Last year saw a new front opened up in what has been described as Israel’s democratic recession. This time, it was the country’s proliferation of left-leaning non- governmental organisations that came under attack from legislation that would see such non-profits sharply curbed by limits placed on their foreign funding. Amid proposed bills that would limit the independence of the Supreme Court, ban calls to boycott goods produced in Israel or the settlements and penalise those who taught that Israel’s birth in 1948 was a ‘nakba’ or catastrophe, the danger to dovish non-profits came as a new blow to what remained of the Israeli left. Some of those particularly targeted for criticism included the New Israel Fund, B’tselem, Adalah, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. The willingness of governments — mainly in Europe and northern America — to assist and grant funding to such Israeli organisations dedicated to human rights, civil society and a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has given the right another opportunity to accuse these groups of disloyalty to the state. It has also opened up fresh ways to legislate against the funding of left-wing NGOs. The original proposals to limit NGO backing have somewhat run aground amidst the controversy, but fresh ones have been put forward in their wake. These new bills would prevent governments from donating to NGOs that support, for example, Israeli officials in international courts or encourage refusal to serve in the army, while other foreign donations to NGOs would be taxed at 45% unless the non-profit was already part-funded by the government or exempted by the finance ministry.

It seems curious that NGOs have become such a sensitive issue when it could well be argued that the very foundations of the state of Israel rest upon their existence. In the nascent stages of Zionism, community-organised services went a long way to founding institutions responsible for creating the fabric of the new Jewish society. Most were financed by Jews from abroad. One of the oldest, now known as Yad-Hanadiv, was set up by the Rothschild family for settlement and industry in Palestine and amongst its other achievements can claim credit for helping to build the Knesset and Supreme Court. British Jewish philanthropist Moses Montefiore was another proponent of this drive, among other things financing some of the first neighbourhoods to be built outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. But these were not just organisations run by rich foreign donors; many communities throughout Europe had a communal trust which financed Jews living in Palestine, not all Zionist. The ultra-Orthodox financed yeshivas and the livelihoods of their students in Jerusalem, Safed and Hebron, and their funders helped build many neighbourhoods in these cities.

From the 1920s, the Zionist movement developed a semi-governmental framework handled by
what today could be described as NGOs

Jews have always given money to fund social causes, and both the Zionist and non-Zionist communities in pre-state Palestine were very much dependent on money coming from abroad, to kick-start new communities, develop agriculture and sustain new immigrants. From the 1920s, as the Zionist movement began to consolidate itself, a semi-governmental framework began to develop, handled by what today could be described as NGOs. These institutions served as a parallel Jewish administration set apart from that run by the British Mandate. It became known as “ha-medina she’baderech” — the state on the way. The Kupat Cholim health service, for instance, was founded in 1911 by the union of agricultural workers in Yehuda, near Petach Tikva, with the idea of providing medical insurance and treatment to workers. In the late 1930s, it became a division of the Histadrut, the workers union, and by the 1940s they had established whole hospitals. Similar organisations supplied other social needs and financed the building of civilian infrastructure, planting of forests, school networks, vocational training colleges and the new Jewish universities. The British Mandate government was nominally in charge of supplying services to the local population but the Jewish community was eager to set up its own system. While some of the finance was from special taxes and fees paid by the local Jewish users, these institutions were, to a great degree, subsidised by the largesse of Jewish philanthropists from around the world, not all of them rich — many middle-class and even poor Jewish families contributed to the building of the Promised Land.

‘When the state was established, with strong socialist values, its ideological position was that a strong central government should provide services’

This trend began to change after 1948.“When the state was established, with strong socialist values, its ideological position was that a strong central government should provide services,” says Rachel Liel, the head of the New Israel Fund. Most of the functions of the Jewish Agency — which until the creation of Israel had functioned as the de facto government — were absorbed into the state, apart from aliyah and foreign fundraising. Health was channelled through the government — with the Histadrut continuing its central role as a virtual part of the government, as both were run by the Mapai party until 1977 when the sweeping victory of the Likud heralded a change in the state’s ideological framework. A number of social, financial and political developments from this period onwards changed the basic framework of Israel’s social services sector, not least the breakup of much of the financial holdings of the Histadrut which either went bankrupt or were sold off, as well as an increasing trend of privatisation and greater affluence in the economy.

This expansion is not a uniquely Israeli phenomenon, and can be seen in various forms throughout the world, as Benjamin Gidron explains in a paper for the Israel Democracy Institute entitled ‘The Israeli Third Sector: Patterns of Activity and Growth, 1980–2007’. “Globalisation processes and privatisation of public services, the weakening of governments and increased awareness on the part of certain groups and populations regarding the potential benefits of self-organising — all contribute to the third sector’s growth,” he writes. “These factors have transformed that sector into an important factor in the economy, society, and polity.” But this seems to have been taken to somewhat of an extreme in Israeli society, which now has one of the highest numbers of registered non-profit organisations in the Western world. “Slowly but surely services were delivered by the private rather than the public sector,” says Liel. “Most social services are no longer provided by the government but by a service sector. A very major part of the third sector in Israel are services — for elderly, housing, disabilities — which have contracts with the government who provide them with policy guidance, supervision and funds.” According to the latest figures available from the Ben Gurion University of the Negev Israeli Centre for Third Sector Research, there are currently over 40,000 registered third sector organisations in Israel, although only about a third of these are active. An average of 1,500 new organisations register annually, and this sector constitutes roughly 13% of the country’s GDP. According to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, total donations to NGOs in 2010 were estimated at 16.2 billion NIS, with about two-thirds estimated to come from foreign sources.

The NGO sector in Israel has been profoundly affected by the growing influence of ultra-Orthodox parties within the ruling coalitions. While the Haredi education networks have remained largely independent of government control, the ultra-Orthodox parties have demanded and received government funding for their schools, girls’ seminaries and yeshivas. The government grants for these are channeled through non-profit NGOs. As a result, 26% of the NGOs in Israel are dedicated to religious aims, with thousands of small operations attached to synagogues and schools, and major ones including El Ha-Maayan, the main NGO run by the Shas political party, and Tzeirei Chabad, the central NGO supporting Chabad-Lubavitch operations in Israel. 16% deal with health and social affairs, another 16% are concerned with culture and entertainment, 15% finance education and research, 12% deal with general philanthropy and the rest are dedicated to social change and development.

In many cases, it has proven easier for the government simply to hand over funding rather than work at incorporating Israel’s diverse groups

Another reason for the proliferation of NGOs in Israel is the country’s babel-like cultural diversity. Orthodox Zionist philosophy championed the melting pot but the state has had to confront the desire of various groups to retain their own particular character as well as control over their internal affairs. In many cases, it has proven easier for the government simply to hand over funding rather than work at incorporating these groups. Establishing specific NGOs ensures that special interests are taken into account. These NGOs can function like pressure or interest groups but beyond special interest groups there are also NGOs for non-minority causes such as feminism.

Women’s social change organisations, such as the veteran Israel Women’s Network lobby group and Kolech which fights for women’s rights within the religious community have made important contributions towards creating change in gender issues, especially at a time when many note a hardening of positions towards women. A right-wing government containing ultra-Orthodox parties seems unwilling to oppose an apparent trend to exclude them from public life, with attempts to segregate public buses and limit women from participating in civic and military forums.

As the Israel Women’s Network’s founder, the feminist campaigner Alice Shalvi told the Jerusalem Post, female leadership faced a particular challenge “in this male chauvinist society, in which military considerations are such a determining factor in what happens. This patriarchal and paternalistic attitude stems not only from our security situation, but also from Judaism, which is a patriarchal religion”.

The strong female presence across the NGO sector can be seen as a response to the more macho excesses of a militarised society. Many of the women’s NGOs have eschewed a hierarchical structure in favour of a collective approach.This is especially notable in groups like Machsom Watch, a movement of Israeli women, who, since 2001, have conducted daily observations of IDF checkpoints in the West Bank and along the separation fence, as well as monitoring events in the offices of the Civil Administration and in military courts. Also operating as a collective is Who Profits? a research project investigating the commercial involvement of Israeli and foreign companies with the occupation and initiated by the Coalition of Women for Peace.

Valeria Seigelshifer, who now works for the Women’s Forum For a Fair Budget, has been employed in the NGO sector since 2003. In nearly 10 years, she says, “all my bosses were women. Maybe they are more willing to listen to their employees, to other views and to share and take decisions in a more inclusive way. Opinions are taken into account; maybe it’s more democratic.” The NIF’s Liel agrees. “My feeling, cautiously, is that the NGO sector in Israel is more dominated by women employees and directors,” she says. “There is more conversation and dialogue, rather than power imposed, and more mentoring and sharing rather than hierarchy.”

‘Previously, this political left would usually take the blows, now the NGOs take the fire’

The other phenomenon in the Israeli third sector, as so acutely highlighted by last year’s attempted legislation, has been the rise of NGOs campaigning for human rights in recent years, such as Breaking the Silence, which records the testimonies of former IDF soldiers, and Yesh Din, documenting abuses in the occupied territories. This rise may be ascribed to the decline of the political left in the country, which battered by the second intifada and a general turn rightwards within society, has shrunk to near-negligible proportions. The current Knesset has just eight members of the Labour party, five members of its breakaway party Ha’atzmaut, and only three representatives from Meretz. Without a substantial opposition to reign in the excesses of the current administration, it has fallen to NGOs to raise critical voices and challenge.

“What’s unique about our situation in Israel is that human rights NGOs are being targeted as scapegoats because the political left are so weak,” says Roy Yellin, a political consultant working with many human rights organisations. “Previously, this political left would usually take the blows, but since they don’t have enough representation in the Knesset, now the NGOs take the fire.”

