Peering from behind bars, his hair shorn to prison regulation length, Mikhail Khodorkovsky maintains a quiet dignity. Once the richest man in Russia and head of the giant Yukos oil conglomerate, he has become a cause célèbre as Russia’s most famous political prisoner and an increasingly irritating thorn in the side of the Putin administration. His case highlights Russia’s ingrained authoritarianism, an image Putin has been at pains to challenge, as well as drawing attention to the uncomfortable phenomenon of the Jewish oligarch. More widely it invites consideration of the position of Jews in post-communist Russia and why it is that so many of them left.

Among the many restrictions to be lifted along with the iron curtain were the two great taboos: money and religion. At the same moment that ordinary Russians found themselves able, even encouraged, to make money and build private enterprise, they were also allowed to express the ethnicities and religions they had suppressed under 72 years of communism. Many Jews took advantage of the new freedom to emigrate — up to 1.3 million left for Israel — while those who stayed were able to benefit from the radical domestic reforms and, possibly, to play a part in helping shape the future state. Khodorkovsky himself studied chemistry, following in the footsteps of his Jewish father and Christian mother. Together with his right-hand man, Leonid Nevzlin, fully Jewish and currently in exile in Israel, in 1987 ‘Misha’ Khodorkovsky founded Menatep, Russia’s first private investment bank, with the approval of Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalising Kremlin. At the time he was a middle-level chemist and a former member of Komsomol, the Communist Party youth wing. Before the Menatep years, he had already shown entrepreneurial nous by setting up a firm to import badly needed computers from abroad. In 1991 he used Menatep proceeds to gain the fertiliser company Apatrit. Yet the big breakthrough came in late 1995 when he acquired Yukos, Russia’s second biggest oil producing company, from Boris Berezovsky in loans-for-shares auctions, for $300m. Even then the line between politics and business was hard to draw. In 1996 Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky and Guzinskii helped re-elect Boris Yelstin, according to Yelstin’s biographer, Timothy Colton. At the time Berezovsky was the most politically active of the oligarchs.

By 2000, however, Khodorkovsky seemed to breach the unwritten rules of the game. He rebranded himself with the help of a PR firm; he founded the Open Russia foundation, to encourage liberal values and broader education; he also turned Yukos into a transparent, Western-style conglomerate. This last apparently innocuous and praiseworthy gesture won Yukos increased loyalty from foreign investors, and shares soared, but worried the Kremlin inner circle, who saw it as the thin end of the wedge, a threat to their power. Misha publicly stated that the Kremlin had problems with corruption; televised for all to see, a furious Putin retorted that Yukos should be investigated for possible tax evasion. Not that everything about Yukos seemed pristine, even by Khodorkovsky’s admission. In the eponymous film by Cyril Tuschi, Khodorkovsky — whose screenings in Moscow and St Petersburg were abruptly cancelled this year — the man himself is quoted as saying: ‘Yes, we bent moral standards, but those standards matched those of the society we were in…’ The Yukos acquisition at knock- down prices saw Menatep assuming $2bn in debt; in 2001 the bank was declared broke. Worse followed when the state arrested Khodorkovsky’s deputy, Platon Lebedev. In the film Misha admits he knew he would be next, but he wanted to tell the truth in court… while admitting “I was naïve about justice”. Sure enough he was arrested onboard his private jet on a landing strip in Siberia in 2003. After an 11-month trial, for tax evasion, he was sentenced to 15 years. In 2005 Roman Abramovich ousted Khodorkovsky from Forbes magazine’s Russian Rich List — “the ultimate indignity in the world of the super-wealthy”, according to the BBC.

During the build up to the collapse of communism, there was a growing awareness among Soviet authorities that they would need to create a Russian elite, a native super-rich class, that could acquire state assets and keep them on Russian soil. Screeds have been written about the Jewish preponderance in the top-ranking business elite. One theory suggests that because Jews were traditionally excluded from the centres of Communist Party power, especially in post-war Russia, they developed skills on the unofficial peripheral market which came into play when the Marxist edifice of a centrally run economy collapsed in 1991. However, the theory develops holes when we look closer: most oligarchs were not cunning black marketeers in the Soviet days, but often clerks, scientists and technicians, even mathematics professors, who operated, quietly, within the system. As it was virtually impossible for Jews to enter high profile Moscow Universities, many studied at less prestigious establishments like the Institute of Oil and Gas where they were, later, ideally placed to develop Russia’s lucrative Oil trade. Certainly, the lifting of restrictions on Jewish professions combined with the licence to develop private enterprise may go some way to account for the fact that by the early 1990s, six out of seven of Russia’s richest tycoons were Jewish or part-Jewish.

Of the Yeltsin-era oligarchs, who enjoyed particularly close relations with the government, few have managed either to retain their fortunes or stay in Russia under Putin. Years in the KGB gave Putin a mistrust of the individual and his rule has seen the restoration of state authority over the once all-powerful magnates. Roman Abramovich, formerly favoured by the Kremlin, was forced to sell 72% of his assets to the Russian state before finding a bolt-hole in the UK, also the haven for his former business associate Vladimir Berezovsky. Heeding the warnings, Leonid Nevzhlin, Khodorkovsky’s original business partner, moved to Israel where he enjoys the status of major philanthropist and friend of Binyamin Netanyahu. Unlike his fellow oligarchs, Khodorkovsky chose to stand his ground and use his inordinate wealth to help shape the free and democratic Russia he wanted to live in.

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The American Dream is one of upward mobility, but also sideways movement. The aspiration to greatness comes with a rhetoric of self-sufficiency that causes people to move along and start again, rather than navigating existing structures. Not only was the founding event of the United States a secession, but the most traumatic moment in American history — the Civil War — was also a failed attempt at the same thing. From Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Splendid Isolation’ to the libertarian Tea Party movement, the United States has tended to view government involvement as an intrusion and to laud those who start afresh over those who try to improve what already exists.

The frontier myth romanticises the West as the place where American ideals of equality, democracy and innovation are forged. Despite 82% of the population already living in cities by 2008, the metaphors of individual freedom are still predominantly rural. The most iconic of these is the cowboy — beholden to no law but that of natural justice — who can ride off into the plains carrying nothing but his six-shooter. If you don’t like the current system, just “get out of Dodge” (a phrase made popular by Gunsmoke, the legendary television show about the settlement of the West) and start again.

This individualistic Western mythology has had little hold on Jews. For Jews in America, as in Europe, 20th century life was predominantly urban and communal. From generation to generation Jews dealt with their own existing structures, whether scriptural, legal or political. While some have, of course, rejected the community, growing up Jewish has inculcated a pervasive sense of struggle with self-governance, whether through Talmudic pilpul, fights for civil rights or communal wrangling. The urban concentrations of a community whose traditional skills were best employed in the cities and the tribal nature of a community that is both historically close-knit and closely-knit to its history has meant that completely abandoning the past and moving on is less of a simple option for American Jews. It is no coincidence that the great renewal legislation of American history—Roosevelt’s New Deal — had profound Jewish support.

