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 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.”
The
writer is senior vice president and Koret distinguished fellow at the Shalem
Center in Jerusalem. His most recent book, Saving Israel: How the Jewish People
Can Win a War that May Never End (Wiley), won the 2009 National Jewish Book
Award. His next book, The Promise of Israel: Why Its Seemingly Greatest Weakness
is Actually Its Greatest Strength, will be published this August.
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