A New Zionism

Fein, Leonard

A New Zionism LEONARD FEIN Many American Jews vividly remember the birth of Israel. And in large measure, we remain mesmerized by the events surrounding Israel's birth It is no small thing to...

...And so forth If I am correct about all this...
...It is not just that Reform and Conservative and Reconstructionist Jews feel themselves offended...
...Again, I say all this not to criticize our Israeli cousins...
...But the exercise carries us to some unexpected and useful conclusions...
...which is to say that we know next to nothing regarding life as it is experienced in Israel For all our vaunted intimacy, for all our announced oneness, we remain—and I include here even the active among us—tounsts to the Holy Land, connected, perhaps, to a handful of Israeli counterparts, cut off from the life of Israel's Jews—as they from ours That, it seems to me, is one reason our two communities spoke largely past each other during the recent and acerbic debate over "Who is a Jew...
...That is how it is, always and everywhere, with real people The governors of Israel are sometimes statesmen and sometimes ward heelers...
...I can imagine an Israeli's response to these distinctions: "What a roundabout way to make the case for marginahty...
...In all this, I do not fault the Israelis...
...In the early years, when the data from the earthly Jerusalem began to encroach on our pnstme image of Israel as the heavenly Jerusalem, we managed to accommodate the data by recalling the great Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik's classic line, ' 'I yearn for the day when there will be in [then] Palestine a Jewish jail, with a Jewish guard on the outside and a Jewish prisoner on the inside...
...I do not regard Israel's failures, its imperfections, its enthusiastic pursuit of normalcy, as especially remarkable The people of Israel are people, some move with grace, some have clay feet...
...Here is what I owe, here are the limits and here are my expectations The citizens of Israel, on the other hand, have entered into a covenant with their polity, and a covenant has no limits...
...Third, and last...
...The first has to do with Israel's expectations of us...
...It is coming close to time to call an end to conferences and symposia on Israel-Diaspora relations The way to have a relationship is to do worthy things together Project Renewal shows a bit of the way...
...Which is why there should hang on the wall of the chairman of the Presidents' Conference Amir Gilboa's four-line poem- "If they show me a tree, and I say tree, they say tree...
...in effect, Israelis cannot afford to take the evidence of Judaic success in America seriously, for to do so would be to admit the irrelevance of Zionist theory...
...that is all I promised...
...Specifically, we owe them the right to love Israel freely and critically, lest they not love Israel at all Whatever our need to defend Israel before the court of American public opinion, we dare not allow ourselves to defend it in ways that alienate our own young people...
...what a tortured defense of homelessness, of precisely that which Zionisrh and Israel came to cure...
...For if we are right, if it is in fact possible to live a meaningful and satisfying Jewish life in New York or in San Diego, then what is my cousin doing hanging on in Tel Aviv or in Yeroham, where his life is both more difficult and more threatened, where he must raise his children to kill and be killed...
...Imagine: In Vietnam, we lost 57,000 soldiers...
...Those who believed that the air of Jerusalem makes those who breathe it wise did not take account of the pollution that characterizes our time, the conventional pollution of a modern industrial society and the particular pollution of a people so burdened as we by a nightmare that will not go away It was and is a grave mistake to suppose that this broken people would rise up and leap gracefully from the death camps into the end of days, somewhere, we are bound to stumble, and stumble we have...
...whether or not it is, in the words of the Israeli chief rabbinate, reisheet tzmichat ge'ulatemu, the beginning of the blossoming of our redemption, it is for us the foundation on which our capacity to hope rests...
...It is also the Israel of Jewish terrorists, of corruption both petty and grand, of Sabra and Shatila and of administrative detention, of Jonathan Pollard and of the new political party, Moledet, which won two seats in the new Knesset on its one-plank platform calling for the transfer of Palestinian Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza It is the Israel whose government of national incompetence now bids to be replaced by a government of national incoherence...
...Our religious teachings are oriented towards the behavior and the destiny of the Jewish People, not towards individual salvation...
...if only a tiny number of Israelis have anything more than a superficial familiarity with who we here are and what we are about...
