A Time to
Speak Out:
Rethinking
Jewish Identity and Solidarity with Israel
Brian Klug
Jewish Quarterly
(UK), Winter
2002/3 (Number 188)
Website: www.jewishquarterly.org
Copies: jewish.quarterly@esco.co.uk (Esco Business Services Ltd.)
On 27 August 2002,
the Guardian published an interview with Chief Rabbi Professor Jonathan
Sacks. In the course of the interview, the Chief Rabbi made certain comments
about Israel
that sparked a fierce controversy within the Jewish community in the UK
and abroad. Some praised his courage for speaking out about Israel.
Many denounced him. A typical accusation was that he was ‘giving comfort to Israel’s
enemies’. And yet, as he himself was at pains to emphasize later, he did not
criticize Israel
at all; he merely lamented the fact that the prolonged conflict with the
Palestinians is having a corrupting effect on the nation and its culture. The
real significance of his comments lies less in their content than in the scale
of the public reaction. Both the praise and the denunciation – especially the
latter – were out of all proportion to what he actually said. This raises the
question: Why were his remarks received this way? Why the exaggerated reaction?
It points to something that lies beneath the surface of the controversy.
The deeper issue is a tendency
among Jews to define Jewish identity in terms of the State of Israel, and the
ethos of ‘solidarity’ to which this gives rise. This ethos has led to an
environment within the Jewish community in the UK
and elsewhere that is intolerant of all criticism of Israel,
mild or strong, actual or – as in the case of the Chief Rabbi’s comments in The
Guardian interview – merely perceived.
In this essay I shall critically
discuss this ethos and the place Israel
has come to occupy in Jewish self-understanding. I shall argue that the spirit
in which Jews are bonding together in the name of solidarity with Israel
is misguided and unhealthy. In the first place, it distorts Jewish identity,
whether secular or religious, to collapse the distinction between being Jewish
and owing allegiance to the State of Israel. In the second place, it prevents
Jews who do feel a tie to Israel
from thinking clearly about what genuine solidarity means. After making certain
distinctions that form the basis of the argument, I focus on the Israel
Solidarity Rally that took place in Trafalgar Square,
London, on Bank Holiday Monday, 6 May 2002, in which tens of thousands of
people took part. The Jewish Chronicle (10 May) observed that ‘more
British Jews turned out, in response to a call for public solidarity, than ever
before’. Everything that is wrong with
the whole ethos of solidarity was concentrated in this landmark event. I
conclude by drawing out some implications for the future.
I
The subject of Jewish identity, not
least in relation to Israel,
is complex, confusing and fraught with emotion. It is difficult to
differentiate between the various elements (cultural, religious, ethnic and so
on) that enter into someone’s sense of being Jewish and their tie – or lack of
a tie – to Israel.
It varies from person to person. It would, therefore, be rash to try to speak
across the board: anyone who tries to define what it means to be Jewish is
taking their life in their hands! Consequently, although the subject is a
general one, I am not sure how to tackle it except in the first person
singular, which is the tack I shall take. I shall speak for myself and leave it
to readers to judge to what extent, and with what adjustments or
qualifications, the following reflection speaks for them too.
There is a song – and a question –
that haunts me from childhood: ‘Vi Ahin Soll Ich Geh’n?’
(‘Where Can I Go?’). Some time in the 1940s (probably around 1948 when the
State of Israel came into existence) Leo Fuld, the
‘King of Yiddish Music’, recorded the song in Yiddish and English. We
frequently played the record, an old 78 rpm, at our North London
home. My mother would sing it with feeling, as if its questions were hers and
its answer an answer to her prayers. To the best of my (and her) recollection,
the English version of the first verse was as follows:
Tell me, Where can I go?
There’s no
place I can see.
Where to go, where to go?
Every door is closed to me.
To the left, to the right,
It’s the same in every land.
There is nowhere to go
And it’s me who should know,
Won’t you please understand?
Even without the soulful melody, these despairing words ring
in my ears; when sung they go straight to the heart. As a young child, the
first verse seemed to me as melancholy as Kol Nidre – the solemn supplication that opens the evening
service on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement – but less obscure. Here was a
person in a nightmare: lost, shut out, cut off, set apart, a voice crying in
the wilderness. I was a child and I understood crying. I understood lost as
well. ‘Won’t you please understand?’ Oh, but I did, to the core. But where to
go, where to go? The song itself supplies the answer, expressed in the jubilant
second verse:
Now I know where to go,
Where my
folk proudly stand.
