There’s more, of course, including their treatment of Sephardim (even haredi Sephardim), the often despicable attitude to women in their communities, their tendency toward violence (when irked, they attack city workers, police officers and even the haredi rabbi who urged the Sephardi parents to go to the Supreme Court) and, most obvious, their unwillingness to share the burden of defending this country.

This cancer threatens to destroy everything we have built. Yes, that’s a harsh metaphor, but it’s apt. As Dan Ben-David of the Taub Center has shown, despite its current economic stability, the State of Israel is simply economically unsustainable if matters continue this way. Barring a dramatic shift in policy, the country will collapse under the weight of these haredi “cells” that drain the energy from the best of the body. There’s nothing inherently evil about a cancer cell; we dread it only because it kills the organism we desperately wish to preserve. Haredim have every right to live as they wish, but that does not mean that we must allow them to destroy the country that we have built at such great cost over the past century.

THE HAND-WRINGING of the past week suggests that most Israelis believe that there’s little we can do. I disagree. With apologies to Jonathan Swift, I offer the following modest proposal for our collective consideration.

Those who argue that the two-state solution will not work are right. We need not a two-state solution, but a five-state solution.

1. Hamastan will be created on the territory now known as the Gaza Strip, and will be ruled by the same people who already run it. Like Iran and North Korea, Hamastan will survive through sheer force and the use of terror, until its citizens rebel. Its borders are already internationally recognized. It already has a flag, and international sympathy in abundance.

Yes, it’s short on many other commodities, so one presumes that even as Israel continues to blockade it (for it will remain sworn on Israel’s destruction), it will have to continue to let in massive humanitarian aid, either by sea or by land. But perhaps Egypt will open its borders and let goods flow in from the south. After all, it’s not as if Hamastan will be sworn on Egypt’s destruction. In Hamastan, in short, nothing but the name changes.

2. Fatahland, on the other hand, will rise from what is today the West Bank, or Judea and Samaria. It, too, thankfully already has a flag. It could become a democracy, though probably a limping one at best, considering the Palestinians’ record of creating transparent, democratic institutions. True, we might be pleasantly surprised, and its democracy might flourish. Equally possible, though, is that absent Israel’s efforts at propping up the scaffolding of its democratically inclined leaders, Fatahland could slip into dictatorship. The jury is out, but whether Fatahland is democratic or just another version of the brutal regime of Hamastan would really not be Israel’s problem.

Fortunately, even if Fatahland begins as a despotic regime, however, that could eventually change. For as Americans like John Adams and his compatriots knew, as millions of former Soviet citizens learned and Zionists before May 1948 understood well, you can earn freedom when you want it badly enough and are willing to risk – and sometimes to die – for it. Perhaps Fatahlandians will really crave freedom enough to be willing to die for it. They’ve proven that there are those of them willing to die to kill us; now we’d see if they’re willing to die to make themselves free.

3. Palestine will be the country of today’s Israeli Arabs. Increasingly, Israeli Arabs are wholly unambiguous about the fact that they reject the notion of Israel as a Jewish state. Adalah is only one of the Israel-Arab advocacy groups that have openly called for ending the Jewish character of the State of Israel. And the citizens of Umm el-Fahm, Israeli Arab citizens who rioted after the recent flotilla incident, continuously make it clear that they want a different type of government. It’s time to give them one. Though its borders would have to be negotiated, Palestine would be based in the “Triangle” section of the Galilee where such sentiment is strongest. And we’d have to figure out how to handle the other pockets of such sentiment, which are not geographically contiguous with the Triangle.

Palestine would probably be democratic. It would simply be liberated from the oppressive Jewish regime that it can’t bear, and would be free to chart its own course. And amazingly, Israel might have a neighboring Arab state with which it’s never been at war.

Alas, Palestine does not have a flag. The PA’s flag will be taken by Fatahland. And Israel’s flag, based as it is on the image of a tallit, would be thoroughly unacceptable. Designing a flag will thus be one of the first challenges to which the leaders of the new state will have to turn their attention.

4. Haredia will be the ultra-Orthodox state. Based primarily in the Jerusalem neighborhoods of Mea She’arim, Geula and Sanhedria, along with Bnei Brak and perhaps a few other localities, Haredia would be the country that last week’s 100,000 plus protesters clearly desire. It would have a Supreme Council of Rabbinic Elders, not the vile secular Supreme Court that so offends them. They would be free to do whatever they wished with their schools, and with their Sephardim. They could impose a halachicly based system of law as other countries have done with Shari’a. They could virtually guarantee the exclusion of all the nefarious influences they so deeply object to in contemporary Israel. They could impose whatever standards for conversion they wished, without causing a rift with the rest of the Jewish world, which would actually have more in common with Turkey than it will with Haredia.

Today’s haredim already have a political party called Degel Hatorah, the flag of Torah. Surely, they’ll have some ideas for a flag.

How Haredia will defend itself against attacks from elements emanating from Hamastan and Fatahland is, admittedly, not entirely clear. Defense, after all, takes some serious commitment, a willingness to risk and lots of training. There is a real possibility, unfortunately, that Haredia will be utterly unable to defend itself, and Haredians (some will just call them Haredim, probably) will find themselves the most abandoned and vulnerable group in the Middle East. What will the world say about that? Will there be the same outpouring of concern that there is now for the Palestinians of Gaza? We’ll learn a lot about the world from watching how many other countries come to the verbal and physical defense of Haredia facing its Arab neighbors all alone.

5. Israel will be the region’s Jewish and democratic state. It doesn’t have recognized borders, but at least it does have a flag. It will be mostly Jewish, though some Israeli Arabs will decide to remain Israelis instead of becoming Palestinians, and they should be welcomed. The same with Haredim – a few might be willing to recognize the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and might decide to live in a Zionist entity. If they want to go to the army and are willing to live off their own salaries and not off government subsidies, then they, too, should be welcomed.

ISRAEL WILL be a broad tent. It will include religious and secular, right wing and left wing, free marketers and those more inclined to socialism. It will be home to Im Tirtzu, a right-of-center student organization seeking to restore Zionism to Israeli campuses that countenances no criticism of Israel whatsoever, and Breaking the Silence, former IDF soldiers – and other peaceniks who’ve now glommed on to them – who travel across the world telling anyone who’ll listen about the excesses of Israeli power. It will be home to Avigdor Lieberman and Naomi Chazan.

Eventually, of course, it’s likely that both Palestine and Haredia will discover that running a country is a pretty complicated business. You need hospitals, and police. You need a functioning court system. You need people who can run the power company and the phones, people who can fly airplanes and people who can represent you in the international community. And, they’ll discover, all that money that Reform and Conservative Jews helped steer toward Israel actually did make life much better.

So the time may come that they’ll crawl back to us, on their hands and knees, begging us to annex them back. Imagine that. Israel annexes territory, but because the territory actually asked to be annexed. What a breath of fresh air.

