The Promise of Israel

Why Its Seemingly Greatest Weakness Is Actually Its Greatest Strength

Makes the surprising—and surprisingly compelling—argument that Israel is the model that many other nations should follow

 

What Israel's critics in the West really object to about the Jewish State, Daniel Gordis asserts, is the fact that Israel is a country consciously devoted to the future of the Jewish people.  In a world where differences between cultures, religions and national traditions are either denied or papered over, Israel’s critics insist that no country devoted to a single religion or culture can stay democratic and prosperous. They're wrong.  Rather than relentlessly assailing Israel, Gordis argues, the international community should see Israel’s ...

Neshama Carlebach, daughter of the revered Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, issued a noteworthy message this week: “Two weeks ago, The Forward honored me with a request to perform their new version of our timeless and beautiful ‘Hatikva,’ the Jewish national anthem. My intention was not to make a political statement of any kind but to speak to the hearts of people from all faiths and backgrounds with love.” But then Carlebach had this to say: “To those who have misunderstood my intentions, I ask you not to dishonor yourselves by comparing my performance of ‘Hatikva’ to the acts of the worst persecutors of the Jewish People.”Now, I’ve no idea what sort of responses Carlebach received that elicited her ...

Imagine it’s January 1946. Imagine, too, that you are exactly who you are now: thoughtful, educated, worldly, rational. And then, someone says to you, “Tell me about the future of the Jews.” So you survey the world in January 1946. It’s a year after the liberation of Auschwitz, and just months since the war has ended. You cast your eyes toward Eastern Europe, which not much earlier had been the world’s center of Jewish life, learning, literature and culture. Eastern European Jewry is gone.  Though we commonly say that Hitler annihilated one third of the world’s Jews, that number is technically correct but misses the point. The number that really matters is that after Hitler, ...

Peter Beinart is right. The relationship between American Jews and the Jewish state is indeed in crisis. Beinart and his title are just wrong about what the crisis is. What we face, as his book accidentally demonstrates, is not The Crisis of Zionism, but a crisis of American Judaism. The Crisis of Zionism is, as countless reviewers have already noted, an Israel-bashing-fest. The second intifada was Israel’s fault: It “erupted because while many Israelis genuinely believed that [Ehud] Barak was trying to end the occupation, Palestinians felt it was closing in on them.” Israel attacks terrorists “nestled amid a stateless and thus largely defenseless Palestinian population,” as if the terrorists’ decision to lodge there were Israel’s ...

‘To save Israel, boycott the settlements,’ Peter Beinart pleaded in this week’s New York Times. Israel, he says, is dangerously creating one political entity between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, in which “millions of West Bank Palestinians are barred from citizenship and the right to vote in the state that controls their lives.” Therefore, it is time to drop the phrase “West Bank.” Or “Judea and Samaria.” Rather, Beinart suggests, freedom and democracy-loving Jews should now call the West Bank “nondemocratic Israel.” Perhaps, he muses, that name and the boycotts of West Bank settlements that he hopes will follow might save whatever hope remains for a two-state solution. Many Jews, including Zionists deeply committed to ...

International exasperation with Israel’s role in its conflict with the Palestinians has created an atmosphere so poisoned that, in the name of “fairness,” even proposals that could lead to the destruction of the Jewish state are now given serious hearing. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has repeatedly said that the Jewish state must be destroyed. The weapon he now seeks would enable him to carry out his threat. Is “nuclear nonproliferation,” a euphemism for denuding Israel of its defensive capacity, really the way to respond? If Iran is a rational actor, the only factor preventing its attacking Israel is Israel’s second-strike capacity. And if it is not rational, all the more reason Israel should not bear sole ...

It’s Purim in Jerusalem today, a day of masks, of identities hidden, of a topsyturvy imaginary world. In this region, though, the absurdities we create for Purim can sometimes pale in comparison with the painful realities that will endure long after the holiday. Each year, I interview a few candidates for a college in the US. Typically, they are either American students in Israel for a gap year or Israelis just out of the army who want to attend an American school. It was thus without too much curiosity that I opened this year’s email with the names and addresses of the two students I was being asked to interview. But then I saw that one ...

We Jews permit ourselves degrees of intolerance towards each other that we would never exhibit toward others outside our community. The settings are numerous – theology, Halacha, denominations, politics and more. But nowhere are the vehemence and the inability to actually listen to those with whom we disagree more pronounced than with regard to the State of Israel. The great irony of our age is that arguments about how to safeguard the Jewish state are a significant part of what now threatens to destroy any semblance of unity among the Jewish people. It is therefore helpful to have periodic reminders of just how much is at stake in the survival and flourishing of this state. This week ...

Since 2007 I’ve been Senior Vice President and Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. Until now a think tank at the forefront of Jewish and Zionist thought, education, and research, we’re on course to become Israel’s first liberal-arts college. Our aim: To create a cadre of graduates with the skills, wisdom, and character required to be leading citizens of their state, and committed members of the Jewish people and world at large. If you’re interested in helping ensure the survival and success of Israel in the long-term, check out the vital work we’re doing here. http://www.shalem.org.il/

There is, it seems, a bit of an occupational hazard to this column-writing business. It probably holds for all sorts of topics, but it’s undoubtedly true when thinking aloud about Israel. Here’s the choice: You can either plant yourself firmly on one side of the political divide, being predictably “right wing” or “left wing,” or you can, depending on the issue, say what you think but appear a bit less consistent. The advantages of the first option are clear. Once you are tagged as a “right winger” or “left winger,” people assume that they know what you’re going to say. If you’re “on their side,” they read and nod approvingly, feeling ever so validated by yet ...