Let me go,
let me go
To that
precious promised land.
No more left
no more right.
Lift your
head and see the light.
I am proud,
can’t you see,
For at last
I am free:
No more
wandering for me.
No more wandering, no more questions. Unless it’s the
question ‘Can’t you see?’ But I could see. I saw a nightmare ending. I saw the
person in the song approaching a light at the end of the tunnel. This was my
first glimpse of Israel.
I was a child and so was the state. However, 50 years later we have both lost
our innocence; I have learned that light can be deceptive and that it can also
be blinding. The song comes back to haunt me, but I see a different nightmare
now, one that has the whole of ‘that precious promised land’ and all its
inhabitants, Jewish and other, in its grip. And the question I hear, subtly
altered, is a cry of bewilderment rather than despair: ‘Tell me, now that I’m
here, where am I going?’
Given the ethos of ‘solidarity with Israel’,
it is difficult to make this question audible, let alone offer an answer. Calls
for solidarity rain down from the pulpit. While this varies from congregation
to congregation, and although there are notable exceptions,[1]
rabbis of every stripe (including the Chief Rabbi) tell their congregations to
rally round in support of the Jewish state. Leaders of community organizations
proclaim the same message. Some hasten to add that Israel
is not beyond reproach. They acknowledge that Jews of goodwill may hold views
about Israel
that depart from the mainstream. But God forbid if anyone does. And if they do,
this is taken to indicate that they are clearly not Jews of goodwill.
They are branded as either naïve or ignorant or cowards or self-hating traitors
or some strange behemoth that is a hybrid of all these things. Now is not the
time, we are told, for Jews in the ‘Diaspora’ to criticize the government of Israel.[2]
Loyalty is what is expected of us now. But why now, especially? And why of me,
exactly? And what is loyalty, anyway? Or is it disloyal to ask?
The fact of the matter is that, above the din of
sermons and admonitions, I hear the question the song puts to me in the here
and now: ‘Where am I going?’ (‘Am I going wrong? Where am I going wrong?’) So
of one thing I am positive: now, especially now, is not the time for
closing ranks and keeping quiet, nor for vociferous expressions of blind
support for Israel in the name of unity. It is a time for clarity rather than
unity: for making distinctions, for questioning certitudes, for thinking
through; a time, ultimately, to speak out.
Clarity begins at home. Accordingly, I shall try to
clarify why the song haunts me. What chord in me does it strike? To put it
another way, what does Israel
have to do with me? Well, when I am asked (or expected) to show solidarity, at
least two separate claims are made, though they are so fused together that it
is hard to pick them apart. On the one hand, there is the claim based on the idea
that Israel,
being a Jewish state, is my state, and that its people, the Jewish
people, are my people. This is the point of view of Zionism, the
movement to establish a home for the Jewish people in the land
of Israel on the model of a
nation-state. Zionism, a modern political idea, draws heavily on Judaism, an
ancient religious and ethical tradition whose roots lie in the Torah and the
Talmud. The fact that Zionism uses the vocabulary of Judaism, but adapts it to
the idiom of modern political theory, goes a long way towards explaining why
this subject – Israel and Jewish identity – is so confusing. For at the heart
of Judaism there is also the notion of the Jewish people, but it is a
significantly different notion. This notion – the religious and ethical notion
of the Jewish people – is the other basis on which I am asked to show
solidarity with the State of Israel. I shall discuss this basis first, and then
turn to the claim that derives from Zionism.
Zion, in
the Bible, refers to Jerusalem. But
it is not a city merely. In the biblical and religious context, Zion
is the place of which Isaiah (2:2-3) speaks when he proclaims his vision of
‘the last days’, saying, ‘out of Zion
shall go forth the Torah, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem’.