Wait, though – not so quick. Maybe we’ll take them, maybe we won’t. Because by then, hopefully, we’ll have had a serious national conversation about what our country is committed to. We won’t be embarrassed by the idea of a Jewish democratic state, and we’ll have discussed what preserving it will entail. So we’ll tell them who we are. They can join the enterprise called Zionism, or at least live with it and respect it, or they can stay independent.

But we ought not to be cavalier about this scenario – it is profoundly sad for Israel, too. Most Israelis take great pride in the country’s commitment to diversity, even if it is far from perfectly implemented. Its commitment to heterogeneity, and to freedom, is both one of its great strengths and one of its great weaknesses. Breaking up the region into these disparate countries addresses the weakness, but also robs Israel of potential strength. It’s an eventuality Israel should want to avoid.

What makes Israel different from these other imagined countries is that it does not wish to purge from its ranks those who are different. But it is slowly being given no choice. The challenge to its leaders now – were they only able to extricate themselves from their inability to make any decisions about anything at all – is to take sufficient steps to show these populations that in an ideal world, we want to live with them. But even more than that, we want to survive. Therefore, if surviving means living without them, so be it.

The real onus is on those groups who refuse to accept the notion of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state to show Israelis how we survive with them, and to demonstrate that their continued participation in our nation will not lead to its ultimate demise.

And now for something completely different — an article on the political significance of the Bible’s Tower of Babel story.  You can read it online here or download a PDF here.

Subscription information to Azure if you’d like it is available here.

Comments and reactions, as always, below …

A Botched Raid, a Vital Embargo

By DANIEL GORDIS

June 3, 2010

Jerusalem

IN the last few days, Jerusalem has been blanketed by an unusual combination of humiliation and steely determination. How is it, people here wondered aloud, that the same country that tripled its size in three lightning days in June 1967 and then pulled off the rescue at Entebbe nine years later now seems to botch everything?

We lost the 2006 war in Lebanon, believing — incorrectly — that our venerated air force could win the war from the skies. The strikes on Gaza in December 2008 were a military success, but we have utterly failed to convince the world that it was a defensive effort precipitated by eight years of Hamas’s firing Qassam rockets at us, killing and maiming and destroying any semblance of a normal life for Israelis living near the border. And then came Monday’s attack on the flotilla trying to break through the naval blockade of Gaza.

Yet, despite widespread criticism at the way the raid was conducted, few here doubted that stopping the flotilla was the right thing to do. Life in Gaza is unquestionably oppressive; no one in his right mind would choose to live there. But there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza; if anyone goes without food, shelter or medicine, that is by the choice of the Hamas government, which puts garnering international sympathy above taking care of its citizens. Israel has readily agreed to send into Gaza all the food and humanitarian supplies on the boats after they had been inspected for weapons.

Thus this flotilla was no “peace operation.” It was intended to break the blockade or to increase international pressure to end it. Its leaders, with the connivance of the Turkish government, set a trap, and Israel blundered smack into it.

But that does not make the blockade wrong. Hamas is a terrorist organization that completed its takeover of Gaza through brute force. It executes its political enemies at will. It is one of the world’s most misogynist regimes, allowing the murder of women for the slightest infraction of family honor.

Hamas kidnapped an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, from Israeli territory and has held him for four years without giving the Red Cross any access to him, in violation of the most basic international standards of conduct. And, of course, Hamas openly insists that it will countenance no long-term peace with Israel; the resistance will not end, it says, until Israel is destroyed.

Like every other country, Israel has as its foremost obligation the protection of its citizens. Given that, why should it have allowed the flotilla to enter without inspecting its goods? If the United States were to impose a blockade on Iran (which seems unlikely), and another country dispatched a string of ships in a similar operation, is there any chance the United States Navy would let them through without inspection?

Israel will, of course, endure tremendous international condemnation for this week’s events. Sadly, though, we Israelis are becoming somewhat inured to such criticism. And we know that we dare not capitulate now.

It is no accident that Turkey sent the flotilla at this time. It is clearly cozying up to Iran these days, even teaming with Brazil to offer Tehran a deal on atomic fuel that would allow the mullahs to maintain their effort to build a nuclear arsenal. Ankara’s warmongering talk this week was not intended for global consumption; it was meant to show Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that Turkey is playing a new role in the Middle East.

Iran finances Hezbollah and Hamas and does everything it can to weaken and marginalize Israel, inching toward its vision of a world without a Jewish state. The West has known of Iran’s nuclear intentions for well over a decade, but has effectively done nothing. Israelis understand that we — and we alone — will have to ensure our security and our survival.

The recent avalanche of international condemnation is very painful for Israelis, who remember the years in which we were seen as a beacon of democracy and sophistication in a repressive part of the world. Those days are gone, of course, because of the world’s impatience with the “occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza.

Our problem is that though most Israelis want peace with two states — one Jewish and one Palestinian, living side by side — we cannot find anyone to make a deal with us. A decade ago, President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak, tried, but Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, walked away. Now the supposedly moderate Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, refuses to negotiate, as of course does Hamas.

Israelis are resigned to the fact that reason will not shake the world’s blatant double standard. Our blockade of Gaza is “criminal”; yet nobody mentions that Egypt has had a blockade of Gaza in place since 2007, and has never hesitated to use lethal force against those trying to break it. Israel’s attempt to enforce a blockade becomes an international crisis, while most of the world shrugs when North Korea sinks a South Korean ship. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared his willingness to sit with Fatah leaders any time, anywhere, but they insist on mere “proximity talks,” which they will probably now scuttle, using the flotilla as an excuse.

Israel’s geographic vulnerability means that we do not have the luxury of caving in to the world’s condemnation. We will have to gird ourselves for the long, dangerous and lonely road ahead, buoyed by hope that what ultimately prevails will be not what is momentarily popular, but rather what is just.

[Credit:  Both Text and Image from New York Times]

Hey Danny….yet again a misguided Israeli political and military mission with regard to Gaza that American Jewry will be asked to stand by and support. All over the news Israel will be referred to as “the Jewish State” as worldwide condemnation will pour in. As a Jew I will be on the defensive despite the fact that I have no vote and no say in whatever the politicians in Israel decide. Again, you will no doubt ask for solidarity by Jewish folk worldwide and we will answer for Israeli decision-making. I love Israel as my religious base, but the policies do not reflect my peace loving values. I support Israel with bonds and donations and visits, but the thriving American Jewish experience is independent of it.

OK, there’s a lot there, and most of it I won’t respond to now.  But this is one of those moments when I don’t think we have the luxury of writing a column over days, printing it out and editing it, sleeping on it and editing it again.  Too much is happening, and people are too hurting and too confused for something not to be said.

To be sure, there’s much more that we don’t know than we do.  We’ll learn a lot in the days and weeks to come.  But we do know that this was a tragic day and an excruciatingly painful one in Israel.  At the fruit market, and at the dry cleaners, I asked people working there how they were, and all I got was a sigh.  And then, “Yom kasheh.  A tough day.  They’re going to eat us alive.”

