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 model as key to the future of culture and freedom.  Israel provides its citizens with infinitely greater liberty and prosperity than anyone expected, faring better than any other young nation. Given Israel’s success, it would make sense for many other countries, from Rwanda to Afghanistan and even Iran, to look at how they’ve done it. Most importantly, perhaps, rather than seeking to destroy Israel, the Palestinians would serve their own best interests by trying to copy it.

**  Turns the most compelling arguments against Israel on their heads, undoing liberals with a more liberal argument and the religious with a more devout one

**  Puts forth an idea that is as convincing as it is shocking—that Iran’s clerics and the Taliban could achieve what they want for their people by being more like Israel

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE PROMISE OF ISRAEL

This beautifully composed saga magnificently illustrates the historic truth that wherever Jews have gone in history, whether in agony, in prayer, in hope, in tragedy or in triumph, we have always followed our own way, deeply involved in the paths of history but never swallowed up by them – forever belonging to and contributing mightily to world civilization and yet remaining distinct from it – and throughout inspired by the knowledge that Israel is the eternal nation state of the Jewish people.

Yehuda Avner; Author, THE PRIME MINISTERS; Former Israeli Ambassador to Australia and the United Kingdom

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, 90 percent of Eastern Europe’s Jews had been murdered.  Prior to the war, there had been some 3,200,000 Polish Jews. At the end of the war, merely 300,000 were left. By 1950, estimates are that 100,000 Jews remained in Poland. As far as Polish Jewry was concerned, Hitler had won.

Hitler won in Hungary, too, and throughout Eastern Europe. The great seat of Jewish life was simply no longer. There are a few Jews left there, of course, but many of those who did survive will for a long time be living under Soviet rule, which, if you’d had a crystal ball, you’d know was going to get infinitely worse long before it got any better. A future for the Jews? It did not look pretty.

You could look a bit westward. You might turn your attention to Salonika.  Some 56,000 Jews had lived there before the war; 98% of them died. Westward still, you might consider France. But the story of Vichy France would bring you no solace.  Europe, until only some 10 years earlier the center of the Jewish world, was an enormous, blood-soaked Jewish cemetery – only without markers to note the names of the millions who had been butchered.

So you might turn your attention across the Atlantic Ocean, to the United States.  But the American Jews you would have surveyed in 1946 were not the American Jews of today. Today, at AIPAC’s annual Policy Conference, for example, thousands of American Jews (and many non- Jews, as well) ascend the steps of Capitol Hill to speak to their elected officials about Israel. They do so with a sense of absolute entitlement (in the best sense of the word), with no hesitation.

But between 1938 and 1945, how many Jews ascended those steps to demand that at least one bomb be dropped on the tracks to Auschwitz, or that American shores be opened to at least some of the thousands of Jews who had literally nowhere to go? During the worst years that the Jews had known in two millennia, virtually no Jews went to Capitol Hill or the White House. There was the famous Rabbis’ March of October 1943, in which some 400 mostly Orthodox rabbis went to the White House (though FDR refused to meet with them), but that was about it.

In January 1946, American Jews did not interview for positions on Wall Street wearing a kippa, and did not seek jobs on Madison Avenue informing their prospective employers that they would not work on Shabbat. The self-confidence of American Jews that we now take so for granted was almost nowhere to be found back then. With European Jews going up smokestacks, American Jews mostly went about their business, fearful of rocking the boat of American hospitality. A future for the Jews? There was, of course, one other place where there was a sizable Jewish population – Palestine. But in Palestine, too, the shores were sealed. Tens of thousands of British troops were stationed in Palestine, not only to “keep the peace,” but to make sure that Jews did not immigrate and change the demographic balance of the country. The story of the Exodus is famous, perhaps, precisely because it ended reasonably well. Most Jews today can name not even one of the ships that sank, carrying their homeless Jews with them. In January 1946, the British weren’t budging. A future for the Jews? In January 1946, there was little cause to believe in a rich Jewish future. You might have believed that a covenant promised some Jewish future, but it would have been hard to argue it was a bright one.

Now fast-forward 66 years, to 2012.

Where do we find ourselves today? Jewish life in Europe, while facing renewed anti-Semitism in some places, is coming back to life. Berlin is one of the fastest growing Jewish communities in the world. There are Jewish cultural festivals in Poland (though staged largely by non-Jews, since there are few Jews left). In Budapest and Prague, Jewish museums, kosher restaurants and synagogues abound. Soviet Jews are largely out, and those who remain have synagogues, schools, camps and community centers. And across the ocean, the success and vibrancy of American Jewish life is legendary.

There was no way to expect any of this in 1946, no reason to even imagine it.  How did it happen? The simple but often overlooked truth is that what has made this difference for Jews world over is the State of Israel.  It was Israel’s victory in 1967 that injected energy into Soviet Jewry and led them to rattle their cage, demanding their freedom.