Dealing with renewal rather than replacement is not an exclusively Jewish preserve. However, the systems of Jewish life have provided a stepping stone for those who want to study this. Jews have been central in questioning and revising structures of thought and society, from Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud in Europe to the founders of literary, linguistic and social science in America. And, as has been often noted, even the recent theorists of foreign policy neo-conservativism were Jewish — trying to reform the world through belief in American hegemony. Most visibly, perhaps, in the world of contemporary commentary, Jewish intellectuals prominently provide insight into the systems governing respectively economics, social construction and politics. From Paul Krugman on his Nobel-powered pulpit at the New York Times to Malcolm Gladwell propagating virally from The New Yorker to the vastly influential Jon Stewart at the intersection of satire and news on Comedy Central, systemic analysis is still coming from the people who brought you Noam Chomsky and Milton Friedman.

But the American dream has always been an unwieldy admixture of the personal and the theoretical, bypassing the implementation. From the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty to the inspirational story of Barack Obama, the country leaps from an ideal to a biography without dwelling on the systems or institutions that might allow ideals to unfold into reality. Partly this is true because of the rapidly evolving nature of the nation, partly because of the increasingly vested interests in the status quo and partly because of the influence of the media. Hollywood, as its paradigm, purveys a relentlessly optimistic set of American possibilities.

The palpable atmosphere of possibility in the United States of America — the world’s first ideologically established nation — comes from this sense that if atfirst you don’t succeed, you can give up and try something different. From this impetus comes, on the one hand, America’s proclivity to waste time, space, energy and people but, on the other hand, profound freedom to create. In David Simon’s The Wire, which Jacob Weisberg of Slate called “the best television show ever,” there is no such freedom or energy: only compromise, concession, constraint and, eventually, capitulation.

Based on Simon’s experience as an embedded reporter with the Baltimore homicide unit, The Wire was an urban drama set in Baltimore that unfolded over 60 hours of television in five seasons between 2002 and 2007. The first season was based around a homicide squad that gets permission to use a phone tap — the eponymous wire — for surveillance of a drug gang they have reason to believe is responsible for a number of murders. But rather than just playing out like another cop show, The Wire evinced a deep sympathy for the social structures that created the drug dealers and their world. From the very start it showed the policemen suffering the consequences of their actions and, from season to season, it changed focus from the black underclass to neglected union workers at the docks, teachers, politicians and journalists all making their own desperate attempts to deal with the eroding social fabric.

The Wire is profoundly televisual. Weisberg praises the show though for its ability “to portray the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature.” Such literary comparisons have been widely made — The Wire is frequently painted as Dickensian by critics, but it is closer to Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine in its profound humanity, breadth of scope and realistic cast of characters whose centrality varies in any given story. Ultimately though, the comparison with literature is flawed. In Dickensian fashion, Simon’s writing is rich in social critique but television, unlike literature, has no recourse to the interiority that is the sine qua non of the literary. We never know what the characters are thinking, only what they are doing, over and over again.

Films are often too short to allow for the types of examination that systemic scrutiny demands. Although occasional cinematic epics like Abel Gance’s 1927 Napoleon, Mankiewicz’s 1963 Cleopatra or Lanzmann’s 1985 Shoah are able to bring several hours of inspection of both people and systems, that breadth of scope is a rare exception. A season of 13 programmes has a series of rhythms and micro-rhythms, repetitions and variations that is simply not attainable in a single long-form film. These remarkable films echo down the decades but, unlike The Wire, their profundity is inexorable (a gradual unfolding) rather than incessant (a continual series of variations on a theme). The Wire has been compared to a movie because of its high production values and unremittingly intense dialogue. The comparison, though intended as a compliment, is misguided. Each of the five seasons is not a 13-hour movie, but a television series, with the driving cycles and repetitions that implies, meaning that each interaction is loaded with the weight of previous encounters. Each repetition and reevaluation is like the cyclical reading and reinterpretation of the Torah and, more universally, like the repetition of the working week.

Taking its cue from its niche on the subscriber network HBO, The Wire is deliberately dense, layered and occasionally just plain difficult. Itself a product of the new television world of the 1990s, the cable network HBO did not rely on fickle advertisers but on subscribers. The Wire took full advantage of the creative freedom to push the boundaries of verisimilitude both in characterisation and dialogue. It became famous for its constant (and, by all accounts, realistic) use of the word ‘fuck’. The script of an epiphanic five minute scene where detectives Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) and William ‘Bunk’ Moreland (Wendell Pierce) revisit a murder scene is entirely, and brilliantly, made of up f-word cognates.

The show has redefined the limits of televisual form and evolved a whole new language of television. Through short episode-long cameos and long multiple-season story arcs, Simon and his co-writers have created an encyclopaedic dramatis personae of nuanced, fully realised characters including black and white dockers, union leaders, lawyers, politicians, drug runners and disadvantaged 6th graders. The complex, lifelong relationship between the childhood friends who run the Barksdale drug gang in the first three seasons is no less lovingly explored for their status as murderers. Perhaps the show’s greatest achievement is giving the African-American underclass a fair voice and a realistic context.

According to Simon: “All the things that have been depicted in The Wire over the past five years — the crime, the corruption — actually happened in Baltimore.” But, as with his book Homicide, the depth of sympathy that Simon is able to elicit from his audience, is the key part of a fiction that makes you not only believe in it, but care about the situation. For example, straight-speaking Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen) is a would-be reformist politician who sees with some clarity what needs to be done, but vested interests are against him and, as he observes in the fourth season, voting is deeply racial: “I still wake up white in a city that ain’t.” Carcetti wants to make a difference but the price of power is compromise and the cost of compromise is the cutting edge of reform. Despite their intentions and backgrounds, there is, in the end, little difference, between the almost comically corrupt black politician, Senator R. Clayton ‘Clay’ Davis (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) and the newbie Italian American one. Both have learned to play the system and yet both are, in their own ways, its victims.

But, like Woody Allen’s early films about New York, the central character of The Wire is the city of Baltimore itself. Concrete power and unrealistic hope are the twin powers corrupting the city and, by extension, America. In thrall to an untrammeled local and global capitalism, the local community is victim to those in power and failsto hold either individuals or institutions responsible. At the heart of this failure lies the cursed American hope, which deludes and distracts in equal measure, suggests Simon. The advanced technology, after which the show is named, and which promises so much proves useless to the students in the under-privileged schools. Instead it is incorporated into the plans of the drug gangs on the streets, into the smugglers’ cover-ups at the automated docks, and misused in the new world of web-journalism.

By following legitimate and illegal institutions in parallel, Simon critiqued not only the democratic product, but the democratic process as it is lived in 21st century America. Teachers, lawyers, policemen and city bureaucrats are subject to the same systemic dehumanisations and temptations as drug runners and drug sellers. The difference between their motivations is tiny. That they do not end up in the same trouble is as much the result of their initial privilege as it is a result of their resolution. In its portrayal of good intentions gone bad — not least in the heart-rending depiction of Bubbles (Andre Royo) the perpetually reforming drug-addict, caretaker and part-time informant — it savages the banal, yet fatally distracting hope that lies at the heart of the American dream.