Isaiah speaks as a prophet and ‘Zion’
is a term of his art. Now, if this is the Zion in whose name I am being asked
to show solidarity with Israel, then it is appropriate to respond in kind – by
invoking the religious ethic to which this idea of Zion belongs and judging
Israel’s actions by that standard; for that is the standard I am being asked to
affirm. It is the standard I do affirm if I am in shul
on shabbat for the opening of the Ark
at the beginning of Kriat Hatorah
(the Reading of the Torah) and join
the congregation in the singing of the very verse from Isaiah that I have just
quoted. To appeal to my Jewish identity, and at the same time tell me not to
apply to Israel
those standards of truth and justice which, along with peace, Judaism itself
insists upon as fundamental:[3]
this strikes me as inconsistent. It is certainly incongruous when, week in week
out, in the Torah readings that are the focus of the shabbat
service, the children or people of Israel
are constantly being chastised and criticized for their failings. To take
self-criticism out of Judaism would be like taking the light out of a candle or
the heat out of a flame: it would mean taking the ‘Jewish’ out of the Jewish
people. The whole point of this people, in the context of the Torah, is that
they are constituted by commitment to an ethic – the covenant they accept at
Sinai – in order to be (in the words of Isaiah 49:6) ‘a light to the nations’.
It is precisely this commitment that makes them, as it were, a people apart, ‘a
kingdom of priests and a holy nation’ (Exodus 19:6), rather than an ethnic
group as such. This is the concept of Am Yisrael, the people of Israel,
the Jewish people, in the Torah: a people constituted by their commitment to
the book or word of God. This commitment constitutes a way of life, not a
modern political state. It cannot be the basis for unconditional solidarity
with a country – any country, especially one called Israel.
If, on the other hand, I am expected to show
solidarity on the basis that Israel,
being a Jewish state, is my state, then my response is this. I do feel a
tie to Israel
insofar as Israel
came into existence to provide a home for Jews fleeing persecution and seeking
a place where they could live in peace and security. After the Second World War
and the Holocaust, Israel was a state for the stateless, for Jews who had lost
everything and had nowhere to go because, in the words of the song that still
haunts me, every door was closed to them. It was the same in every land. Then
suddenly, miraculously as it seems, there was one door that opened and they
stepped through it into what they believed would be the safe haven of Israel.
At last they were free. It was the end of a nightmare – or so they believed.
But now their dream is shattered. They live in fear of their lives every day.
Even when they go to the market, or eat at a pizzeria, or sit down to a Seder
with family and friends to celebrate freedom: they are not free. At every turn
their lives are at risk – just as before they came to this land. What can they
do? Where can they go? I see their plight and my heart goes out to them. It
goes out to them as fellow human beings. But on top of that I know that there
but for the proverbial grace of God go I, for they are Jewish, and I am Jewish,
and being Jewish is what brought them to these straits. This makes their
predicament more poignant for me – not greater than the predicament of other
human beings in similar circumstances but more pointed.
This is the tie that I feel, these are the chords
that are struck by the song. They resonate with me deeply. But the tie is a tie
of affection, not loyalty or allegiance. Israel
is not my country and I am not its citizen. To put it another way, ‘the people
of Israel’, in
the modern political sense of that phrase, is not synonymous with ‘the people
of Israel’ of
which the Torah speaks. Many Jewish Israelis feel no affiliation whatsoever to
Judaism and even repudiate it totally. They are Jewish people but they
do not see themselves as part of ‘the Jewish people’, Am Yisrael, the
People of the Book. Moreover, about one million Israeli citizens –
approximately one fifth of the total population – are not Jewish: they are
ethnically Arab and profess either Islam or Christianity or feel as secular as
some of their Jewish co-citizens. They also are part of the (modern) people of Israel.
They are, I’m not. There are other minority groups within Israel
too. In short, while in terms of dominant culture Israel
is a Jewish state, the people of Israel,
like the people of Britain,
are a motley crew.
Moreover, if Israel
were my country, I would not consider it my patriotic duty to support it
right or wrong. If I thought its policies were foolish or shameful, unwise or
unjust, I hope I would not hesitate to speak out, even in a time of crisis –
all the more in a time of crisis because this is the part of a conscientious
citizen. More to the point, it is what Israelis do. Israel
is not a monolith. Its citizens are at odds over the issues of the day, and are
hardly shy about saying what they think. In particular, on the subject of the
future of the Occupied Territories,
the question of land for peace, the two-state solution and the treatment of
Palestinians in the interim: there are diametrically opposed camps. The
divisions pit Israeli Jew against Israeli Jew. Consequently, not only do I not
feel under an obligation, as a Jew, to show solidarity with Israel,
but there is no such thing as ‘solidarity with Israel’:
it is a sentimental illusion.
