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.

Jun. 4, 2009
Daniel Gordis , THE JERUSALEM POST

Imagine that Germany, embittered by incessant reminders of what happened during the Holocaust, passed a law forbidding German Jews from publicly marking the destruction of European Jewry. Or that the US Congress, tired of hearing Native Americans recite their tales of woe, made it illegal for them to mention their losses on July 4. If Turkey passed legislation like that, directed at Armenian memories of 1915, we would hardly blink an eye. But if a genuine democracy followed suit? We would scarcely believe our ears.

So why are we not more distressed by legislation before the Knesset that would criminalize marking the “Nakba” on Independence Day? What kind of a democracy makes it illegal for a group of its citizens to mark the losses they have suffered? And in what kind of democracy can such legislation be proposed without massive waves of protest?

So why no protests here? Surely, few of us pretend that Israeli Arabs didn’t lose very much in 1948. We know they did. Is it that we’re still at war with the Arab world (unlike America and its native population, for example), or that marking the Nakba is tantamount to asserting that Israel is illegitimate, which we cannot and will not abide?

Perhaps. But we’re also witness to something new. It’s a belief in the ability of hastily written laws to correct problems created by decades of failed Zionist education. For years, Israel has done virtually nothing to even try to inculcate loyalty to the state among parts of its haredi population, Arab communities or a younger secular Jewish generation smack in the middle of the country. But instead of asking ourselves what our children ought to be taught, what they ought to read and discuss during their education, some Knesset members prefer to bury our failures beneath legislation.

Yisrael Beiteinu ran its recent campaign largely on the issue of loyalty oaths, claiming that some Israelis (Arabs, mostly) were insufficiently loyal to the state. It was right about the problem, but wrong about the solution, and the Knesset rejected its proposal. So now, the party has a new issue. Israel, it says, is losing the battle over the Zionist narrative. About this, it is also absolutely right. Once synonymous with the greatest human drama of national rebirth, Zionism today is too often a term of disparagement. A new narrative about Zionism has emerged; in this narrative, Israel is a violation of human ideals, not their realization.

SO WHAT is the proposed response to our failing efforts in the battle to tell our story? Let’s just make it illegal for anyone to tell a competing version.

It would be funny, if it weren’t so frightening. Silencing one’s foes has never been the hallmark of self-confidence.

But what if instead of silencing those who disagree with us, or even hate us, we invested in education? Imagine that we actually cared enough about our own past to try to preserve it and to teach it. “What?” you ask. “Israel has made a virtual art form of remembering the past.” But that is only partially true. We’ve done an extraordinary job of preserving the memory of the Holocaust, but a much poorer job of remembering how we built a country to recover from it.

Now that Israel is more than 60 years old, the people who were instrumental in creating this country are dying at a dizzying rate. In recent days, Shlomo Shamir, the last living member of the 1948 General Staff, and Yehoshua Zetler, commander of Lehi forces in Jerusalem, both died. But how many young Israelis know who Shamir or Zetler were? How many know that Shamir was the only general to have commanded units from the air force, navy and ground forces (on the Iraqi-Jordanian front)? Or that he completed his high school matriculation exams at 55 and went on to university? How many Israelis still know anything about the infamous Acre jail in which Zetler was imprisoned? Very few. But now, it’s too late to record their stories for future generations of Israeli students.

EVEN MORE distressing than how little we know is how little we’re doing to try to remember. For the most part, Israelis have paid no attention to the need to preserve this historic legacy.

One person, at least, is trying. An oleh named Eric Halivni has been working on a project called Toldot Yisrael that aims to record the stories of the country’s founders – the men and women who fought, lobbied, farmed, taught and did everything else necessary in the extraordinary human drama called the creation of the State of Israel. But he, too, is being stymied by Jews’ disinterest in their own history. His hopes of creating a video archive containing thousands of interviews have languished due to lack of funding. With heroic dedication, he’s managed to film about 80 interviews thus far, but that’s not nearly enough.

Scanning his small but precious archive is a history lesson come alive. Who knew that Norman Lamm, later president of Yeshiva University, worked in a bullet factory in upstate New York when he was a chemistry student at Yeshiva College, to do his share to create the Jewish state? Toldot Yisrael filmed Lamm telling his story.

Imagine if young Israelis could watch Miriam Ben-Peretz, professor emeritus of education at the University of Haifa, recalling the morning her then-young husband departed with the lamed heh, never to return. Or Yitzhak Navon, later to become the fifth president of the state, recounting how, as a young man in the Hagana, he monitored the airwaves that night and heard the boasting celebrations of the Arabs who had just butchered the 35 men. Fifty percent of Israeli Jews don’t know who the lamed heh were. What will teach them? The Nakba law or a project like Toldot Yisrael?

Yisrael Beiteinu has inadvertently done us a great service, for the Nakba bill begs us to ask: What is really going to win the battle to right the wrongs in the way that Zionism is now perceived? Do we silence Israeli Arabs who obviously have what to mourn, or instead celebrate the lives and accomplishments of Jews across the globe who believed in the rebirth of the Jewish people, and who then devoted their lives to making it happen?

We all know the answer. The only question is whether we still possess the honesty, foresight and determination that winning our story’s battle will require.

Interfaith Radio

In a controversial new book, Avraham Burg argues that Israel is “stuck in Auschwitz,” using the Holocaust as the defining experience of Jewish identity. This former speaker of the Israeli Parliament says his country’s preoccupation has led to an unhealthy nationalism that mourns the past, fears the future and feeds violence.

Daniel Gordis also views Israel as Holocaust-centric, but doesn’t think it impacts Israeli politics as negatively as Burg suggests.  He emphasizes Israel’s mandate to remember, and points out that the country was founded by survivors of the Holocaust.

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.