Even when concerned with something other than simple escapist entertainment, Hollywood has found it difficult to liberate itself from the personal. Whether highlighting the impact of General Motors’ factory closings in Roger and Me (1989), Reagan-era AIDS policies in Philadelphia (1993) or energy company cover-ups in Erin Brockovich (2000), health insurance in John Q (2002) or a hundred others, the critique is narrow and anecdotal. Only rarely does the corporate movie set-up address the systems that affect the success of the protagonist. In contrast, The Wire focuses explicitly on systems and institutions, from drug policing, unions, politics, education to the media in each of the series respectively. As Simon himself has pointed out:

“We are not selling hope, or audience gratification, or cheap victories with this show. The Wire is making an argument about what institutions — bureaucracies, criminal enterprises, the cultures of addiction, raw capitalism even — do to individuals.”

With movie-lite budgets, movie production values and poetic license, The Wire provides perhaps the most profound dramatic insight into the tragedy of America’s structural problems yet seen. The most damning revelation is, however, that well-intentioned people can hardly make a difference. By awarding a 2010 MacArthur Genius Award to Simon, the MacArthur Foundation added their imprimatur of approval to this dramatic insight. But, the brilliant, well-intentioned team behind The Wire seem, as they would surely have suspected, to have made no difference.

Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, two great Jewish intellectuals of the early twentieth century and lifelong friends, took opposing sides on one of the great Jewish debates of modernity: was it possible to create a perfect community in an imperfect world, or did the world have to be changed first?

Scholem believed in the utopian collective—a partial redemption in the here and now—while Benjamin saw any solution other than global revolution as usurping the prerogative of the Messiah. In 1923, Scholem emigrated to Palestine to help build a utopian community. A series of letters between the two men, covering religion, politics, Marx and Kafka, illustrate the passion of the debate between Communism and Zionism, the two philosophical positions warring for the heart of the interwar, vulnerably assimilated, European Jew.

At the heart of their discussion lies the failure of the Enlightenment to assimilate Europe’s Jewish population. France,the home of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, had been rocked by the Dreyfus affair, and the full extent of Jewish vulnerability was exposed and felt everywhere. Scholem, a scholar of Jewish mysticism, responded to this failure by turning to theology, attempting to root utopia in the revival of the mystical tradition. Benjamin, on the other hand, rejected Zionism and progressive politics, believing that a superior, Communist, universality could emerge from the Jewish position in Europe.

Neither man was typical of their political tribe. Scholem’s ‘Cultural Zionism’ placed him apart from mainstream Zionists, who wanted to found a powerful Jewish nation state excluding the Arab population of Palestine. In a letter to Benjamin reporting on the 1931 Zionist Congress, Scholem describes his Zionism as a ‘religious-mystical quest for a regeneration of Judaism.’ He also warns of parallels between the attacks upon him—a ‘deracinated intellectual’—by the mainstream Zionists who deplored his ‘Diaspora mentality’ and those attacks upon Jewish intellectuals by the German far-right.

He rejected a future for the Jews that was not based upon reviving an authentic experience carried by the fundamental texts of Judaism. Underpinning his utopian collective was this command from Exodus: ‘You shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites’. Not only did it dissolve the distinction between priest and non-priest, unifying the sacred with the profane, but it made each person equal. For Scholem, this particular type of Zionism represented the fulfillment of Jewish theology. Even before he emigrated to Palestine, he argued, in his 1918 text ‘On the Bolshevik Revolution’, that there could not be a revolution for the Jews, as this would be tantamount to building the messianic kingdom without the Torah. Founding a Jewish collective in Palestine along these lines should synthesise theory and practice. In 1933, when Benjamin contemplated emigrating to Palestine, Scholem warned him that only if he were able to ‘feel completely at one with this land and the cause of Judaism’ would his emigration to Jerusalem be a success. For Benjamin however, Judaism, as the experience of marginality and the failure of assimilation, denoted the impossibility of feeling completely at one with anything, including Judaism itself. The contra- dictions between theory and practice, the individual and community, politics and theology, were, for Benjamin, testament to the unredeemed state of the world and the necessity of Revolution. Rather than Palestine in 1933 he chose Paris, embracing the very experience of marginality and exile that had prompted Scholem to emigrate.

Was it possible to create a perfect community in an imperfect world, or did the world have to be changed first?

In Benjamin’s work, after his Marxist turn in the mid 1920s, there could be no immediate return to the teachings of Torah. His figure of the ‘angel of history’ represents a critique of Scholem’s understanding of Judaism, particu- larly, his notion that ‘all that befalls the world is only an expression of this primal and fundamental galut (exile)’ Of the angel, Benjamin writes: ‘his face is turned towards the past.Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.’ Communism, he believed, had the power to raise the dead through the force accumulated through past political action (even when that action had failed):

It is not in the form of the spoils that fall to the victor that [refined and spiritual things] make their presence felt in the class struggle.They manifest themselves in this struggle [of the oppressed] as courage, humour and fortitude.They have retroactive force and will constantly call into question every victory past and present of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward the sun which is rising in the sky of history.

With his commitment to political action, Benjamin takes his place in a canon of Jewish Messianism that asserts humanity’s role in achieving redemption. He translates this into Marxist terms:

Not man, or men but the struggling oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden.

Benjamin’s ‘Jewish interpretation’ of Marx enacts a short-circuit between partiality (the agent of redemption is the working class not humanity as a whole) and a stronger universality (the inclusion not only of present and future generations among the redeemed but also the past generations of the downtrodden).

Both Benjamin and Scholem take as their starting point the inauthenticity and vulnerability of assimilated European Jews, but for Benjamin, the response of Zionism, even the variety advocated by Scholem, was a betrayal of what was essential to Judaism. The sharpest description of this Zionist tendency comes from Benjamin’s friend Ernst Bloch: Zionism was a denial of the Jews’ ‘power of being chosen as the agents of redemption’ and entailed the assimilation of Jews, previously a internationalist, group, into the system of balkanised nation states. Even in Scholem’s ‘cultural Zionism’, the attempt to found healthy socialist communities of the previously excluded represented a refusal of the link between Jewish marginality and universality in favour of partiality and fixed national identity in which all contradictions were resolved.

For Benjamin, Judaism denoted the impossibility of feeling completely at one with anything, including Judaism itself

Both Benjamin and Scholem’s politics were defeated. Scholem’s anarchic cultural Zionism was marginalised by mainstream Zionism, which adopted the reactionary policy towards the Arabs that he always feared, and created Israel as a nation state like all others. Benjamin killed himself fleeing the Nazis, who, in turn, extinguished the possibilities of European Jewish Communism. However, there remains something to salvage politically from Benjamin’s rejection of Zionism: how the refusal of fixed identities and the easy resolution of contradictions cannot be undertaken in the name of a complacent liberal cosmopolitanism, but instead always carry a link between marginality and the universal. The contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou’s link of foreignness to universality in the absolute defence of immigrants repeats this:‘let foreigners teach us at least to become foreign to ourselves, to project ourselves sufficiently out of ourselves to no longer be captive to this long Western and white history that has come to an end, and from which nothing more can be expected than sterility and war’.

