In the September 25 issue of the Forward, we published an essay from columnist Jay Michaelson titled, “How I’m Losing My Love for Israel.” In it, he wrote that defending Israel’s actions in his liberal social circles had grown “exhausting.” Michaelson explained that he has begun to “second-guess” his love for Israel, a love that has made him feel “implicated” in Israel’s actions. All the while, he lamented, the liberal Israel he loves “is increasingly disappearing.”
“I still support the State of Israel, its right to exist and the rest. Most important, it is still, in part, my home,” he wrote. But, he added, “while my love endures, my unease grows, and with it, the gnawing sense that this relationship is in trouble.”
Michaelson’s article sparked a firestorm of debate and discussion, online and elsewhere. In addition to an outpouring of letters and comments — some angry, others appreciative — there were in-depth responses from some prominent thinkers.
Writing in the Forward, historian Jonathan Sarna argued that the “waning American Jewish love affair” with Israel reflected dashed hopes for a utopian Jewish state. “When the bloom falls off of young love, there are always those who announce that their relationship is in trouble and prepare for divorce,” he wrote. “So it is today with too many American Jews and their ‘waning love’ for Israel. The deepest and most meaningful of relationships, however, survive disappointments.”
Rabbi Daniel Gordis weighed in with an open letter to Michaelson (which was republished on the Forward’s Web site) titled “No Right to Exhaustion.” “I don’t see the connection between exhaustion and losing love, or between exhaustion and committing oneself to what’s right and just,” Gordis wrote.
In light of the strong reactions to Michaelson’s essay, the Forward decided to continue the conversation. To that end, we invited four writers of varied political orientations and backgrounds to weigh in on the debate thus far. And we offered Michaelson an opportunity to reflect on the passions provoked by his essay.
By Gadi Taub
Jay Michaelson’s article “How I’m Losing My Love for Israel” is a sad testimony, not only to his personal grief, but also to the fact that it has become hard to support Zionism in polite liberal society. Zionism is now habitually seen as a Jewish version of apartheid South Africa’s white supremacist ideology.
Unfortunately, we can’t fully prevent all this as long as settlement in the occupied territories continues. But we can limit the damage by resisting the Israeli right’s attempt to portray settlement as the continuation of Zionism. Rather than grant settlement the legitimacy of Zionism, the Israeli right’s rhetoric stained the reputation of Zionism with the illegitimacy of settlement.
In truth, settlement in the West Bank is Zionism’s opposite. Zionism is about liberating people; settlement in the West Bank is about redeeming land. Zionism is about having one place under heaven where the Jews are not a minority; settlement is entangling Israel in a bi-national situation that will lead to an Arab-Muslim majority. Zionism was clear about granting Israel’s Arab population full civil rights, as most democracies treat national minorities; in the territories Arabs do not have these rights, and Jews do. In short, the effort to defend the de facto apartheid in the territories by calling it Zionism ended with liberal public opinion calling Zionism apartheid.
Most Israelis realize that the occupation may doom the Jewish state, and we opted to leave Gaza even in the absence of peace. For the time being, Qassam rockets are preventing us from doing the same in the West Bank. Israelis have been negligent, however, when it comes to conveying that we want to end the occupation precisely because we are Zionists.
So long as we can’t make the case for Zionism as opposed to settlement, we will only have Michaelson’s dwindling nostalgia to defend Israel with, whereas we should have had liberal humanism on Zionism’s side.
Gadi Taub teaches communications at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His book “The Settlers and the Struggle Over the Meaning of Zionism” is due out from Yale University Press in 2010.
By Miriam Shaviv
The end of the Diaspora’s love affair with Israel has been blamed on a variety of internal Jewish factors, including the increasing assimilation of Diaspora Jewry, its disillusionment with the reality of Israeli life, and a turning inward now that Israel is perceived to be strong and self-sufficient. External factors, however, may be far more important.