...Perhaps there really was no way for us to respond to Israel save by transforming it into a mystenum Iremendum, an enchantment beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond the tedium of facts...
...But plainly, the task has become more difficult and more delicate over the decades...
...It is not, in my view, Israeli behavior that leads to the disenchantment and the disillusion...
...Israelis cannot afford to take the evidence of Judaic success in America seriously...
...One might suppose that as against the insult there would come the comfort of being loved as unconditionally as American Jewry loves Israel...
...A new Zionism must call things by their right names, lest we alienate a generation of young people...
...Schooled and socialized in my right and my ability to define for myself the boundaries between the public and the private, my Jewish concerns are also matters of personal choice rather than organic impositions from without In Israel, freedom of choice, the ability to draw boundaries, is considerably more constricted...
...It will have to enable us to express our love for Israel with utter candor, in ways that do not cause us to feel that we have abandoned our critical judgment It will have to help us to love Israel not only well, but also wisely...
...There are two points I wan...
...And that is why we now experience the beginnings not of a new maturity in the relationship, not of a revision of our messianic expectations into something rather more modest, but instead a revolution of collapsing expectations That is why the reaction to the Who-ls-a-Jew debate has been so intense and so acerbic, has been, in fact, an over-reaction The debate is not exclusively about defining a Jew...
...a way to share not merely a vocabulary but also a grammar...
...to make in this connection...
...That is how it is always and everywhere with politicians...
...what a galul [exile] mentality1 Life is about commitments and investments, and you seek to define your preference for standing aside as a cultural imperative rather than calling it what it is—a moral choice...
...most of us did not know a single one Still, though small, Israel is not tiny There are 3.8 million Jews in Israel, scattered across a country which, narrow though it is, is still the size of Massachusetts...
...There are, obviously, still other elements to this cultural divide Only a tiny number of American Jews have any idea of the songs Israelis listen to, the books they read, the ways in which the nature of Israel's economy shapes the daily life of its people, the particular culture and curriculum of the public schools...
...There is more How can the Israelis appreciate and respect a love that is as riddled with kitsch as ours for Israel...
...if, whatever else we are to them, we are also a challenge and an insult and an object of contempt...
...But the day came—for some of us in 1967, for others in 1977, for still more in the summer of 1982—when the category we called "normalization" was no longer adequate to contain all the data...
...And what most Israelis find exceedingly difficult to understand about us is that—our profound attachment to Israel we acknowledge our Americanness' Perhaps...
...Size also contributes: Israel is in many ways a neighborhood posing as a country...
...the second concerns our image of ourselves as Americans...
...The intended audience for the statements of the chairman of the Presidents' Conference may be Capitol Hill and the White House and the State Department, but there is inevitably an unintended audience as well, to everything that Morris Abram or his predecessors or his successors say, our own children are eavesdroppers...
...I have no elaborate solution to the problems I have been discussing, I do have three proposals, and it is with these I conclude these reflections...
...And if it be argued that many Israelis have on their own and for their own reasons concluded that Zionist theory is irrelevant, then it must be noted that in this one respect, there are powerful reasons for Israelis to cling to the classic Zionist view...
...But there is more to it than that...
...Nor should we overlook the heritage of socialism which Israel's founders bequeathed it: It is a long distance from A. D Gordon and Berl Katznelson to John Locke...
...It seems to me that as against the model of an idyllic association interrupted periodically by a passing upset, we might do well to explore the possibility that what we actually have is a very shallow relationship, rising periodically—typically in moments of crisis—to genuine and passionate concern Now this will surely strike some people as implausible, if not downright subversive...
...others, in large number, have begun to distance themselves from the Jewish state...
...It will sound like a ritual formula, I can only observe that for me, it reflects a radical shift of position born of precisely the concerns I have here expressed We simply must find ways to raise up a generation that is tolerably fluent in the Hebrew language We cannot be satisfied that the culture our young people share across the oceans is the culture of American television, nor can we be content to communicate in translation or through footnotes...