Post-1967, the world saw the Jews as people who would shape their own destiny.  Unlike the Tibetans (or Chechnyans or Basques, to name just a few), Jews were no longer tiptoeing around the world, waiting to see what the world had in store for them.

The re-creation of the Jewish state has changed not only how the world sees the Jews, but how the Jews see themselves.  The days of “We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we appeared to them” (Num. 13:33) are gone, and the reason is the State of Israel.

We are a people sometimes over-inclined to indulge in hand-wringing (and at others, unwilling to do the hand-wringing we ought to). And we face our challenges. Iran is worrisome, Egyptian peace is tenuous. Hila Bezaleli’s tragic death was a metaphor for the lack of accountability that plagues this country.  The behavior of Lt.-Col. Shalom Eisner, as well as the reactions to what he did, is also deeply unsettling.

But let us remember this, nevertheless: it is far too easy to lose sight of what we have accomplished. Sixty-six years ago, no sane, level-headed person could have imagined that we would have what we have. A language brought back to life, and bookstores filled with hundreds of linear feet of books in a language that just a century ago almost no one spoke. More people studying Torah now than there were in Europe at its height. An economic engine that is the envy of many supposedly more established countries. A democracy fashioned by immigrants, most of whom had never lived in a functioning democracy. Cutting-edge health care. An army that keeps us so safe, we go days on end without even thinking about our enemies.

That’s worth remembering in the midst of the attacks on us, from the international community as well as from Jews.  There’s much to repair, and too often, we fail to meet the standards we’ve set for ourselves. All true, and they demand our continued attention, but at the same time, we dare not lose sight of what we’ve built. To borrow the phrase from Virginia Slims, “we’ve come a long way, baby.”

The Jews have a future because the Jews have a state.

There are moments when a People has earned a celebration. Yom Ha’atzmaut is, without question, one of those moments.

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 fault. Such myopia abounds.

Israel is blamed everywhere in this book, often thoughtlessly. The most obvious example is the one with which the book opens. Beinart watched a video of a young Palestinian boy wailing uncontrollably as Israeli troops arrested his father for “stealing water,” and found himself “staring in mute horror” at his computer screen. He is right, of course, that it is painful to watch a five-year-old weeping as his father is arrested. But Beinart is so anxious to blame Israel that he abandons any investigative savvy. Haaretz, not known for its enthusiastic support of the occupation that so troubles Beinart, reported that Fadel Jaber was actually arrested on suspicion of attacking the police. Border Police sources also suggested that the whole scene of the sobbing five-year-old was staged for the cameras. And everyone admits that Jaber was breaking the law.

Why, though, does Beinart never even wonder if there is an Israeli side to the story, never entertain the possibility that Jaber deserved to be arrested? The mere fact that Israeli actions cause people pain is too much for him to bear.
Here, then, is the rub, and the central question that I kept asking myself as I read the book: Why do Beinart and his ilk expect their Zionist bride to be free of all blemish? And worse, what is the reason for their instinctively blaming the bride they allegedly love, without asking whether anyone else might bear some responsibility for the painful realities they witness?

Why is there not one mention of the extraordinary social organizations in Israel, or the many cultural, literary and other accomplishments of Jews and Arabs in Israeli society? Why does one finish the book with the sense that Beinart, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, actually detests Israel? Why are assaults on Israel described in the cold language of the pathologist, while the scene with Jaber is so emotional? When Beinart mentions Gilad Schalit, this is all he has to say: “Hamas was not innocent in all this: it had abducted an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, and refused to release him until Israel released Palestinians in its jails.” That’s it?! No mention of the fact that Schalit was captured inside Israeli territory? Or that Hamas never once allowed the Red Cross to visit him? Or that Schalit emerged from captivity emaciated? Or that he was held in virtual solitary confinement, with no sunlight, for five hellish years?

Where’s the Jewish soul here? What kind of Jewish observer weeps over young Khaled Jaber but has nothing else to say about Schalit? It’s worse than infuriating; it’s stunningly sad.

Again, the pathologist: Discussing the March 2011 murder of the Fogel family, Beinart first says, “[The terrorists] murdered Ehud and Ruth Fogel and three of their children, Yoav, Elad and Hadas, in their beds. Elad, aged four, was strangled to death. Hadas, aged three months, was decapitated.” Even about the Fogels, he can summon no emotion?

Then, unbelievably, Beinart has this to say: “But what distinguishes Palestinian terrorism and settler terrorism is the Israeli government’s response.” Really? That’s all that distinguishes Palestinian and Jewish terror? How about the fact that there have been very, very few incidents of Jewish terror, while the Palestinians have turned it into a cottage industry? How about the fact that Israeli society detests the Jews who do this sort of thing, while Palestinian society lionizes them? Why does Beinart not mention those enormous differences? His sort of accusation and absurd misrepresentation is what one would expect from the enemies of Israel, not someone who professes love for the Jewish state. When Beinart and I debated some time ago, I actually left the evening believing that he loved Israel. This book convinced me that I was horribly mistaken.