“In Israel major areas of concern in human rights — the occupation and Palestinian citizens of Israel, for instance — are perceived as working against the interests of the state

Another aspect particular to the Israeli situation, he adds, is directed by the Jewish nature of the country. “In any other democratic, modern western country, if you were working to aid refugees or marginalised communities, you wouldn’t be seen as doing something against the state,” he said. “In Israel major areas of concern in human rights — the occupation and Palestinian citizens of Israel, for instance — are perceived as working against the interests of the state. This contradicts the modern concept of nationalism — for instance, that a French citizen is French no matter their religion. In Israel, if you are working for the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel, you’re a traitor.”

The growth of left-wing NGOs has conversely led to a rise in oppositional non-profits. One such group — NGO Monitor — aims to uncover what it calls “the insidious motives of a range of human rights organisations”, and argues that, in terms of foreign funding, “both the amount of money given to NGOs and the quantity of these types of NGOs are not found elsewhere…there are no other cases where sovereign, democratic countries manipulate the internal political affairs and promote opposition policies in another sovereign, democratic country in this manner and to this extent,” the organisation claims.

To back up its claims, NGO Monitor published accounts sourced from the Israeli Registrar of Non- Profits, noting that groups such as Ir Amim, which campaigns over the status of Jerusalem, had received funds from the EU, the UK, Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands and Switzerland amounting to NIS 2.7m in 2009, 73.9% of its total donations. In the same year, Yesh Din relied on NIS 3.12m of funding from Belgium, the EU, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, the UK and Ireland — 72.4% of its total.

Another leading light in the counter-movement is Im Tirtzu, a neo-Zionist grouping which ran a notorious campaign featuring NIF board chair and former Meretz MK Naomi Chazan with a horn emerging from her head. The counter-movement has progressed single- mindedly towards its aim of marginalising those ‘disloyal’NGOs. “They are very effective at raising money and have better political strategists than our camp, as well as better co-ordination and better synchronising with government,” notes Yellin.

It is by no means certain whether the campaign against the NGOs will succeed. Netanyahu himself in November 2011 pulled the law which he had initially supported “for redrafting”, perhaps dismayed at the level of criticism from Jewish leaders abroad and senior politicians in friendly governments. British Foreign Secretary William Hague had said his country was “deeply concerned” by proposals to pass legislation to limit foreign funding. “This would have a serious impact on projects funded from the UK and elsewhere to support universal rights and values and would be seen as undermining the democratic principles the Israeli state is founded on,” he added. And Israel’s attorney- general Yehuda Weinstein warned he would be unable to defend proposed legislation in the High Court should it be approved by the Knesset, noting that they would deal “a harsh blow to a long list of constitutional rights, including freedom of expression, freedom of association and the right to equality”.

‘Working for the rights of women, Israeli Arabs — this isn’t anti-Israel, this is pro-Israel’

Perhaps the ferocity of the attacks are evidence of the sector’s influence — “if something is so marginal and non-influential you don’t need to outlaw it,” notes Yellin, predicting that human rights and social justice NGOs will emerge stronger from the maelstrom. But others, including Liel, see foreign funding as essential for the survival of this sector, and the sector as essential for the survival of democracy. “Working for the rights of women, Israeli Arabs — this isn’t anti-Israel, this is pro-Israel. Those trying to frame it as anti-Israel have an agenda and need to be exposed,” she said, adding, “If a lot of this funding goes, then this sector will cease to exist. I can’t be more passionate about this — a democracy without a human rights sector is no longer a democracy.”

Daniella Peled is editor at the Institute of War and Peace Reporting. A former Foreign Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, she writes widely on international affairs.

Liberal Zionism is in vogue. It underpins the thinking of groups like J-Street, Yachad, and the New Israel Fund, as well as the writings of figures like Peter Beinart and Gershom Gorenberg. They claim that liberalism and Zionism can be fused. Some even claim the two are complementary, asserting that Zionism’s socialist origins lend it a collectivist penchant for social justice and action. It is particularly popular amongst Zionists outside Israel, keen to find a brand of Jewish nationalism that matches their liberal proclivities and chimes well with their belief in the importance of equal rights. It has become prevalent lately largely as a response to the perceived anti-democratic excesses of Netanyahu and Lieberman. Rhetorically, “Liberal Zionism” appears to offer the possibility of supporting Jewish national self- determination while still holding true to the principles of liberty and equality for all.

Peter Beinart is fast becoming the pin-up boy of the Liberal Zionist movement.

Peter Beinart is fast becoming the pin-up boy of the Liberal Zionist movement. An American political scientist and journalist, his New York Review of Books essay, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” generated intense international debate when it was published in June 2010 and reached record inboxes virally. His new online group blog, the virtual ‘Zion Square,’ which was launched in March 2012 to provide a platform for “conversation” among a selected group of political thinkers and activists, explicitly states: “We believe in a two-state solution in accordance with the liberal Zionist principles articulated in Israel’s declaration of independence.” Beinart’s latest book, The Crisis of Zionism, launched at J-Street’s 2012 conference, is similarly premised on Liberal Zionist principles. Beinart believes that the original Herzlian Zionism was both a nationalist movement and a liberal one. Though he accepts that there is a tension between the two, he does not view it as any more problematic than the tension between, say, economic development and environmental protection, or government spending and fiscal discipline.

The problem, according to him, is posed by the illiberal Zionism unleashed by Israel’s territorial acquisitions during the 1967 war, and the subsequent establishment of Jewish settlements beyond the so-called ‘Green Line.’ In Beinart’s words, “to the west of that line, Israel is a flawed but genuine democracy. To the east, it is an ethnocracy. In the Israel created in 1948, inequities notwithstanding, citizenship is open to everyone. In the Israel created in 1967, by contrast, Jews are citizens of a state whose government they help elect; Palestinians are not.” Alongside this political injustice, Beinart identifies another problem: a vicious cycle, “in which the illiberal Zionism beyond the green line destroys the possibility of liberal Zionism inside it” by breeding intolerance towards both Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel. Fearful of the imminent destruction of Herzl’s democratic dream, Beinart effectively appeals to the most powerful leaders of the American Jewish establishment to recognize the urgency of the situation, and support a return to the original liberal variant of Zionism. In so doing, he holds out a tantalising opportunity to a new and bewildered generation caught between the unapologetic ultra- Zionism of the right and the disillusioned non-, anti- or post-Zionism of the left: that they can reconcile these increasingly conflicting aspects of their identities — the liberal and the Zionist — and that in seeking to square that circle they are effectively fighting “the battle every Zionist generation wages against itself.” Not surprisingly, Beinart appears to be acquiring an iconic status in some circles, especially among young Jewish liberals.

Some argue that Zionism is an exclusionary ideology that privileges one ethnic group over another

Yet there are those who question this fusion of liberalism and Zionism. Some argue that Zionism is an exclusionary ideology that privileges one ethnic group over another, and as such is inherently incompatible with liberalism, which is premised on equality. Several writers and academics share this perspective, including Oren Yiftachel, a political geographer at Ben-Gurion University, who regards the ‘Jewish and democratic state’ formula as an oxymoron akin to ‘hot ice.’ Yiftachel argues that the common scholarly and political attempts to portray the existence of ‘Israel proper’ within the ‘Green Line’ as ‘Jewish and democratic’ are both “analytically flawed and politically deceiving.” Instead, he argues that the whole entity, territorially and politically, ought to be characterised as an ethnocracy, which he defines as “a non-democratic regime which attempts to extend or preserve disproportional ethnic control over a contested multi-ethnic territory.” Yiftachel’s argument partly stems from what he regards as Israel’s history as a settler society, marked by ethno-nationalism and the ethnic logic of capital, with its resultant discriminatory land laws and planning policies.

But Yiftachel’s argument is not merely about history; he also points to the inherent conceptual incompatibility between liberalism and Zionism, which seeks to simultaneously privilege one group while guaranteeing equal citizenship for all. In this, he is supported by Nadim Rouhana, a legal scholar at Tufts University, who emphasises, “a Jewish state in theory and practice means privileging Jewish citizens over all other citizens [...] There are few honest observers in Israel who dispute that a Jewish state, by definition, privileges one group of citizens over another.” Given these internal inconsistencies, the journalist Joseph Dana wrote in the Israeli blog-based web magazine +972 that “liberal Zionism, as used today, is a dangerous and, in some profound ways, dishonest system of thought.”

Liberal Zionists come in many shapes and sizes. The UK based Labour Friends of Israel recently published a collection of essays “Making the Progressive Case for Israel” that introduced a conscious re-branding of the organisation using Liberal Zionist arguments and phrases. Lorna Fitzsimons, the former CEO of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), which is “dedicated to creating a more supportive environment for Israel in Britain,” adopted a similar approach, announcing in The Jerusalem Post, “We are launching a campaign to win back and hold the centre ground alongside many other communal organizations. We are launching the progressive case for Israel and driving the campaign for the Left to support it as a Jewish state.” The UK’s Union of Jewish Students also shifted to a liberal Zionist approach with the launch of their ‘Liberation’ campaign in September 2011.

Some liberals are genuinely struggling — or hugging and wrestling, as they themselves often describe it — with Zionism in a bid to reconcile their love for the Jewish state with their belief in social justice. Finally, there are those who doubt the coherence of Liberal Zionism, and in turn the Jewish and democratic state formula, but who nevertheless support Liberal Zionist organisations that make a valuable contribution to equal rights in Israel. For example, some supporters of the New Israel Fund may question the premise of the organisation, yet acknowledge the importance of the Fund’s investment in groups at the forefront of the struggle for civil and political rights in Israel, like the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.

“At the heart of the Zionist project is the struggle to reconcile these two valid but conflicting ideals.”

Beinart accepts that the principles of Zionism and liberalism are absolutely in tension. “There will always be tension between Israel’s responsibility to the Jewish people and its responsibility to all its people, Jewish and non-Jewish alike,” he explains, “at the heart of the Zionist project is the struggle to reconcile these two valid but conflicting ideals.” At the same time, he defends the pairing, arguing that the tension between them is neither indicative of one of the values being illegitimate, nor irreconcilable. But are Beinart’s analogies, comparing the tension in liberalism and Zionism to that between economic development and environmental protection, or government spending and fiscal discipline, appropriate? Might other analogies be more appropriate, those in which the two terms are fundamentally at odds with one another, such as the contradiction between heredity and meritocracy, or evolution and creationism?

