The Jewish People's Dirty Little Secret-continued

You want to have a Jewish State? Prove it

Every individual, family, community and nation have dirty little secrets that they attempt to conceal. For the Jewish people, these do not include the blood libel, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, being oversexed, being slum landlords, being cheap, being as bad as the Nazis, instrumentalizing the Holocaust, being afraid to use power, committing war crimes, selling arms to unsavoury regimes, and being just plain rude. These amount to anti- Semitic canards or, in the case of Israel, double standard accusations rooted in anti Semitism, sometimes of the self hating variety.

Like the seasons, or the stock market, the Israel popularity cycle has descended into one of its inevitable troughs. In the days after October 7, we had the sympathy of the world. Dana Horn nailed it: the world loves dead Jews, but now she can add raped, burned, tortured, decapitated and burned Jews, including babies. How brief the expressions of sympathy would be was demonstrated when hordes of anti Semites world- wide hit the streets to not only condemn Israel, but to celebrate Hamas’ exhilarating explosion of resistance atrocities before Israel had dropped one bomb in response. Especially entertaining were the simultaneously held views that Hamas had struck a blow for justice and that Israel had actually staged the whole horror show to justify ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

This surrealistic alternative universe of perceptions provided fertile ground for the rapid growth of a dense thicket of tangled podcasts, public debates, and duelling punditry. Who’s committing genocide here? Is Zionism a colonial throwback? Does Hamas only want to kill Israelis, or all Jews? Is there a rupture between Diaspora Jews and Israel? Do Israelis know what is going on in Gaza? Is Israel harvesting organs from Gazans to transplant into Jews? Is Israel just lousy at public relations, or would it not make any difference because everybody hates the Jews? What will constitute total victory, and what about the day after?

World leaders, from Joe Biden to Olaf Shultz, hastened to visit Israel to show solidarity. Media stars, such as Sam Harris, Bari Weiss, Glen Loury, Dan Senor and Bill Maher, deployed their considerable influence to discuss October 7, and mock elite universities and their Presidents for the ignoramus’ chanting “from the river to the sea” on their campuses. In one episode of Dan Senor’s “Call Me Back,” Yossi Klein Halevy castigated Peter Beinart, who, “as a Jew” views Israel as an apartheid state born in sin. Celebrity Rabbi Angela Buchdahl reported to Yonit Levy and Jonathan Freedland, on their podcast, that many in her typical 900 congregant Friday night services are troubled by what Israel is doing in Gaza. Rabbi David Wolpe, speaking to Sam Harris, ventured that October 7 brought Diaspora Jews and Israelis, who had been distancing from each other, closer in sharing existential fears, which didn’t sound accurate to this Israeli Jew. Weiss, as part of her “The Free Press in Israel” post October 7 whirlwind tour, interviewed Natan Sharansky about how to deal with the alienation of many young American Jews in the US from Israel. At one point Weiss winkingly suggested to Sharansky that maybe Jews should move to Israel.  After a jovial “that’s never gonna happen,” reaction, they returned to fretting, as did Halevy, over the vast ignorance of American Jews about their heritage and Israel. It was left to Douglas Murray, not a Jew, to tell Sam Harris that Chuck Schumer’s “friendly advice to Bibi” speech in the Senate was out of bounds because Schumer has “no skin in the game.”

The endless soul searching over how Israelis and Diaspora Jews see things like bombing Gaza to smithereens so differently is amusing. What is so hard to understand? US Jews are 10,000 miles away from Gaza! We live in different universes! Murray, typically, cut straight through the bullshit to the point: when you live in Israel, things look different. In fact, if you’re a displaced resident of the Gaza envelope and/or the relative of someone who was murdered and/or taken hostage by Hamas, you see things differently than I, a resident of Tel Aviv. It’s so simple, the further you are from ground zero, the less skin you have in the game, and the more likely you are to be discomfited by how Israel’s actions impact Diaspora Jews.

A great example of this is Sara Silverman. After palling around with the Ocazio- Cortez led “squad” in Congress, because it fit with the so called Jewish main ethos of “tikkun olam”, she was shocked when the squad acted to remove funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system from the Federal Budget. “Hey!”, she said, “my sister and my nieces and nephews live in Israel and are protected by Iron Dome!” So simple. One sibling in Israel, more skin in the game.

So, there we are. Not enough Jews in the world have enough skin in Israel’s game. Whether anti Zionist or a member of AIPAC, what you see and feel from there, is not what you see and feel from here. And this simple point, the avoidance by so called Zionist American Jews of having anything beyond a superficial tourist physical contact with Israel, let alone immigrating to it, provides the Occam’s Razor explanation of what is ailing the Jewish people. Yes, it’s not just Israel that is ailing. If Israel is the state of the Jewish people, then that people have a problem. Israel’s failures are actually the Jewish People’s failures. No amount of “peoplehood,” rhetoric or study trips will negate that.