BUT WHY does he hate Israel so? Time and again, Beinart seems just bewildered that the Israel on which he was raised, that “Little Engine that Could” of swampdraining pioneers and noble soldiers, could commit the acts that he’s now suddenly discovering. In the War of Independence, Beinart tells us (as if he has uncovered something interesting), “Zionist forces committed abuses so terrible that David Ben-Gurion… declared himself ‘shocked by the deeds that have reached my ears.’”

What’s truly interesting about this, of course, is not Ben-Gurion’s shock, but Beinart’s. Does Beinart really expect Israel to have fought 10 wars (depending on how you count, but I include the War of Independence, the Sinai Campaign, the Six Day War, the War of Attrition, the Yom Kippur War, the Lebanon War, the first intifada, the second intifada, the Second Lebanon War and Operation Cast Lead) without occasional terrible misdeeds being committed? Seriously? How could someone as smart as Beinart be so naïve? What disturbs him so deeply about Israel that he suspends his prodigious intellectual capacity and assumes a stance of consistently stunned disappointment?

Beinart’s problem, most fundamentally, is that the American liberalism with which he is so infatuated does not comfortably have a place for Jewish ethnic nationalism.

Throughout the book, the words “liberal” or “democratic” are always positives. And what means “negative” or “shameful”? In Beinart’s book, the word is “tribal.” Every time he uses the word “tribal,” he means “distasteful.” “Liberalism was out,” he laments early in the book, and “tribalism was in.” Or “ethically, the ADL and AJC are caught between the liberalism that defined organized American Jewish life before 1967 and the tribalism that has dominated it since.” “Among younger non-Orthodox Jews,” he later says smugly, “tribalism is in steep decline.” What is wrong with the settlers is that they have “tribal privilege” much “like the British in India, Serbs in Kosovo, and whites in the segregated South.”

Really? Israel, in which Beduin women graduate from medical school, is like the segregated South? Surely Beinart knows better. So why the relentless attack?

BEINART’S PROBLEM isn’t really with Israel. It’s with Judaism. Bottom line, what troubles Beinart isn’t what’s happened to Zionism. What troubles him is the dimension of Jewish life that he can’t abide, but of which Zionism insists on reminding him. And that element is the undeniable fact that Judaism is tribal.

Judaism, in its earliest phases, was actually composed of tribes. Even after the tribes mostly disappeared, a deeply tribal sense continued to color the lenses through which Jews viewed the world. The Book of Esther is a book about peoplehood (Esther 3:8) and the dangers of forgetting our tribalism when acceptance by the foreign majority becomes too tempting (4:14). In the story of Ruth, tribalism comes before even God when joining the Jews: “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16). Other peoples, too, define human beings on the basis of what people they come from. When the ship on which Jonah has run away is beset by a storm, the other sailors ask him, “What is your country, and of what people are you?” (Jonah 1:8) The list is virtually endless.

I don’t know which kiddush Beinart recited on the first night of Passover, but surely he knows that most Jews begin the main portion of the kiddush by praising God “who has chosen us from among all the nations, raising us above other languages.” Has he noticed that the blessing before being called up to the Torah thanks God for “choosing us from among all the nations,” or that we end Shabbat with havdala, noting that God distinguishes between “holy and profane, light and dark, between Israel and the nations”? What about the Mishna’s claim in Bikkurim (1:4) that converts may not recite the phrase that “God swore to our ancestors” because they are not of our tribe (a position that Maimonides overruled, interestingly) or the Talmud’s claim that “converts are as burdensome to [the people of] Israel as leprosy” (Yevamot 47b), presumably because the mere idea of having people join a tribe is counterintuitive?

Does Beinart’s Haggada not contain the line “Pour out Your wrath upon the nations”? And does that phrase mean nothing? Judaism is many things, but it is undeniably tribal. The crisis that Beinart feels stems from the fact that he cannot abide Judaism’s tribalism; the State of Israel is simply caught in the crossfire between Beinart and the religion that so deeply conflicts him.

NOW, WE can surely debate whether or not Jewish tribalism – a view of the world that says that we are not just like everyone else, that we are distinct and ought to remain that way – is one with which we are comfortable. We can debate whether or not this element of Judaism invariably leads to illegitimate Jewish senses of supremacy. But what we cannot debate is that that is what Judaism has always been. Had Beinart argued that a tribal Judaism has outlived its usefulness, that would not have been very new (Reform Judaism made that claim a long time ago, though it has largely retreated from that position), but it would have been interesting. And honest. And fair.