Much of this debate hinges on the definitions of “Zionism” and “liberalism.” Liberalism, like Zionism, has been through several historical incarnations, and can now be understood as incorporating many things from a loose sense of liberty or equality (themselves arguably in tension) to liberal democracy as a political system, free and fair elections, constitutionalism, and human rights. Liberalism evolved from a focus on ‘negative liberty,’ the reduction of government intervention in the lives of individuals, to incorporate ideals of ‘social liberalism,’ in which the state was obligated to protect its citizens through welfare support. Despite these various, sometimes competing, definitions, it appears that most political theorists agree that liberalism incorporates some notion of individual rights, universal equality and civil liberties.

Zionism, in most of its incarnations, is an ethno-centric political ideology

By contrast, Zionism, in most of its incarnations, is an ethno-centric political ideology committed to returning the Jews to, and sovereignty in, Eretz Yisrael. Though this may be conceived in more territorially expansive terms (Revisionist Zionism) or twinned with certain socialist economic arrangements (Labour Zionism), the underlying assumptions seem to be that Jews constitute an ancient nation, or people group; that they require self- determination to protect themselves from timeless and annihilationist anti-Semitism; and that the logical site of that self-determining entity ought to be the historic Land of Israel.

It seems that this ideology, which privileges one group on the basis of their membership in an ethnic, religious or national group, is inherently at odds with a political philosophy premised on individual rights and universal equality: a state founded by and for the Jewish people, living both within and outside of its territory, cannot also be a democratic state for all its citizens within territorial limits. It is illogical to claim that everyone is equal, yet some are more equal.

The debate about Liberal Zionism is not only about concepts. It is also about history.

But the debate about Liberal Zionism is not only about concepts. It is also about history. Ever since the founding of the State of Israel, the theoretical privileging of Jews within Zionist ideology has resulted in widely documented discrimination in the allocation of resources in Israel, especially access to land and housing, and government budget allocations. Though the socio- economic indicators suggest improvements in the lives of Israel’s Palestinian citizens (as they prefer to be identified) over time, they remain one of the poorest groups in Israel, have a lower life expectancy than Jewish citizens, and their infant mortality rate is twice as high as that of the Jewish population. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), around 50% of Israel’s Palestinian population lives in poverty, compared to around 15% for Jewish families. Palestinian citizens of Israel are vastly under-represented among university students in Israel, making up only 8.1% of all university students in 2003, less than half their share of the country’s population. The gaps between the Jewish majority and Arab minority are the result of multiple factors including large Arab families, the low participation rate of Arab women in the labour force, the overall lower skill level of the Arab workforce, and discrimination in the labour market. But discriminatory state policies and neglect by many Israeli governments have also contributed to this gap, particularly visible in the area of land planning and rural-urban development; in 1949 Jews owned 13.5% of the land. By the 1960s they had 93%. The upshot is that Arab towns and villages have a high population density, and Arab homes are overcrowded.

Perhaps the most serious discrimination has occurred in relation to population policies. Zionism was not only a nationalist movement that saw itself as a revival of an ancient people and a solution to rising levels of European anti-Semitism, but also a settler colonial project that sought to establish a Jewish nation- state in a region populated predominantly by non- Jewish Palestinians. Ironically, the goal of establishing a democratic Jewish state, with a Jewish majority, necessitated a range of population policies to ensure first the creation, and then the maintenance, of that Jewish majority. Population displacement, especially in 1948 and 1967, combined with discriminatory immigration policies, according to which Jews are effectively entitled to automatic citizenship via the Law of Return while Palestinian refugees who fled, or were driven from, their homes in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war are barred from returning. According to the sociologist Christian Joppke at Bern University, “Israel cannot be a liberal state, with a non-discriminatory immigration policy, unless it ceases to be Jewish. Its Jewishness prevents Israel from ever coming to rest within its territory, and from becoming a ‘state of all of its citizens.’” At times, there have also been unofficial discriminatory fertility policies intended to increase Jewish and decrease Palestinian fertility. The 1970 Veteran’s Benefit Law, for example, offered increased child allowances to families in which at least one member had served in the IDF.

In the UK, those who advocate discriminatory immigration policies are not regarded as “ultra-liberals.”

Liberal Zionists often share these demographic fears, pointing out that their support for the two state solution stems from their fear concerning the threat to the Jewish majority posed by retaining areas containing large numbers of Palestinians. For the same reason, many support the continuation of Israel’s selective immigration policies, in particular the Law of Return coupled with the continued barring of the ‘Right of Return’ to Palestinian refugees. The self-described “ultra-liberal Zionist” Larry Derfner says that he would “do away with all the discrimination, except in one area — immigration.” In the UK, those who advocate discriminatory immigration policies are not regarded as “ultra-liberals.” Quite the reverse, they are seen as ultra-nationalists, aligned with the British National Party (BNP) or English Defense League (EDL).

The contradiction of Liberal Zionism, in turn, has serious implications for the “two state solution,” which envisages a Jewish and democratic state alongside a Palestinian and democratic state. The analysis above suggests problems with at least half of that formula. Moreover, the ethno- national logic and exclusivist tendencies of Zionism may be mirrored on the Palestinian side; there are already worrying demands from some Palestinians for a Jew- free Palestinian state. At minimum, Jews left inside the future Palestinian state are likely to experience the same second-class status as Palestinian citizens of Israel. This would not be surprising; anti-colonialist nationalist resistance movements often come to embody the very entity they have fought so hard to throw off.

To resolve this problem one could redefine Zionism and Palestinian nationalism by removing the discriminatory ethno-national elements of both. Within a two state framework this would look as follows: The Palestinian side would be required to forgo an exclusivist conception of the state premised on ethno-national Palestinian peoplehood transcending geographical boundaries, in favour of a more inclusive legal-territorial citizenship with Palestinian symbols on the flag and national holidays. On the Israeli side, this would entail abandoning the original Herzlian notion of Jewish self-determination, and limiting the ‘Jewish’ element so that it included only symbols, like the Star of David on the flag or Jewish festivals as national holidays. Such cultural symbols, though not innocuous, would render Israel akin to the UK, which has a flag comprising crosses and national holidays that are generally Christian in origin, yet no official policy of selecting or privileging citizens according to ethno-national or ethno-religious belonging or identity.

Do the (discriminatory population policy) means justify the (Jewish majority) ends?

These changes would not, however, ensure the continuation of Israel as a Jewish majority state or safe- haven for persecuted Jews. But is that conception of a state still necessary or has it become an anachronism? Even if it were necessary, do the (discriminatory population policy) means justify the (Jewish majority) ends? In other words, is the Jewish community prepared to accept un- or anti-democratic discriminatory policies in order to maintain the Jewish state? Can anything ever justify flouting democratic norms? Finally, can anti-Semitism be truly resolved by creating a state that perpetuates ethno- national difference, and institutionalises discrimination rather than promoting inclusive citizenship?

The debate about “Liberal Zionism” is not merely a conceptual or historical debate. It is both central to potential political solutions to the conflict, and to the debate about Jewish identity and its relationship to Israel. As ‘Zion Square’ develops, I hope that its contributors live up to their promise “to put front and centre the very questions that official Jewish discourse rules out of order,” in particular questioning Liberal Zionism itself. I also hope that those Liberal Zionists hugging and wrestling with complex ideas find the will and the courage to engage honestly with these questions. This may not be easy, but will be absolutely necessary to the future wellbeing of the Jewish people and Israel.

RESPONSE BY HANNAH WEISFELD

It is true that there is a tendency among those that define themselves as Liberal Zionists to displace the tensions between Liberalism and Zionism over the green line. The territory considered by the international community and a growing number of Jews to be illegally occupied — a place where 3.5 million Palestinians live without passports, freedom of movement and the right to vote for a government that controls their land, sea and air space to mention just a few of the implications of a 45 year old occupation — is not Israel ‘proper’ and therefore ‘Liberal’ Zionists can voice heartfelt criticism. It is seen to be legitimate criticism as it is tied up with ‘love’ for Israel and concern for its long-term safety and security. The conversation is on much tougher terrain when it comes to dealing with that considered to be ‘legal’ Israel — the territory within the 1949 armistice lines — as it calls into question the Jewish national project in its entirety.

The early Zionists comprised an eclectic mix of visionaries, each believing a nation state for the Jewish people would revive Judaism and the Jewish people in a way that continual dispersal in the diaspora could not. Herzl in particular was driven by the notion that without self determination — in the form of a political entity that could defend itself — the Jews would forever face the threat of annihilation. One could argue that Israel’s premier, Netanyahu, sees himself as a the baton carrier for the political Zionism of Herzl . In his latest interaction with Obama in the White House, in which the threat of a nuclear Iran dominated the conversation, he made clear that “…after all, that’s the very purpose of the Jewish state, to restore to the Jewish people control over our destiny.”

However, while anti-Semitism and pogroms served as one historical backdrop, it was by no means the sole motivating factor for many of these idealists. There were those who believed that Israel did not actually need to be a political entity, rather an opportunity for Jews to build a physical connection to the land, others who believed that the Jewish people would create a truly equal society if they refused to exploit local Palestinian labourers through a class based system, and others who, driven by God, were part of a different discourse entirely: the fulfilment of religious obligation. Underpinning these diverse beliefs was the 20th century discourse of nationalism. Amos Oz describes the modern state of Israel in relation to its early Zionist thinkers as a collection of dreams: ‘dreams can only remain wonderful as long as they don’t come true. But the real Israel is not one dream come true, but a conglomeration of dreams, fantasies, blueprints and master plan’. For many Jews, the dream being played out today is one that does not reflect the core Jewish values of equality and justice. Within the diaspora, and in fact among Jewish and non-Jewish communities alike, the actions of the Israeli government have become synonymous with the state of Israel which, in turn, represents the embodiment of the Zionist dream.