They will, indeed, eat us alive.  It’s taken a full day for the Israeli government to say anything coherent at all, riots are breaking out in Israeli Arab towns, Israelis in Istanbul have been warned by the Foreign Ministry not to leave their hotel rooms, and the international community is raining down condemnation.

But I jump to conclusions very different than those of my high school friend, and I responded to him in language very close to this:

David – we couldn’t disagree more strongly.  Israel’s actions were “misguided”?   Let’s take that first. Were there tragic outcomes? Obviously. But “misguided”? Gaza is under the malicious and cynical rule of a terror organization sworn on Israel’s destruction, that is holding an Israeli soldier captive in contravention of all international treaties, and that oppresses its own population while even Palestinian witnesses there acknowledge that there is no food shortage. Given Hamas’ military objectives, Israel would be crazy not to check what’s going in.  But Israel had already pledged to pass on any humanitarian goods after they were inspected, and told the boats the same thing.  So, no, I don’t think that the idea of stopping the boats was misguided.

What we know is that on five of the ships, the commandos (among them friends of our kids, by the way) boarded the boats, and there was no resistance and no fighting.

On one boat, however, the first soldiers to land on the boat were attacked with metal rods and knives. There’s video of it.  It’s playing all over Israeli and all over the internet.  In some cases, soldiers’ weapons were stolen and used against them. One was stabbed, apparently in the abdomen.  Another was tossed from a desk and trampled when he landed. There were a handful of commandos there, and 600 “peace activists.” On Israeli news tonight, the soldiers on helicopters taking them to the hospital were interviewed.  They descended the ropes, they said, planning to talk the “activists” into going to Ashdod.  Their weapons were not in their hands, but strapped to their backs.  “We went into war,” one in his 30’s said bitterly tonight, “and all we had were toys.”  They were beaten, trampled, shot (yes, there were bullet injuries) but only after forty minutes of combat did they resort to live five.  They were going to get lynched if they didn’t fight back, they said.

Was I there?  No.  Do I know what really happened?  No.  But do I trust these kids and their officers?  Yes, I do.

As for “peace activists,” David, how much do you know about the IHH? It’s a terror support group, supported by Turkey (among others) and it was ent to provoke. If they just wanted the goods to get to Gaza, they could have agreed to transfer them to an Israeli ship, or to unload them in Ashdod, as the Navy personnel asked them to.  But they didn’t want that. They just wanted to break the blockade. Why?  For food?  Even a few Palestinian journalists with some guts are reporting that there’s no humanitarian food crisis in Gaza.  No, it wasn’t about food.  They want the blockade broken so that after that, non-humanitarian items (read weapons) could brought in. Why should Israel allow that?  So that they can be better armed the next time we have to send our kids into Gaza?

As for “being on the defensive,” you “will be on the defensive” only because you totally don’t get it. For if you did get it, you wouldn’t feel that way.  There’s only one country anywhere on the planet about which there’s a conversation about whether it has a right to exist. Do you ever think about why that is? What, the fate of the Palestinians is worse than that of aborigines in Australia?  Or people in the Congo, or Rwanda?  Why all the attention on Israel?  Do you really not get it?  You think that New Zealand just coincidentally decided this week to make kosher slaughtering illegal?  You think it’s really about humanitarian commitments?  Come on.

No, David, you really don’t have to defend Israel.  No one’s asking you to.  We know that it’s too late to expect many Americans like you to assume we’re right before you assume we’re wrong.  As we look out at Jews across the world, we’re just assessing who gets Jewish history, and who’s so thoroughly intellectually assimilated that they’re actually embarrassed that that Jews don’t have to continue to be victims. I’m horrified by what happened on the ship, and I’ll be shocked if after all is in, we find that Israel made no mistakes.  (This was pretty clearly an intelligence failure, at the very minimum, sending those soldiers into something for which they had not at all been prepared or armed.)  But if that had been my kid on the ship, and he’d gone in to prevent the blockade from being broken, but had no intention of fighting, and had then been attacked, I’d want him to defend himself.  No matter what.  I’d want him to come home whole, because that’s part of the new Jewish reality that this country is supposed to make possible.

The loss of life is tragic. So are the injuries to soldiers, including serious head wounds.  But most tragic of all is that the world is so willing to be blinded to what’s really going on here.

At the end of this excruciating day in Israel, at least given what I know at this moment, I’m saddened but not apologetic.  I’m not surprised by most of the world’s reactions.  But I haven’t lost sight of who provoked this, and why they did that.  But you’re a very smart guy.  Why have you?

In October 1994, several days after kidnapped IDF soldier Nachshon Wachsman was killed in a failed attempt to save him from his terrorist captors, I was scheduled to teach my weekly graduate seminar at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. But given the horror of what had just transpired, I couldn’t even imagine simply teaching as planned. I no longer recall what had been scheduled for that day. But what I do remember is that I decided to scrap the usual fare and that I taught a text in memory of Wachsman.

As the seminar drew to a close, it was obviously quiet in the room. But just as the students were preparing to disperse, one looked at me and asked, “What does any of this have to do with us?”

More than 15 years later, I can still picture that moment, frozen in time. I remember exactly where she was sitting. I recall the looks of discomfort on the faces of some of the other students, but the nods of agreement with her question from others. And I remember that I had no idea what to say.

And I remember feeling unbearably lonely and wholly out of place. Lonely because it was clear that she was not the only one wondering why in the world we were thinking about Nachshon Wachsman, when my own heart was breaking, and out of place because I had no idea how to engage those students in a conversation about why he mattered to me. I didn’t know where to begin.

What I didn’t know then, of course, was that a question that seemed to me an aberration would soon become the norm.

BUT IT has. Among young American Jews today, the public discourse has been captured by the intellectual and emotional heirs of that graduate student. Today’s is a generation of young American intellectuals and communal leaders without the instinctive bond to Israel that my generation possesses, even when Israel infuriates or embarrasses us. This is a generation of people like the talented writer Jay Michaelson, who wrote in The Forward, “I no longer want to feel entangled by [Israelis’] decisions and implicated in their consequences… count me out.”

Even in the moments of our greatest frustration with Israel, the people that I grew up with could never utter the words “count me out.”

Michaelson is but part of a massive wave. Prof. Jack Wertheimer, in presenting some preliminary findings from his newest study of American Jews (the specific figures are still being processed), noted a few weeks ago that most young American Jewish leaders (yes, leaders) “do not see Israel as central to Jewish identity and peoplehood.”

The evidence is virtually limitless. We’re witness to a tectonic shift in American Jewish life, but many people would rather ignore it than face the serious work that lies ahead. Thus, when I pointed out (“If this is our future,” Jerusalem Post, May 7) that following Brandeis University’s invitation to Ambassador Michael Oren to be its commencement speaker, the public discourse was captured by those opposed to his invitation, some people responded by pointing out the (obvious) fact that many Brandeis students (and probably the majority) supported the invitation. A petition in favor, signed by 5,000 people, was also reported. And a small number of articles in the Brandeis paper, opined one faculty person in a response to the Post, ought not be taken out of context. “Imagine someone telling you it’s pouring rain outside and you stick your head out the window and see there are just a couple of clouds in the sky,” he wrote.

