This is a decent piece - thanks for forwarding, Doug. its very interesting to see Haaretz' editorial choices for whom they chose to draft responses to A.B. Yehoshua's statement two weeks ago in DC - that you can only be a real Jew in Israel. Like a lot of mainstream periodicals, even Time harbors some fairly diverse opinions amongst its editors. I worked with a terrific writer with great progressive politics from their Jerusalem bureau last year - he was their Jerusalem bureau chief until this spring. His name is Matt Rees, and he wrote a fantastic piece about mentally ill holocaust survivors, and how they've been historically screwed by Israel's health care system.
On May 21, 2006, at 7:51 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> <http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/717653.html>
>
> Haaretz - May 21, 2006 Iyyar 23, 5766
>
> How Jewish is Israel?
> By Tony Karon
>
> If we concede A.B. Yehoshua's claim that Israel is the source of
> Jewish identity in today's world, we reduce Jewish identity to a
> conversation between anti-Semitism and a blood-and-soil nationalism
> that is Jewish only in the sense that anti-Semites use the term
> i.e., racial. But if, instead, we define "Jewish" on the basis of
> the universal ethical challenges at the core of Judaism, then not
> only is the Diaspora an essential condition of Jewishness, but
> Israel's own claim to a Jewish identity is open to question.
>
> The idea that the modern State of Israel expresses some ageless
> desire among Jews across the Diaspora to live in a Jewish nation
> state is wishful thinking. Before the Holocaust, Zionism had been a
> minority tendency among Western Jews, and scarcely existed among
> those living in the Muslim world. And a half century after Israel's
> emergence, most of us choose freely to live, as Jews have for
> centuries, among the nations. That choice is becoming increasingly
> popular among Israeli Jews, too: 750,000 at last count - hardly
> surprising in an age of accelerated globalization that feeds dozens
> of diasporas and scorns national boundaries.
>
> The State of Israel was created by an act of international law in
> 1948, largely in response to the Holocaust. It was violently
> rejected by an Arab world that saw it as a new Western conquest of
> the territory over which so much blood had been spilled to defend
> Muslim sovereignty during the Crusades, so like most nation states
> Israel had to fight its way into existence. Its victory came at the
> expense of another people, whose dispossession was the precondition
> for Israel achieving an ethnic Jewish majority. And the conflict
> fueled by the unresolved trauma of its birth has condemned the
> Jewish state to behave in ways that mock the progressive Zionist
> dream of Israel fulfilling the biblical injunction to Jews to be a
> "light unto the nations."
>
> Former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg puts it eloquently: "The Jewish
> people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new
> weaponry, computer security programs or anti-missile missiles. We
> were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have
> failed. It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish
> survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral
> clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens
> and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More
> and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their
> children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are
> honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know."
>
> So, while Yehoshua challenges the Jewish identity of the Diaspora,
> Burg challenges the Jewish identity of Israel. Of course, they use
> different definitions of "Jewish." Yehoshua dismisses religion, and
> says it is the land and language of Israel that defines him. I am
> not religious, but I share Burg's belief that Judaism is
> fundamentally an ethical challenge epitomized for me by the famous
> "on-one-leg" definition by Hillel: "That which is hateful unto
> yourself, do not do unto others; all the rest is commentary."
>
> The fact that in Israel, Hebrew was transformed from a liturgical
> language to eclipse the Yiddish, Ladino and Arabic in which Jews
> had communicated for hundreds of years is a remarkable feat of
> nationalist social engineering, but nothing more. The notion of
> identity deriving from the soil seems to owe more to 19th-century
> European nationalism than to Jewish ethics. I can't see anything
> Jewish about investing hills and piles of stones with a spiritual
> significance worth dying and killing for.
>
> Growing up in apartheid South Africa was an object lesson in Jewish
> ethics. Yes, there was plenty of anti-Semitism in the colonial
> white society, but the mantle of victimhood belonged to others. And
> if you responded to the very Jewish (although in no way exclusively
> so) impulse to seek justice, you found yourself working side by
> side not only with the remarkable number of Jews who filled
> leadership roles in the liberation movement, but also with
> Christians, Muslims, Hindus and others, each articulating their own
> traditions within a common identity based on the common values.
>
> Judaism's universal ethical calling can't really be answered if we
> live only among ourselves - and Israel's own experience suggests
> it's hard to live only among ourselves without doing injustice to
> others. As physical threats to Jewish existence in the Diaspora
> have receded, Zionists today cite the specter of "assimilation."
> But assimilation holds no fear for the happy Diaspora-ist who
> expresses his traditions as just that - traditions - alongside
> those of others.
>
> The idea that Jews should live in a ghetto is one from which Jews
> were, mercifully, liberated variously between the 18th and the 20th
> centuries. A.B. Yehoshua and others want to revive something we're
> better off without. All of the great Jewish intellectual,
> philosophical, moral and cultural contributions to humanity I can
> think of were products not of Jews living apart, but of our
> dispersal among the cultures of the world . Maimonides or Spinoza,
> Marx, Freud, Einstein or Derrida; Kafka, Proust or Primo Levi;
> Serge Gainsbourg or Daniel Barenboim; Lenny Bruce or Bob Dylan - I
> could go on ad nauseum - all are products of our interaction with
> diverse influences in the Diaspora.
>
> Jewish identity is always in flux and contested. The Zionist moment
> is a comparatively brief one in the sweep of Jewish history, and
> I'd argue that Judaism's survival depends instead on its ability to
> offer a sustaining moral and ethical anchor in a world where the
> concepts of nation and nationality are in decline. Israel's
> relevance to Judaism's survival depends
>
> first and foremost on its ability, as Burg points out, to deliver
> justice, not only to its citizens, but to those it has displaced.
> Until then, Israel's own Jewish identity also remains uncertain.
>
> Tony Karon is a senior editor at TIME.com. For more of his views,
> see his blog, "Rootless Cosmopolitan." (tonykaron.com).
>
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