Tom Gann is a political activist and former Labour Parliamentary Candidate. He blogs on politics as part of the Labour Partisan collective at labourpartisan.blogspot.com

‘Security. A word that these days seems simultaneously both to conceal so much and to reveal so much.’ – John Berger

A man is told that he will die from a fall. Such is the terror this generates in him that he decides never to leave his home again. But confining himself to his house doesn’t remove the fear.A sense of security is not so easily gained, for fear has its own authority. He could, after all, fall down the stairs—he lives in a mansion and there are many flights of stairs. So he decides,‘for safety’s sake’, to confine himself to the ground floor. But soon he realises that the floors downstairs are polished: couldn’t he easily slip and break his neck? The dining-room, however, is fully carpeted, so he decides to live only in that room. Ordering his staff to serve his meals there, he never leaves the room. Yet still he feels unsafe: he thinks,‘I could still stumble and fall, hit my head and die’. So he orders an armchair to be placed in the middle of the room, away from all sharp objects and hard surfaces and—in a moment of triumphant certitude —insists that his servants tie him down into the chair. A sense of security descends. No danger now of a fall, he thinks. The loss of his freedoms is nothing compared to the relief that his fear can never come true. But when he hears the rustling above him, and feels grains of plaster on his skin, he looks up and sees the ancient crystal chandelier over his chair unmoor itself from its casing and begin to fall towards him…

I read this story as a child and it has never let me go. Today, Iassociate it with the quest for ‘security’: the efforts of individuals, groups and nations attempting to design projects that will guarantee their security.The recurring fantasy of total control over one’s fate was mocked millennia ago within the Biblical myth of the Tower of Babel.Yet we still try to design a solution to what is essentially a psychological and existential dilemma: that none of us knows how or when we will die. The story reminds us that viewing the world through the prism of our fears restricts us in damaging ways. It also reminds us that the stories we are told—and tell ourselves—can shape our fears, as well as contain them and that this world-view can unwittingly catalyse the very thing we fear. The world may be a dangerous place, but more often than we are aware it is we who make it dangerous.Although we know there are people ‘out there’ who hate us, it can be hard to bear the reality that ‘security’—what it is, what we need in order to achieve it, where it comes from, and what we feel threatens it—is an internal experience. Implicitly, this story invites us to construct more life-enhancing stories than those ghosted by our fears.

I recently had a conversation with a young Jewish woman who was preparing a Channukah pageant for local children at the provincial Arts Centre where she works. She’d been approached by a woman in a hijab and a conversation had ensued. The woman said she’d just arrived in the UK from the Middle East with her child and was exploring the neighbourhood.The Centre’s publicity had caught her eye and she was wondering if the event was open to everyone. Something about this conversation felt ‘troubling’: the visiting woman seemed ‘glassy-eyed’ and had a ‘vacant’ look; she seemed rather needy and during a follow-up conversation the next day she hadn’t seemed satisfied by the resources offered to her that were available in the area. The woman telling me this story started to wonder if this woman was hiding something: why should a Muslim woman be interested in the details for a Channukah event? Perhaps she was a suicide bomber and this open event, where anyone was welcome, would make a perfect target. Perhaps, she thought, she should cancel the event, just in case.

She called the CST—the Jewish community’s self- appointed ‘Community Security Trust’—to report her suspicions and seek advice, which was duly provided. Although she felt they were ‘measured and reassuring’ in their response, she nevertheless decided, on reflection, to cancel the event. She regretted the lost opportunity for children of all faiths and none to come together, dress up and celebrate, but once her anxiety had been triggered she couldn’t rid herself of her ‘gut feelings’.

This story—and it is not a parable—filled me with an immense sadness. I knew that this enlightened young woman had a sound understanding of how we uncon- sciously project onto others disowned feelings from within ourselves, and then feel ourselves threatened by those very feelings. If even she had succumbed to collective Jewish unease about Muslims, what hope was there for our collective well-being in the UK, when the community is led by those with a less psychologically-informed and more outwardly belligerent approach to questions about security?
Who will reflect on the ways in which our own unconscious aggression, our own explosive rage, is projected—so that we feel we live in a hugely insecure world that is liable to blow up in our face, metaphorically or literally, at any moment? Who or what can we trust, we say, if we can’t trust our ‘gut feelings’? Our deep fear of annihilation may be generated in the earliest stages of our lives and can re-awaken when catalysed by a current situation; or it can be projected forward as a picture of our future.

Here the personal and the collective merge. As a community, have we any sense of the historically-deter- mined unconscious hostility we hold within us that is continually being projected that we are then obliged to protect ourselves from? And what terrifying crimes do we unconsciously imagine we have committed that would need to be punished by all those aggressors ‘out there’ waiting to attack us?

We are driving ourselves mad because of a spurious fantasy: that there is something called ‘security’ that we can achieve and possess.

The stories we tell ourselves—about the persecutory world ‘out there’ and the undying hatred of our enemies— provide a sort of comfort: they offer a coherent narrative for our lives. By constantly reaching for and repeating the same familiar story—the story of our insecurity—we unconsciously fabricate for ourselves a kind of security. It is, of course, a pseudo-security, but its advantage—it offers ersatz ‘meaning’—can outweigh (and help us avoid) the painful psychological task of facing up to the innate vulnerability that is intrinsic to being human.
We are driving ourselves mad because of a spurious fantasy: that there is something called ‘security’ that we can achieve and possess. But feelings of ‘insecurity’ are psychological, spiritual, existential – such feelings can’t be eliminated by more of this chimera we name ‘security’.

Today, bitachon is used in modern Hebrew to mean ‘security’ in a military/political context. It’s travelled a long way from its original meaning in Biblical Hebrew: ‘trust in what we cannot see’. The prophet Isaiah demanded trust in the unseen and intangible—‘God’—rather than in human power alone. Of course since the Shoah such trust has been exposed as hopelessly naïve, even dangerously deluded. In our post-Shoah world, where bitachon has become secularised, Jews put their trust in what they can see, and in the power of their own hands. Who dares to disagree with this pragmatism? Who would disavow this realpolitik? Even the religious settlers on the West Bank with HaShem in their hearts have an Uzi in their hands.

So is that to be the last word on ‘security’? Is that what a 3000 year-old tradition of Jewish struggle to articulate a moral vision comes down to? ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition’? Perhaps Isaiah’s understanding needs re-visioning. Perhaps to experience ‘security’ we need a renewed faith in aspects of ourselves that we Jews used to attribute to the Holy One of Israel: a capacity for compassion and reverence towards other human beings, a capacity to discern forms of idolatry that offer false security, a capacity to transmute anger into a passion for justice, and an enduring capacity for truth-telling that holds the impossible tension between love of the Jewish people and a responsibility to the ‘other’, the stranger, the outsider, who may never love us but whose well-being is still our concern.

Rabbi Howard Cooper is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice, the Director of Spiritual Development at Finchley Reform Synagogue, and an author. His latest book is The Alphabet of Paradise: An A-Z of Spirituality for Everyday Life. He blogs at www.howardcoopersblog.blogspot.com

So wrote Gershom Scholem to his colleague Franz Rosenzweig in his 1926 letter, ‘A Confession about our Language’. Scholem, a young Jewish philosopher from Berlin, had just immigrated to Palestine. He was among the founders of Brit Shalom, an organisation that supported the establishment of a bi-national Jewish-Arab state, and was concerned not only by the dominant political trends of Zionism, but with its very tongue, with the project of reviving, modernising, and secularising Hebrew. Scholem believed that recruiting the sacred biblical language for the modern political Zionist cause would plant a messianic ticking bomb in the hearts and minds of the Jewish people in Palestine.