But what we’re facing would be “just a couple of clouds in the sky” if the story that mattered was about Brandeis, which it obviously is not. Everyone knows that Jewish life on campus doesn’t get better than Jewish life at Brandeis. So why pretend that Brandeis is the issue? What is significant is that even at Brandeis, one of the crown jewels of American Jewish academe, as of the publication of my previous column, there had been four pieces in the student newspaper about the Oren invitation. The Justice’s official editorial and the head of the campus J Street chapter weighed in opposed. So, too, did a member of the computer science faculty. And a student representative to the Board of Trustees aimed to defend the invite by suggesting that Oren was being asked to campus not as a representative of the State of Israel, but as an academic.

WHY DOES any of this matter? Because in not one of these pieces did any of the four writers have a single positive thing to say about Israel. That, not Brandeis, is the story.

So instead of circling our wagons, seeking to convince ourselves that it’s not really raining and that there are only a few clouds in the sky, I propose that we ask ourselves a few basic questions: (1) Do we believe that the future of the Jewish people depends on what happens to Israel? (2) Do we believe that Israel can survive without strong and consistent support from the American Jewish community? (3) Given today’s younger generation, does a serious problem loom? (4) If we are facing a challenge, how did it arise? (5) And perhaps most importantly, what should be done?

To me it seems patently obvious that the secure, confident and creative Diaspora community that many American Jews now take for granted is directly dependent on a vital and flourishing State of Israel. Today’s young American Jewish leaders can neither recall nor imagine the days in which Jews hesitated to march on Capitol Hill, or the days in which one could not get a job on Wall Street wearing a kippa. That confidence is the product of Israel, and of the formative experiences that many American Jewish leaders have had in the Jewish state. The image of the Jew, no longer one of victim, but of utter confidence, was born in June 1967. In Israel.

Though many will disagree, it seems equally clear to me that were the State of Israel to be vanquished, the vibrant American Jewish life that we now too easily take for granted would wither away within a generation. And if that were to happen, the two great centers of world Jewry – Israel and America – would each essentially be gone.

And I believe that Israel’s military might, cultural flourishing, strength of spirit and more, important though they all are, are not sufficient to sustain the country. America’s support – financial, military and in the increasingly hostile court of international public opinion – is critical. Yet that support would be much endangered without an American Jewish leadership that instinctively feels deeply connected to Israel, that doesn’t ask, “What does any of this have to do with us?”

Today, we have that leadership. But the future is not as secure as many would like to believe. Nor is that future very far away.

SO HOW did this come to be? To be sure, Israel is partly at fault. It is notoriously horrendous at telling its own story, and has allowed those sworn on its destruction to capture world opinion. Nor has Israel been blameless in the interminable conflict with the Palestinians, of course. Israel alienates American Jewry with an anti-intellectual and often intolerant religious establishment. And the government still refuses to see the gradual distancing of young American Jews as a serious existential challenge, which it could become, if it isn’t one already.

But the responsibility for this widening fissure in world Jewish life cannot be attributed solely to Israel. Too many young American Jews have not been taught what they need to know to evaluate the conflict fairly. They know that they are opposed to the occupation, but they are much less clear on how the occupation began or what Israel has done in the past 43 years to seek to end it. Largely illiterate in Jewish texts or language, they are increasingly unaware of the cultural renaissance that Israel has made possible for Jews the world over.

Yet the problem is actually far more complex. At its core, the issue isn’t really Israel, or even American Jewish education. The real issue is the larger world in which today’s younger American (and Israeli) Jews live. Responding to Wertheimer’s study and the concerns it raised, Noam Pianko, a professor of Jewish history at the University of Washington, denied that there is a problem. As Gary Rosenblatt of the Jewish Week recently wrote, Pianko insisted that “boundaries don’t match the moment” of 21st-century America. His America, Pianko says, is “‘post-ethnic,’ symbolized by President Barack Obama, who he said represents racial fusion rather than division.”

Obama did not create this worldview; this Weltanschauung elected him. But Obama is perhaps the most eloquent spokesperson for this orientation, insisting, as he did in Cairo, that we ought not be “defined by our differences.”

Even if we set aside the obvious fact that it is precisely by pointing to differences that we define most things, Obama reflects the worldview that is shaping both young Americans and increasingly, young Israelis: Difference is not an ideal, but an unfortunate reality, best transcended whenever possible.

In such a world, it is no surprise that a successful young nation-state, which breathes new life into an ancient language, which fosters Jewish ingathering from across the globe and which enables a cultural regeneration unlike anything humanity has ever witnessed – a state which, in other words, celebrates difference – would be uncomfortable for many, and reviled by some.

All of which makes the challenge even greater. Because engendering the instinctive passion for Israel that many of us feel, and miss, requires swimming against the current of an intellectual culture now pervasive in America and much of the Western world. But Jewish history in general and Zionism in particular are proofs that the trends of Western civilization can be withstood, and even altered at times. The question facing us now is whether we plan to capitulate, or whether we’re willing to lace up our boots and enter the battle.

This will be no simple battle. But as Joshua said to the angel (Joshua 5:13), you are either with us or against us. Left versus Right, or Orthodox versus Reform are now secondary issues. What matters now is whether or not each individual, organization, movement, etc. sees defense of Israel’s absolute right to exist as a Jewish state as its foremost responsibility. Let all our differences abide. But let both leftists and hard-liners understand that today, they are not opponents, but rather partners, assuming that both are committed to Israel’s survival and to making the case for that survival day in and day out. The rest we can deal with down the road. For the moment, especially when any substantive chance for a peace deal seems remote, changing the Jewish conversation about Israel, and then the international conversation, is what matters most.

That will not be easy, but first we have to decide that that’s what we want to do. So let’s begin with honesty. We delude ourselves if we pretend that there are but a few clouds in the sky. The Jewish people will survive, and thrive, not by pretending that everything will magically work out, but rather by acknowledging the challenges that lie ahead, and by then bonding together and resolving to meet them head-on.

Tragically, of course, there’s nothing hypothetical about the scenario. Brandeis University recently decided to award honorary degrees to Michael Oren, Dennis Ross and Paul Simon, among others, at its May 23 commencement, and Ambassador Oren, an extraordinary orator among his many other qualities, was invited to deliver the commencement address.

But the days in which Jewish students on an American campus would have been thrilled to have the Israeli ambassador honored by their school are apparently long since gone. Brandeis’s student newspaper, The Justice (how’s that for irony?), deplored the choice, writing that “Mr. Oren is a divisive and inappropriate choice for keynote speaker at commencement, and we disapprove of the university’s decision to grant someone of his polarity on this campus that honor.”