Zionism itself has come to be associated with an ongoing occupation and increasingly anti-democratic legislation

So Zionism itself has come to be associated with an ongoing occupation and increasingly anti-democratic legislation that seeks to marginalise dissenting voices within Israel, along with minority communities. It is for this reason that the widely acclaimed ‘Beinart theory’ of young Jews ‘checking’ their Zionism at the door of liberalism is playing out. It is not surprising, Zionism having been redacted so significantly, that there is a powerful drive within diaspora communities to reinvent a ‘brand’ of Zionism that can engage a new generation of Jews.

Organisations such as J Street in the USA and Yachad in the UK assert that the most urgent task of this generation of Zionists is to end the occupation and safeguard Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. As this can only be achieved by removing the ‘demographic’ threat of 3.5 million Palestinians, who most people believe, cannot and should not be indefinitely occupied, the choice must be either to give them the vote or give them their own state. So does this mean that Liberal Zionism fails to deal with the tensions existing within the green line, and is, therefore, an intellectually dishonest exercise in protecting what is, at its core, a rotten concept — a nationalist dream that will forever need to privilege one group over another? Is the very discourse of viewing a minority population as a ‘demographic threat’ entirely illiberal?

At the first Zionist Congress held on August 29th 1897 Herzl famously said ‘“In Basle I founded the Jewish state . . . Maybe in five years, certainly in fifty, everyone will realise it.’ On November 29th 1947, three months short of exactly fifty years, the United Nations voted into existence the Jewish state. The sense of urgency and visionary leadership which drove the Zionist movement in 1897 is today required by the Liberal Zionist movement of 2012.

The Liberal Zionism of the 21st century must continue to recognise the urgency of ending the Occupation

Liberal Zionism must not only to give legitimacy back to an ideology which was once considered to be core to our national self determination, but build a new narrative that will take the Jewish national project in the 21st century. The Liberal Zionism of the 21st century must continue to recognise the urgency of ending the Occupation, not least because of the grave threat it poses to the viability of a Jewish state. At the same time it must articulate a civic narrative for all the citizens of Israel, including the 20% that are not Jewish. This narrative will contain multiple, and sometimes conflicting versions of history, and accept that those holding the literal (or metaphorical) key to a home no longer theirs, form part of the story of contemporary Israel. Liberal Zionism will revisit the discussions of the early Zionists and understand that what was, for some, an attempt to build a Marxist utopia, resulted for others in displacement and economic hardship. The Israel of the new Liberal Zionist may not look like that of the old Zionists. Some of the symbols of statehood, and certain state institutions and mechanisms created during the years when the Jewish people were fighting a war of survival, may no longer be deemed fit for purpose. This is not a rejection of rotten ideology, it is modernisation.

While modernising, Liberal Zionism retains at its core the narrative of the Jewish people: the longing to return, the desire to have a place where Jewish people can feel safe both physically and psychologically, and a place where the revival of the Hebrew language and culture can provide sustenance to Jewish culture and tradition world-wide. This is the legitimate dream of successive generations and any national manifestation must, in part, be a reflection of the dreams of the people.

The Israel of the new Liberal Zionist may not look like that of the old Zionists

The task of defusing the tension within the term ‘Liberal Zionism’ has barely begun. Those already on task in Israel need the support of their fellow Jews abroad — Zionism was always a co-creation between the diaspora and Jews of Israel. Rather than dismissing the task as too great, or irreconcilable before it has even been tried, we can both hold onto the dream and bring it into a new world that looks and feels quite different from the original world into which it was born.

Rebecca Steinfeld is a Visiting Lecturer and Teaching Fellow in the history and politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict at the University of Birmingham. She received her doctorate in politics from St Antony’s College, University of Oxford.

Hannah Weisfeld is the director, and one of the founders of the pro-Israel pro-peace movement Yachad. Prior to this, she was involved in managing campaigns on a wide range of social issues including the conflict in Darfur and climate change.

By Gilad Atzmon

Zero Books 2011

Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights

By David Landy

Zed Books 2011

So contested has the issue of antisemitism become and so promiscuously is the term used that it is increasingly difficult tofind clarity amid the fog of frenzied debate. The publication of these two recent books provides a much needed opportunity to map out exactly where the borderline between disillusionment with Israel, anti-Zionism and antisemitism actually lies.

David Landy, an Irish-Jewish academic and Palestinian solidarity activist offers a sympathetic but not uncritical analysis of Jewish pro-Palestinian activism, based on extensive interviews. Through these he demonstrates that ‘Israel critical Jews’, as he calls them, are often motivated by a desire to reclaim their Jewish identity from Zionism, and it is through pro-Palestinian activism that many have actually come closer to their Jewishness. Further, some see themselves as providing a kind of guard against anti-Semitism within the wider pro-Palestinian movement. In these respects, most of Landy’s interviewees refute the criticism often made that Israel critical Jews are cynically ‘using’ their Jewishness.

The book raises complex questions about Jewish activists: Should they concentrate on convincing other Jews and transforming the Jewish community? Should they support groups within Israel itself? Should Jews support the Palestinians as Jews at all? Should Palestinians be the ones to set the agenda for activism? These are difficult questions, and the seriousness and sensitivity with which Landy and his interviewees address them does them credit, even if one disagrees (as I do) with some of the positions they take.

Israel critical Jews are subject to vituperative criticism from other Jews. They are accused of treachery, of being superficial ‘AsAJews’ and — most seriously — of being apologists for antisemitic anti-Zionism. Sometimes these accusations have merit and sometimes they are simply part of a self-perpetuating circle of intra-Jewish conflict. Amid these inflamed passions, the recent controversy over Gilad Atzmon’s now notorious book The Wandering Who?  superficially looks like another example of an Israel critical Jew being hung out to dry. In fact, Atzmon is a very different character and much more than a Jewish anti-Zionist.

The Wandering Who? is full of bluster, pompous verbiage and heroic posturing as Atzmon, an acclaimed jazz saxophonist and one of the disillusioned, self-exiled Israelis whose creative cynicism enriches the British cultural scene, seeks to explain his total rejection of Jewish identity. His argument is based upon the premise that Jews fall into three types: ‘those who follow Judaism’, ‘those who regard themselves as human beings who happen to be of Jewish origin’ and ‘those who put their Jewish-ness over and above all of their other traits’. The first two types are ‘harmless and innocent’ but ‘third category’ Jews are the real ‘problem’.

For Atzmon, in the post-emancipation era it is positively archaic and poisonous for Jews to maintain their ‘tribal’, marginal identities. Atzmon claims to be against what he considers the ‘myth’ of identity, and any kind of minority identity politics. We are all nothing more than human beings. While such a monolithic universalism may be oppressive and in any case unachievable, it doesn’t have to be anti-Semitic as any group identity would be invalid. But Atzmon only singles out one other group for his opprobrium — separatist lesbian feminists — and refrains from mentioning any other ethnic, religious or national minority identity as problematic. It seems that it is only Jews that destructively cling on to their identities.  By clinging onto Jewish identity, ‘third category’ Jews become part of a global network that ‘is all about commitment, one that pulls more and more Jews into an obscure, dangerous and unethical fellowship’. Zionism is just one part of a ‘unique political identity’ that is responsible for Western expansionism, and even the credit crunch (which Atzmon calls the ‘Ziopunch’).  Ultimately, Jews care only for achieving power and dominance, through Zionism and other means.

Atzmon reserves his greatest contempt for secular, left-wing, anti-Zionist Jews.  To campaign for universal values while identifying as a Jew is contradictory at best and mendacious at worst. To campaign as a Jew for the Palestinians and against Zionism is to automatically invalidate one’s own argument.  Since Jewish identity is the cause of Palestinian oppression, it cannot contribute to Palestinian liberation. Only through the renunciation of Jewish identity can those who are born Jewish bring peace and justice to the world.

Atzmon argues that the politics of anti-Zionist Jews, neo-cons and every other kind of Jew are simply part of one interdependent Jewish political identity, engendered by what Atzmon calls the ‘holocaust religion’. This predates the actual holocaust (which in any case Atzmon appears to be skeptical about, while not actually denying) assuming the latter actually took place and is a religion based upon an imagined fear of gentile hostility designed to perpetuate separation of the Jews from the rest of humanity. The holocaust religion, according to Atzmon, requires Jews to infiltrate all of society and politics. Jewish anti-Zionists and neo-cons alike are simply ensuring that Jews cover all the bases in their quest for political ubiquity.

The book is a peculiar mix of polemic, philosophising and personal narrative which creates a veneer of radicalism and up to date thinking. But, beneath it all, Atzmon is more conventional that he thinks he is. Ultimately, The Wandering Who? boils down to a number of hoary old anti-semitic tropes:

When Jews appear to be assimilating, they are really infiltrating and subverting.

When Jews identify themselves as Jews, they are primitive separatists.

Jews are obsessively concerned with attaining power and influence.

Jews are responsible for the hatred they attract.

The holocaust myth is simply a Jewish strategy to gain power through the world’s guilt.  The Wandering Who? is an anti-Semitic book certainly, but is it a dangerous book? So ludicrous are his arguments and so pompous is his tone that it is tempting to dismiss Atzmon as a crank. More genuinely disturbing is the fact that this book was published at all. Zero Books is a small company that has published some excellent quirky philosophy and intellectually rigorous criticism; they should have seen the book for what it was. (The book is endorsed by figures like Richard Falk, John Mearsheimer and Karl Sabbagh who, while strong critics of Israel and Zionism, should have heard alarm bells ringing when they saw the chapter entitled ‘Swindler’s List’). Ironically, it is precisely Atzmon’s Jewish background that gains him this platform, providing an alibi for his antisemitism.