The echoes of ‘God will not remain silent’ still whisper in the streets of Jerusalem, eighty-four years after these words were written. Although Scholem feared that religious sanctity would either dominate or destroy the people, he did not anticipate the more complex, ambivalent relationship that Zionism would form with religion. He did not assume that the very political struggle that facilitated the return of the Hebrew language actually included asking God, very politely, to remain silent. This attitude enabled the founders of Zionism and the majority of Israelis today to pull out of the sea of Jewish knowledge religious precepts that support their agenda. Like skilful pearl divers, Israeli society has brought up to the surface only those glowing stones which have Zionist purposes, and kept those which do not (including those in which God himself is mentioned) deep at the bottom of the ocean.  Consider some of the more popular Israeli-Jewish ‘moral validations’ of state policy. These validations, drawn exclusively from Jewish tradition and texts, have become part of the political consensus, and secure the place of religion not just in the ‘secular’ political debate but in wider Israeli-Jewish society.

Ha-Ba le-Horgekha Hashkem le-Horgo is a teaching of increasing popularity among Israelis.  Taken from the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 72:1, its most precise translation is: ‘If someone comes to kill you, get up early to kill him first.’ It seems that every online newspaper Comment section will include this sentence when discussing Israeli aggression: the Gaza offensive? ‘Kill him first’. The Second Lebanon War? ‘Kill him fi rst’ again. A Google search for the expression ‘kill him first’ and ‘flotilla’ yields more than 4,200 Hebrew results, confi rming the centrality of this narrative.  This convenient license to kill extends beyond the online community to Israeli decision makers and politicians. Following the Second Lebanon War, Ehud Yatom, a Likud MK, explained the asymmetrical death toll of 44 Israeli civilians and 1,191 Lebanese civilians with the same trump card:

‘and if someone comes to kill you, get up early to kill him fi rst.’ It has been used by Minister of Strategic Affairs Moshe Ya’alon when addressing university students about their military reserve service and by Minister of Public Security Avi Dichter when lecturing about IDF strategy. It was also the explanation provided by Minister of Minorities Avishai Braverman for the assassination of a Hamas leader in Dubai. Even Ayoub Kara, a Druze MK from Likud, has used it. When asked about the Iranian nuclear plan Kara showed little originality: ‘I think an attack on Iran will be justifi ed’, he said, ‘since if someone comes to kill you, get up early to kill him fi rst.’ Meharsayikh u-Makharivayikh Mimekh Yetse’u is another overexploited formula. Translated as ‘your destroyers and devastators will depart from you,’ and taken from Isaiah 49:17, this sentence has become Israeli society’s remedy for criticism that comes from ‘within’—from Jews, either Israeli or Diaspora. It stems from a refusal to acknowledge wrongdoing and brands all critics ‘destroyers’.  From Gideon Levy’s Haaretz articles on the eviction of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah to Judge Goldstone’s report proving that IDF soldiers shot at Palestinians waving white fl ags, the chorus rings out: ‘Destroyers and devastators will depart from you.’ Also for Channel 10’s Shlomi Eldar when he dares to say that ‘Hamas is not a diabolical junta’, and for the eminent Israeli poet Natan Zakh, who supports the end of the siege on Gaza, even volunteering to swim there. The Israeli Government’s recent revival of the embarrassing ‘Ministry of Propaganda’, offi cially known as the Ministry of Public Affairs, effects a similar principle—it ignores the dissenting voices from within Israel, rejecting them as ‘destroyers’ rather than as concerned players. In other words, Israel is not going to rethink its policies, but will only strive to explain them better.

Almost as popular as these two precepts is‘Aniyei ‘Irkha Kodmim, loosely translated as ‘the poor of your city take precedence over the poor of a different city.’ Taken from the Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 71:1, this is used by Israelis to justify the

preferential treatment of Jews. It is quoted almost every time human rights organisations highlight the inferior treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel or the living conditions for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. The use of this quote has intensified lately due to the debate about the thousands of refugees and migrant workers threatened with deportation. The fact that many of them have children who were born in Israel, or that deporting them would endanger their lives, does not convince large parts of the Israeli public, who cleave to principle of the ‘precedence of our poor’. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Finance Yuval Steinitz announced that at the heart of their plan to reduce unemployment is a strategy of encouraging Israelis not to hire migrant workers, and emphasised that ‘precedence of the poor of your city’ is a sacred principle.  This Talmudic proverb has also served well during wars and military operations. One month before the Israeli attack on Gaza, Yossi Peled, a Minister from Likud, gave a good ‘Jewish’ explanation for the future use of excessive force. ‘I don’t want to hurt the Palestinians living in Gaza Strip, but we need to defend ourselves, or as the Jewish tradition teaches: “The poor of your city take precedence”’ Six weeks later, the poor people of Gaza had buried 1,400 men and women.  These three verses, overused in Israeli-Jewish discourse, exemplify the hijacking of ‘Judaism’ to suit the Zionist programme. It is therefore not surprising that they are much more popular among ‘secular’ and national-religious Jews in Israel than among the traditionally Orthodox Jews. Interestingly, when considered in their religious context, their assumed meanings appear to be quite different. ‘Get up early to kill him first’ refers in contemporary Israel to the pre-emptive strategy of the Israeli military, particularly the notion of defensive rather than offensive action.  The expression supports the Israeli ‘self-defence’ theory by presuming that all enemy casualties are caused either in response to a previous act or a pre-emptive ‘response’ to a future act. But the original verse refers to an individual acting in self-defence, and there is no indication that this teaching applies at state level. Indeed, one can even argue that the sacredness of life lies at the heart of this precept, since it sanctions killing only to preserve life, and only when the enemy is coming to kill you. It is anything but a religious ‘license to kill’. Similarly, ‘your destroyers and devastators will depart from you’ originally taught that foreign elements will eventually leave the country they are trying to destroy and carries no reference to internal criticism and how to handle it.

Zionism’s basic separationist aspirations—Hebrew labour, a Hebrew market, a Hebrew state—have been nurtured and protected by the belief that ‘the poor of your city take precedence over the poor of a different city’. In contemporary Israel, this verse provides a pseudo-religious justification for racist practice, while in its original context it is closer to our own ‘charity begins at home’. According to the Talmud, if two people request a loan from the same rich person and he or she is unable to help both of them, that wealthy individual is ordered to be more generous with the poor of his own city, regardless of religion. In the case of ‘the Jewish state’ of Israel, ‘the poor of your city’ are actually the Palestinians and the migrant workers who remain socially and politically disenfranchised.