The ambassador is a polarizing figure? Why is that? Because, the editorial continues, “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a hotly contested political issue, one that inspires students with serious positions on the topic to fervently defend and promote their views.”

This is where we are today. For many young American Jews, the only association they have with Israel is the conflict with the Palestinians. Israel is the country that oppresses Palestinians, and nothing more.

No longer is Israel the country that managed to forge a future for the Jewish people when it was left in tatters after the Holocaust. Israel is not, in their minds, the country that gave refuge to hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from North Africa when they had nowhere else to go, granting them all citizenship, in a policy dramatically different from the cynical decisions of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan to turn their Palestinian refugees into pawns in what they (correctly) assumed would be a lengthy battle with Israel.

Israel is not proof that one can create an impressively functioning democracy even when an enormous portion of its citizens hail from countries in which they had no experience with democratic institutions. Israel is not the country in which, despite all its imperfections, Beduin women train to become physicians, and Arab citizens are routinely awarded PhDs from the country’s top universities. Israel is not the country in which the classic and long-neglected language of the Jews has been revived, and which produces world class literature and authors routinely nominated for Nobel Prizes.

Nor is Israel the place where Jewish cultural creativity is exploding with newfound energy, as the search for new conceptions of what Jewishness might mean in the 21st century are explored with unparalleled intensity, particularly among some of the country’s most thoughtful young people. No longer is Israel understood to be the very country that created the sense of security and belonging that American Jews – and these very students – now take completely for granted.

No, Israel is none of those things. For many young American Jews, it is only the country of roadblocks and genocide, of a relentless war waged against the Palestinians for no apparent reason. For everyone knows that Palestinians are anxious to recognize Israel and to live side-by-side with a Jewish democracy. That, of course, is why Hamas still openly declares its commitment to Israel’s annihilation, and that is why Hizbullah has, according to US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, accumulated “more missiles than most governments in the world.”

None of this is to suggest that Israel is blameless in the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, or that the present government has a plan for ending it. Those are entirely different matters. The point is that even if these students hold Israel partially (or even largely) accountable for the intractable conflict with the Palestinians, even if one believes that it should have conducted Operation Cast Lead differently, or even if one disapproves of its policies in the West Bank, for example, it is a devastatingly sad day for world Jewry when those issues are the only ones that one associates with Israel, when mere mention of the Jewish state evokes not the least bit of pride from students graduating from a prestigious institution long associated with the very best of American Jewish life.

WHAT WOULD have happened had Brandeis invited President Barack Obama to deliver the commencement address? Obama is, after all, not exactly a non-divisive figure. He is president of a country at war in Iraq and in Afghanistan, places in which (a small number of) American troops have committed their share of atrocities, a country in which civil rights issues are still far from resolved, in which the bounty of America is still far beyond the reach of millions of its citizens.

One suspects that the students would have been thrilled to hear Obama, despite the fact that many do not agree with his policies. They would have been honored to host him despite the fact that some must be disappointed that he has not lived up to his campaign promise to call the Turkish treatment of the Armenians a “genocide,” despite the fact that he is intent on pursuing the war in Afghanistan, to which many of the students must certainly be opposed. They would have been delighted by Obama’s presence because even if they disagree with some of his views or some of America’s actions, they understand that the US is more than Obama, and more than this war or that policy. And they are, quite rightly, enormously proud of what America stands for and what it has accomplished.

But that kind of instinctive pride in the Jewish state is, sadly, a vestige of days gone by, even for many American Jews.

Reading some of the reactions to Oren’s invitation, one is struck by an astounding simplicity, and frankly, an utter lack of courage to stand firm against the tidal wave of unbridled hostility toward Israel.

Jeremy Sherer, president of the Brandeis J Street U Chapter, wrote to The Justice, “I am… bothered [by the invitation to Oren] because I disagree with his politics.” That’s what education is now producing – people who want to hear only those with whom they agree? “I’m not exactly thrilled,” Sherer wrote, “that a representative of the current right-wing Israeli government will be delivering the keynote address at my commencement.”

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, of course, is now busy fending off members of his coalition who are far to the right of him, like Moshe Feiglin and Avigdor Lieberman, and whether or not one takes him at his word, he is the first head of the Likud to endorse a two-state solution, no small matter for those who know the history of the Likud. But Sherer makes no mention of that complicating data, for it doesn’t fit his overarching conception of the intrinsic evil of Israel’s “right-wing” government (of which the Labor Party is also – inconveniently for Sherer – a member).

The president of the Brandeis J Street U Chapter, who writes that he’s of “Israeli heritage” (whatever that means), did not see fit to say a single positive word about Israel. Not one. One wonders what the “pro-Israel” part of J-Street’s “pro-Israel, pro-Peace” tag line means to Sherer.

Ironically, though, some of the attempts to defend the invitation to Oren were no less distressing. A student representative to the Board of Trustees writes in a disappointingly anemic piece to the The Justice that Oren “is being invited for his academic achievements, not his political ones,” and then launches into a recitation of Oren’s many academic accomplishments.

Here, too, however, not a single positive word about Israel, or of the honor that having not only a world-class historian, but also its representative to the US, might be for the university. That sort of pride appears nowhere in The Justice’s editorial, the J-Street representative’s piece or the op-ed defending the invitation. For too many American Jewish undergraduates, it’s simply no longer part of their vocabulary.

Imagine that Sherer had written something like this: “I disagree passionately with Israel’s policies regarding the Palestinians, and welcome President Obama’s new pressure on Israel to bring the conflict to a close. But as a Jew who understands that despite my disagreement with Israel’s policies, the Jewish state is key to the Jewish revival of which my entire generation is a beneficiary, I honor Ambassador Oren for his service to a country of which I am deeply proud in many ways, and I look forward to welcoming him to campus.”

Or if the pro-Oren op-ed had said, “There is a radical disconnect between our generation and today’s Israeli government. Many members of my generation believe that Mr. Netanyahu and his government either do not know how to speak to us, or are uninterested in doing so. Ambassador Oren’s appearance on campus is a perfect opportunity for the Israeli government to address us and our concerns; I urge our campus to listen carefully to what may well be a watershed address at this critical period in Israel’s history and in the relationship between Israel and the future leadership of American Jewry.”

Imagine. But nothing of that sort got said.

Indeed, the seeming refusal of any of the student articles to say even one positive thing about the Jewish state was all the more galling given other events that took place across the globe on the very same week that the Oren controversy was unfolding. At the University of Manchester, pro-Palestinian protesters tried to attack Israel’s deputy ambassador to the UK, some holding Palestinian flags up to the windows of her car and others climbing on the hood and trying to smash the windshield. In Berlin, a Danish street art duo known as “Surrend” blanketed several neighborhoods with maps of the Middle East in which the State of Israel had been removed, with the term “Final Solution” at the top. The Scottish Labor Federation reaffirmed its support for a boycott of Israel, and the student government at the University of California, Berkeley fell just one single vote short in a bid to override a veto against a divestment bill; a similar bill was also debated at UC San Diego.