Perhaps Atzmon has done us a service by illustrating exactly where anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism. In fact, anti-Zionist Jews, like Tony Greenstein, are among Atzmon’s most severe critics. Perhaps agreement over Atzmon might even provide the basis for a productive dialogue on antisemitism between Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews.

To the extent that Landy’s book is mostly carefully argued and certainly not antisemitic, it is perhaps unfair to compare it to Atzmon’s.  But both of them demonstrate the weakness of a certain kind of contemporary Jewish critique of Jewishness: it develops in ignorance of Judaism and the contemporary Jewish world.  To give one example of both authors’ ignorance, Landy says that Reform Judaism ‘may be developing into a syncretic Judeo-Christian religion’ and Atzmon doesn’t acknowledge that it even exists in his blanket statement that ‘Judaism is a non-reformable religion’.  Atzmon sees the apparent divisions between Jews as irrelevant, and Landy lumps all Zionist Jews into one monolithic bloc. Landy’s caricature of the Jewish community as filled with fervent Zionists who live in denial of the Palestinian plight may not be as antisemitic as Atzmon’s caricature of Jews as a clan of power-crazed paranoids is, but they are both caricatures nonetheless.

It is vital that Jews, Judaism and Jewishness be subjected to critique in order to stay alive and dynamic. There is a long and distinguished history of Jewish heretics and mavericks, from Elisha Ben Abuya, through Spinoza to Walter Benjamin. But the ones who really made a mark were those who were steeped in the traditions they rebelled against. Critiques founded on ignorance and fantasies will always fail.

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.
This is not the first time religious left-wing associations have involved themselves in Israeli politics. In the 1980’s the late Rabbi Yehudah Amital founded Memad, a moderate left-wing movement. Deeply upset by the massacre in Sabra and Shatila in 1982 during the first Lebanon war, Amital saw the need to challenge the growing sense that religious Judaism was synonymous with nationalist politics; the people of Israel, he proposed, were more important than the land of Israel. In 1988, Memad failed to pass the election threshold and has since integrated into Labour, where it makes up a fraction of the dwindling party. Memad was involved in leading the Birthright Israel project and in promoting joint secular-religious prayers on high holidays in community centers. They were also a part of the ‘Citizens’ Accord Forum,’ which tried to promote a grassroots dialogue between Jewish and Arab Israelis, but remained quite marginal. Netivot-Shalom and Oz ve-Shalom started as two small movements in the beginning of the 1980’s but soon united to form Oz ve-Shalom- Netivot Shalom. Further to the left than Memad, this group was composed of religious Israeli intellectuals wishing to deliver an ideological alternative to religious Zionism through educational programmes. Apart from periodic seminars and conferences, the movement’s main activity was and still is its portion-of-the-week pamphlet, distributed in selected synagogues, especially in Jerusalem. The most visible group of religious left-wing activists today is Rabbis for Human Rights, which wages campaigns for social and economic justice and protests against human rights abuses such as the intimidation of Palestinian farmers by settlers and military forces; they even escort hundreds of farmers during the harvest, serving as human shields. Most of the rabbis active in this organisation are non-Orthodox and therefore marginalised in Israeli religious discourse. Despite their achievements, these groups have not succeeded in creating an effective counter-voice to the prevailing nationalism among religious Jews. The religious establishment has played a vital role in perpetuating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the occupation, aligning itself with the extreme right since 1967. This phenomenon can be called also clear when setting the moral criteria expected from inhabitants of the holy city: ‘Lord, who shall sojourn in Thy tabernacle? Who shall dwell upon Thy holy mountain? He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh truth in his heart; That hath no slander upon his tongue, nor doeth evil to his fellow, nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbour.’ (Psalms 15, 1-3). Since when is it Jewish to treat your neighbours as inferior and expel non-Jewish working immigrants from your society because they pose an ‘ethnic threat’ to the maintenance of a Jewish majority? Numerous verses in the Torah warn us to remember our time in Egypt as gerim, inhabitants who do not enjoy the full status of citizens. A compelling example is found in Exodus 23:9: ‘And a Ger shalt thou not oppress; for ye know the heart of a Ger, seeing ye were Gerim in the land of Egypt.’ Judaism, unlike democracy or dictatorship, is a not a form of government. The religious activism I’m engaged with is in no way a dominant trend in contemporary Israel. We are a small group within an overwhelming majority of right-wing religious congregations. Some of us belong to the more liberal congre- gations in Jerusalem, both politically as well as halachically, but most of us do not belong to one particular congregation. Within the religious part of Israel we are absolutely anonymous. The only recognition we receive from the wider religious community is through the heated responses we attract from the religious settlers in Sheikh-Jarrah, who fail to understand how a person can claim to be religious and at the same time ‘love the Arab terrorists’. It is mainly through verbal confrontation with the settlers that we, religious peace activists, are addressed ‘in the name of the Whole’. Just as Israel needs a new democratic, anti- fascist leadership, so it is in want of a new (and in the same time very old and original) set of Jewish tenets. These are vital not only to Jews in Israel, but to all Jews, wherever they may be.

Hillel Ben Sasson: born and living in Jerusalem, is a member of the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity movement. He is working towards completion of his PhD in Jewish Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

No more sand art, no sand books, no masters.
Nothing on the dice.
How many dumb ones?  Seventeen.
Your question, your answer.
Your song, what does it know?
Deep in snow.
eepinow
ee-i-o

Many years after that historical tragedy we are beset by questions of how the wider population could have tolerated the actions of its government or the minority of ideological extremists, how complicit they were, why they didn’t say anything, how much they knew and how possible it was not to know. I am hugely grateful that such questions regarding the Palestinian situation have been settled for me. I have seen and I know. Now like many thousands of other Jews in Israel and around the world, I protest.

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.

Denied our freedom Palestinians will always resist the Occupation, in one way or another. This is only natural, it is something we share with oppressed people around the world and throughout history.  We are committed to our approach. We are willing to pay the price. What is our alternative?

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.

The current electoral system was introduced during the pre-state Yishuv — the government-in-waiting of the future state of Israel — and it was designed to be as simple and representative as possible, allowing for formal representation to the many diverse groups that made up Mandate Palestine’s Zionist community in order to ensure unity in the movement. It was never intended to be Israel’s permanent electoral system.

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.

So, thanks to Israel’s tiny Threshold, and its ‘Cultural Melting Pot’ sociological realities, every single government to date has been a coalition. fifteen parties have won seats in two elections, while amazingly there have been seven parties in a single government. Consequently, the smaller parties in the Knesset hold power disproportionate to their limited public support and Knesset seats, for the system makes them the kingmakers as coalitions cannot be made without them. Political blackmail inevitably develops. The party forming the government has to pay a heavy, heavy price for the smaller parties’ inclusion in the coalition, handing over key ministries and agreeing to drop policies they support, or support ones they don’t. And there is such wide-scale horse-trading and deal making, a culture of corruption can also all too easily develop.

Not surprisingly considering this reality, from early in the system’s history there have been those advocating radical reform — yet it has proven time and again to be a case of easier said than done. Israel’s visionary first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion tried, breaking away from his own Labour bloc in 1965 after the realities of the system had become to be all too self-evident, and he pushed  for urgent electoral reform. He led a breakaway of eight members of Knesset from Mapai, the ruling party he had led for so long (and the precursor of the Israel Labour Party). Rafi (List of Israeli Workers) only managed to secure 10 seats in the election later the same year, were unable to apply pressure on Mapai to support reform, and were to eventually merge back into the Labour bloc with the formation of the Alignment three years later. Major electoral reform has not been a Labour policy priority since.
By the late-1970s reform was back on the political agenda: in 1977 the Democratic Movement for Change (DMC) won a significant 15 seats, a very high return for a new party, and entered the Likud government later in the year in return for promises in regards to electoral reform. This reform never got off the ground however, and the DMC never contested another election.

By the 1990s it had become clear that attempts to move away from the Party List System or to increase the Threshold significantly were just too difficult to achieve, such was the stranglehold the small parties had over Israeli political life. So an entirely different approach was taken, with the direct election of the Prime Minister being introduced for the 1996 General Election. The Knesset vote was left as before (though with the Threshold upped from to 1.5 to 2 per cent), with a second vote added so that that the PM would now have a direct mandate from the people. This, the larger parties hoped, would strengthen their hand, for small parties would now have less blackmail potential as no one would be in any doubt who would be forming the next government.

The change, however, achieved the exact opposite effect.  The public now did not have to vote Labour or Likud if they wanted them to form the government — they just had to vote for their leader in the new vote for the Prime Minister. Overnight Labour and Likud’s amount of seats plummeted, making it even harder for them to form a government, giving small and medium-sized parties even more power! The direct election of the PM was thus quickly abolished, and Israel went back to the old system! But voter behaviour did not revert, and the ‘big’ parties continue to this day to receive middling numbers of Knesset seats. Labour won the 1992 election with 44 seats, yet the highest number of seats received by a party in 2009 was a mere 28, less than half the amount required to form a government. The 2009 poll highlights all too clearly just how entrenched these problems now are: before the result had even been declared it was clear that no one could win. Whether Likud or Kadima won the most seats, both were going to have to form a multiple-party coalition, almost certainly with at least one party opposed to some of their core policies. For the first time in Israeli history the party that has won the most seats was not the one invited to form the government, and had to do so with just 27 of the 120 Knesset seats.  The election thus stimulated much eye-rolling and expressions of disillusionment across Israeli society, politics and the media.
Yossi Verter wrote in Ha’aretz: ‘Only Israel’s version of democracy could come up with the largest political bloc being comprised of … right-wing and ultra-Orthodox parties at the same time that the largest political party (Kadima) is the one leading the centre-left camp.’ Meanwhile, in another influential daily, newspaper Ma’ariv, Ben Kaspit wailed: ‘Woe unto this government, woe unto Israel … because of the system; because of the stalemate; because of the dead end.’