Selecting religious texts for political use is not a Jewish invention. But the selected adages, which all stem from a Diasporic experience, acquire new meaning and dangers when used by a majority in a sovereign state, and even more again when that state also happens to be the strongest military power in the Middle East. Ironically, Israeli society attributes fundamentalist readings of religious text to Islam, choosing to deny its own decontextualised following of violent texts. With respect to Bava Metzia, the Sanhedrin, and even to the Prophet Isaiah, there are texts more central to Judaism with more urgent lessons for Israeli society: ‘Foreigners living among you will be treated like your own people. Love them as you love yourself, because you were foreigners living in Egypt’ (Leviticus 19:34).  A clear threat to Zionism’s founding principles, this has been marginalised, together with God, and more politically comfortable quotations selected.  Israeli scholar Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has summed up the relationship between Zionism and ‘secular’ Judaism: ‘There is no God, but He promised us the Land.’ God has indeed been left outside the Israeli political debate, replaced by the People and the Land of Israel. Slowly but steadily, concepts such as ‘the State of Israel’, ‘the Arab’, ‘security’, or even the Iranian ‘existential threat’ have been shaped through misquoting of Jewish religious texts, a process aided by national institutions like the Chief Rabbinate, the IDF rabbinate, and the Religious-Zionist movement.  Gershom Scholem warned that God would not remain silent in the language that invoked him thousands of times. The revival of Hebrew and its common use in Israel did not bring God into the lives of ‘secular’ Jews but instead created a dangerous validation of contemporary political dilemmas with the authority of ‘omnipotent’ religious texts.  Contemporary Hebrew with its ancient Biblical resonances grants this political-religious God-free coalition the illusion of entitlement. How long God will remain silent is another story.

Yonatan Mendel is completing a PhD on the relationship between security, politics and Arabic language studies in Israeli-Jewish society.  The research is conducted at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. He is the co-editor of ‘Reflections on Knowledge and Language in Middle Eastern Societies’, which will be published in 2011.

In between beatings and arrests by the police, we managed to hold a bilingual (Hebrew and Arabic) Selichot evening with both Israeli and Palestinian participants. It began with a joint study of Talmud portions on repentance and forgiveness and continued with the chanting of Selichot and Palestinian poems in front of the stolen houses in Sheikh Jarrah. We also built a Sukkah in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, with young Israeli and Palestinian children working together and preparing decorations. This Sukkah was demolished as an illegal building by the munici- pality’s inspectors minutes after it was set up; they neglected to give any excuse why our Sukkah was illegal while thousands of Sukkahs all over the city are considered legal. And every several weeks we conduct a full Shabbat evening ceremony in this tormented neighbourhood, with prayers, Kiddush, and dinner.

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Adam Foulds lives in London. He is the author of two novels and a narrative poem. He was named the Sunday Times Young Writer Of The Year in 2008, and has won the Costa Poetry Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the 2009 South Bank Show Literature Award. His recent novel, The Quickening Maze, was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize.

Mohammed Khatib is a member of the Bil’in Popular Committee. He was born and raised in Bil’in.

Attorney Limor Yehuda is the director of the Human Rights in the Occupied Territories Department at ACRI (The Association for Civil Rights in Israel) and submitted the petition against the closure of Route 443 on behalf of ACRI.

Faced with far more pressing problems than the seemingly mundane matter of how to conduct its elections — war, enemies intent on its destruction, integrating hundreds of thousands of immigrants, building the new state, etc. — Israel ‘temporarily’ continued with the system. And it has been stuck with it ever since.
Israeli national parliamentary elections are conducted under a form of Proportional Representation, one of the variants of what is known as the Party List System.
Each party submits a list of up to 120 names — the total number of seats in the Knesset, the unicameral national legislature — which are elected nationwide (Israel being one single electoral district).
Following an election, Knesset seats are distributed as per the order on the lists — if party ‘A’ receive five seats, the individuals listed one to five on their list are elected to the Knesset.
The leader of the party deemed most likely to be able to form a government is invited to do so by the (otherwise ceremonial) State President. If they are not able to, within the timeframe allotted, another party can be offered the opportunity to form the government instead. The leader of the party who succeeds in forming a government becomes Prime Minister.
The only regulating factor in the virtually unimpeded translation of votes into seats is the Threshold, a bar that has to be passed before a party can be eligible to win a seat.
Until the elections for 13th Knesset (1992) the Threshold was one per cent, and during the 16th Knesset (elected 2003) it was increased from 1.5 per cent to two per cent. This is one of the lowest in existence in any PR system — with countries like Turkey placing it at 10 per cent, and with one as high as 20-25 per cent in Eire — which has proven increasingly significant to Israel’s political fortunes as the decades have passed.
The role a regulating mechanism like the Threshold plays in such a system is vital, with its size having a huge bearing on the ability of parties to win seats.  Where the Threshold is low, small parties have an opportunity to secure parliamentary representation, and thus many participate; when the Threshold is high, only parties with higher levels of public support have a chance to win seats, and therefore fewer parties participate.
The Threshold also influences possibly the single most important function of any electoral mechanism: the ability for a government to emerge from an election. When the Threshold is low the chances of a clear winner are low, for it is most unusual in modern democracy for a party to win over 50 per cent of the national vote, and coalitions become inevitable.
However, when the Threshold is high the chances of a clear winner increase significantly: votes of parties failing to pass the Threshold are either discarded or redistributed, meaning that a party winning less than half the seats can secure more than half of the seats.

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What voice exactly was this? What was it saying? More importantly, for whom was it speaking?

If the tangible feelings of dismay, paralysis and incredulity around me were anything to go by, whole swathes of Anglo-Jewry were left unspoken for.

Urgently, it seemed, a platform was needed for those unheard voices. The following is a transcript of the first conversation organised by the JQ to establish what these voices might be saying. What are the issues? How might they be broached? How, as a community, might we manage these differences?

The conversation was chaired by Jonathan Boyd (acting director of Jewish Policy Research). The participants were Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg (Rabbi of New North London Syngogue), Douglas Krikler (Chief Executive of the UJIA), Paul Usiskin (Co-chair of Peace Now UK), Geoffrey Alderman, (Columnist, Professor of Politics & Contemporary History at the University of Buckingham) Kevin Sefton, (Limmud Trustee) Joseph Finlay (Musician, involved with Jewdas and the Moishe House), Keith Kahn-Harris (Sociologist, convenor of New Jewish Thought www.newjewishthought.org) and Daniella Peled (journalist and analyst who specialises on the Middle East).

JB: What’s the problem? Can we define it? Do we have a shared understanding of what the issue is in the community?

GA: Why are we here? Is there a reason why we’re here? Is there a problem? I know some people around here. We talk. We have different views but maintain a civility towards each other.

KKH: Being willing and able to talk to anybody is unusual in the Jewish community The dominant mode of intra-Jewish politics is to refuse to talk to people and appear on platforms with them. Some people feel personally damaged by their encounters. Some feel pariahs. It creates a lot of disquiet and hurt and affects the community dynamic.

JW: Ignoring everyone else in the room momentarily, I find the things I say to myself about Israel difficult. I worry that it ceases to be a moral example of the kind of Judaism I, as a rabbi, believe in passionately.

I say to myself that I do not understand how this country has a future and how it’s going to survive. I think the most appalling things are being done to it. I say to myself that the world treats it wretchedly, and I tend to think those things all at the same time. I feel guilty about saying this and I feel hopeless a lot of the time — that is a struggle. I see the Jewish world in an existential crisis of a different kind completely to the shoah, but great in magnitude.