None of the writers to The Justice felt that they had to distance themselves from those views, even as they critiqued or supported the invitation to Ambassador Oren.

The student-thugs at UC Irvine, who disrupted Oren’s speech on campus in February, have won. They have set the standard for how one treats any mention of Israel on any campus. Israel is nothing but a legitimate whipping post even at institutions of higher learning, and sane discussion of its rights and wrongs need not be defended, even in communities ostensibly committed to civil and intelligent discourse.

Tragically, even these students at Brandeis, one of the great institutions of American Jewish life, had nothing terribly different to say to the world. Theirs are only more tepid versions of the delegitimization now spreading across the international community like wildfire.

One shudders to imagine a future in which they might be our leaders. ]]> http://danielgordis.org/2010/05/07/if-this-is-our-future/feed/ 92 http://danielgordis.org/2010/03/19/settlement-whiplash/ http://danielgordis.org/2010/03/19/settlement-whiplash/#comments Fri, 19 Mar 2010 07:11:37 +0000 Daniel Gordis http://danielgordis.org/?p=1571

By DANIEL GORDIS The Jerusalem Post 19/03/2010

It was only a matter of time until settlement construction – the issue that the Obama administration has chosen to situate at the very core of its Mideastpolicy, as if settlements have anything at all to do with decades of Palestinian recalcitrance – reared its proverbial head once again. But now that the issue is back, it’s time for some honesty on both sides of the political divide: The wisdom or folly of settlement construction is substantially less obvious than most observers are willing to acknowledge.Barack Obama, Joseph Biden and Hillary Clinton are all justifiably incensed by the embarrassment caused to Biden by the sheer buffoonery of Israel’s elected officials. But their ire says nothing about the substance of the issue, which is once again being addressed with a stridency born of the fact that everyone believes that there is absolutely no merit to the position of the other.

LIVING IN Jerusalem, you don’t have to be prime minister to have periodic bouts of settlement whiplash. Life in the Jewish capital is sometimes comprised of conversations so surprising that you wonder whether to believe your ears. In the hopes of injecting even a drop of bilateral humility into the discourse, I share two conversations that took place not long ago – before most people had heard of Ramat Shlomo, but after it was already clear that settlements were a cause célèbre once again.

I was sitting at one of those ubiquitous cafés on Rehov Emek Refaim, chatting with a lay leader from New York. Biblical claims to the land no longer matter, he was telling me. Nor do picayune legalistic arguments about why this family or that has the right to inhabit this building or that. All of that, he insisted, is now irrelevant.

“You’re losing us,” he explained. “Lots of deeply committed American Jews have just had it with Israel. They want to care, but they can’t. Ninety percent of America’s Jews are Reform and Conservative Jews, but the Jewish state spits on them, and then expects us to pretend that it’s rain. You never elect a prime minister with the guts to stand up to those thugs called chief rabbis. You really expect us to be loyal third-class citizens?”

And he took a deep breath. “But then, you make us not only angry, but ashamed. Doesn’t anyone here give any consideration at all to how Israel’s policies play in our community? How are we supposed to defend policies that push the Palestinians off of more land and out of more neighborhoods, when the world’s decided that that’s simply abhorrent? And have you got a strategy? Do you want a two-state solution? Because if you do, you’d better start leaving them some land on which to create one. And if you don’t want a two-state solution, what do you plan to do with those millions of Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank? Kick them out? Make them non-citizens forever, and then prove that Jimmy Carter was right about the apartheid accusation all along? Are you still going to expect us to watch your backs then? Really, do you guys ever actually think?”

I pushed back, but only a bit, and very gently, because I wanted him to know that I had, indeed, heard him. I disagreed with many of his factual claims, but his angst was genuine, and he was far too articulate to be easily ignored.

But it was soon time to go, for I had to pick up our car from its annual service. A short while later, I found myself in the waiting room, the car not quite ready though I’d been assured it would be. Sharing the space with me was a blond gentleman in a tweed suit and a tie, speaking English with a thick European accent. We had time to kill, so I figured I might as well talk to him. He was from Scandinavia, it turned out, but was now working for the European Union in “Palestine.”

Oy. This, I could tell, was just going to be one of those days. From the frying pan into the fire. I asked him about his counterparts in the Palestinian government. Some good people, he said, but a lot of corruption. They have a long way to go before they’re ready for statehood, he added.

That surprised me. So I pushed. “So, are we eventually going to have peace here?”

“Well,” he said, “‘eventually’ is a long time. But probably not in my lifetime, or yours.”

“So,” I asked, figuring that little could be worse than that conversation at the café, “what should Israel do in the meantime?”

“Just what you are already doing,” he said.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning, that you keep building your country, and keep building the settlements.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly. “Build the settlements?”

“Absolutely.”

“Why’s that?”

“Look,” he said. “Some day, they’re going to be ready for serious talks. They’re going to make a huge concession, and recognize your right to exist. But they’re going to expect a similarly grand concession from you. Your concession can’t be recognizing their right to a state, because you’ve already done that. And you can’t compromise on the return of refugees, because then you have no Jewish state. So you need something massive that you can give up on – and that’s going to be the settlements. You’ll have to evacuate and destroy most of them in the end, but if you do that now, then what will you offer at the table? The settlements are your key to making peace eventually.”

AT THAT moment, we were both told that our cars were ready. We shook hands, and went our respective ways. I should have asked for his card, I thought as I was driving home, because I should have introduced him to my American Jewish philanthropist friend. And my American Jewish friend should really speak not to me, but with the people who actually shape Israeli policy.

Which got me wondering: Could those people begin to hear each other? Can we? Not now, probably. But eventually? Perhaps. The problem, though, is that eventually can be a really long time.

February 21, 2010

Few biblical verses are more commonly misquoted than Isaiah 49:17, in which the prophet promises Israel that they have not been forsaken, that the day will come when “your destroyers and despoilers shall leave you.” But the Hebrew words that mean “shall leave you” – mimech yetzei’u – can also be easily translated as “will come from among you.” Taken out of context, therefore, Isaiah’s promise of a secure future can be read to mean, “Those who destroy and despoil you will come from amongst you.” And though it’s not at all what Isaiah meant, the mistranslation still rings true.

Much has been written about the latest confrontation between Im Tirzu (“If You Will It,” an obvious reference to Herzl’s famous phrase), an organization of Israeli students committed to combating what it sees as post-Zionist or anti-Zionist forces in Israeli society and on Israeli campuses, and the New Israel Fund (NIF), which Im Tirzu accuses of funding many of the left-wing organizations that contributed to the findings of the Goldstone Report.