Some of us, myself included – as in my forthcoming book The Promise of Israel – would then respond that the very tribalism that so troubles Beinart is actually essential. Why? Because it is tribalism, the very opposite of the universalism that so enthralls Beinart, that is key to our being someone, of having something to contribute to humanity. No one has said it better than Michael Sandel, who wrote in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice:

“We cannot regard ourselves as independent…without… understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are – as members of this family or community or nation or people, as bearers of this history, as sons and daughters of that revolution, as citizens of this republic. Allegiances such as these are more than values I happen to have…. They go beyond the obligations I voluntarily incur and the ‘natural duties’ I owe to human beings as such. They allow that to some I owe more than justice requires or even permits, not by reason of agreements I have made but instead in virtue of those more or less enduring attachments and commitments which taken together partly define the person I am.… To imagine a person incapable of constitutive attachments such as these is not to conceive an ideally free and rational agent, but to imagine a person wholly without character, without moral depth.”

One can surely disagree with Sandel. That is the debate that Peter Beinart wants to have; he just doesn’t know it. He believes that a tribal Judaism is one of which we should be ashamed. A Judaism of which we could be genuinely proud would be a universalist Judaism that taught Jews to be “sympathetic to the rights of Palestinians… at least as [much] as global warming, health care, gay rights and a dozen other issues.”

In the universalized Judaism for which Beinart yearns, however, there would be no place for Israel. Jews would not need a refuge, for they would fit in everywhere. They would not reside in the Middle East, for the creation of the Jewish state (like the creation of every other state) required the displacement of people. So the only way for this basically-unnecessary-Israel to be tolerable is for it to be perfect. If people are arrested and their children cry, Beinart cannot bear it. If Israel fights 10 wars in 65 years and there are terrible incidents, Zionism is in crisis. So he will discuss Jewish losses with the frigid pathos of a pathologist, but weep at the pain that Israel causes. He will hold Israel accountable to standards that are utterly unreachable and unrealistic, because in a world in which tribalism is the real problem, Beinart can feel the love only so long as the bride is utterly beyond reproach.

WE DON’T marry perfect spouses, though, and we don’t raise perfect children. Love is tested in the messiness of life, in the thick of triumphs and disappointments. Israel fails us all in many ways, but it’s also an astounding story of the revitalization of the Jewish people, of a democracy built by people who for the most part did not come from democracies.

Beinart’s real problem is that Israel is not, and was never meant to be, a felafel-eating, Hebrew speaking version of the United States. It is not ethnic-neutral. It was created, and our children die for it, not simply so there can be another democracy in the Middle East. Is one more democracy worth my soldier son’s risking his life? No, it’s not. Israel is about the revitalization of the Jewish people. It is, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, “of the Jews, by the Jews and for the Jews,” all while protecting and honoring those who are not Jewish. Are we perfect? Hardly. But do we aspire to America’s ideal of a democracy? Not at all. We’re about something very different.

As Beinart himself admits, his cadre of mostly young American Jews is essentially Jewishly illiterate. They know nothing of Judaism’s intellectual depth, can say nothing about the classical Jewish canon, have no sense of what great ideas Judaism has brought to the world. They are thus utterly incapable of articulating what a Jewish state not committed to America’s ideals might be about. Confused and disappointed, they grow ashamed of us. For us to fit their universalistic world, in which nothing Jewish is of supreme value, they need us to be perfect. When we’re not, they cannot abide us.

We Jews have been here before. Until recently, it had typically been the enemies of the Jews who demanded that we drop our differentness in order to be accepted. Today, it’s the Jews themselves, or some of them. Wise Jews, however, will know better than to believe that becoming just like everyone else will do us any good. Leaving aside the fact that such a move would mean abdicating the very essence of Judaism and that it would produce an anemic ethos incapable of attracting anyone of real substance, it will also never succeed in getting the world to like the Jews. As Israel Zangwill, the famed British Zionist, wrote scathingly a century ago:

“The poor people of Kishinev tried to save themselves by putting in their windows sacred Russian images. It is our history in a nutshell. In moments of danger we put up the flag of the enemy. And it avails nothing in the long run – the image-imitators at Kishinev were the people particularly chosen for crucifixion.”

It is no accident that Beinart’s book is among the most discussed – and reviled – in recent memory. For the book is not really about Israel. It is about the unsustainable new Judaism of which he is a selfappointed prophet, and to which, sadly, many young American Jews seem to be attracted, its self-consuming malignant core notwithstanding.

I can think of no reaction more apt than that of Deuteronomy 13:12: “Let all of Israel hear and be filled with fear.”

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 Israel, will resonate to portions of Beinart’s argument. They will agree that the conflict has lingered far too long, and that it is, at certain times, brutal and ugly. They will acknowledge that Israel’s presence in the West Bank is oppressive for the Palestinians and at times callouses Israel’s soul. They will certainly share Beinart’s wish that matters could be otherwise.

But Beinart’s op-ed is cavalier, and thus dangerous, on many levels. What, exactly, is he proposing with this boycott? If a rape crisis hotline serves people on both sides of the Green Line, must it be boycotted? What about Israeli-Palestinian coexistence organizations based in Haifa, but which do work in the settlements? Should Beinart’s plea that contributions to West Bank charities not be tax-exempt apply to them, too? 