In the past 20 years, the political climate in the West has changed radically, in ways that do not flatter Israel. Much of Europe is dominated by a post-colonial, almost pacifist, attitude, in which occupation, under any circumstances, is considered immoral, military action is almost always undesirable and the very idea of a modern nation-state is questioned. The range of “acceptable” political opinion in the United States is far broader, but these sorts of views are also gaining traction among many American liberals.
The reality is that throughout history, Diaspora Jews have, to some extent, always absorbed (and at times also led) the political reality in their countries. Zionism itself grew out of the nationalist movements in 19th-century Europe, combined with a Tolstoyan ennobling of land and physical labor. More than a century later, Jews still do not live in a vacuum.
Is it really realistic to expect that Diaspora Jewry remain completely detached from the political zeitgeist, seeing Israel solely through Jewish eyes? Can Jews who grew up in London or Washington really be expected to understand Israel the way it understands itself, when their basic political, cultural and even religious frames of reference differ so radically?
The drift between the two communities is to an extent inevitable, at least as long as current Western attitudes toward warfare prevail — or as long as Israel remains embroiled in conflict. So can a complete breakdown of the relationship be prevented? So far, Israel’s approach has been to try to better explain the realities it faces to the Diaspora, mainly by bringing young Diaspora Jews to spend time in the Jewish state. But perhaps Israelis need to take a step back, and first try to improve their own understanding of the realities that prevail in the Diaspora.
Miriam Shaviv is foreign editor of Britain’s Jewish Chronicle.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
Jay Michaelson is right when he suggests that American Jews mythologize Israel in a way that says more about their own sense of identity and politics than it does about the Jewish state. Leftists play this game just as much as the Likudniks Michaelson presumably loathes. Coming to grips with the real Israel requires us to have the maturity to understand that it is a great democratic nation run by fallible people who can make mistakes. This flawed country nonetheless has the right to defend itself against the Palestinians who, as it happens, have a violent political culture based on negation of the Zionist project.
That’s the problem with leftist laments such as Michaelson’s. His lost love is based, as he admits, on his frustration with the absence of peace and the unpopularity of Israel among American liberals, who increasingly tend to wrongly view it as an apartheid state. For all of Israel’s imperfections, the lack of peace is due to its having antagonists whose own identity rests on a belief that the Jewish presence in the land is illegitimate. That is what has prevented the Palestinians from accepting land-for-peace solutions in the recent past and is what continues to make the notion that either the Palestinian Authority or the Islamists of Hamas will ever accept a final peace deal with Israel a fantasy no matter where the borders might be drawn.
Those on the American left either can’t or won’t accept this, and that makes their own illusions about what should be done to achieve peace a more damaging myth than anything dreamed up by naïve Zionist sympathizers. If life among the liberal elites forces Jewish liberals to find the courage to stand up against these false narratives about Israeli beastliness, then they are just going to have to find the courage to risk the opprobrium of their peers. But if they are so disconnected from the realities of the Middle East or too tired or susceptible to peer pressure to do so, they should not expect much sympathy from the rest of us.
Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of Commentary magazine.
By Steven J. Zipperstein
When we were young, many of us were told tall tales about Israel. Parents tend to protect the young from those wild things, unruly, ambiguous things that make the world odd — and also interesting — but that often are hidden to protect the sleep and innocence of children.
Israel tended to be spoken about among Jews, especially following the 1967 war, in heroic terms, in major key; it remains there for most Orthodox Jews. For many of the rest of us there are the annoyances and embarrassments and angst that have led Jay Michaelson to muse about turning his radio dial, removing himself from this tumult to more benign music. He writes in his essay about how much easier it is for him as a Jew to traverse the streets, the culture of Berlin than of Jerusalem.
And so it should be. Berlin has, more or less, come to terms with its past. Israel continues to debate with all around it — and with not a few within it — past, present and future. The byproduct of this can be, and sometimes is, awful: arguments leading nowhere and that have gone on forever; enemies who keep worsening; Israeli leaders who keep coarsening; a conflict that crossed the line of quagmire ages ago. Little surprise Michaelson prefers to avoid this; so would I.