As in most such cases, both parties may have overreacted. Im Tirzu’s shameful ad depicting Naomi Chazan (president of the NIF) sporting a horn was in exceptionally poor taste, evoking the caricatures of Jews once common in Nazi publications and ubiquitous in today’s Arab press. But the NIF’s efforts to promote democracy in Israel, without question a laudable goal, also need calibration.

For any good to come out of the vicious battle of words between Im Tirzu and the NIF, certain elements of the Jewish world must recognize a plain truth that they would rather ignore. That truth is this – the Jewish People is at war.

There were decades in which the Arabs believed that Israel could be destroyed by standing armies. But that, even our enemies understand, is not about to happen. Since 1973, no standing Arab army has dared attack Israel. In subsequent years, the Arab world tried economic boycotts and terrorism. But neither destroyed the Jewish state. Having failed on those fronts, therefore, the Arab world has adopted a new strategy – the delegitimization of Israel. In this, it is joined by countries and individuals far from the Middle East.

OUR ENEMIES are winning this trial in the court of international opinion. Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, Jimmy Carter, Richard Goldstone and British courts issuing arrest warrants for Tzipi Livni are only the best-known witnesses. The real list is much more extensive. One does not need a vivid imagination to envision a scenario in which the world simply imposes a binational solution on this region. If one is not absolutely committed to Jewish sovereignty, that solution actually makes some sense. Thus, this war over Israel’s legitimacy is one that we cannot afford to lose.

Nor is the State of Israel all that is at stake. American Jewish life as we now take it for granted would not survive the loss of Israel for very long. It would take only a few years after Israel’s demise for American Jews to lose the confidence and optimism that they now take for granted. After all, what is different about the Spanish, French and Italians, on the one hand, and the Basques, Chechnyans and Tibetans on the other?

All six nations have rich histories, cultures, languages, religious traditions and more. But three help determine the course of history – because they have states – while the latter three are peoples to which history simply happens. Israel is what puts Jews in the former category rather than the latter. And the transformation from our being the objects of history to shapers of history has been so thorough that most Jews simply cannot imagine the profound change in Jewish life that would ensue were Israel a vestige of the past.

Because this is a war of words with potentially lethal consequences, words matter more than ever. Thus, those who believe that territorial concessions might bring about peace must do more than simply say that. They must ask whether now, as the international community creeps steadily closer to deciding that the re-creation of the Jewish state was a grave mistake (and as Iran makes constant progress in its quest for a nuclear weapon virtually unfettered by Western sanctions), is the time for Jews to ascend the steps of Capitol Hill to convince congressmen and women to put more pressure on Israel.

Similarly, few thoughtful people would deny that Israel’s democratic institutions need strengthening, or that as long as Israel’s Arabs remain in Israel, Israel ought to provide them greater economic opportunity and increased inclusion in Israel’s democratic processes.

BUT COMMITMENT to our democracy must not come at the cost of commitment to our survival. No country at war maintains the same freedoms of speech or action that countries not facing existential threat can permit themselves. Since the Jewish people is at war, it must think as a people at war must think.

One can understand some American philanthropists’ eagerness to support the Israeli-Arab organization Adalah, which purports to “promote and defend the rights of … Arab citizens of Israel.” Yet instinctive support for a vision of greater democracy isn’t sufficient in this day and age. Harder questions need to be asked. Adalah’s proposed Israeli “Democratic Constitution” calls for ending Israel as a Jewish state. Is that a proposition that American Jews should be funding, however indirectly? Adalah’s Web site discusses the “Israeli attack on Gaza,” offering no indication that Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, whatever one might think of its conduct, was a response to years of shelling from Gaza. Is that the perspective that American Jews, regardless of their political dispositions, ought to be funding as the world inches closer to declaring Israel a pariah state?

Im Tirzu is not the issue. Nor is the NIF, or Naomi Chazan. The issue is what a people at war for its very survival can allow itself. The issue is whether as the world’s noose tightens around the very notion of Israel’s legitimacy, Jews can allow themselves the liberties we might otherwise permit ourselves were we not fighting for our very existence. As the fate of Isaiah’s prophecy reminds us, it takes only a few words to move from a vision of a secure future to one in which those who could destroy us come from our very own midst.

It’s been one of those months, with its renewed call for “balance” and “honesty” in discussion of Israel. First there was the Goldstone report, with its accusations that Israel committed war crimes during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. Goldstone was followed by the J Street Conference, celebrated by many as an opportunity to demonstrate their devotion to Israel by encouraging the US to get tough with it, to force it out of the militant and pro-occupation mind-set it has allegedly forged for itself.

Then there was the appearance in English of Tel Aviv University Prof. Shlomo Sand’s new book, The Invention of the Jewish People, with its claim that the concept of a Jewish people was a late invention, which the Zionists cynically manipulated to justify their taking land from the indigenous Arabs. Finally, verging on the surreal, Donald Bostrom, the Swedish journalist who authored the article accusing Israel of harvesting organs from Palestinian victims of Cast Lead, was invited to a conference in the Negev.

The utterly predictable responses are not terribly interesting. On one side of the divide, there are those who assail Goldstone for unfairness, J Street for allowing its campus activists to drop the “pro-Israel” portion of its “pro-Israel, pro-peace” moniker, Shlomo Sand for shoddy and self-hating scholarship and the Dimona Media Conference, which invited Bostrom, for utter naïveté.

There may be much merit to these accusations, but they have a serious downside, as well. Too often, those who rush to Israel’s defense have no interest in the undeniable suffering on the other side of the border. In knee-jerk fashion, they strive to silence any criticism, even in cases when its policies might well be wrong.

But no society benefits from an absence of criticism, and no nation improves without vigorous debate. Could we be effective parents without letting our children know when they disappoint us? Citizenship may not be all that different. In the long run, support that seeks to suppress debate will do us as much harm as good.

BUT ON the other side of the divide is a growing group so insistent on dialogue that it’s no longer clear to what they are most fundamentally committed. When a group of American rabbis visited Jerusalem last week, one of them remarked that it was unfortunate that Ramallah wasn’t on the itinerary. “Why visit Ramallah?” another member of the group asked. “Because Ramallah is also part of our story,” was the response. “More than Holon? Are you distressed that we’re not visiting Holon?” was the question that followed. To that, the first rabbi had no response.

Why, indeed, should Ramallah matter to us more than Holon? And why hide our pro-Israel position (if that’s really what we are) simply to appeal to more college students? Had Theodor Herzl adopted that stance with the sultan, or had Chaim Weizmann been bashful in London, would we have a state? Had Golda Meir been self-conscious about her convictions in the face of an American community not entirely certain that a Jewish state was a good idea, where would we be? One shudders to imagine.

Have we become so utterly addicted to dialogue with our enemies that we would rather visit their cities than our own? Have we lost the ability to say, “If you breathe new life into the age-old blood libel, we will shun you”? Would we invite Alfred Dreyfus’s accusers here for dialogue, were they alive today? We have real enemies. Have we so lost sight of that that we forget that anything we say, to paraphrase Miranda, “can and will be used against us”?