...hence, they cannot respect those who love them Moreover, they may accept but cannot respect a love that appears to them as mindless as it is intense So, for example, at a conference more than a year ago m Palm Beach, the audience was addressed on one evening by Labor's Abba Eban and on the next by Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu...
...Given our behavior over the years, the Israelis are entitled to suppose that were Ariel Sharon, for example, to become prime minister of Israel, we here would issue press releases describing what a wonderful family man he is, and would likely add that he cannot be the brute so many think he is, since he is a Jew, and Jews, as everyone knows, have a unique sensitivity to human life...
...For those who carry the memory with them, Israel remains an irrevocable enchantment...
...that to Mount Zion and Mount Sinai we would add the Green Mountains and the Rockies, that this land would become genuinely our land, from California to the New York island, from the Ivy League to the Electoral College...
...In time of war—and in Israel there is no other time—the citizens are mobilized...
...So we must also take note of the fact that the Jews in their own land are ripe for a pervasive sense of collectivity...
...Why not a Jewish peace corps of some sort, aimed not only at the slums of Tel Aviv but at the villages of Thailand or Kenya— or even at Chicago' Is there anything that can connect people more powerfully than sharing the work of redemption with each other' If not a peace corps, then perhaps a university, a major laboratory, some other way not of analyzing a relationship but of living it, of providing a new generation with the opportunity to go beyond nostalgia to the active making of memories Or must we sit passively and wait for the next war to renew the sense of attachment' A sketch, a few ideas...
...It is often suggested that Israel has given us a new self-respect, and perhaps that is so...
...But whether or not we are culpable, we are, I believe, responsible for that transformation, and hence also for the disturbing consequences we now witness, for the disenchantment that thereby becomes inevitable...
...And if all they hear is stale apology and cliched excuse, they will tire of the game soon enough Indeed, in my view, they have already begun to tire of it...
...It is simply unthinkable that American Jews, who learn French and Spanish and these days Russian and Chinese, should so universally remember Hebrew school as the place where they failed to learn Hebrew It is simply unacceptable that we cannot find the ways to promote literacy in the language that is the most fundamental cultural bond of all...
...So far, my argument, even though perhaps cast a bit more explicitly than is usual, is compatible with the general model we have of Israel-Diaspora relations— namely, that ours is a close and unbreakable relationship, but that in any intimate relationship, some bumps are inevitable...
...The consequence of all this is that there are no limits to the claims of the state, and no clear boundaries, for that matter, between the society and the state I do not intend a judgment by this distinction between contract and covenant...
...Here in America, this nation of immigrants and of unprecedented mobility—geographic, psychic, economic—we have come to view personal identity as a matter of choice In Israel, identity is an assignment...
...Several years back, the Jewish Fund for Justice provided a grant to native Americans in Arizona to import Israeli agronomists who could teach them drip irrigation...
...And the memories of trauma along with the chronic war have defined with terrible clarity the boundaries of the hamullah, the clan is of all the Jews, and only the Jews, who dwell in the land...
...the Israel Forum shows a bit of the way...
...You take marginality, which is an inherently unhealthy, constricted condition—a condition which, because it inhibits commitment, is less than fully human— and try to make a virtue out of it...
...a way, finally, to reach out from our earthly abodes to the heavenly Jerusalem, a way, if you will, to transform sentiment into covenant '8...
...No great expectations, no great disappointments—and therefore, considerable opportunity for productive change in the direction of greater intimacy and involvement And here I shift from the political to the cultural, from the episodic to the enduring For the periodic crises in the relationship—indeed, our basic orientation, which, given Israel's needs, is heavily political—obscure a cultural divide that grows wider with each passing day...
...And among the consequences of the open America I have been describing is the simple fact that we are Jews by choice...
...I shan't quarrel with that Marginality is what we know I am suggesting that our marginality stems not only from the condition of being Jewish in a Christian country, but also from an American political culture that reinforces it...
...There is also the culture of the region, the fact that Israel is in the Middle East, where the hamullah, the clan, still matters...
...The Israel we defend today is no longer the unmodified Israel of the swamps drained and the deserts made green, of immigrants ingathered and lives repaired...