Norman Finkelstein is a rabid Israel hating Jew. In a recent podcast debate with Benny Morris on the Lex Fridman show, he spouted an anti Zionist, anti Israel, polemic based on his reading of thousands of documents and his PhD on Zionism. He clearly wishes Israel did not exist. And that is his right; he is entitled to his opinion. He is certainly preferable to Angela Beuchdal’s tortured congregants bleating about how uncomfortable they are with Israel’s behavior, but never thinking, or being told by their Rabbi to think, of moving to Israel if they care so much. Rabbi Angela doesn’t mention Jewish immigration to Israel, or more accurately, the lack of such as a factor in creating the reality that the Jewish people, not only Israel, confront. It is the dirty little secret that every podcast, sermon, or pro Israel rally comes right up to but never touches. At best it is a joke for Natan Sharansky and Bari Weiss to laugh at while trying to solve the “real” problems of the Jewish people.

Back to Norman Finkelstein. It is very often the worst enemies of Israel who get it right, at least partly. There follows a quote from him during the Fridman podcast. It’s a long quote, so the impatient reader may focus only what is highlighted.

“Now, I do believe there’s a legitimate question: Had it been the case, Professor Morris, that the Zionists wanted to create a happy state with a Jewish majority, but a large Arab minority, and, if by virtue of immigration (like in our own country (the US, dpc), in our own country, given the current trajectories, non whites will become the majority population in the United States quite soon. And, according to the democratic principles, we have to accept that. So if that were the case, I would say maybe there’s an argument, that had there been mass Jewish immigration, changed the demographic balance in  Palestine, and therefore Jews became the majority, you can make an argument in the abstract, that the indigenous Arab population should have been accepting of that, just as whites in the United States (whites quote unquote) have to be accepting of the fact that the demographic majority is shifting to non whites in our own country. But that’s not what Zionism was about. I did my doctoral dissertation on Zionism. And I don’t want to now get bogged down in abstract ideas. But, as I suspect you know, most theorists of nationalism say there are two kinds of nationalism. One is a nationalism based on citizenship. You become a citizen, you’re integral to the country. That’s sometimes called political nationalism. And then there’s another kind of nationalism. And that says, the state should not belong to its citizens, it should belong to an ethnic group. Each ethnic group should have its own state. It’s usually called the German romantic idea of nationalism. Zionism is squarely in the German romantic idea. That was the whole point of Zionism. We don’t want to be Bundists, and be just one more ethnic minority in Russia. We don’t want to become citizens and just become a Jewish people in England or France. We want our own state. We want our own state. And in that concept of wanting your own state,  the minority at best lives on sufferance, and at the worst gets expelled. That’s the logic of the German romantic Zionist idea of a state. That’s why they’re Zionists.”

What Finkelstein is arguing is that the Zionist plan was to have an exclusively Jewish state with, at most, a minority Arab population that would be forever kept second class. If it were otherwise, why was there not a mass immigration of Jews to Israel, and not just made up of fleeing refugees, that could have qualified Israel as being both Jewish and democratic? While he is a foul source, I agree with him on this basic point which could be put slightly differently: If Israel is supposed to be the state of the Jewish people, why does half of the Jewish People choose to stay in America? This truth makes Israel look to be only a refuge for suffering Jews, created at the expense of the Palestinians. Notably, it was the massive influx of immigrants who self identified as Jews from the former Soviet Union that coincided, or more accurately preceded, the agreement of the Palestinians to engage in the Oslo process. If there are going to be millions more Jews in Israel, they thought, we better cut our losses now.

Thus, the lack of Zionism being manifested by its only true meaning: the ingathering of the exiles, is at the core of the pathological condition of the Jewish people. Two more perspectives, from personalities much more palatable than Finkelstein will fill out the picture.

In 1968, the historian Jacob Talmon, addressed a letter to Israel’s then poet laureate Natan Alterman. The latter was swept away by Israel’s 1967 victory which ended with the Israel Defence Forces taking Jerusalem and the entire West Bank. Alterman was one of the trumpeters of the euphoria felt by many Israelis at returning to the parts of the Land of Israel in which the forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had lived and begun the story of the Jewish People. For him, Nablus was no less, perhaps even more, a part of Israel than Haifa. Giving back the former would put a question mark over the latter. Emotional songs were written about our return, among others, to Rachel’s Tomb, outside of Bethlehem, exhorting mother Rachel to see that her children, as promised, had returned home. While the settlement movement in the West Bank began in earnest only after the Yom Kippur War, writers like Alterman, who was also a publicist, clearly supported Israel’s holding on to the West Bank.