But to do so means dereliction. No issues in contemporary Jewish life loom so large, and feel so burdensome, as do those facing Israel: These include reconciling democracy and Jewishness, cobbling together a coherent political culture embracing a large minority of Arabs not grudgingly but emphatically, and moving beyond arguments of left and right in a debate that for so long has had little to do with either. It also means a readiness to move toward a two-state solution — once the other side is ready, too.
Wild things fill our woods. Many are inside of us; some threaten, with horrors, from without. They will certainly persist. Adults have — and more often than we’d sometimes care to admit — knotted feelings about what it is we care about most, but the alternative is the simplicity of childhood tales that go down easily because they flatten so much.
Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. He is the author, most recently, of “Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing” (Yale University Press).
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The BDS movement will continue to grow as long as Israel avoids accountability by Adam Horowitz Mondoweiss on September 17, 2009
[. . . . ] "Jay Michaelson’s wonderful piece in the Forward also gives a snapshot of how Israel is increasingly perceived in the liberal and progressive community [ . . . . ] This growing perception is being met by a total unwillingness in the international community to hold Israel accountable. In that void, the BDS movement has flourished. [ . . . . ] The carnage in Gaza moved Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin and other leaders on the left who had been reticent to engage with Israel/Palestine to jump in full force. The fact that the Goldstone report has coincidentally been released as the debate in Toronto rages over Israeli attempts to "re-brand" itself after the Gaza war serves as a perfect microcosm of the moment. Israel has yet to be held accountable for the incredible carnage in Gaza, and has already announced that it rejects the Goldstone report’s recommendation for an independent investigation of war crimes committed in the fighting. Although a report like this might have been ignored in the past, protests like the one in Toronto are making this more difficult to do, and in turn the Goldstone report is a chilling reminder of why such protest is unfortunately necessary.
The BDS movement is a nonviolent grassroots attempt to hold Israel accountable while the international community refuses to. After Gaza, Israel will face increasing criticism and rebuke whenever it tries to avoid the issue or change the subject. Although world leaders may not want to sanction Israel quite yet for its ongoing abuse of human rights and international law, it’s becoming clear that there is a growing global movement willing to take up the challenge." [ . . . . ]
http://mondoweiss.net/2009/09/the-bds-movement-will-continue-to-grow-as-long-as-israel-avoids-accountability.html
Gadi writes:
"In truth, settlement in the West Bank is Zionism’s opposite. Zionism is about liberating people; settlement in the West Bank is about redeeming land."
Really?
Zionism was foremost taking back Eretz-Yisrael from the Ottoman Turks, taking labor from the Arabs, establishing kibbutzim, cities and very other type of residential entity possible. Herzl wanted a "charter" from the Sultan and that was rights conferred "to acquire certain (Arab) lands in Palestine and Syria".
Without land, Zionism is nothing.
And, is Gadi anything if he doesn't understand this?
http://www.myrightword.blogspot.com
There's a huge bifurcation in the way we're raising our children today. My husband and I made the decision to send our children to an Orthodox Jewish school. They are learning more about Yiddishkeit (Jewish religion and culture) and Israel than I ever did as a child. Yes, they are being "indoctrinated" a bit - they're certainly getting a very heroic view of the Jewish state - but they are also being given the tools to connect with that state. They know Hebrew, they are familiar with many Jewish and Israeli cultural references, and they have many Israeli friends and teachers.
In contrast, I look at the children of my secular friends and relatives, who are being sent to excellent (non-Jewish) schools. In some cases, these kids are given the impression that Israel is a "good" place, and some are given the impression that it is "bad". But these are just ambient feelings they are picking up from friends' conversations and comments. More worrying is their inability to connect with Israeli or religious Jewish culture. My secular Jewish friends' kids know no Hebrew, have only the most superficial knowledge of wider Jewish culture, and have very, very few Jewish friends. Certainly no Israeli friends.