...it is, far more centrally, about a widespread sense of betrayal...
...Normalization, we called it, and we took a perverse kind of pride in the evidence that we Jews were fully capable of having, to paraphrase Israeli author Ze'ev Chafets, our own whores and hard hats and hustlers, alongside our undoubted heroes...
...Our way has costs as well as benefits...
...Plainly, and all the attendant problems notwithstanding, it is healthier by far to seek a Judaism/Jewishness that draws not only on our memories and on our present concerns for and commitments to Jews elsewhere, but also on the rhythms and the rhymes of our own daily lives But precisely because good health points us in different directions, it is essential that we begin to think together about steady ways to bridge the growing gap...
...And it is not merely the Jews who have thrived, but, in ways almost no one predicted just a generation ago, Judaism as well...
...In refusing to make aliyah, we betray not only Israel but ourselves and our children, for surely we shall soon succumb to weightlessness, to pointlessness, to Judaic purposelessness...
...We became virtuosos at euphemisms, at excuses and alibis And now it has come time for some truth The truth, as I see it, is that significant numbers of American Jews are experiencing considerable disappointment in Israel...
...All this it will have to accomplish lest the Zionism we, the still mesmerized, have inherited and practiced turns out to be a Zionism we find ourselves unable to pass on to our young That, in the end, is my principal concern Such data as we have indicate that the American Jewish commitment to Israel is very much tied to generational status, that as one might expect, people over 45 have a different and much closer relationship than people in the 30 to 45 age bracket, and that people under 30 are more distant still...
...War is part of the reason, of course...
...The proportions may not be Texan, but they are large enough to suggest that something more is at work...
...Our existence alone would be sufficient to disconcert and, in some ways, to disappoint the Israelis, for according to Zionist theory, we should long since have been pogrommed to death...
...it is our own trafficking in magic and in kitsch, in messianism and in melodrama, our own reluctance to seek a relationship based on family ties and mutual respect...
...And so, over the years, we became not only Israel's defenders, but also Israel's apologists...
...I fear, however, that there is a kind of Virginia Woolf syndrome that colors Israeli appreciation of the American Jewish commitment to Israel Specifically, whether arising out of classic Jewish self-hate or from some other source, Israelis believe themselves to be unlovable...
...The living culture of a people must, in the end, reflect the sights and sounds and assumptions of its environment, the actually experienced...
...If Israel is viewed, as it has been, as we have encouraged it to be, as the harbinger of redemption, then the fact of its radical imperfection must either be denied or it must lead to heresy...
...Whether through rape or through seduction, we could not survive Consider not only how Israel has disappointed us, but how we have disappointed Israel, And yet, blatantly, we have not only survived, here and there we have thrived...
...but if they show me blood, and I say blood, they say paint, if they show me blood, and I say blood, they say paint " The first commitment of our communal leadership and the first requirement of a new Zionism must be to call things by their right names, lest in our zeal to defend Israel we forget what those names are, lest in our concern for Israel's safety we alienate a generation of young people who cannot bring themselves to take seriously a community that cannot or will not tell blood from paint...
...Comes Zionist theory to assert that we delude ourselves, that in fact what we take to be thriving is merely a thin veneer, an illusory health that masks the fatal illness of irrelevance, Israel is not merely the center of Jewish life, it is the purpose of Jewish life...
...And many find it an outright embarrassment...
...it is our own insistence on avoiding reality, on squeezing the data into such categories as might keep enchantment and illusion alive, on refusing to acknowledge Israel's imperfections...
...and if, in addition to all that, we steadfastly resist the logic of ahyah, our profession of love and commitment is transformed from a gift to be treasured into a curiosity to be manipulated and exploited...
...Given the theories on which their enterprise rests and the behaviors m which we engage, they have come to a nearly inevitable conclusion I say all this because if we are to talk seriously about moving towards a more mature partnership, radical transformations of perception, of understanding, of underlying theory are required Here in America, with its r magnified obsession with the individual, it is as if each of us has signed a contract with the polity...