Beinart argues that the boundary between Israel and the West Bank has become unconscionably blurred, but then ignores his own complaint in pretending that one could boycott the latter without punishing all of Israel. The whole plan is so half-baked that one knows, instantly, that it cannot be taken seriously. Why, then, even suggest it? Because of a psychology we need to understand.

A similar line of reasoning leads Beinart to place most of the blame for our morass on the Israeli side. Though he acknowledges that the Palestinians haven’t been much help, Beinart invariably spotlights Israel. “Many Israeli maps and textbooks no longer show the green line at all,” he notes. That’s true. But what about Hamas? And what about the maps distributed by the Palestinian authority? Surely, Beinart knows that they have always avoided showing the Green Line, suggesting that all of Israel will one day be theirs. Why does he never mention that? As Clinton might have said, “It’s the psychology, stupid.”

That very same dangerous psychology also leads Beinart to a complete ignoring of history and of the future. Nowhere in this op-ed, or in his original New York Review article, for that matter, do we learn about how the occupation began. It’s as if Israel woke up one morning, and for want of anything better to do, grabbed the West Bank. Or why no mention of the fact that Ehud Olmert, to cite but one example, was elected prime minister on a platform of getting out of the West Bank, after the Gaza fiasco had already begun to unfold, but was stymied by the Second Lebanon War, which he, of course, did not start? In Beinart-land, the past is a blank screen. All that matters is the unbearable heaviness of being in the present.

The future is absent as well. Beinart cannot bear the occupation, but dares not imagine what might unfold if Israel retreated tomorrow. Just last week, the southern portion of Israel was immobilized by rocket-fire from Gaza, even with Iron Dome in place. What would Beinart have us do? Move back to the Green Line so that Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and the runways of Ben-Gurion Airport would also be in range? Would he have the entire country be paralyzed the next time?

Does Beinart believe that pulling back to the Green Line would end the armed resistance? Hezbollah and Hamas insist that it wouldn’t. Does he not believe them? Does he understand their intentions better than they themselves do? We don’t know, because he never even raises the subject of what the future might bring. The psychology precludes that.

THE SEEMINGLY noble but tragic psychological logic of Beinart’s worldview goes like this: Good Jews do not occupy people. Therefore, for this unbearable conflict to continue violates our most basic Jewish sensibilities. And since, deep down, we know that Israel’s enemies are not going to compromise (and why should they, given that time and increasing numbers of Jews are on their side?), we must do whatever it takes to end it. Better that Israel should take the moral high road – even at great danger – so that we no longer feel shamed. The less they budge, the more we must. For the conflict must end at any cost.

Beinart insists that he loves Israel, and I believe him. When we debated at the Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, I found him warm, likable and smart; his devotion to Israel was evident. But warmth and likability, lovely as they are, do not make for clearheaded policy. What Beinart and his movement owe those of us dubious about their proposals is an answer to these questions:

Do you really believe that compromise on Israel’s part now will end the conflict? Do Fatah agreements with Hamas mean nothing? If peace will not come even when Israel retreats, what do you propose that Israel should do once rockets are launched from the West Bank, too? And perhaps most damning: Is it possible that when people espouse your position they give the Palestinians ever less reason to compromise, thus making war more likely, not less?

As the American Civil War raged, John Stuart Mill had this to say to Americans wearying of the conflict: “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral… feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. A man who has nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance at being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”

Sadly, some battles cannot be ended, and when they cannot, even if they occasionally shame us, they must be fought. Neither personal safety nor even absolute moral comfort are ultimate values. Any Jew with even a smidgeon of Jewish sensibility wishes that this simmering war could end. But we ignore John Stuart Mill at our own peril. Ending a war at any cost sounds noble, but it is cowardly. For if we cannot articulate that there are things worth fighting for – and yes, killing and dying for – then tragically, we are “miserable creatures who have no chance at being free.”

It was precisely that condition that Zionism sought to end. Thinking Jews dare not knowingly embrace it now.

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 responsibility for ensuring that Iran not acquire such a weapon of mass destruction. Every reasonable observer of the Middle East knows which country might use such a weapon, and which would not. Can anyone, no matter how critical of Israel on the Palestinian front, even imagine a scenario in which Israel would use a nuclear weapon pre-emptively against an enemy? Has the international conversation become so corrupted we now compare Israel’s moral compass to Ahmadinejad’s?

Had Israel’s neighbors ever accepted its right to exist, a level nuclear playing field might be fair. But they never have, and after Hosni Mubarak and Bashar al-Assad, Israel will face more enemies, not less.

Israel was founded after the worst genocidal rampage in history, when the West admitted that because of its own failings, the Jews were never permanently secure anywhere. Israel was the West’s belated attempt to ensure the future of the Jewish people. Do the Jews now deserve a future less than they did 65 years ago?