Some might consider it sensationalist, if not risible, to suggest that Israel’s electoral mechanics pose as great a threat to Israel as an Iranian nuclear bomb, Hamas or Hezbollah, but I am going to make just such a point without even a hint of exaggeration or irony. For while the Irans and the Hamases of this world pose a specific short and medium-term existential threat to Israel and its physical stability, failure to address the growing crisis that is the country’s political quagmire may pose the greatest long-term threat to Israel’s social and political stability and cohesion. For a country that goes for decades without a secure and strong government, where subsequent administrations are a cobbling together of disparate elements constantly watching their own backs, where no government can implement their core policies, and where the public go to the polls every couple of years, is a country that is rapidly losing its social and political viability.

Modern political history, and especially the history of democratic governance, has taught us that a country that lacks genuine governmental and structural stability can all too rapidly cease to be a country at all.
All too many examples — Weimar Republic Germany, the former Yugoslavia, most poignantly the experience of Israel’s northern neighbour Lebanon, — demonstrate that when political instability becomes permanent political reality, and when social tensions become permanent social conflicts, a state can implode. Signs of such a potential implosion in Israel can  already be glimpsed. For the failures of the system — combined with the fall in public confidence in its politicians following the plethora of high-profile corruption, sleaze and even sexual misconduct allegations made against some of the country’s most senior politicians — are increasing producing a disconnect between the governors and the governed. Israelis are becoming ever more detached from politics — as stated in the 2008 Israeli Democratic Index, published by the Israel Democracy Institute, ‘The Israeli public is drawing away, at times in disgust, from the political establishment.’ History again tells us that when this occurs it becomes increasingly likely that elements on the periphery of society and politics will seek to attain their aims outside of the established system, i.e. civil disobedience, or even violence or terrorism, can all too rapidly become commonplace.
Recent examples suggest this is already starting to happening. The last year has seen Jewish-Arab tensions and rioting in Acre, and there were major tensions and some unrest in Um al Fahem (the largest Arab town in Israel) during and after the recent election, signs of growing tensions within the Israeli-Arab population. And there was a massive increase in attacks by West Bank Israeli settlers in 2008 from 2007 — on both Palestinians and Israeli soldiers deployed in the area — with 2009 threatening to be even higher. Increasingly, social, ethnic and religious groups feeling politically and sociologically disenfranchised are looking outside of the political and legal frameworks to achieve their aims.

And this is the only logical argument against significant radical reform of the system — that by curtailing small-party representation minority elements, minority elements become alienated, in particular the Arab and ultra-orthodox sectors, the two quickest growing in the state. This, some argue, could cause equal levels, if not more unrest and violence, a factor to certainly keep in mind if any radical reforms are ever seriously considered.
Despite this objection there can be no doubt that the system as it stands is too representative, guaranteeing power to the small parties while, as a consequence, denying the largest ones the ability to form strong or stable government. Whereas such a system can rightly be seen as a true democracy fully representing the cultural and ethnic melting-pot that is Israeli society, this comes at the expense of the vital traits of strength and stability.
With three major parties now in the mix, and a whole set of middle-sized ones now too, electoral mathematics seem fixed in a hugely problematic place. The largest party is not winning and will not be winning more than half of the seats in the Knesset, which is a recipe for a future of four and five-party mishmash coalitions, governmental inertia and ineffectiveness, and far too frequent elections.

Reform — real and radical reform — has thus never been more urgently required. Finding a solution to the problem is a lot more complex that assessing the faults of the current one. Reform of such an entrenched system — and deciding which specific reforms to push for — is of course a challenge, as proven by the fact that some of the world’s leading experts advised Israel to introduce the direct election of the PM, which made matters worse, not better. Nevertheless, numerous possible reforms could make a real difference, so long as the proportionality versus governability balance is redressed, and the small-party blackmail factor consigned to the dustbin of history.
Take one option, for example, that could bring the necessary improvements while also allowing minorities and interest groups to still secure parliamentary representation and thus ensure they don’t feel disenfranchised and seek their objectives outside of the system. A modified version of the German electoral mechanism, could be adapted by combining both PR and the (British-style) first past the post system (FPTP). (The Bundestag has 598 members, 299 elected in single-seat constituencies via a FPTP vote, with the other 299 allocated from state-wide party lists via a vote conducted under a PR mechanism called the Additional Member System.) Such an approach has the potential to achieve some of the benefits of both systems: clear and stable government is much more likely to emerge (and without the need for four or five parties in a coalition), yet small parties can still win some seats.
It would not of course be apposite to adopt an exact copy of the German system — Germany has both constituencies and a two-chamber parliament while Israel does not (nor must it) — but there is no reason why a variant, taking into account Israel’s particular political and social realities and challenges, could not be forged.
The latest poll should have finally alerted Israel’s leaders to the true predicament of their politics, and convinced them to put their party-political differences aside and save Israel from its own, self-made and impending political degradation and erosion.

Without a sea change in the prevailing political mindset, such reform will not be forthcoming since Labour and Likud (and no doubt now Kadima) have historically second-guessed themselves, panicking that any reform would be of more benefit to the other than to themselves, and so a ‘better the devil you know than the devil you don’t’ mentality has set in. There is thus little or no appetite within the major parties for it. They seem resigned to being forever stuck in Israel’s Electoral Catch-22. Sadly, we are still dealing with politicians consumed with the day-to-day challenges of this most volatile and uncertain of political realities, and so ‘the bigger picture’ will continue to be ignored. Attention surrounding the recent poll and its consequences has already died down and will not again be a prominent issue until the next disastrous electoral experience … by which I mean the next election that takes place in Israel.

Israeli politics has already gone back to business as (ab)normal.

Hagai M. Segal lectures in Near and Middle-Eastern Politics at New York University in London.

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.

Israel’s Palestinian-Arab citizens comprise almost twenty per cent (1,413,500) of Israel’s population (7.1 million) and are Israel’s largest minority. Traditionally, Jews and Arabs have lived in separate communities, with the primary form of interaction being exchange of services. In recent years we have witnessed a growing phenomenon of Jewish–Arab mixed regions, increasing the complexity of Israel’s multiethnic and multicultural nature. The Galilee, for example, home to the majority of Israel’s Arab citizens, is today fifty per cent Jewish and fifty per cent Arab.

Exposure to the language outside of the classroom is known to be highly beneficial both to language learning and to changing negative attitudes towards the native speakers of the language. However, despite the fact that Jews and Arabs often live in close proximity and face similar challenges, this physical reality has not engendered cooperation or relations of trust. Friendly relations are only rarely established and the majority of Israel’s Jewish citizens identify Arabic with feelings of fear, mistrust and even alienation.

The Declaration of Independence guarantees ‘complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or gender’, yet Arab citizens continue to suffer discrimination in budget allocation, land use, planning, access to government services, employment opportunities and education. Israel’s Arabs’ significant under-representation in the civil service hinders the participation of Arabs in decision-making processes, hampers social change and inhibits the transformation of negative attitudes towards Israel’s Arab citizens. In 2003, the Orr State Commission of Inquiry acknowledged that the government’s handling of the Arab sector has been ‘neglectful and discriminatory’, yet the vast majority of its recommendations to address the insensitivity to the Arab population and unequal distribution of state resources has not been implemented.

Based on the Mandate legislation King’s Order-in-Council, Israel’s legal system defines Hebrew and Arabic as official languages of the state. Despite its status as an official language, and the fact that Arabic is the mother tongue of more than one million Israeli citizens, it has little presence in the public sphere. Attitudes toward the Arabic language and the Arab culture are influenced, in large part, by the contemporary aggressive and confrontational public discourse; 75% of Jewish Israelis report feeling disgust when they hear Arabic spoken, 31% feel hatred towards the Arabic language, 75% oppose living in the same building as Arabs and 56% support separation of Arabs and Jews in places of entertainment (Racism Survey 2007, ACRI Report 2007).

Through communication, culture and tradition, language binds those using it to a social and ethnic community. Because of the fundamental role of language in shaping identity and thought, learning a second language has far-reaching and important consequences for individuals and groups (Clement et al, 2001). It is clear that knowing the language of the other is essential for mutual understanding and the development of good intergroup relations. The need to reinforce the status of the Arabic language in Israel’s public-cultural sphere, therefore, cannot be overemphasised.

The education system has a key role in the process of shaping students’ attitudes and in promoting values of equality and tolerance. It is therefore essential that the Ministry of Education take active steps to promote the study of Arabic language and Arab culture.
In making these changes, educational authorities must be aware that students’ attitudes do not (as we might hope) become more positive merely by studying a foreign language. In fact, without teacher intervention, students become not more, but less positive about other languages and cultures after initial exposure to language study (Mantle-Bromley, 1995).

The teaching of Arabic language and culture must, therefore, be accompanied by education for coexistence. This will promote a society based on democratic principles that include equality, respect for human and civil rights as well as understanding and respecting the identity, views and culture of Palestinian fellow citizens. Together, these programmes can be highly effective in inculcating values of equality, tolerance, understanding and equal opportunity.

Arabic teaching in Israel has fluctuated throughout the modern period according to the ebb and flow of the priorities of the local residents and their relations with their Arab neighbours (Naiman, 1999). In the Ottoman period, spoken Arabic was popular as residents valued the ability to communicate with their Arab neighbours. During the British Mandate, as contact with the Arab population decreased significantly, Arabic was almost exclusively taught within a security framework. Following the establishment of the state, Arabic teaching continued to fall. At the start of the 1960s, in response to a significant drop in conscription-aged Arabic speakers, the army began to call for more Arabic teaching to fulfil their needs.

