise of anti-Semitism around the world as well as the Jewish anti-Semitism contained in the forefront of movements like BDS. This is not about Israel. It is about anti-Semitism and I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, especially to our young people. I would love nothing more than to tell you that anti-Semitism has disappeared and that old folks like me who grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust are just paranoid. But I can’t. I have no choice but to tell you that anti-Judaism is a feature of Western civilization and that it makes itself known whenever the people of the world need a common enemy, a scapegoat for their own failures or those of their governments. The present wave of anti-Semitism is as irrational as any previous eruption and is only a surprise to that generation of young Jews who were led to believe that the Messiah, in the guise of Western liberal democracy, had arrived.

But what of Western liberal democracy? It is certainly something positive in the world and represents the best in Jewish values as well. Can Zionism, should Zionism survive if the cost of its survival is a betrayal of the values of liberal democracy?  It is this question that the recent Israeli election precipitated that is the only truly serious consequence that isn’t spurious.

The threat to democracy in Israel did not come from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s crude remarks about Arab voters. We have heard remarks far more crude in the history of American electioneering. The difference is that such sentiments in the American context often serve as catalysts for eliminating the prejudices that give rise to them and a reconfirmation of the core value of liberty that our country continues at least to espouse.  In Israel the core value is not liberty, it is Zionism – the inalienable right of the Jewish people to maintain a state which privileges Jewish culture and the Jewish character of the state above all other values – presumably above equality.  The election highlighted the generational shift that has occurred in Israeli culture between Socialist Zionism and Revisionist Zionism; between Labor and Likud, Haganah and Irgun, Ben Gurion and Begin, Herzl and Ahad Ha-am. This is a long standing intra-Jewish debate taking place in a world that has forgotten the history of the debate.  It is a debate that takes place now in the context of a large and militant messianic religious community that was absent to a large extent from the original Zionist debates – which, in fact, rejected Zionism largely because of its commitment to the values of liberal democracy.

The question that the election has raised the world over is: what is Zionism and, more particularly, is there a Zionism that is compatible with the liberal values we cherish. Does Zionism logically lead to an apartheid state? What is the difference between an Afrikaner State and a Jewish State?  A Catholic State and a Jewish State? In a world in which such privileged states have faded from the scene, is there justification for bringing one back just because it is Jewish?  The only way to answer this question is to explore the meaning of “Jewish” in the idea of the Jewish State.

L’shana ha-ba-ah b’yirushalayim.  With the words that conclude the Pesach Seder, I began these remarks.  The profundity of their significance is often lost in their having become cliché.  Coming at the end of a ritual that simultaneously explains the centrality of the land in the meaning of redemption, provides for a portable substitute for the land in the face of exile, and deeply mourns the need for that substitute, the seder is intended to serve as a springboard of the redemption and, therefore, must include the return to the land. The Rabbis offer study as the primary substitute for the land, but it is the land that remains the definition of redemption.

The leadership of the Zionist movement believed implicitly that the true definition of the People Israel, the real answer to the question, “Who is a Jew,” was a person who lived in Israel and contributed to the culture of Israel.  They saw the Bible and the prophets as products of the culture of Israel not its progenitor.  They eschewed the Talmud because they rightly viewed it as a product of diaspora.  They envisioned and explicitly proclaimed a country based on the prophetic spirit which they believed had bequeathed to the world the values that ultimately produced liberal democracy.  They believed that in the future the ethnicity of Israeli would replace the ethnicity of Jewish and while those who had suffered for their ethnic-religious identity as Jews and kept the dream of return alive for millennia had a privileged right to return to Israel, the State itself would create its own culture; a new culture building on the Biblical heritage but encompassing the contributions of its citizens of all races and religions.

This is the Zionism that is disappearing from contemporary Israel. It has been battered by Arab distrust and disbelief and the perhaps understandable unwillingness of the Arab community in Palestine to cede sovereignty to what they perceived as just another colonial power.  There we have and will always have to disagree. We will always have to claim the legitimacy of our historic connection to the land. This Zionism has suffered deeply from this mistrust and disbelief and the wars it has spawned. This Zionism has also been battered by Messianic Orthodoxy.  It is perhaps one of the great ironies of Jewish history that the great experiment in creating a new land-based Israeli culture is turning into a State ruled by the laws and experiences of the long night of Exile.

All this has resulted in the emergence of a new Zionism and it is this Zionism that Bibi Netanyahu led to victory last month. It is not the Zionism of Israel’s founders who rejected the revisionist Zionism that has now triumphed. It is not the only Zionism and it is not my Zionism nor the Zionism that has historically claimed the allegiance of the majority of American Jews and Jewish institutions.

The question then that faces the American Jewish community is not whether to be Zionist or not, but whether to embrace the new Zionism or use our influence to insist on a return to the old Zionism and to lend our support to those in Israel who are being disenfranchised by the new Zionism, Jew and Arab alike.  To the Arab citizens of Israel we must lend support to their desire for full equality before the law and thus encourage them to bring their personal abilities and cultural heritage into what will eventually be the Israeli character.  To the Jewish Israelis on the verge of being entirely expunged from the new Zionism in their desire for religious freedom – Masorti/Conservative Jews, secular Jews, Buddhist Jews, whatever kind of Jews, even Christian Jews, must have the freedom to pursue their own vision and allow it to compete in the Israeli market place of ideas.

In the Declaration of Independence of Medinat Yisrael, just preceding this statement:

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open to the immigration of Jews from all countries of their dispersion; will promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; will be based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew Prophets; will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex; will guarantee full freedom of conscience, worship, education and culture; will safeguard the sanctity and inviolability of the shrines and Holy Place of all religions; and will dedicate itself to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

makes this statement:

WE HEREBY DECLARE that as from the termination of the Mandate at midnight, this night of the 14th and 15th of May, 1948, and until the setting up of the duly elected bodies of the State in accordance with a Constitution, to be drawn up by a Constituent Assembly not later than the first day of October, 1948, the present National Council shall act as the provisional administration, shall constitute the Provisional Government of the State of Israel.

Perhaps it is time for American Zionists and Israeli Zionists, in the image of the founders, to invite and put our efforts toward the creation of an Israeli Constitution and Bill of rights without which the question of the relationship of Zionism and Democracy must continue to be vexed.  Is it possible?  Well, who would ever have thought that “Next year in Jerusalem” would be a truism.  Redemption has to begin somewhere.

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