Interesting to note that such an article can be printed in Haaretz but not in any major U.S. paper.
Joanna
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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