The 1967 war led to a change as people began to hope for peace in the region. Spoken Arabic again became popular to facilitate greater contact with Arabs, to the extent that it was made compulsory in some primary schools. It was taught in transliteration, using Hebrew letters. From 1986, spoken Arabic was replaced by literary Arabic (also known as Modern Standard Arabic — MSA). The aim was to offer a solid foundation in Arabic language and grammar and to introduce the spoken language intensively in the later years.
Complaints that students could not communicate in Arabic, despite their studies, gained momentum, culminating in renewed efforts to teach spoken Arabic. One particular initiative to start teaching spoken Arabic at an early age began in the Tel Aviv – Jaffa area in 1996. By 1999 the programme had been implemented in 36 schools with 6,400 students. But, despite the obvious success of the spoken Arabic programme, the Ministry of Education mandated literary Arabic as the official curriculum.
Today, the law requires all pupils aged thirteen to sixteen in Jewish public schools to study three hours of Arabic per week. In practice, however, this requirement is implemented only in part. Many junior high schools do not teach Arabic or offer Arabic as an elective subject; in the Jewish public-religious educational system and the technological high schools, most schools do not teach Arabic at all.

Teaching Arabic in Israel presents unique challenges beyond those associated with teaching a second language. Firstly, the subject suffers from extremely low status; many parents and pupils regard it as a waste of time while others resent having to study ‘the language of the enemy’. Secondly, the diglossic nature of the language itself presents huge teaching challenges. Literary Arabic and spoken Arabic are very different languages, added to which there are many varied dialects. Teaching Arabic has required a unique, tailored approach and methodology to standardise the language for schoolchildren.

To date, the solution has been to start with literary Arabic, on the assumption that in the senior years students will be able to learn the spoken language. Unfortunately, so few students continue their studies into the senior years that the vast majority never have any exposure to the spoken language: of the 40,000 pupils aged thirteen to fourteen that study Arabic each year, only 8,400 continue to take the high school matriculation exam. Teaching spoken Arabic before literary Arabic is supported by research on children’s cognitive development, which suggests that learning the language orally first, bears greater resemblance to natural language learning and that developmentally, elementary school children are not capable of dealing with the difficulties of the literary language (Brosh, 1988). People now believe that an integrated approach, where both spoken and literary Arabic are taught with situation-specific considerations, should be introduced as early as possible. This enables children to communicate (students and parents agreed that communication was the most important language skill), while preventing students from feeling that they have to learn two entirely distinct languages in order to be proficient (Naiman, 1999).

In addition to these technical challenges, there is a lack of appropriate teachers; many of the Jewish Arabic teachers lack basic knowledge of oral expression (in both literary and spoken Arabic) and in Arab culture. The situation is compounded by a chronic shortage of resources, especially teaching hours.

There are two leading initiatives, which operate in full coordination with the Ministry of Education. ‘Ya Salaam’, a programme of The Abraham Fund’s ‘Language as a Cultural Bridge’ Initiative, is active in one hundred Israeli schools and caters to 10,000 students. The programme is implemented nationwide: in the Haifa district, northern and southern district, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and in several kibbutzim and agricultural communities around Israel. ‘Lets Talk’ is a project of Merchavim, the Institute for the Advancement of Shared Citizenship in Israel, and operates in twenty-four schools in the central district of Tel Aviv. Four bilingual schools run by ‘Hand in Hand’ are attended by Jewish and Arab pupils who study together in both languages. The four schools are in Jerusalem, Kfar Qara, Misgav and Beersheba. Crucially, these initiatives include: elements of spoken and literary Arabic; the study of contemporary Arab culture; integration of Arab teachers into Jewish schools; and bilingual and multi-cultural study frameworks with an emphasis on aspects promoting coexistence and tolerance. Arab teachers are trained to lead class discussions on sensitive subjects and help children examine their own prejudices. Having an Arab teacher who is sympathetic and stimulating is an important first step in redressing negative stereotypes among Israeli schoolchildren. The modernised, lively curricula also involve music and theatre and have proved popular; positive responses by parents and school principals have increased demand for the programme in other schools. Ya Salaam also includes a web-based learning programme to encourage children to engage with the language at home.
Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive: most students acknowledged that learning Arabic was the first step towards improving relations between Jews and Arabs. As a result of their studies, many developed more positive views of Arabs in Israel and expressed a greater willingness to engage with Arab neighbours (Meltzer-Geva & Awade, 2007).

These findings, alongside the increasing demand for the programmes from schools and local authorities, demonstrate that cooperation with the Ministry of Education and local authorities is attainable and contributes to the further success of the programmes.

The education system has the power to affect social change. Exposing Jewish children to Arabic language and culture is a powerful and effective means to improve negative perceptions and increase the willingness for Jewish-Arab interaction. But until the government implements a programme of mandatory Arabic from elementary school across the whole of Israel and with the appropriate teacher training, the gap between Jews and Arabs will continue to expand.

The Abraham Fund Initiatives is a non-profit NGO working for an inclusive and just society for all of Israel’s citizens, Jewish and Arab.
For more information, visit www.abrahamfund.org.

Those who level the charge obviously have no doubts. So much so that it’s deployed as the ‘killer fact’: to be called a self-hating Jew explains everything. No more need be said. Self-hatred means being a traitor to your race, an Uncle Tom, siding with the enemy, willing the destruction of your own people. In Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews, Sander L. Gilman says it’s ‘a term interchangeable with “Jewish anti-Judaism” or “Jewish anti-Semitism”’.

Recently you could have taken a course in the history of Jewish self-hatred at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The playwright David Mamet deploys the concept in his book, The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred and the Jews (2006), a fierce denunciation of ‘apostate Jews’ and ‘race traitors’. And then there’s the outrageously gross ‘S.H.I.T.’ — Self-Hating, Israel Threatening — ‘list’, a website purportedly ‘exposing’ more than 8,000 self-hating Jews, given credence in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz in July 2007 in an article which argues that Muslims would benefit from a good dose of the kind of public self-hate so common among Jews. Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks refers to it uncritically in his most recent book, The Home We Build Together (an attack on multiculturalism): ‘[Self-hatred] is something Jews know about: we can fairly claim to have invented it (Arthur Koestler once memorably said, “Self-hatred is the Jew’s patriotism”). It occurred in mainland Europe in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century [sic], as Jews internalised the negative image others had of them. It represents the breakdown of an identity, and nothing good can come of it.’

Is the application of the concept of ‘Jewish self-hatred’ an objective judgement on a way of thinking, a legitimate diagnosis of a personality disorder? Or is it merely political rhetoric that has got out of hand and says more about the people using it than the people it’s targeted at? I would argue that the latter is true: the concept of ‘Jewish self-hatred’ is entirely bogus and it serves no other purpose than to marginalise and demonise political opponents.

As a formal psychological category, the term ‘self-hatred’ was first used by Sigmund Freud in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1916–17). But according to Professor Gilman, the term ‘self-hating Jew’ comes from a disagreement over the validity of the Jewish Reform movement between neo-Orthodox Jews of the Breslau seminary in Germany and Reform Jews in the nineteenth century. Some neo-Orthodox Jews viewed Reform Jews as ‘inauthentic Jews’ because they felt that the Reformers identified more closely with German Protestantism and German nationalism than with Judaism.

The key point is that the term ‘Jewish self-hatred’ arose from the specific circumstances of Jews in Germany and came increasingly into use at the beginning of the twentieth century. And you could say — following Gilman’s explanation of its first use — that it was one of the radical or extreme reactions to the partial failure or partial success of emancipation, to the results of the attempts by Jews to assimilate into German society.

By the 1900s the formal emancipation of German Jews was complete and they had achieved a very high degree of assimilation. But the more they demonstrated their desire to be the same as everyone else, they more they were acutely reminded of their otherness. The more they distanced themselves from their Jewish identity the further away seemed the prize of complete acceptance. Coping with this double bind was not easy. One response — intended to help overcome those barriers — was to lay the blame, in whole or in part, at the feet of Jews themselves, to see weaknesses and faults in Judaism, Jewish culture, Jewish mannerisms, Jewish ways of behaving and so on — to cultivate the notion of group inferiority. On the one hand, this was an intensification of the lively, and valued, self-criticism among German Jews that had been developing for some time. On the other hand, the fact that it was sometimes couched in Anti-Semitic terms suggested that Jews were internalising the negative images society imposed on them, stemming from the increase in public Anti-Semitism, and seeking to appease their persecutors in order to finally gain acceptance.

At the same time, Jews (and non-Jews) had concerns about the mental and physical health of Jews. There was vigorous debate about the special tendency of Jews to have particular diseases or engage in asocial behaviour, and in particular to experience problems of mental health. (This was a preoccupation in German and Austrian society as a whole.) Some accepted the ‘Jewish disease’ argument and saw it manifest itself in ‘Jewish Anti-Semitism’, in ‘Jewish self-hatred’ — a psychic disorder, a psychopathology reflecting, in Paul Reitter’s words, an ‘inner torment’. (Expressions of group inferiority were not confined to Jews. The historian Shulamit Volkov reminds us that ‘among Germans at the time [they] were both numerous and “amazingly vehement”’.)

Most use of the ‘Jewish self-hatred’ charge was made by Jewish writers, intellectuals, Zionist politicians (who were very often also writers) and religious figures. And traffic went both ways. Assimilationists and anti-Zionists accused Zionists of being self-haters, for promoting the idea of the strong Jew using rhetoric close to that of the Anti-Semites; Zionists accused their opponents of being self-haters, for promoting the image of the Jew that would perpetuate his inferior position in the modern world. And certain German and Austrian Jews have been regarded as the supreme examples of Jewish self-hatred: Heinrich Heine (1797-1856, the leading German romantic poet, essayist and journalist), Otto Weininger (1880-1903, the influential Austrian philosopher who killed himself at 23), Karl Kraus (1874-1936, the Austrian writer, journalist, editor and satirist) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939).

Use of the term ‘Jewish self-hatred’ was very prevalent during the years immediately preceding the First World War, when German Jews continued to experience the dilemmas of wishing to become completely assimilated into German society. Theodor Lessing’s book Der judische Selbsthass (Jewish Self-Hate) appeared in 1933 and supposedly charts Lessing’s journey from Jewish self-hater to Zionist.