II
Some readers who have got this far will, I expect,
be itching to tell me that I have completely missed the point about solidarity
with Israel. In
particular, they will want to put me right about the Trafalgar
Square rally, to which I now turn. I imagine them
giving me a little lecture, speaking, as it were, on behalf of the Jewish
community. Drawing on published sources, I hear something like this: ‘Of
course there are diametrically opposed camps in Israel.
What do you expect: it’s a Jewish state. But there is something that transcends
party politics: survival and the right to live in peace and security. This is
why Jews were urged to attend the Israel
Solidarity Rally: to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the people of Israel
and to say in one clear voice. ‘We are with you. Yes to peace. No to terror.’ Is this so wrong?’
Yes. Given the spin being put on it, it is so
wrong that it is hard to know where to start. The lecture makes the claim that
the Israel Solidarity Rally transcended party politics. I take it that this
claim refers to domestic politics in Israel,
and I assume for the sake of argument that the rally was genuinely intended to
be non-partisan. No doubt, many people who took part saw it that way. The fact
that there was some diversity of view on the speakers’ platform might have
seemed to give substance to that perception. However, what the onlooker saw
was something else: a high profile public statement of support by British Jewry
for the policies of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Consider the message
proclaimed by the main official banner (and cited in the lecture): ‘Yes to
peace. No to terror.’ What does this really mean? Saying ‘yes to peace’, in
itself, means nothing. Who says no to peace? Everyone, unless they are
insane, ultimately wants peace. The real issue is not peace per se but peace on
whose terms and peace by what means. Here, for example, is Sharon
on the subject of Israel’s
intentions: ‘Israel
will act, and with might. Israel
will fight anyone who tries to wage fear [sic] through suicide terrorism. Israel
will fight. Israel
will triumph. And when victory comes, Israel
will make peace’ (Ha'aretz, 8
May 2002). So, if peace means triumph, Sharon
is ‘a man of peace’, to use President Bush’s sobriquet. But who isn’t?
‘Yes to peace’ is an empty platitude, a well-meaning but meaningless gesture.
‘No to terror’, on the other hand, is telling. It determines the political
sense of the rally – because of what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say ‘No
to settlements’. Nor does it say no to curfews, closures, collective
punishment, deportations, demolition of homes, destruction of vineyards,
uprooting of olive groves, and all the other apparatus of Israel’s
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Thus, far from being apolitical, the rally could
hardly have been more partisan. Within the Israeli political spectrum it came
down, broadly speaking, on one side (say, Likud) over
another (say, Meretz). This was compounded by the way
the limelight fell on Binyamin Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister, whose hardline hawkish views are similar to Sharon’s.
When I told an Israeli friend that Netanyahu was going to be one of the main
speakers, she e-mailed me emphatically, ‘I’d agree that it would be far more
supportive to stay away from such a rally!’ So when the demonstrators waved
their banners saying ‘Israel,
we’re with you’, who were they with exactly? Not with my friend, and not with
those Israelis who feel as she does: who oppose the appropriation of
Palestinian land and the spread of Jewish settlements in the Occupied
Territories; who stand up against their own government’s repeated violations of
the international human rights conventions to which Israel is a signatory; who
promote Jewish-Palestinian cooperation; and who seek a resolution of the
conflict that will enable two long-suffering populations to have a future side
by side; all of which happens to be in Israel’s interest. These far-seeing
Israelis want and need solidarity. They and their cause – which includes the
peace and security of Israel
– were betrayed by the Israel Solidarity Rally on 6 May.
Of course, there are those who attended the rally
who take a different view of the conflict with the Palestinians and of Israel’s
long-term interests. In their opinion, the Israelis I am calling far-seeing are
at best shortsighted. The last thing they would want is to give succour to Israelis like my friend. Some of these people
think the Palestinians must be bludgeoned into submission; some believe in a
‘Greater Israel’ that incorporates the Occupied
Territories; some went on the rally
in the spirit of ethnic bonding, pure and simple. (As one letter to the Jewish
Chronicle on 3 May 2002
put it, ‘We cannot abandon our kith and kin’.) All such people are
entitled to express their views. However, on the one hand, they should stand up
and be recognized for who they are rather than hide behind the fuzzy veil of a
vague ‘solidarity with Israel’.