Jacob Talmon had the vantage point of being on sabbatical in the US when he penned his letter to Alterman. A little perspective, perhaps. Talmon’s arguments against holding on to the territories were eyepopping. Ostensibly, they were not based, as might be expected, on moral considerations. In effect, Talmon based his opposition to Alterman on demography. We don’t have enough Jews to make it realistic or moral to retain the conquered West Bank he contended. The two main reservoirs of Jews in exile were in Russia and the United States. Russia, and the disposition of its Jews, were inscrutable he said (one wonders what he would say today, riding, as I do, on a bike through Bat Yam’s stunning promenade over the Mediterranean, and hearing mostly Russian being spoken). As for American Jews, posited, Talmon, one could not anticipate an emigration inducing anti -Semitic wave in the land of liberty, pluralism, and immigrant absorption (hmmm... again, wonder what he would think today). Without a population influx from those two sources, the world, embarking on its anti- colonialist era, would never countenance continued Israeli control over the territories.

In effect, and ironically, the paradigm framing Talmon’s argument is identical to Finkelstein’s, despite the fact that the former loved the State of Israel, and the latter despises it. Both pin the legal and moral validity of the State on the demographic reality on the ground. Finkelstein would have been willing to countenance Israel as a Jewish and democratic state if there had been massive immigration of world Jewry to Israel. Talmon was arguing that without significantly more Jewish feet on the ground, holding to the territories would be tantamount to the rebellion against Rome all over again. Either way, the moral value of Israel is largely predicated on mass immigration of Jews, and not only refugees, to Israel.

For reasons unknown, Talmon never sent his letter. Alterman, the government of Israel, and the settler movement, never got the memo. Perhaps Talmon perceived that the failure of the Jewish people to populate the State was some dirty laundry that should not be hung out in public.

The third perspective is that of the late AB Yehoshua. His deconstruction of anti-Semitism anchored it in the rootlessness of Jews in the Diaspora. Jews have always been hated for being different, and this was only accentuated by their presence in non-Jewish societies. Their difference was threatening. Their presence exacerbated the psychological complex of the majority populations in which they found themselves. The majorities in every country with Jews in the population projected all their own guilts, insecurities and failures onto the Jews. The Jews were the avaricious sexual predators. The Jews were peadophiles, who tortured gentile children for ritual purposes. These were all tendencies that the host societies felt in themselves, and found in the Jews a scapegoat for their own insecurities and failures in creating successful and just polities. If the Jews were poor, they were parasites. If they were rich and powerful, it was through magical subterfuge.

By this thinking, the Jews of America are low hanging fruit for anti Semites. Why are they so concerned about Israel, if they are loyal American citizens? And, as MIT faculty said after October 7 to Jewish students complaining about feeling unsafe on campus: “If you don’t feel safe, why don’t you go to Israel?” Why are they here, lobbying Congress to use our tax dollars to support an Israel that is oppressing the Palestinians? What could be more colonial? And weak kneed, guilt ridden, bleeding-heart Jewish college students looking for a meaningful cause, buy into this and openly seek to disassociate themselves from this conspiratorial Zionism.

Now Yehoshua, an ideologue, saw this in black and white terms. He told American Jews to their face that not only could they not be Zionists in the exile, but they also couldn’t even continue to be Jewish. But Finkelstein, ironically, is softer on the Jews. As a social scientist historian, he believes in processes. A major immigration (say, one third) of American Jews to Israel would have been enough to countenance a Jewish State that would also be democratic. But Zionism, in his view, leads to a situation in which Jews, regardless of the proportion of the Jewish people who live in that state, lay claim to an exclusively Jewish state in which minorities are at best suffered, and at worst expelled.

One can easily dispense with Finkelstein as a self hating Jew more concerned with the enemies of the Jews than with his own people. The point is that both lovers of Israel and its haters have identified the issue of the Jewish people proving that they want to live in Israel as being at the root of what ails the Jewish people. Finkelstein represents one strain of Diaspora Jewishness, the wicked son who wants not only to have nothing to do with Israel, but actually seeks its destruction. At the same time, Diaspora Jews who claim to be Zionists, but fail to populate Israel in any significant numbers, are almost as bad. This is the dirty little secret of the Jewish people that lurks in the background of all the podcasts, blogs, editorials, sermons and debates about the Gaza War, anti Semitism, and criticisms of Israel that have the chutzpa to accuse it of genocide. But it is never broached. Following Murray, it really is all about having skin in the game. It deserves not a momentary giggle between Bari Weiss and Natan Sharansky, but a systematic analysis. Even if a major immigration of US Jews to Israel is considered unrealistic, the dirty little secret needs to be outed. Without dealing with it explicitly, Israel and the Jewish people cannot realistically carve out a future.  *

*See my other posts for more on this subject