...Our scandalously low rates of political participation may well be one of the costs of a government that is separate from and sometimes even adversary to the inviolate individual Both Carter and Reagan ran for president against the government, a style that would be utterly incomprehensible in Israel And these days, one can legitimately ask whether all Americans understand that they are partners to the American social con-ti act—partners with each other, with the polity If the much heralded "civil religion" that allegedly informs American life is real, it is apparent that there ai e a growing number of agnostics, and even heretics Huge numbers of Americans are simply outside the system But at least for now I want merely to draw attention to a distinction and a difference that are most often overlooked, and that are major barriers to genuine understanding We in America are used to civic lives of very limited liability As much a political junkie and an American patriot as I am, I can effectively drop out whenever I choose...
...some have moved from distancing to estrangement, tomorrow, estrangement will collapse into alienation...
...But that is my point: We have been raised in an expansive America, large enough and sure enough not to be a jealous lover America permits us to love Israel as we do precisely because it leaves such large spaces for us to fill at our own discretion It is for that very reason that we can sing "America, the Beautiful" with whole heart Israel, by contrast, wants everything, wants all of us, leaves no private space...
...And in large measure, we remain mesmerized by the events surrounding Israel's birth It is no small thing to have experienced, if even vicariously, the transition from the Kingdom of Night to the Republic of Hope It is no small thing to have etched in your mind and on your heart the image of Israel as Reunion, the memory of the bent and broken men, women and children stumbling off planes and boats into the arms of their loved ones—and if there were no loved ones left for them, then into the arms of others prepared to help them stand straight and tall again...
...a way to move towards a more respectful and more mature relationship...
...All the talk about a covenantal relationship may be satisfying at conferences such as those we attend, but the crude fact of the matter is that from what Israelis see and hear of us and our relationship towards them, it is not covenant but sentiment that governs and that is systematically exploited by those who manage the relationship...
...a way to ensure the future of our past...
...It was then we created, together with the Israelis, a wonderful new category, one capable of containing an almost infinite amount of disturbing data We called it "media bias," a device that enabled us to deny what our eyes were seeing and our hearts were feeling No matter the evidence, our way has become to blame the messenger, easier that than to give aid and comfort to Israel's enemies, easier that than to leave transcendence and enchantment behind and deal with the gritty, mundane reality...
...How very peculiar, how ultimately empty it would be were we to live here as at a wayside hostel, cut off from the old-new homeland by distance, cut off from our palpable home by choice How unsatisfying it would be were our Judaism/Jewishness to be expressed mainly in our dancing the horn and signing pledge cards...
...When the submarine Dakar went down some years back, with some 70 Israelis drowned, an Israeli research institute learned that one of every three Israelis knew at least one of those who were lost...
...But perhaps this is also a way to stop taking for granted that which can no longer safely be taken for granted...
...what was not predicted and not expected is that we in America, too, would finally leave Warsaw and Minsk and the shtell behind us, leave the Lower East Side behind us...
...And it was a graver mistake still for us not to prepare the Jews of America for such falls, to pretend to them that all was well in Israel when we knew full well that all is not well anywhere...
...It is unfortunate that the term is used nowadays to describe converts to Judaism, because it is the American condition that all of us who make something of our Jewish origins, who make a Jewish present of our Jewish past, are Jews by choice ) And among the consequences of the organic Judaism the Israelis experience—Hebrew as the spoken language, the Bible as a geography text, Shabbat as the national day of rest—is that they are Jews by circumstance They may, of course, choose to become explicit Jews, but there is no compelling need for them to do that, we, on the other hand, can be no other kind of Jew And that, too, creates a space between us...
...It is helpful to consider not only the ways in which Israel has disappointed us, but also the ways m which we have disappointed Israel...
...If culture grows out of experience, must we not invent opportunities for genuinely shared experience...
...Israel wants all of us, and there is much, our bodies included, that we withhold...
...A new Zionism, if that is what we choose to call it, must somehow come to terms with such matters, lest today's distancing lead to tomorrow's estrangement Which brings me to my second proposal...
...if, as I believe current events demonstrate quite clearly, we are simply not taken seriously by them, either on our own terms or in terms of our relationship to them...