One can never know the future, but right now if I were a betting person, I'd bet that my kids' schoolfriends will feel very attached to Israel and maybe even move there as adults. They will certainly have a link to Israel, take holidays there, donate money to Israeli causes, etc. Most of my secular Jewish friends' children will, I'm assuming, have little or no connection to the Jewish state. If the prevailing political winds in Europe and the United States blow against Israel, they will blow with it. We are raising two groups of children: those who are being given the tools to understand and engage with the Jewish state, and those who are being brought up in wilfull ignorance of it.
Jay Michaelson's essay raises some fundamental issues, not just being experienced by young Diaspora Anglo Jews in America, England and everywhere else that it's nice right now, but by Anglo Jews shanghaied in Israel, and a bit ambivalent about the sacrifices they make, and what they're worth.
Gadi Taub and Johnathan Tobin alike demonstrate their alienation from the bigger problem being experienced by young and idealistic people regarding Israel, the problem at the heart of Michaelson's essay: How Israel treats itself, it's own self identified Israelis, both native and repatriated, Jew and Gentile. We all feel endangered there, and it has less to do with war than it does with the everyday little persoanl violences and the sense that we're aboard a pirate ship with captains who are filling up with booty, and planning to leave us all behind during a raid that we were goaded into in the first place.
The settlements? really? That's the only problem with Zionism? What a questionable thesis. Silly me, I thought it was the manipulation of EVERYONE by whoever has any authority at all, the institution of force and cruel insensitivity by every bureaucracy, from the private interests to the state functions, the insistence that force, and force alone, will be respected or surrendered to.
The problem with modern Zionism is the degree to which we didn't realize that the means we used to secure the state and it's modern nature are still in effect on every level in Israeli society, and we, people who didn't grow up thinking it was good to push eveyone else into doing what we wanted, or waiting for a chance to, feel a bit dirty about participating in a situation where the social rules insist that kindness = naivety, and that gangland tribalism is the only way anyone does buisness. Yes, we want refuge from that assumption! And there is great concern that in an Israel where there is no recourse for having been taken advantage of or abused, by the phone company or by the army, is a scary place to be, and not the kind of scary that wants to be courageously ignored, or feels effective being fought, or even brought up.
"Coming to grips with the real Israel requires us to have the maturity to understand that it is a great democratic nation run by fallible people who can make mistakes." The concern is that these are not mistakes that the captains of the Good Ship Zion are making: they are cynical tactics of staving away accountabiliy or responsibility for anything. Like the executives and American banking officials who did not make "mistakes" when they gutted the World Economy, thoughtlessly, hungrily, mechanically, it's not mistakes that we percieve as the problem: It's a culture of using force to make our will be done, without sensitivity to impact, and the encouragement to be a part of the problem together, that offends the delicate western liberal soul. That, and the sense of utter disinterest at relating to the fruits of our old violences (to ourselves! to our brothers! to our families!) when they come back to us, in whatever form.
Why hold Israel to a higher standard than every other corrupt and abusive country, every other country there is? Because most countries have had to deal with some kind of accountability from their neighbors by now, to normalize existence. England isn't still warring with France over every inch of land, Nor Egypt with Ethiopia. Israel is a bulwark supporting the corrupt and even more abusive countries surrounding it, giving a sense of justification to the fear-mongering profiteers on both sides of every border, and there is a terrible sense that no good will come out of the ambivalent staring down of a bunch of angry bullies, trying to scare each other, while trying to scare others into backing them up. "In place of the utopia that we had hoped Israel might become, young Jews today often view Israel through the eyes of contemporary media: They fixate upon its unloveliest warts.
Israelis who question me about the waning American Jewish love affair with Israel nod comprehendingly when I offer them this explanation. After all, they have seen many of their own Zionist dreams ground down by years of war. In both countries, the ardor of young love, with all of its unrealistic hopes and passions and dreams, has given way to middle-aged realities."