No state has an obligation to commit suicide because the world has tired of a conflict that it cannot settle. No people has an obligation to disappear just to placate a world that no longer cares about its existence. And the West has no moral right to make the Jews, once again, the victims of its own moral failures and its unwillingness to do what is right.

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 of the candidates came from east Jerusalem and the other from Ramallah.

This, I thought, could actually be interesting.

The candidate from Ramallah arrived in the company of her father. Impeccably dressed, speaking almost perfect English devoid of any appreciable accent (she’d lived abroad for a number of years, it turned out), she was smart, inquisitive, affable and interesting. She spoke articulately about how difficult it was to move back to Ramallah in September 2000, just as the intifada was starting.

There were tanks near her house, she told me, and soldiers everywhere. There were curfews and fear – life was very different from what she’d experienced during her years in the West. Then we spoke about the books she was reading, the science and literature she was studying. It took only minutes for me to know that I was going to write her an excellent recommendation.

I could have just thanked her for coming, but her father hadn’t yet returned to pick her up, and more importantly, I wanted to ask her about things that really matter.

How often, after all, do I sit down with a bright young woman from Ramallah who attends a first-rate high school (which, she told me, enables exceptional students in Gaza to “attend class” via Skype), reads voraciously, is completely at home on the Internet and prides herself on her intellectual openness? How often does she sit with a Jew wearing a kippa, in an office lined with books, talking about whatever interests both of them? For both of us, I imagined, this was a pretty unusual meeting. So I asked her if we could discuss something completely off-topic, with no bearing on what I’d write to the school, and she said it was fine.

“Imagine it’s 2032,” I told her. “You’re not 18, but 38 years old. You’re still living in Ramallah, and the situation in this part of the world is more or less what it is now.

The only difference is that you’re in charge. You determine Palestinian policy, and can make anything happen. How would you solve this?” She smiled.

“It’s complicated,” she said, as if I didn’t know that. But she then launched into her description of what she would do. Now, though, for the first time in our conversation, I couldn’t understand what she was saying. The words were clear, but the ideas weren’t. So I decided to press.

“Wait,” I said. “First of all, are we talking about one state or two?” “Two,” she said, “of course.”

“And where you and I are now, in pre- 1967 Israel, this is the Jewish state?” “No,” she said.

“No? But there is a Jewish state?” “Of course,” she said, “there has to be.”

“But where is it?” She continued to explain, but I still didn’t understand, so I sketched a basic map of the region, with all the standard markings so we could get to work: On the west, the coast, with a little bump for Haifa. On the east, the Sea of Galilee, the Jordan River and the Dead Sea. I drew the Green Line, marked Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ramallah and Gaza, and said, “OK, so now show me what’s where.”

The basic principle, she explained to me, is that refugees from both sides have to be permitted to return to their original homes. Basic human rights demand that. So Israel, she said, will have to absorb all the refugees from Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.

That, she rightly understood, is a significant number of people. So what is now Israel, she explained, can’t be the Jewish state. Instead, it will be a “shared state” of Jews and Palestinians. I chose not to ask her how well she thought those Jews would fare as a minority in such a state – things were getting complicated enough.

“So where is the Jewish state?” I asked her. “Take the pencil and shade in the area.”

What she shaded was a portion of the West Bank.

“The Jewish State is now in the West Bank?” I asked her. “Why?” Because, she explained to me, the “settlers” are really refugees. They, too, are returning to their ancestral homelands. It wouldn’t be fair to tell them to leave. So the Jewish state will be in the part of the West Bank where there is a concentration of Jews, and the rest of the West Bank will be Palestine.

There was no way to tell her, without being insulting, how utterly absurd her plan was on many levels. As well-read as she was, as much Internet access as she had, she clearly knew virtually nothing about the conflict, its history or the current proposals for how to end it. I was struck that she could be so thoughtful, so earnest, so open and live just a few miles from me, and inhabit an entirely different “reality.”

I opted for a bit of a “Hail Mary pass.”

September 2000 was also hard on my children, I told her; I even wrote a book about it. If I gave her a copy, would she read it? She assured me that she would, and three days later, I got an email from her with a lengthy response to the book, which she’d clearly read from cover to cover. We exchanged a few more notes, and she asked me to look her up if she gets admitted to that college.

I will. I liked her, and I’ll be interested in seeing what four years at an American college does to her views of this small region that we both claim as home.

Weeks later, I continue to ponder that conversation. In some measure, it was encouraging. Two people, from opposing sides of the conflict, could talk, laugh and learn with each other, and even stay in touch beyond. I think she liked me no less than I liked her. There was something refreshing about the whole thing.

But it was somewhat devastating, too.

Where are we if the smartest, most open Palestinian kids, from the best schools, believe that the Jewish state is going to be a corner of the West Bank? Given that worldview among their best and brightest, what are the genuine prospects for any change for her or for my children, who will, of course, inhabit this region together? No need for Purim for confusion to reign, it turns out. Even without masks, it’s sometimes hard to imagine who’s who, who thinks what, or what’s possible. But it’s sad, not funny. For when the masks are put away and the hangovers are forgotten, the reality with we’re left will be no less absurd than the pretend world we’d delighted in creating.

