The pursuit of public happiness

Although Zionism has been about survival and creation, citizenship, it turns out, is not a Jewish value.

By PHILIP GOLD
Ethiopian olah hadasha 521 (photo credit: REUTERS)
Ethiopian olah hadasha 521
(photo credit: REUTERS)
In the spring of 1970, at a Shabbat dinner in America, I got into a discussion with a young visiting Israeli. It ended when the Israeli flared up: “When you come live with us, then you can tell us what to do!” Forty years later, I showed up. I didn’t exactly scream into the Ben- Gurion Airport terminal, “Asher, I’m here!” And I’d long lost any desire to tell people what to do. Still, the moment was evocative.
A year later, I was diagnosed with cancer. Israel saved my life. Had I stayed in America (we’d lost our health insurance during the economic meltdown), I would likely have died.
And the question arose: How to repay? How to become a responsible citizen of my new country? The answer isn’t obvious, since the normal avenues of participation are closed. I’ll never serve in the military. I might bring money into the country, but I’ll never make a significant economic impact. My Hebrew may someday be adequate for getting around; most Israeli cultural and intellectual life will forever be beyond me. Voting in the last election was a lovely experience, but as a working journalist/author, I don’t become involved in partisan politics. Nor do I place much value on recreational protest. Been there, done that, saw where it led. Health and energy levels preclude sustained volunteering.
So what’s left? Two things. And one realization.
The first is a project my wife and I intended to carry out when we came here; but put on hold for a couple years. We’re starting a small e-book (and maybe dead-tree) press that will publish Israeli-writers-in-America and American-writers-in-Israel – people who would be of no interest to standard commercial or academic publishing, but have something important to say.
With luck, we’ll have our first list out in fall 2014.
The second is writing for an American audience about Israel, in a manner I’ve come to think of as “breaking the debate.” In the US, people do not speak to each other about issues. They hurl preformatted messages past each other. During my decades as a college professor, journalist, author, think-tank gerbil and whatever else, I learned that when you come at someone in a way they don’t expect, they get very upset.
Sometimes, you also get through.
How to “break the debate” over Israel? Perhaps by making Israel interesting to America again – an America that is rapidly losing interest in the world.
Few Israelis understand that the US’s growing popular indifference to Israel is exactly that. Indifference. Not simple anti-Semitism, although there is that. Not mere disgust that support of Israel, once a bipartisan verity, increasingly belongs to the political and religious far Right. Not just the accumulated impact of 40 years of film, video clips and sound bites of Israeli deeds and misdeeds in the territories and elsewhere. Americans know that Israel’s enemies aren’t exactly candidates for sainthood.
And certainly not revulsion at the heavy-handed, defensive arrogance of so much of what passes for Israeli and American Jewish public diplomacy and “outreach.” Most Americans never see it, and would laugh it off if they did.
So: Start yourself a press, write some articles and books and blogs. Make it compelling. That’s my goal. But I’ve also learned that active, responsible citizens are not really wanted in Israel.
Let’s face it. Citizenship is not a Jewish value.
It’s Greek, this notion that you can create and then find your meanings within an artificial political space. It’s an Enlightenment value, this notion that the purpose of the state is to ensure the equality of all its citizens, regardless of their religious and ethnic attributes.
And it’s postmodern, this notion that humanity must learn not just to tolerate but to “celebrate” diversity.
Zionism, in both its secular and religious incarnations, was never about such citizenship. It was a tribal, primal effort that inevitably took the form of a nation-state. The exigencies of survival and creation, plus the dead hand of one-party dominance and socialist bureaucracy from 1948 to 1977 made active secular citizenship virtually impossible.
Today, Israeli politics too often combines the worst of the 19th century/Second Aliya heritage with hi-tech American manipulative techniques and money from here, there and everywhere. The result is much the same. Citizens need not apply.
This is not to say that Israelis don’t love their country, or sacrifice for it. But it is to remember that when Thomas Jefferson spoke of the “pursuit of happiness,” he also meant a “public happiness” – the coming together of free human beings to determine the public world through the exercise of civic virtue.
So in the end, the important question is not, how will I become a responsible citizen? The important question is: How will others? To adapt a old Margalit lyric, “Eyfo hem?” Where are they? By the way, if you run across Asher, please give him my best.The writer, an American immigrant, is most recently author of Yom Kippur Party Goods (John Hunt/O Books, 2011). His latest novel of Israel and America, Ha’Kodem, is awaiting publication.