If those who insist on silencing any critique of Israel fail us because their passion threatens to squelch the debate we desperately need, those passionately committed to open debate suffer from the opposite problem – they do not recognize that they are unwittingly playing right into the hands of those determined to destroy us.

Take Sand’s book, The Invention of the Jewish People. It is, ostensibly, nothing but an academic hypothesis. Why all the tumult, numerous young American Jews have asked me. Perhaps Sands errs in some of his claims, but so, too, do many academic tomes.

What’s so dangerous is clear on the Amazon page for Sand’s book. Take a look at the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section. There’s Avi Shlaim, the well known post-Zionist, and his Israel and Palestine: Reflections, Revisions, Refutations. Next to it, sporting a cover with both a swastika and a Star of David, Debating the Holocaust: A New Look at Both Sides, as if there’s actually something to debate. Then, Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide. And Palestine in Pieces: Graphic Perspectives.

Surely, Sand must have known how his book would be used.

But there are critics of Israel who genuinely do not wish to do it harm. And these people ought to bear one central fact in mind: In today’s climate, anything we say can, and indeed will, be used against us.

Yes, there is moral failure and dangerous shortsightedness in refusing to hold ourselves and our government to standards of which we, and our children, will be proud. Of course Israel needs nuanced moral critique; no true lover of Zion would want that critique silenced.

But there is also suicidal folly in denying what we know: Were the UN to vote today on the creation of Israel, the motion would fail. The outcome of November 29, 1947 would not be repeated, for the world has decided that Israel was a mistake. No other country anywhere is subjected to debate as to whether it should exist. And that is the fact that matters more than any other.

Given that, the ultimate question is the one that the biblical Joshua posed to the angel (Joshua 5:13): “Are you with us, or do you seek our destruction?” It is frustrating, and tragic – but right now, in the world in which we live, those are our only choices.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu were thinking of Tevye these days. Tevye was, after all, a quasi-pathetic character simply trying to make sense of a world changing far more quickly than he might have ever imagined possible. Having granted his daughter, Hodel, permission to marry Perchik the pauper, he wonders, “What am I going to tell your mother?” He didn’t choose Perchik, and he doesn’t really approve. But he is powerless. And when his wife expresses her dismay, the best explanation he can offer is “It’s a new world, Golde.”

“It’s a new world, Golde” is not a claim that Perchik is the right man for Hodel. Or that he’ll ever make a real living. It’s simply a claim that the rules have changed. And in a world with new rules, people must learn to act and respond differently. Tevye never says that, of course. But he is simple, not stupid; and he intuitively understands that he is going to have to learn to navigate his world in an entirely different way.

Tevye is a not entirely inapt metaphor for Israel. We’re living in world operating according to rules that we’re just beginning to understand. Convinced of the legitimacy of at least much of our position, for years we ignored the warning signs that the world was turning on us, that it has grown tired of the conflict in the Middle East, and that it believes we are the reason the conflict will not subside.

The world didn’t change overnight. We simply weren’t watching.

NOW THERE is no more denying the new ground rules. Barack Obama is not really changing them. Perhaps he is shifting America’s position, perhaps not. But more than anything, he is simply articulating infinitely more clearly than anyone else has what it is that the world has come to believe. And we are going to have to learn to operate not in the world we wish existed, but in the world that does exist. And in this new world, Israel is going to be held to standards that are infinitely less tolerant than the standards to which the rest of the world is accountable.

Consider, after all, events of just the past few weeks. In the aftermath of the Iranian election, much of the world watched with admiration and hope as Iranians took to the streets to insist on their (supposed) democratic rights. When the Iranian government resorted to intimidation, silencing of the press, force and then murder, the world was horrified – but it was also quiet. Where were the mass rallies across Europe and on those North American campuses where students were still to be found calling for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to back down? Where were the heads of state clamoring to get in front of television cameras calling for a new election? To be sure, the world was unhappy, but this was hardly an outpouring of support or of condemnation.

Compare that to the world’s reaction to the Gaza operation half a year ago. To be sure, the circumstances were entirely different. Iran’s election is an internal matter, while the Gaza op was not. And other differences abound. But Israel was responding to eight years of shelling of its citizens in what is undisputedly its territory (unless one disputes the notion that any territory is legitimately ours – which, in fact, is exactly Hamas’ position); nonetheless, even before the urban warfare began, the world was unanimous and vocal that the operation had to end.

An almost deadening silence in one instance. And deafening outcries of excessive force in the other. Welcome to the new world.

OR SUPPOSE that some number of Israeli Arab women decided that they were going to wear the burka as a means of intensifying their personal religious odyssey. And that in response to their decision, Netanyahu said, “In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity,” or that “the burka is not a religious sign, it’s a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement – I want to say it solemnly, it will not be welcome on the territory of the State of Israel.” One can just imagine the world’s outcry, the accusations of religious oppression, comparisons with apartheid South Africa or, yes, Nazi Germany. But substitute “the Republic of France” for State of Israel, and you have precisely French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s words this week – again, to a relatively silent international community of listeners.

Or finally, recall Obama’s twisting in the wind as he came to realize that his outstretched hand to Iran was not going to be shaken as warmly as he’d allowed himself to imagine. Eventually, he gave in to enormous pressure to criticize the Iranian regime’s repressive measures. But his criticism was tepid – he couldn’t get over his fundamental sense that the world ought not meddle in Iran’s internal affairs. A few days later, however, the press reported that Sarkozy had told Netanyahu that it was time to dump Avigdor Lieberman and restore Tzipi Livni. Sarkozy’s advice, apparently, is considered moving peace forward. Obama’s suggesting that Iran recount the vote would be meddling.

THERE’S NO point railing against a double standard that no one is even inclined to deny. Right or wrong, for better or for worse, we need to adapt. Israel is going to have to learn to get ahead of the curve. Had Netanyahu’s speech at Bar-Ilan University, by most accounts a very good speech, preceded Obama’s Cairo address, Israel would have been throwing down the gauntlet, challenging the Palestinians to recognize the Jewish state and to live in peace beside it. But coming when they did, Netanyahu’s remarks were essentially seen as caving in to Obama – too little, too late. That’s what has to change.

In this new world, the spotlight will almost always be on Israel. Settlement building. Roadblocks. Lieberman. We’re going to have to learn to alter that. Make some accommodations, but demand – clearly and unequivocally – that the Palestinians do the same. Netanyahu, or whoever follows him, is going to have to learn to keep the ball, and the world’s attention, squarely in and on their court. Like it or not, Israel needs to take the initiative, time and time again – because nothing else will work.

“It’s a new world, Bibi,” Tevye would have said. We don’t have to like it. And it may not be fair, or just. But as we are wont to say, “zeh mah yesh” – it is what it is. As Tevye understood, we can either adapt, exerting at least some control over our fates, or we can wistfully long for days when other rules prevailed, even as we get swept away by currents we’ve barely begun to comprehend.