But the real news is that contrary to what many expected, or feared, President Obama assumed positions virtually identical to those of Israel’s political center — namely, that the Palestinians must renounce violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist, while Israel must cease settlement building and permit a Palestinian state to arise. Now, Benjamin Netanyahu’s problem is that it’s difficult to distinguish between President Obama and Tzipi Livni. And in Israel’s recent elections, Livni and her Kadima party won more votes than anyone else.

But the major “problem” that the speech poses for Israel’s leaders is that Israelis are finally going to have to make painful decisions about our future. No longer will Israel’s fractious politics provide a curtain behind which to hide. Will we abide a Palestinian state, or are we committed to the present stalemate as a matter of principle? Are we committed to keeping the West Bank (for reasons of security, history or theology), or are we open to withdrawing if a genuine peace accord is possible? If all Jews will have to depart the West Bank, what about Arabs in Israel? For years, we’ve fudged on these painful questions; with President Obama, that may no longer be possible.

Once Israelis grow accustomed to the new tenor emanating from Washington, we may see today’s speech in a different light. Barack Obama may or may not bring peace to the Middle East, but he may well force clarity, and perhaps disciplined policy, on an Israeli society that has long desperately needed it.

May. 14, 2009
Daniel Gordis , THE JERUSALEM POST

He was in his 20s, the young man with the question after my lecture. He couldn’t have asked it more kindly or gently. Without a hint of cynicism or anger, he expressed what was clearly on the minds of many of the people his age in the crowd: “Can you justify a Jewish state,” he wanted to know, “when having a Jewish state means giving up on so many of Judaism’s values?”

Here’s what he didn’t say: Israel is the root of evil in the Middle East. It’s the cause of checkpoints, of roadblocks, of a big ugly wall that runs along a border no one has agreed to. The Palestinians are desperate, and in the massive imbalance of power, they have no chance and no hope. Israel is the nuclear bully in a region that, were it not for Israel’s existence, would no longer be on the front page. To achieve peace in the Middle East, Israel just needs to be subdued. Break Israel’s intransigence, and we’ll finally see progress.

That was his unspoken claim, and now it’s also the position of the Obama administration. At AIPAC’s recent Policy Conference, Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. John Kerry made it clear that for the US to support Israel on Iran, Israel must settle the Palestinian problem once and for all. It has been widely reported that Rahm Emanuel, in an off-the-record session, said precisely the same thing. After decades of tacit agreement that the US would remain silent about Israel’s nuclear capability, a State Department official publicly suggested that Israel sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, as if, on the eve of Iran’s going nuclear and with Pakistani weapons in danger of falling into the hands of the Taliban, Israel’s nuclear arsenal is the world’s most serious concern.

A new message is afloat – Israel is the problem, and the US has had enough.

Even the pope couldn’t help himself. His comments about the victims of the Holocaust were so tepid as to be outrageous, but he had no problem calling urgently for an immediate Palestinian state, as if Israelis haven’t tried to create one for decades.

The young American Jews in my audience, clearly struggling with the morality of a Jewish state, now have the Obama administration and the pope echoing all their misgivings.

I have no illusions that all this can be changed overnight, but with the upcoming Binyamin Netanyahu-Barack Obama meetings putting Israel into the spotlight once again, I’d like to propose the following thought experiment – at least to these young American Jews, and possibly to Obama himself.

IMAGINE THAT ISRAELIS decide that by Jerusalem Day, this coming week, they want a deal. So we take down the security fence. We remove the checkpoints. We open all the roads, and Gaza’s sea and air routes. We agree publicly to return to something closely approximating the pre-1967 borders, and we accede to the demands that parts of Jerusalem be internationally governed, or even put under Palestinian control.

Does this end the conflict? Of course it doesn’t. The Hamas Charter calls not only for the destruction of Israel, but for Islamic war on Jews everywhere. (Why do we consistently refuse to believe that Hamas means what it says?) What would change? The noose would tighten. The rockets would be fired from a shorter distance and the demand for the return of refugees (thus ending the Jewishness of the state) would persist. As was the case when Israel left Lebanon in May 2000 or Gaza in the summer of 2005, Israel’s enemies would smell a weakened, bloodied state and would prepare for the next stage of their war.

But peace would not have come. Much as we all want this conflict to end, does anyone really doubt that? There is, as honest brokers must admit, nothing that Israel can do to end this conflict.

