It’s our Jewish responsibility to see the full picture when it comes to Israel. We’re failing.
The Jewish state is profoundly flawed, and extraordinary. Why can’t we perceive both those truths?
There are multiple, complicated truths about Israel. It’s our job, as Jews, to see all of them. Graphic by Forward Collage/Canva
Ancient Jews were summoned to make three annual holiday pilgrimages to the holy temple in Jerusalem, where God and the people of Israel were said to gaze at each other directly. For such a profound encounter, the rabbis of the Talmudic ruled that “since it requires two eyes to see fully, a person blind in one eye is exempt from pilgrimage.”
This rabbinic wisdom seems elusive since Oct. 7 and the war it spawned. All around me, I see people, including Jews American and Israeli, failing to look at the whole picture, to keep both eyes open.
It is an understandable human instinct to divert our eyes from disturbing realities. Too many in the Zionist mainstream still shut our eyes to Palestinian suffering. Through a century of conflict, and especially right now, that is a moral and intellectual failing. We must force that second eye open to absorb the full scope of death and destruction in Gaza, and grapple with how Israel can keep itself safe without inflicting unnecessary harm.
But I am also deeply concerned about the growing chorus of anti-Zionists and non-Zionists in our community, particularly in the younger generations, who seem blind in one eye.
Over the past year, a handful of members declined to rejoin my Upper West Side synagogue because of their profound alienation from Zionism. A recent visitor to our congregation objected to the prayer calling Israel “the first flower of our redemption.” Instead, she told me, “Israel is the first weed of our enslavement.”
To those dissenters, those giving up on the national home of the Jewish people, I say: Do not ignore our failings, but keep both eyes open to see what Israel and Zionism have meant to the Jewish people.
I do not apologize for the warped aspects of Israel’s politics. However great its security challenges, however vicious Palestinian enemies can be, the occupation of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza must end. With appropriate treaties and international cooperation, we can and must give Palestinians the political rights all peoples deserve.
But none of that undermines the concept — or, given our history, the necessity — of a Jewish state.
The well-justified criticisms of the non- and anti-Zionist camp should not blind anyone to Israel’s extraordinary achievements of building a modern society representing an age-old people; giving Jews from around the world safe haven; and nurturing Jewish culture.
Non- and anti-Zionists should see Israel’s 1948 creation in the context of the Jewish erasure in the years preceding it. Thanks to wars, pogroms, Nazis, Communists and Islamic fanatics, virtually all our ancestral communities became untenable. After centuries, in the blink of an eye, there was no longer a sustainable Jewish life in Warsaw, Frankfurt, Baghdad or Salonika.
At the edge of oblivion after the Holocaust, Am Yisrael — the nation of Israel, the Jewish people — responded to unimaginable destruction with unimaginable resilience.
Israel gave Jews a place to go, someone to greet them when they got there, a reason to go on living as Jews, and a renewed Hebrew language that incubated an astonishing cultural, literary, spiritual and intellectual revival.
Opposing Israel’s existence is not by definition antisemitic. I know many non-Zionist dissenters who are devoted Jews. But I have to wonder what they think would have been the better outcome for Jews in the middle of the 20th century.
I sometimes hear people say they favor “principled diasporism,” perhaps hoping to insulate our wonderful tradition from the taint that inevitably comes with state power.
I believe this is Jewishly and morally unserious. Am Israel needs both homeland and diaspora communities; I, myself, still live in Manhattan. Yet as great as American Judaism can occasionally be, it has not exactly been “the forge of the national soul,” in Bialik’s poetic phrase. How’s our Hebrew? Our Jewish literacy? Our success at raising Jewish children?
The most important American Jewish questions concern where we fit in a diverse nation, our access or exclusion, who loves us or scorns us.
Israel and Zionism, on the other hand, address questions Larry David or Philip Roth never ask themselves: What do three millennia of Jewish peoplehood mean? What is our collective past and future, fate and destiny? These questions barely apply to American Jewish life, but they define Israeli Jewish life.
Taking office in February 1949, Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizman reflected on the new state’s epic responsibility: “I know that anything done, or anything not done, will bring light or cast shadow on our entire nation.”
With one eye, then, we should look squarely at Israel’s failings. But let’s please keep our eyes on this all-important prize: the collective meaning of Jewish peoplehood.
It is morally inadequate not to see that Israel’s tremendous successes in caring for Jews requires state power. Who else could send planes to rescue the Jews of Yemen, Iraq, Ethiopia and Ukraine from war and antisemitic regimes?
Palestinians justly consider Israel’s creation their Nakba, Arabic for catastrophe. It truly did wipe away much of their society in what is their homeland, too. We must not close our eyes to that displacement.
But it is also blind to suggest that Israel should not have been created unless the Palestinians agreed.
I regret that our neighbors in the Holy Land did not agree to the original United Nations partition plan. But that would not make it morally superior to send a million Shoah survivors to rebuild their homes in graveyards — alongside former neighbors who sold them out, stole their homes and often shot them. There would be no high ground in leaving Europe’s remaining Jews in the hands of Stalin and his comrades, who hated them nearly as much as Hitler did, and did their best to efface the last traces of Jewish life under their domain.
Many Holocaust survivors emigrated to the United States and other nations, of course. But relying on the graces of liberal countries is no adequate answer for Am Yisrael — not after World War II, and not today, when America’s capacity for nativist cruelty is on display. Remember that in 1939, Canada’s immigration minister barred Jews escaping Hitler with the infamous statement “None is too many.”
My eyes are open to the fact that the U.N. plan did not divide our disputed land equitably, given that Arabs outnumbered Jews 2:1 in Mandatory Palestine. But that is because the new Jewish state was created to absorb hundreds of thousands of refugees, first from the Shoah, and then from the Islamic world.
Palestinians and Arab states took up arms rather than divide the territory. I hope they regret the ruin this has caused them. I sincerely hope they at last decide to build the best life they can in a shared land, within history’s unfairness, rather than committing themselves to endless destruction. But I do not think their repeated refusal warrants a conclusion that Shoah survivors should have been sent back to Poland; that Soviet Jews deserved the gulag; or that Syrian or Iranian Jews should have remained repressed under Islamic fundamentalism.
Only a fool or a liar would deny that realizing both Israel’s Jewish and democratic character is fraught with tension. The Jewish state’s formal legal documents and its citizens often “skip on both sides of the fence” — to borrow another biblical phrase — between equality and hierarchy.
But that only makes the challenge more urgent. With our voices, bodies, and checkbooks, liberal Jews should never give up on building a Jewish state worthy of our people’s history, one that shares a homeland with people as scarred as ourselves.
The Israeli novelist David Grossman gave an electrifying speech at a Tel Aviv rally for the hostages last June. His hands shook as he stated, in terse poetic rhythm, what is at stake:
There is whom to fight for
and what to fight for,
because we will never again receive
a gift like this
a gift from life
No other state will sprout for us
from within these quarrels.
Now, everything depends on you
now is the time to arise
to live
To be a nation or not be
To be human or not be
There is for whom
There is for what.
And everything hangs suspended over the abyss.
This is what a state of Israel means to Am Yisrael. Let us all keep both our eyes open to see it.
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