GA: Would you not feel the same about Britain? I moralise about Britain.

DP: No one questions whether or not you’re a self-hating Briton. People care about Israel and get upset…more than might be reasonable.

GA: I don’t find this at all. Perhaps I’m meeting the wrong kind of Jews. People walk out of talks I give, but never over Israel. Maybe it’s because in academia we have tradition of free dialogue.

DP: I thought we did in Judaism.
DK: The assumption that there is no debate in the Jewish community about Israel is patently wrong. You only need to look in the JC; the letters pages, the columnists. In any shul community there will be discussion. There are constraining factors and we need to find a way to escape those constraints, which come from within and without.  Many people feel dislocated from any position because there is a degree of defensiveness from the more established elements of the community — understandably because of some of the external pressures. People who want to have a more nuanced, sophisticated, and honest discussion are squeezed between the lack of openness within certain sectors to hear that debate, and the nervousness about giving succour to ‘the enemies of the community’. So there is a conflicting set of dynamics within the community which causes dislocation. We need to find a way to reduce those constraints which hamper people’s ability to speak out

The onus is on the mainstream, established, organised elements of the community, to enable and contribute to the creation of a space where all views on Israel are acceptable, and where people feel they can express those views without being ostracised.

KKH: Does that extend to those who question Zionism?
DK: Of course it depends how you define Zionism. If I can define myself as a Zionist but never have any intention of going to live in Israel that’s one thing,when you start to unpick these terms you see how loaded they are.

Zionism is a term used by enemies of the community as a substitute for Judaism. A Jew using the term may have a very different understanding.

What does Zionism mean? It depends who you ask. We have to determine the starting points and parameters. When the baseline of a conversation is an acceptance of the right of Israel to exist, anything else I think is completely open for debate. One can question the nature of society in Israel, policies of Israeli government, morality within  Israel, Israel with reference to rest of the world, us as Jews with reference to Israel.  If one’s starting point is to question the legitimacy of the existence of the State of Isreal, it becomes very much more problematic.

My sense is that there is a need to have an honest debate within the community without being ostracised. But you can’t be naïve: that debate takes place within a broader context, where there are others who don’t have such a benign set of motivations behind questioning and criticising Israel.

PU: I search daily in Ha’aretz and Yedioth Achronot these days to find some residue of something optimistic. But I find little aside from debate about whether the figures of 250 or 236 innocent Palestinian lives are acceptable collateral damage. I don’t go near the JC anymore. I don’t see a place in that paper for the views that I held, let alone the views I hold now. I also find myself viewing communal responses to Israel as something of an outsider. I last viewed the community at Trafalgar Square. When I was there on behalf of Israel, in 2002, there were some 60,000 people there, this time there were around 6,000, which shows that there are a hell of a lot of conflicted Jews out there.

DP: Is there a place in the mainstream community for your views? The big organisations with funds are supposed to represent the Jewish community but how could only one body represent the Jewish community? It certainly couldn’t over Israel. Maybe over shechita, maybe over religious legislation. Israel is the biggest alienating force, certainly when it comes to the younger generation. Why would you want to be involved in something so contentious? It’s a complete turn off.

DK: You can’t dismiss all of the young people involved in Israel-related activity in what you might call a traditional way; 50 per cent of all Jewish 16-year-olds go on an Israel tour, 20 per cent go on a gap year.

For many people, Israel is not a turn off and they are trying to find ways of engaging with Israel in a way that is relevant to them. To the surprise of many, some of the programmes we’re involved with in Israel are not the traditional Rightist Zionist stuff: we are actually challenging the development of society in Israel today, engaging with people of all ethnic and religious backgrounds, as well as environmental issues. These are not the sort of things traditionally associated with a mainstream Zionist organisation, and this has caused us to have debates within UJIA to challenge received wisdom about what engaging with Israel means.

DP: I think things are changing. Take someone going to university today — do they have to defend Israel on campus? Is it a positive engagement to have to defend Israel on campus and in the media?

DK: You can’t pretend that doesn’t exist. The debate and the grappling with issues in Israel doesn’t take place in a vacuum. The reason Jews on campus need to defend Israel is because it’s a very short step from the attacking of Israel, to the compromising of people’s ability to lead Jewish lives on campus.

KKH: I’d like to argue that the events in Israel since December — the Gaza War and the election of Lieberman — represent an enormous opportunity for the Jewish community: it’s clear that the old Israel solidarity narrative is falling apart. The low attendance at the recent rally in Trafalgar Square, the fact that one synagogue movement (Liberal Judaism) refused to take part, the fact that in a letter to the Observer a number of leading Jewish communal figures were critical — albeit in a coded way — of what was going on in Israel.

I think that the consensus is breaking apart both at the leadership level and at the grassroots level. But there’s any opportunity here to do something that has to be done which is to democratise the community. The community has got a lot better at dealing with religious difference, I think the antagonism between reform and orthodox is much less, although it still goes on, and I think the task now is to do the same with Israel and I think the election of Liberman is where it has to happen because when he comes to London (and at some point he will come to London if he’s not put in prison for fraud first) there is going to be a choice for the community: do we roll out the red carpet as usual? There are some senior members of the community who will not be able to. The consensus cannot hold anymore. You can see that negatively or positively.

JW: I think the rally presented all the different directions. One of the reasons why I went, even though I was critical of some of what was going on in Gaza was that people told me they’d seen banners  saying ‘kill the Jews of London’. That was sufficient for me to feel that one cannot be frightened out of public space. I went there feeling extremely torn but was happy to bump into people from the Three Faiths Forum as I think what they stand for is closely related to what I stand for. I was asked to come on the platform but said I didn’t want to and I was walking around the edges a non-Jewish person said to me ‘unforgivable slaughter’ and walked on. I have to speak about this; I am in a public position and not to speak would be an act of cowardice. The conclusion I’m coming to is that criticising the right of Israel to exist is far further than anything I believe in but I have to find those organizations, those people in Israel who represent the values I care about. I agree there are opportunities here but they are opportunities accompanied by pain.

JF: The debate is about what institutions with money and power ought to be doing. Doug’s comment that Jews should be able to take any position on Israel is fantastic and I think that most of us would broadly agree with that. But you put a limit on that: the Jewishness of the state. So let’s agree, for the sake of argument, to take that position. Within that position you could publicly condemn the occupation, the wall, the war on Gaza. You could propose a boycott of settlement goods, even a boycott of all Israeli products for the aim of ending the occupation. If there was genuinely free debate all those things would be legitimately up for discussion, but let’s see how far away we are from that: would voices within the UJIA, the Board of Deputies, the JLC, the JC be able to publicly say those things? Of course not, we’re miles away from that.  But that’s the logic of that really brilliant position that Jews should be able to say anything about Israel! I don’t understand the comment that you can say anything but if you criticize the Jewishness of the state you’re beyond the pale. Why should one who is a principled anti-nationalist who doesn’t believe in states based on ethnicity be somehow outside the conversation. The idea of a state for all its citizens was part of Zionist thought at a certain point in history so, it should still have a place in the debate. Also this notion of Zionism as being contested, and indeed it is contested: let’s imagine we get rid of the word altogether. Let’s imagine youth movements don’t have to have ‘Zionist’ in their title in order to get funding. I think though that if we agree to this openness and this approach we should recognize we are quite far away from here and should think about how we could get there.