On the other hand, for some Jews who took part in the rally nothing could have
been further from their minds than the policy of brute force or the cause of
expansionism or the values of ethnic bonding. These people went in a spirit of
peace, a peace based on negotiation, not subjugation; on sharing the land, not
appropriating the whole of it; on universal principles of justice and human
rights, not on the racial or ethnic interest of one of the parties to the
conflict. But a public rally makes a public statement. And the statement it actually
makes is not necessarily the same as the one in the minds and hearts of
people who take part.
What did the world see on 6 May? It saw a mass
expression of jingoism in which Jews, as Jews, were siding with an established
state occupying the land of a stateless people. True, the banners said ‘Yes to
peace’. But again: by what means and on whose terms? If this had genuinely been
a peace rally, rather than a blatantly nationalistic one, then Trafalgar
Square would not have been awash with
blue-and-white Israeli flags (plus the odd Union Jack). As it is, irrespective
of intentions, and even without any overtly anti-Arab placards, the slogan ‘Israel,
we’re with you’ conveyed to the onlooker the message ‘Palestinians, we’re
against you’, as surely as tails is the opposite of heads. This is not the
attitude of peace – unless for ‘peace’ read ‘triumph’. Those people who took
part in the rally and whose sympathies lie with the peace movement in Israel
were either duped or self-deceived.
Yet, given the way the State of Israel and its
institutions are written into Judaism and Jewish identity, it is almost
impossible to keep one’s head. For example, the new edition of the widely-used Authorised Daily Prayer Book of the United Hebrew
Congregations of the Commonwealth (1998) includes the following prayer as part
of the liturgy for the shabbat morning service:
‘Heavenly Father: Remember the Israel Defence Forces,
the guardians of our Holy Land. Protect them from all distress and anguish, and
send blessing and prosperity upon all the work of their hands.’ All the
work? Including the destruction and havoc caused in Jenin
and Ramallah and Nablus, the humiliation and
indignities visited daily on Palestinians at checkpoints in the Occupied
Territories, not to mention the
violence sometimes meted out to Israeli Jews who protest against their
government’s violations of human rights? Note the poetic, biblical language –
‘all the work of their hands’ – and the sacred epithet, ‘the guardians of our Holy
Land’. This makes Israel’s
military an institution of Judaism itself. The rabbi or chazan
(cantor) recites this prayer in front of the open Ark,
holding a Sefer Torah (Scroll of the Law), with the
whole of the congregation standing united. United as what? As Am Yisrael
before God? Or as the local weekly Israel Solidarity Rally? There is no room,
in such a climate, to stop and think about the nature of your tie as a Jew to
the State of Israel. How can you think, when your very identity is soldered
to the state? (So where do you go if, as a Jew, you do not identify
yourself in terms of Israel, but no longer feel you can ignore the community’s
definition? Or if you are alienated by a prayer that implicates you in military
actions that you abhor? Where do you go if you wish to go to shul, whether regularly or for festivals and special
occasions? More and more individuals are liable to feel that the doors of the
synagogues are closed to Jews who either do not define themselves in terms of Israel
or who repudiate the Israeli government of the day. Increasingly, they will
feel excluded. Reform or orthodox, to the left to the right: there is nowhere
to go.)
And yet, even as I protest, I myself feel a longing
to believe the very thing I am repudiating. There is something in me that wants
it to be true – that wants the modern State of Israel to be the salve that
heals all the wounds of Jewish history. Those wounds go deep. Even if there
were no external pressures brought to bear by the community to show ‘solidarity
with Israel’, there would be those exerted from within: experiences, memories,
stories stored at the back of the mind that seep into the heart, a song from
childhood that resonates down to the present day. Unless I am mistaken, when
Jews turned up in their tens of thousands to support Israel, they were
simultaneously showing solidarity with the past, with all those Jewish
communities, long gone, that came under attack and did not – could not – defend
themselves. It feels like a debt to the dead: to stand up and fight for the
living. It also seems like a duty to posterity: not to let history repeat
itself, the history of discrimination, inquisition, expulsion, pogrom, and
finally mass extermination. But who will discharge this debt and perform this
duty? For many Jews, Israel
came into the world for this very purpose. ‘Never again’ is the state’s
unofficial motto.