What's the point of a civil society that isn't anymore aspiring to anything utopian? buisness is going to happen anyway, thugs are going to thug anyway-- if it's not anymore even turning an eye towards a better Jerusalem (that is to say: nicer, not just wealthier and more aesthetically impressive, and inviting the wealthy to a decadent messianic retirement)then what's the point of Israel? Wasn't that word always bound to an aspiration? Once we all saw that no one in charge was interested in that, and that no-one interested in that could ever be in charge, it became alot harder to justify and defend business as usual. At least for those of us not profitting from the businesses. Present company accepted of course.
As regards duplicity and deceit, Tobin is simply following the lead of his mentor, Charles Krauthammer, the (unregistered) LIKUD lobbyist who serves that entity as a fifth columnist - literally! - in the Washington POST. In the 2000 Presidential 'chitgate,' Krauthammer, people might recall, had nothing but scorn and utter disdain for those elderly Jews (including many Holocaust survivors) who accidently cast their butterfly ballots for Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore.
Saudi Arabia has recently sentenced a woman reporter to 60 lashes for interviewing a man in Lebanon who talked about sex. Saudi Arabia, to be sure, is an extreme case, but everywhere in the Arab world honor murders of women take place. In Israel, on the other hand, Golda Meir became the first woman head of government in history who was neither the daughter, like Indira Gandhi, nor the wife, like Sirimavo Bandaranaike, of a previous head of government. Nevertheless, people who support women's rights rarely have anything negative to say about the Arab world but feel obliged always to be "critical" of Israel. Homosexuals are hanged in Iran and subject to honor murders everywhere in the Arab world. Israel, on the other hand, has always drafted openly gay men into its armed forces. When I was in Jerusalem this summer, there was a vigil on Ben Yehuda Street the day after a murder took place at a gay center in Tel Aviv. There were even bigger vigils in Tel Aviv. Israel has an annual gay-pride parade. Nevertheless, those who support gay rights rarely if ever have anything negative to say about the Arab world, but feel obliged always to be "critical" of Israel.
It may be time for American Jews to give up the ghost on their holy loyalties to the Jewish State. We the indoctrinated think somewhere in the back of our minds that Israel is the ultimate destiny whether we live there or not. We create more rootless US citizens who live vicariously through the adventures of Israel (many of the not so traditional Jews also do the same with Orthodoxy). We must have maintain perspective on this relationship with Israel. It is simply another country whose success and survival is based more upon its own policies. As Americans we should redouble our work to make the US a tolerant and compassionate society for all of its citizens. Israelis who share this hope for Israeli society have the power in their hands to do the same.
For those American Jews obsessively wringing their hands over the future of the Jewish state I suggest they make arrangement for aliyah. Let their deeds be equal measure to their words.
It seems your love is based more on how Israel looks on your arms in front of your friends. Love is acceptance. Maybe you just need a "separation" from Israel to make the love less fantastical and based more on who Israel really is, and not what you want her to be.
Read my Zionist Love Story.
http://www.jewishjournal.com/bloggish/item/jewish_blog-con_a_zionist_love_story_20090812/
And part II: http://www.jewishjournal.com/bloggish/item/zionist_love_story_ii_20091009/
With all due respect, Gadi, the craddle of Jewish civilization - like it or not - is not Tel Aviv but Yesha. We can debate the political merits of settlements but we cannot change history or deny it.
I think we the Israelis are doing more harm to ourselves, then our enemies could do.
Take "Zionism" for example. Looking at it intrinsically. In its days, this movement had one, and only one objective - provide Jews from around the world a homeland in Eretz Israel. Period. In my view, Zionism had accomplished its objectives, and one the eve of 14 May 1948, it gave way to the State of Israel. Therefore, Mention of Zionism should be replaced by Israel. (Absolute majority of new generation of Israelis don't identify themselves by this name anyway)
Unfortunately there are many right wing elements in Israel, whom are still stuck with this label, which provides ample ammunition to our enemies to wrap the Zionism-is-apartheid noose around our neck.
When we stop calling ourselves "Zionists", our enemies will stop too.