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 affords just that opportunity, for we are just days shy of the 70th anniversary of the sinking of the SS Struma. Few people today remember the Struma or its story; the young among us cannot even imagine the Jewish existential condition that it reflected, a condition that the state has, thankfully, completely eradicated.

The story begins in 1941, when it was clear to many Eastern European Jews that they were destined for a horrific end. In Romania, several Zionist organizations, Betar among them, commissioned a Bulgarian ship to transport almost 800 Jewish passengers to Palestine – the Struma.

Like Europe, however, the Struma was a disaster waiting to happen. The ship was barely more than a floating tub, 61 meters in length and six meters wide, which had been built in 1830 for shipping cargo; it had subsequently been used to transport cattle. It was powered by a motor that had apparently been salvaged from the bottom of the Danube River. The immigrants aboard had, according to some accounts, but a single bathroom.

Their only sources of comfort were the knowledge that they were finally succeeding in fleeing a burning Europe, and that the whole trip to Istanbul, the first leg of their journey, would take merely 14 hours.

The Struma set sail on December 12, 1941, but the engine gave out almost immediately. The tugboat that had towed them out of the harbor eventually sent its navigator and engineer on board, but they would only fix the engine for a large sum of money. The passengers, however, had given all their money to the Romanian customs officials. So they parted with their gold wedding bands in return for the repairs.

Four interminable days later, the boat limped into the Istanbul harbor, where it would remain for months.

Turkey refused to allow the passengers to disembark – what country would want a boatload of homeless Jews? Nor did Britain want them to make their way to Palestine; the British were anxious to assure an increasingly restless and sometimes violent Arab resistance that limits on Jewish immigration would be enforced.

On February 12, almost two months after the boat had left Romania, the British finally acquiesced and granted Palestinian visas to the children on board. But His Majesty’s government refused to send a ship to collect them, and Turkey refused to grant them overland passage. The children thus remained on board. With negotiations between Turkey and Britain at a standstill, Turkish officials towed the disabled boat up the Bosporus Strait toward the Black Sea.

Passengers hung signs over the side that said “Save Us” in both English and Hebrew. The signs were plainly visible to people on the shores of the Bosporus, but no one, of course, did anything to help them.

When the hapless Struma reached the Black Sea, the Turks abandoned the ship, leaving it to drift. The next morning, on February 24, a Soviet submarine torpedoed the Struma, which exploded and sank. Of the 769 people on board, only one survived, by holding on to wreckage for more than 24 hours. His name was David Stoliar, and he was imprisoned in Turkey for several weeks, then admitted to Palestine. Stoliar served in the British Army during the war, and then in the IDF during the War of Independence; he later moved to Oregon.

There is much we do not know about the Struma catastrophe. Why did the Soviets sink the boat? Did they mistake it for something else? Did the British actually encourage their Soviet allies to sink the ship in order to “solve” the problem without putting pressure on Palestinian immigration? Some people believe so, but we will probably never know with certainty.

The incident, now mostly forgotten, had all the iconic elements of the Shoah. Human beings transported with equipment once used for cattle. Subhuman and unlivable conditions. Helpless Jews, whom no one wanted, with nowhere in the world to go. And finally, of course, mass death, with no graves to mark the fact that these innocent people had even existed, and had died for the simple reason that they were Jews.

Perhaps the most important element of the story to remember is to be found in a British governmental communication from 1941, referring to the Jews who were desperate to escape Europe and who, the British rightly understood, would try to make their way to Palestine despite British objections. “We should have some alternative scheme in hand for disposing of these surplus Jews, who having escaped from persecution in Europe, are going to be kept in detention camps in British colonies,” the communication stated matter-of-factly.

“Surplus Jews”: The phrase is used with no hint of embarrassment, no expression of responsibility. “Surplus Jews,” as in human beings that are, for now, a commodity – until they become literally worthless. “Surplus,” as in not needed, as in a problem that needs to be disposed of.

No one uses this phrase anymore. Not the British, nor the Turks. Not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, nor Mahmoud Abbas. People across the globe still have their beef with us; some are justified, most are not. But whatever one might say about the State of Israel, one thing is clear – the Struma incident simply could not happen today.

It is simply impossible for today’s Jews to find themselves in a world in which no one wants them or will have them. That, perhaps most fundamentally, is the dimension of Jewish life that Israel has changed, hopefully forever. Jews may be all sorts of things, but we are no longer “surplus.”