NOW, HOWEVER, TRY the opposite side of the thought experiment. Imagine that the Palestinians decide that they have tired of the conflict, or their electorate begins its long-overdue rebellion and insists on a settlement. So the Palestinians, Hamas and Fatah, demand everything Israel’s agreed to above – an end to roadblocks and the wall, an opening of Gaza, a bridge or a tunnel between Gaza and the West Bank and a return to the 1967 borders. Let’s say that they even insist on Palestinian control of east Jerusalem.

But they also recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. They agree to an immediate and permanent cessation of hostilities and violence (this is a thought experiment, after all) and insist that any other outstanding issues be negotiated and resolved with the US and the Quartet as intermediaries. And they require Israelis to vote within a month, no longer, on whether to accept the deal.

Will there be Israelis who object? Will there be residents of the West Bank who will resist leaving their homes? Yes, there will be. But would an Israeli plebiscite overwhelmingly approve the offer? Without question. In a matter of weeks, three quarters of a century of bloodshed and suffering would come to an end.

This, of course, is not going to happen, because all the new rhetoric notwithstanding, and all the confusion of today’s young American Jews aside, there’s always been one party that’s sought peace, and another that’s rejected it. It was true in 1948, and it was true in Khartoum. It’s no less true today.

It’s never been up to us, and it’s always been up to them.

But this simplistic thought experiment is worth considering not because it can be implemented, but because it brings one unfortunate truth into stark focus. Young American Jews ought to take note: Israel cannot end this conflict. It can weaken itself, but the only way it can bring peace to the region is to go out of business.

If that is what the peacemakers really seek, we’ll see that soon enough, with frightening clarity.

It was an interesting, though hardly relaxed, Shabbat afternoon.  (The conversation took place in English ironically, since even though the Arab woman spoke a mellifluous Hebrew, our American Jewish leader friend didn’t. But the abandonment of Hebrew on the part of American Judaism is a subject for a different conversation.)

Though it’s been years since that lunch, I thought of it again this week, particularly one moment at the end of the afternoon.  Lunch was breaking up.  The Arab woman left, as did our American Jewish friend.  My brother was still around, as was our son’s friend, who, by the way, had been born in Israel and lived here his entire life.  We were all catching our breath from what had been a pretty intense conversation.

Then the friend said, “That was really interesting.”  I, frankly, hadn’t noticed that he was paying much attention to the discussion, and was surprised.  “What did you think was particularly interesting?” I asked him.  “Well,” he said, “I’ve never met an Arab before.”

That line stunned me more than the rest of the conversation.  He’d been in Israel for fifteen or sixteen years, and had never met an Arab?  Part of me couldn’t believe that.  But I knew that it was not only possible, but it’s common.  (Israel’s no different than America in this regard, by the way.  In Los Angeles, for example, how many Hispanics or Asians did I really meet socially?  Very, very few – and in my community, I was the norm, not the exception.)

Why did I recall that conversation this week?  Because I got a response from Dr. K.  A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece for the Jerusalem Post that I subsequently distributed here, about a correspondence I had with a certain Dr. K about the Jerusalem home in which he’d grown up prior to the War of Independence.  (You can read the responses to that column here, too.)  Just as I was preparing to write Dr. K and to tell him about my column, I heard from him.  He’d come across the article on the web, it turns out, and wrote me.  I asked him for permission to post his response here, and he agreed.

I was struck, in reading the many responses to my column that were posted on my site that many of the people writing had probably not ever met anyone like Dr. K before.  Like my son’s friend at that Shabbat lunch long ago, they are passionate about much of what goes on here, but haven’t actually conversed at all with significant swaths of the “players” in his complex situation.

So (yes, with his express, written ­permission), I’m posting Dr. K’s response to my article, and his invitation to others to engage in conversation.  The issue, I believe, isn’t the disposition of his particular house (about which I’ve done no research, as my column was about the uses of memory and how we overcome loss and work for a better future).  The issues that ought to concern us are broader than that.  But feel free to engage him on whatever subject you’d like.  Any comment that’s respectful in tone will be permitted.  In this week prior to Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Reunification Day), what subject could be more pertinent?

As Dr. K asks below, is it possible that we might begin to know each other and to hear each other in ways that we haven’t so far?

I am the Dr. K that Dr. Gordis refers to in his post above. The responses to his column raise so many issues that I find myself unable to respond to all of them. I will be short.

My father had this house built in 1932, and I was born in Jerusalem in 1937. My family left Jerusalem because of the state of war that occurred in 1948. Regardless of why we left (it was not voluntary), why should we lose title to our home because of that war? The Israeli government did not allow us to return to it (nor to pay taxes on it!) after May 1948. To this day we have never been offered compensation nor any acknowledgement by any party for our loss.