This gets to the crux of the relationship between
Jews in the ‘Diaspora’ and Israel.
It is something I grew up with: the sense that Jews must come to the defence of Israel
so that Israel
can come to the defence of Jews. Hence the prayer for
the Israel Defence Forces; it is as if they defend not
only Israel but
Jews everywhere. Hence also Sharon, Prime Minister of Israel,
calling himself in an interview with CNN ‘the prime minister of the Jewish
people’ (Ha'aretz, 10 June 2002).
And when he says, ‘Israel
is the only place in the world where Jews have the right and capability to
defend themselves, by themselves’, he hits a nerve with Jews around the globe.
Significantly, he said this at Yad
Vashem, Israel’s
memorial to the Holocaust, on 18 April
2001, the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day. Speaking, as it were,
in his dual capacity of (elected) Prime Minister of Israel and (self-appointed)
Prime Minister of the Jewish people, Sharon has described the conflict with the
Palestinians in epic terms: ‘This is a battle for the survival of the Jewish
people, for survival of the state of Israel’ (televised address to the nation,
reported on www.news.bbc.co.uk, 10
April 2002). The leaflet advertising the rally used the same word: survival.
‘Survival’, for Jews, is a buzzword. Once the conflict with the Palestinians is
put in terms of survival, the floodgates of collective memory open and Jews are
moved to rally round. To invert what I said earlier, it is as if a massive
congregation assembled in the open-air synagogue of Trafalgar
Square in order to affirm with one voice ‘We will
survive’. All distinction between religious and secular, Orthodox and Reform,
was dropped for the purposes of this non-denominational ‘service’ so as to make
it as inclusive as possible. Seen this way, the rally was less a demo than a
love-in, a coming together for its own sake; which is why those words ‘Yes to
peace’ seemed to signify something, even though they didn’t. In the spirit of
this love-in, the slogan ‘Israel,
we’re with you’ was not meant badly; it wasn’t intended to imply ‘Palestinians,
we’re against you’. It wasn’t really aimed at them at all but at ‘the world’, a
world that has always been against ‘us’, that has denied ‘us’ peace, and, in
the words of a London Jewish lawyer quoted in The Times (11 April 2002), ‘does
not like to see Israel strong’.
I understand – from the inside – these perceptions
and emotions and why they seem so compelling. Nonetheless, in fact the Jewish
people do not have a Prime Minister. Israel
is not the only place in the world where Jews have the right – or the
capability – to defend themselves. Israel’s
conflict with the Palestinians is not a battle for the survival of the
Jewish people. And ‘the world’ is not a unified body that wants to see Israel
weak. These ideas are not just false they are crazy. Even to say that the
survival of the state is at risk is to distort both reality and history. One
correspondent to the Jewish Chronicle (3 May 2002) put it succinctly:
The suggestion that
it is Israel,
rather than the Palestinians, whose survival is currently threatened is not
only nonsense, it also diminishes the very real dangers that the Israeli nation
– and the Jewish people – have faced in the past.
Nonsense and craziness are
all that can come from a state of mind that cannot distinguish fantasy from
fact, Arafat from Hitler, the intifada from the Inquisition.
III
‘Vi Ahin Soll Ich Geh’n?’
‘Where Can I Go?’ There were two echoes of this song in the reportage that
followed the intense 10-day battle fought between the Israel Defence Forces and Palestinians in the Jenin
refugee camp in April 2002. One was a message left on a wall of a house that
the Israeli army had occupied and used as a base. A soldier had written ‘in
neat blue ink’ the simple sentence, ‘I don’t have another land’ (Guardian, 16 April 2002). The other was a
remark attributed to an elderly Palestinian who refused to leave his home when
soldiers were about to demolish it. This ‘stubborn old man’ is reported to have
said, ‘Fifty years ago you expelled me from Haifa.
Now I have nowhere to go’ (Ha’aretz, 19 April 2002). In a way, these two statements sum up
the whole conflict. However, the appearance of parity is misleading. For when
the dust settled on the battle, where did each of them go? The soldier to his
barracks – and ultimately to his home in Israel.
But the ‘stubborn old man’ was left in the dust. There is no equality between
this Israeli and this Palestinian. The one has a state, the other is stateless.
He has nowhere to go – and it’s we who should know.