...if Israel is taken, as it is, "as more a faith than a place, we force people either into idolatry and zealotry on the one hand or into blasphemy on the other, into the despair that is inevitable when they learn that this god, too, has failed Perhaps, given the circumstances that surrounded Israel's birth, it could not have been otherwise...
...And indeed, Zionist theory was very nearly correct in its sinister prediction But in the end—or perhaps for the time being— at least with respect to American Jewry, Zionist theory was wrong, as it was wrong in claiming that, if somehow we managed to escape the pogrommist's knife, the open society would get us and we would be assimilated to death...
...It is no accident that Israeli demographers consistently project for us a gloomier future than our own equally competent demographers...
...The success of America's Jews and the possibilities of American Judaism come to Israelis as a challenge, a provocation and, in a fundamental sense, a radical insult that they simply cannot afford to admit And so they deny that success and that possibility, and view with disdain and even contempt those who insist on them...
...First, and most obviously as well as most urgently as well as most generally, it is time for a re-thinking of Zionism itself And why, after all, should the need to re-think Zionism come as a surprise' As Abba Eban has so often put it, why should we expect that a theory put forward a hundred years ago to describe and prescribe for the condition of Eastern European Jewry be thought relevant to the condition of American Jewry in the evening of the 20th century, 40 years after the rise of the Third Commonwealth' The new Zionism will have to take account of the separate development of two Jewish communities that live in freedom and with a considerable measure of autonomy...
...It will have to take account, as well, of the unforeseen delicacies of a relationship between unequals, between a sovereign state and a voluntary community It will have to guide us in distinguishing between our obligations and commitments to the citizens of Israel and our obligations and commitments to its government...
...notwithstanding—we are, in terribly serious ways, Americans Do we betray the State of Israel when we acknowledge our Americanness...
...That its desert and its mountains and its wars and its neighbors have all helped shape the living culture of Israel is plain...
...Instead, the reaction is to an accumulation of events and episodes that together have caused many American Jews to feel that Israel has betrayed their hopes and their expectations, their conviction that Israel is immune from the faults to which all of humankind is susceptible...
...When we encounter such bumps, we hasten to reassure all parties that they will not, in any way, threaten the underlying unity of the Jewish people or our commitment to the welfare of the Jewish state, that soon enough this, too, shall pass and we will revert to the remarkable sharing that has characterized the relationship since Israel's birth I want now to propose, at least as a heuristic device, an alternative theory of Israel-Diaspora relations...
...But these are only harbingers of what might yet be if we were to set out to harness the energies, skills and talents of our people...
...Shall the Israelis respect such a response' Or more generally, the Israelis know that this community will go to great, even extravagant, even distorting lengths to come to terms with Israeli behavior, even when such behavior is the subject of brutal self-criticism within Israel itself Long after the vast majority of Israelis had accepted that the 1982 invasion of Lebanon was a disaster, most vocal American Jews were still twisting to justify that invasion...
...that we would become Americans—or more precisely, become American Jews, a new thing under the Jewish sun, a community forged out of a particular synergy that is authentically our own Do we betray the State of Israel when It is not my purpose here to propose a full-fledged program to span the growing gap, the more so since I think it is actually a sign of health in one important respect...
...if they show me a stone, and I say stone, they say stone...
...When a visitor who arrived the next day asked how the audience had responded to these night-and-day presentations, he was told that 75 percent of the audience had agreed with both...
...And though we owe Israel a great deal, we owe our children more...
...Ironically, if this is an accurate representation, or if, to be more modest, it fits some significant proportion of American Jewry, then our problems may be eased, for we are not dealing with passions so intense that their disappointment provokes a crisis We are dealing instead with an association that blows mostly warm or cool, rarely hot or cold...
...But far, far more important, the birth and the continuing existence of Israel restore the validity and utility of hope So when we rise to Israel's defense, it is not only for the sake of our embattled cousins there, but also for our own sake Without Israel, hope dies, without Israel, therefore, life would not be worth living And rise to Israel's defense we do...

Vol. 14 • April 1989 • No. 3


 
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