My original purpose in communicating with Dr. Gordis was to try and connect with another human being who can help provide me a sense of connection with my home and land of birth. I am a realist and not stuck in living in the past. Yes, I was shocked at the changes that have occurred but who wouldn’t be?

I am interested in a dialogue and not in having people talking at me and telling me how I should be feeling or behaving. I hope we can talk about ourselves and not lecture others. Is this possible in this forum?

Interested in responding to Dr. K?  Post your comments here.

For me, the tears that flowed in Chicago’s Grant Park that night were beyond moving. One need neither forgive nor forget Jesse Jackson’s abhorrent comments about Jews and Israel to be deeply stirred by the sight of him weeping during Obama’s speech.

Like Jews, African Americans have known more than their share of suffering, and to see them transcend yet another barrier moved many of us precisely because in some ways their story is akin to ours. The authors of Negro spirituals who sang of getting out of “Egypt land” understood that, perhaps before we did.

Ultimately, though, the power of that day stemmed from the sense that America had recovered its purpose, had found once again the capacity to be about something. Whether one locates America’s purpose in Jefferson’s claim that “all men are created equal,” or perhaps in some notion that all people ought to be granted “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” America has long been about raising high the glass ceiling too often created by race, religion or socioeconomic class, among others. On November 4, at least for African Americans, that ceiling was raised dramatically, or perhaps even shattered. Americans had good reason to be proud.

BUT I will confess to a bit of unease in the aftermath of the election. For both Israelis and many Americans tend to hold Israel accountable to American standards of liberal democracy, quality of life, city planning, civility and more. Israel may not always measure up, but America has become the de facto standard by which we judge ourselves and are judged by others. Eventually, therefore, someone is bound to ask, rhetorically and likely with little sympathy for the Jewish state: If the United States could remove race as a barrier to its highest office, ought not Israel do the same with ethnicity?

Could Israel ever elect an Israeli Arab as Prime Minister?

Like blacks in the US, Israel’s Arabs obviously deserve a fairer share of this society’s bounty than they have received. Per capita expenditures on infrastructure and education for Palestinian Israelis (as they prefer to be called) are too low, and bias against Israel’s Arab citizens can still be felt in far too many facets of Israeli society. There is much work to be done.

But the work to be done should not blind us to Israel’s very purpose. And Israel’s purpose is fundamentally different from that of the United States.

If, in a century, shifting demographics led Congress to become predominantly African-American, or Asian, or Hispanic, that change would simply be further indication of the flourishing of America’s vision, a sign that the scourge of racism had receded even further. It would be testament to the realization of America’s purpose, not its demise.

Not so, however, in Israel. For while Israel must absolutely strive to make race a non-issue (even among Jews, as with Ethiopians, for example) and to accord Israeli Arabs a significantly greater piece of the pie, we ought to be honest: If Israel one day were to have a Knesset in which a majority of the members were Arab, Israel will have failed in its purpose.

ISRAEL WAS established as the sole country in which the Jews could flourish as only a majority culture can, where they would shape the contours of their society and hone its collective narrative. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 spoke of the creation of a “national home for the Jewish people.” The British committed themselves to the creation of not one more democracy, or an experiment in post-ethnic multicultural coexistence (the Peel Commission of 1937 actually advocated moving populations to separate the Jews and the Arabs). Rather, the British advocated what it was that political Zionism had always sought: a state in which a people that had known countless horrors due to centuries of homelessness would finally have one place to call its own and in which to chart its own destiny.

That, quite simply, is incommensurate with a predominantly Arab Knesset or with a prime minister not committed first and foremost to Jewish flourishing.

Navigating this course will never be simple. To remain both Jewish and democratic, Israel will have to preserve a substantial Jewish demographic majority. That will require nuanced decision-making. Cultivating a nation-state that accords full civil rights to Israel’s Arabs even while it exists explicitly for the purpose of Jewish thriving will be a constant struggle. But it is a tension that Israelis, and the international community, will have to come to accept as both undeniable and inescapable.

Even as we admire America’s extraordinary accomplishment, we dare not allow ourselves to imagine that Israel ought to become a Middle-Eastern version of the United States. Two and a half centuries ago, Montesquieu observed that “each state has a purpose that is particular to it.” The United States has now taken one dramatic step toward fulfilling its original raison d’etre. Israel, though, has a very different purpose. Equality and civil rights must obviously be central pillars of this society, but they are not the “core business” for which this country was created. Israel’s central purpose is the healing, and flourishing, of the Jewish people. It is to those goals that Israeli society must be dedicated, and it will be by that standard that our success – or our failure – will ultimately be measured.

The writer is Senior Vice President of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. His next book, Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War that May Never End, will be published by Wiley in March.