Jews should know, partly from their own historical
experience, and partly because of the impact this had on Palestinians. The old
man alluded to this when he said, ‘Fifty years ago you expelled me from Haifa.’
Like many Jews, I grew up believing that the Palestinian ‘refugee problem’ was
not caused by Israel; that it was an artificial problem created by surrounding
Arab nations who, promising to crush the new Jewish state, urged Palestinians
to flee their homes temporarily. The whole truth of this story, however, is
more complex and less comfortable, as Israeli historians such as Simha Flappan, Benny Morris and Avi Shlaim have shown. What
cannot be denied is that, tragically, solving one refugee problem led to
another. On the one hand, Jews who survived the Holocaust found a haven in Israel.
On the other hand, the creation of the state displaced around 700,000
Palestinians. 15 May, which Israelis celebrate as Yom Ha’atzmaot,
Independence Day, is remembered by Palestinians as the date of al-Nakba, the Catastrophe. This is not because they are
antisemites who think that anything good that happens to Jews is ipso facto
catastrophic. They are not Nazis actuated by hatred. They are people who
suffered a great loss: their homes, their land, their livelihoods. The creation
of the State of Israel was a catastrophe for them. This is fact, not
anti-Israel propaganda.
It is time to face this fact and to stop insisting
on the exclusive righteousness of Israel’s
cause. While Israel, despite the way it is sometimes portrayed, is not the
wicked witch of the Middle East, nor is it a paragon of virtue, with the Arabs
as the villain of the piece. The conflict between Israel,
its Arab neighbours and the Palestinians is
political. It is not a battle between good and evil; thinking this way can only
lead to moral blindness. It is time to see the Palestinians in the light of the
Jewish experience of statelessness; to recognize their predicament; to say
‘Never again’ and refuse to subjugate them or force them out – as if they had
somewhere to go.
The truth is that neither Israelis nor Palestinians
have anywhere else to go. Any solution to the conflict that is not based on
this truth is either doomed to fail or, if it were to succeed, would be
abominable. But as Abba Eban said, shortly after the
first Camp David talks (which led to a peace treaty
between Israel
and Egypt), ‘We
shall never construct a harmony in the Middle East
unless we learn to separate ourselves from our past’ (Address to the Toronto
Leadership Conference, 13 September 1979). To separate itself from its past, Israel
needs a new understanding with Jewry worldwide. It needs to be taken off its
mythic pedestal and relieved of its impossible millennial role as the defender
and saviour of the Jewish people. Jews outside of Israel
must allow Israel
to be its own state, not theirs, so that it can concentrate on its own vital
interest in the here and now – making its peace with the region of which it is
a part – rather than carrying the whole burden of Jewish history on its
shoulders. It needs to cure that corruption of its culture of which the Chief
Rabbi spoke in his Guardian interview. It needs to do these things for
the sake of its own people, the people of Israel
– all its people, Jewish and non-Jewish, equally and alike.
By the same token, Jewish communities in the
so-called Diaspora need to live in their here and now, ‘constructing a
harmony’ within the world. This implies the reverse of the ethos of ‘solidarity
with Israel’.
Instead of lumping everything together, it is time to make distinctions –
between Judaism and Zionism, Israeli and Jew, the biblical and the political.
When everything is lumped together, judgement goes to
pieces. Why else do so many Jews of goodwill and sound mind persist in
defending the indefensible when it comes to Israel?
Making distinctions allows those who care about the state to offer something
better than blind, unconditional support: cool, careful, measured, qualified,
sustained, candid criticism – the kind you cannot give unless you are at one
remove. This is solidarity worth its salt. At the same time, it means making
room within Jewry for all Jews, including those who feel no tie to Israel.
For my part, my tie with Israel
goes back to the song that haunts me from childhood and the question it puts in
the here and now: ‘Tell me, Where am I going?’ (‘Am I going wrong? Where am I
going wrong?’) Hearing this question, holding to the standards Judaism affirms,
and believing as I do that Israel
has gone off the rails: how can I not speak out?
Brian Klug
Dr. Brian Klug is Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at St. Benet’s Hall, Oxford,
and Associate Professor of Philosophy, Saint Xavier
University, Chicago.
His articles on Jewish subjects have appeared in Jewish Quarterly and Patterns
of Prejudice.
Notes