It is worth remembering now just how much has changed in the past 70 years. And as we battle over how Judaism should be manifested in this state, what its borders should be and how we can best protect it, the memory of the Struma ought to serve as a chilling reminder of what we will lose if the stridency of our debate rips our people – and then our state – asunder.

http://www.shalem.org.il/

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 another column that says precisely what they already thought. And if they assume they’ll disagree, or worse, that the column will annoy them, they can just skip it altogether or sharpen their proverbial pencils and bang out the inevitably dismissive talkback. Either way, though, we know what we’ll think of an argument – and of a writer – before we’ve even read a word. Ah, the eternal quest for a predictable and comfortable life.

But I’ve never thought that thinking, or citizenship – or love – work that way. If we love our children, do we validate them or criticize them? This is the wrong question, obviously, for the answer should depend on the context.  Parents who never have a kind or defending word to say about their child probably don’t love them enough. But parents who never critique their children are incompetent.

It’s true of marriage, too. None of us would want to be married to someone who never had a kind word to say about us or to us, or who never made clear that they were proud of us.

But if all we want is that validation, we’re probably better off buying an iPhone 4S and talking to Siri than being in a real relationship.

A functioning relationship is one in which our partner wants us to be better than the person we now are and can lovingly suggest, pretty regularly, how we might get there.

It’s an anemic conception of love that would describe our role as parents, spouses, lovers, friends – or citizens, no less – as assuming a position of constant validation or of relentless criticism.

That’s why some of us who write about Israel take a different approach. We don’t care about being neatly classifiable as “left” or “right”; because to love a country is not that different from loving a person. It means defending but also critiquing. It means loving unconditionally but knowing that love does not mean overlooking serious flaws. To love Israel, I believe, is to know that the Jewish state is not just a flag or an army or some holy place. To love Israel is to love the real Israel, with all its many warts and imperfections. And to love Israel is to know that there is a difference between a wart and a serious disease; when an imperfection is so serious as to threaten the entire enterprise, then the most loyal thing that one can do is to insist that Israel be better.

But this approach makes life complicated for readers because they don’t know, up front, precisely what they’re going to get. They will have to read, and then think.

Not everyone responds so well to that sort of challenge. In recent weeks and months when I’ve defended the very legitimacy of the idea of a Jewish state, or pointed to the Palestinians’ obvious disinterest in peace, or stated my abiding belief that none of us (tragically) are going to see this conflict resolved in our own lifetimes, then one entire set of readers trots out the “he’s a peace-talk-pessimist” line. He must be in Bibi’s pocket. He doesn’t care about peace.

But the opposite is also true – critique this government’s entirely unimaginative mishandling of the so-called peace process, or point a spotlight at the medieval religious leadership that has Netanyahu wrapped around its pinky, and the opposite camp goes berserk. One regular reader wrote to say that he used to like my columns, but now I’m “beginning to sound a bit like a Meretznik, or even worse – like Thomas Friedman!” (Except for those three elusive Pulitzers, I guess.) Meretz is mostly gone, of course, but the derisive label seems likely to outlive the party. If you ever sound like them then you obviously don’t care about Israel. You’re hostile to Judaism. Or you’re blind to the dangers of our enemies. And if you ever sound like Likud then you don’t care about peace. And if you occasionally sound like both then you don’t know how to think. Eventually Leonard Fein will write a column in The Forward (June 23, 2011) called “Will the Real Daniel Gordis Please Stand Up?” Because you either seek peace (or care about social justice) or you defend Israel.

But you obviously can’t do both. Right? At a recent conference of the American Jewish Committee in New York one participant noted that she prefers, instead of “left” and “right,” the labels “prophets” and “guardians” – for those labels each cast the “other” in the best possible light. This nomenclature reminds us that “prophets” are more than mere leftwing social critics – they reflect a critical dimension of the Jewish tradition, Judaism’s classic vision of social justice. And “guardians” is better than “hate-mongers” or “peace-pessimists,” or “Bibi-supporters,” apparently, because every people needs “guardians,” as does every state. To be a guardian is not to be a dinosaur, but rather to recognize that the State we’re discussing is sacred, in desperate need of protection.

As I thought about it, though, I realized that “prophets versus guardians” still isn’t good enough. For the distinction nonetheless implies that either you’re a “prophet” or a “guardian.” You choose one. And then you write, vote, agree or disagree.

But life doesn’t work that way. We dare not force people to pick a camp, no matter how elegant the terminology. The Hebrew prophets railed against the injustices of ancient Israelite society but they were desperately concerned about the survival of Jewish sovereignty. And guardians need to protect against not only the obvious threats from the outside but also against the cancers that threaten to devour us from within. Will the Jewish people be any better off if Israel falls because of Jews than if it is undermined by the Palestinians? Either way, we’d be done for.

Genuinely loving this country means that there will be moments when we defend it and other occasions on which we bemoan its grievous shortcomings. Is that muddled thinking? Does that merit the cynical demand that our “real” self “please stand up”? I think not. It reflects, I think, the real messiness of life, of love and of hope. Imagine our world, and our discourse, if every one of us found the renewed courage to read, to think and to recognize that those with whom we instinctively tend to disagree might still have something to teach us.