KS: I am taken by this idea that the starting point should be the right of Israel to exist. If I went into a room full of Jews and said I’m not really sure if God exists, people would engage with me. They would have strong arguments but would listen to what I have to say. But if I said Israel should not exist as a Jewish state the atmosphere would become uncomfortable and awkward.

The amount of money we spend on sending young people to Israel is interesting. Part of this obligation to support Israel is built up through programmes people go on. That we need to invest all this money in ensuring they talk about Israel in an appropriate way highlights how difficult it is for us to talk about it.

DP: Should the baseline be the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state or the right of Israel to exist?

DK: My baseline is the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state run along democratic lines with equality for all its citizens before the law.

GA: Israel has to exist within a certain world order. I’ve criticized Israel on many occasions however to deny the right of Israel to exist is racism. Anglo-Jewry is very different today than it was in May 1948. There is no table long enough for all members of Anglo Jewry to sit at. We now have a  series of overlapping circles with ends that don’t talk to each other and don’t even recognise each other as Jews. We’ve become pluralized and polarized. Maybe that’s why some of us experience an emotional difficulty when talking about Israel. Zionism was at one time the unifying force of Anglo Jewry and is now the most divisive. I don’t mourn this but try to live my life within it. I heard a lecture at Hebrew University a long time ago that the borders of the state of Israel would change over 150 years. They would expand and contract, it would take a long time to for Israel to settle into its true shape within the Middle East. We are in the middle of this and we don’t know the end game. But let us be civil to each other as we are around this table.

JW: Nothing is outside discussion because eventually one has to confront everything, but not caring if Israel is wiped off the map is morally unacceptable. The question of the relationship in Israel between Jewish and democratic, however, is an essential, unavoidable question.

I find myself weeping many times over things especially the Gaza war. But my biggest difficulties are with the West Bank, particularly the eviction from houses. Certain anti-Zionist comments are racist, but certain actions of the State of Israel are definitely racist. I’ve heard from people and I’ve seen with my own eyes that they’re not accidental but part of a clear policy of wanting to remove non-Jewish inhabitants from certain key areas. I worry this is part of a process of long-term defeat for Israel. In the end, and this is a rabbinic matter, ultimately Judaism is much greater than Israel.

JF: There is no table big enough for these views. Can we just agree not to be saying things in the name of all of us? The things that happen, the solidarity demonstrations  and delegations to government on behalf of the Jewish community- I just don’t understand how any this can be representative. It strikes me that the model is to have a proper debate between right and left as was done at LJS, rather than waiting to hear what the rabbi says. Let’s stop trying to have The Jewish Position, particularly on Israel.

GA: There is no Jewish position.

KKH: People will fight tooth and nail to defend their position. People in representative institutions, who are often very dedicated and able, believe that the jewish community is under threat, criticism of Israel usually goes too far and to defend anglo-jewry you need to take this position. I disagree with this position but I understand those who hold it and also the bad effect of it. It comes back to the word democratization, which is a painful process.

DP: It’s only been 60 years since the foundation of the State of Israel. Both sides have a lot of growing up to do. We still have this idea that we need to look after Israel, we need the UJIA, and the jewish national fund. We need to give money to israel, to defend Israel at home. We believe Israel is the only safe place for jewish people around the world. We shouldn’t shy away from debating these things and also the responsibility of Israel to the diaspora. The age of mass aliyah is over, we now have a drip of people from western countries at great expense supported by organizations like nefesh b’nefesh but even the remaining jews in Russia want to stay in Russia. Our old ideas of Zionism and supporting Israel need to change but we’re too insecure and we don’t want to wash our dirty linen in public. Jews are terrified and always have been of giving succour to our enemies. But if that’s how we define ourselves we’re still living within our old ghetto walls, despite being British citizens in a liberal democracy. There is no future, no dynamism, no progress.

KS: It’s the debate that matters. What is the right forum to have discussions which will allow people to inform themselves and maybe change position. We should have people from all sides joining the debate. I am appalled by the whitewashing of all Palestinians as terrorists who all want to destroy Israel.

DP : You can’t fight a war unless you demonise the enemy or enemies: other Jews are enemies and other people in Britain are also enemies. Where is the place to demonstrate if you’re Jewish and against the Gaza war. Do you go to Trafalgar sq rally or the JFJFP? Where is the place for someone who isn’t protesting as a Jew?

JB: In 2002 we saw a turning point in British Jewish history: the mass demonstration was a very public statement of solidarity with Israel. Prior to that the prevailing ethos was to keep well below the parapet. But we have reached a point where people are really struggling with their relationship with Israel and it’s problematic to have an establishment with such an exuberant, new-found voice.

KKH: It is a fantasy that one can take a position on Israel which is apolitical, consensual and safe. The Jewish community has not learned that great feminist lesson: everything is political.

I like seeing Jews demonstrate, even for things that appal me. But there are 270,000 Jews in the UK. There should be ten different demonstrations. Look how terribly depolitised all the Zionist youth movements have become. All of them have taken the king’s shilling and become part of the centralised structure. Habonim, Bnei Akiva, FZY, Beitar should all be having their own demonstrations because on paper they represent different points of view. But they’ve adopted this myth that one can show solidarity and be unified in a consensus. It’s a contradiction of how the Jewish state was formed. It was created in a completely fragmented Jewish world: there was virtually a civil war in 1947-9 between the revisionist and the mainstream Zionists. Davka, these divisions helped propel the Jewish state forward. People who are politicized are motivated and dynamic. They achieve things.

DP: We have lost our dynamism. We’re not arguing about the issues anymore. We’re not arguing about the occupation or the future of Zionism. We’re arguing about the argument – is the BBC biased, over who stands up and are they acceptable or not. I guarantee you try and have the debate about the future of Zionism and it will revert to the Guardian, the Independent, Melanie Philips and a certain number of columnists. The debate has become circular and we’re losing dynamism and becoming fragmented.

JW: Given that these difficult things are happening in the Middle East and not here, it’s important to find a way to express oneself in that arena, mainly through supporting those people who are doing courageous work out there. There is some level of decision. We can decide how we spend the money we and other institutions raise and this can make a difference.

PU: We need to look for a way to have this dialogue with Israelis. If we have issues with the morality of Israeli government policy we should be discussing it with Israelis. The Jewish Agency, which is as much of a joke as the Jewish Leadership Council, was supposed to be the place where people in the galut met with people in Israel to discuss and make decisions about substantial matters to do with the state. It’s no longer a meritocracy — people who give the most money sit there. The shift in Israel moved long ago from listening to European voices to American voices, which are now beginning to coalesce around not should we but when should we say these things?

RL: is there a respectful language which could enable a closer listening….?

KKH: Behind the scenes I’ve been trying to meet with senior Jewish leaders to discuss just that – to see if there is something not as formal a code of conduct but certainly a statement to say we will not use a certain language within our discussions. I think it’s possible for people to sign up to a minimal statement that would undertake to avoid certain types of language.