But the dilemma that led to the phenomenon of Jewish self-hatred came to an end with the Holocaust, so there seemed little reason for it to remain current. In most post-Holocaust centres of Jewish life, especially the United States, assimilation, though striven for, was a less anxious process, and Jews were not alone in their quest to integrate. And after the establishment of the state of Israel, losing your identity in order to become part of the national story was no longer the only option for a Jew who felt uncomfortable in the host country. Zionism seemed to represent the ultimate resolution of this identity problem: in Israel the Jew was the national story.

But the concept did not disappear from the lexicon. As the centre of Jewish life shifted from a devastated Europe denuded of Jews to the United States, where there were far fewer barriers to assimilation, so too the concept of Jewish self-hatred migrated to the New World, was reborn and took on additional meanings.

Hugely influential in this rebirth was Kurt Lewin, until 1932 professor of psychology at the University of Berlin. He emigrated from Germany in 1933 after Hitler had come to power. In 1941 he wrote an essay, ‘Self-hatred among Jews’, published in an American Jewish Committee-sponsored journal, which was much cited and frequently quoted. Lewin was the leading exponent of the study of group dynamics in the United States and a highly regarded social psychologist. He reinterpreted the problem as one mostly affecting the group rather than the individual. Not surprisingly, given the threat to Jews at the time, and his view of the failure of German Jewish leaders to give public support to Jewish institutions, he argued that criticism of the group weakens and endangers it, and those responsible for that criticism are unable to adjust to the group’s problems. The result is ‘neurosis’ manifesting itself as self-hatred.

A similar theory — ‘Negro self-hatred’ — had developed in relation to black Americans, also promoted by social psychologists like Lewin who had become highly influential in American society in the 1940s. With both theories being fuelled by conclusions drawn from investigations into growing anti-Semitism and anti-black racism, a ‘convergence zone’, as Susan Glenn described it in Jewish Social Studies (2006), was created ‘in which the figure of the “self-hating Jew” and the “negrophobic negro” were imagined […] by Frantz Fanon as “brothers in misery”’.

The concept of Jewish self-hatred gained wide theoretical currency in the 1940s, and as Glenn writes: ‘During and after the war, individuals and groups across the intellectual, social, cultural, religious and political spectrum deployed the term variously, inconsistently, and with conflicting social and political agendas.’ The 1940s and 1950s were ‘the age of self-hatred’. In effect, a bitter war broke out over questions of Jewish identity. It was a kind of ‘Jewish Cold War’: ‘a contentious public debate [intra-Jewish war] revolving around the question of Jewish group loyalty, Jewish group “survival”, and Jewish nationalism’.

Broadly speaking, this ‘war’ was a response to the success of assimilation. Those Jews who saw assimilation resulting in estrangement from Judaism and distaste for one’s Jewish identity diagnosed the problem as Jewish self-hatred. The cure was ‘positive Jewishness’, or ‘living Judaism’, as the influential Rabbi Milton Steinberg referred to it in A Partisan Guide to the Jewish Problem (1945). Critics of this movement accused it of promoting ‘narrow-minded ethnic chauvinism and ideological intolerance’.

These debates over Jewish self-hatred continued to the end of the 1970s but eventually died down, losing their force and urgency. But the concept reemerged with new polemical force in the 1980s in debates over Israel, debates which eventually spread to virtually every other western Jewish community.

In the United States, Glenn says, giving financial and moral support to Israel came to constitute ‘the existential definition of American Jewishness’. Which meant that the opposite was also true: criticism of Israel came to constitute the existential definition of ‘Jewish self-hatred’. So writers like Philip Roth were vilified as self-haters for not wanting to put pro-Israelism at the centre of their lives and left-wing Jews like the controversial journalist I. F. Stone were similarly derided for their ‘weakness’ for universalism.

The sharpness of the US exchanges was not mirrored in Britain, and even though Jewish criticism of Israel grew particularly from the 1982 Lebanon war on, the term ‘Jewish self-hater’ was rarely used. It is only relatively recently that Britain has caught up with the United States and Israel in this regard. The self-hatred accusation, now commonly applied, has moved beyond writers to embrace whole classes of people whose one common denominator is their alleged hatred of Israel or their willingness to connive in its delegitimisation out of a misguided sense of guilt for what Jews have done to the Palestinians.

Both of these accusations come together in the contempt with which the Israeli promoters of the 1993 Oslo Accords are now held, principally by right-wing Jews and Israelis. Examples are legion. The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a major promoter of such views, published an article by Kenneth Levin of the Harvard Medical School, which seeks to explain how Israelis duped themselves about Oslo: ‘the phenomenon of segments of the community embracing the indictments of the besiegers and seeking relief through self-criticism and self-reform recurs constantly in the history of the Jewish Diaspora. […] some have seen it as a specifically Jewish pathology, a unique Jewish self-hatred.’

Steven Plaut, professor of business administration at Haifa University, asks: ‘Who […] could have dreamed that the fulfilment and realisation of Zionism would be accompanied by the emergence of the most malignant manifestations of Israeli self-hatred and Jewish anti-Semitism?’ In online journal Nativ, Shlomo Sharan, professor emeritus in psychology at Tel Aviv University, argues that the ‘“new” self-hatred […] preaches that living in Israel is immoral because Jewry stole the land from the Arabs’.

It would appear from these and many other writers that self-hating Jews, whether in Israel or the Jewish Diaspora, are not just responsible for taking Israel down the wrong path at Oslo but threaten the very existence of the Jewish people. Netta Kohn Dor-Shav, a US-born clinical psychologist now at Bar Ilan University in Israel, warns: ‘It is fair to say that the plague of Jewish self-hatred is more dangerous for the survival of the Jewish people than any outside threat.’ In a paper for the Ariel Center for Policy Research, titled ‘The Ultimate Enemy — Jews Against Jews’, she says: ‘This self-hatred fuels a vicious cycle that can lead to disaster and dissolution of the Jewish people and the Jewish State.’

The strength of feeling about the ‘self-hatred’ accusation burst into the open on both sides of the Atlantic early in 2007. In the United States, the New York Times brought to public attention growing controversy about a pamphlet by Professor Alvin Rosenfeld, Director of the Institute for Jewish Culture and the Arts at Indiana University, titled ‘Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism’, published in December 2006 by the American Jewish Committee (publisher of Kurt Lewin’s 1942 Jewish self-hatred paper), one of America’s leading Jewish defence and advocacy groups, which has become increasingly vociferous in its defence of Israel over the last decade. In Rosenfeld’s own words, the essay takes ‘a hard look at Jewish authors whose statements go well beyond what most reasonable people would see as legitimate criticism of Israel and who call into question the very essence of the Jewish state and its right to continued existence.’ Rosenfeld made no explicit accusation of self-hatred against his ‘progressive’ Jewish targets. But many people believed that was exactly what his text implied. In the words of Michael Lerner, editor of the progressive magazine Tikkun: ‘The atmosphere is hysterical, verging on McCarthyism. You can’t raise questions about Israel without being told you’re an anti-Semite or a self-hating and disloyal Jew.’ And many others thought Rosenfeld had skewered the right offenders. They approved of his criticism of people like Tony Kushner, the playwright, Jacqueline Rose, professor of English literature at Queen Mary College, and Richard Cohen, the Washington Post columnist, and concluded that he was just calling these people ‘self-hating Jews’ in more subtle ways.

In Britain, a network of a hundred or so progressive Jews critical of Israel’s policies for abusing human rights launched Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) in February 2007. They signed a declaration of principles, published in The Times, the Guardian and the Jewish Chronicle, asserting their right to speak out and arguing that established Jewish organisations fail to represent the diversity of views among the Jewish population, especially on Israel, and inviting others to sign. This provoked a storm of vitriolic criticism from many Jews, but the number of signatories reached 400 by the end of the week of the launch.

The reaction IJV provoked was extraordinary: ‘snide to poisonous to the verbally vicious’ was how Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai Brown described it. Leading the pack, and possibly speaking for many, was Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips who called the signatories ‘Jews for genocide’ in her online diary on 8 February, and ‘the British arm of the pincer of self-destruction’ in the Jewish Chronicle on 16 February. And in an obvious reference to Jewish self-haters through the ages she wrote: ‘One of the most painful aspects of all of the Jewish tragedy is that, throughout the unending history of Jewish persecution — from the medieval Christian converts to Marx and beyond — Jews have figured, for a variety of reasons, as prominent accomplices of those who wished to destroy the Jewish people. These signatories are firmly in that lamentable tradition.’

These extraordinary, and ever more personal, claims are not confined to a right-wing fringe. Professor Robert Wistrich, who now heads the Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University, speaks of Jewish self-hatred as ‘a pathological phenomenon’ and Jewish self-haters as being ‘driven by hate and anger against their own people’. Interviewed for his institution’s website, Wistrich excoriates ‘Israeli and Jewish intellectuals who think Israel is to blame for all the problems in the Middle East and even in the world in general. […] They rant on about the Jewish lobby, the Christian lobby, the foreign policy of the United States. Those are often worse than Arab anti-Zionists. In fact I prefer an open-minded Arab intellectual, even if he or she is anti-Israel, to the Chomskys, the Finkelsteins and Ilan Pappes of this world for whom I have no respect at all. They are much more dogmatic, sarcastic, narcissistic and self-righteous than most Arabs I know.’ Edward Alexander, professor emeritus in English at Washington University, helps expose these apparently perfidious Jews in a book of essays he co-edited with Paul Bogdanor, The Jewish Divide Over Israel: Accusers and Defenders. Interviewed about the book he said: ‘The rhapsodising over Islamic suicide bombers that one finds in such Jewish haters of Israel as Canada’s Michael Neumann or England’s Jacqueline Rose, breaks new ground in the long history of Jewish self-hatred’. Writing about IJV in The Jewish Chronicle, Liberal Rabbi Sidney Brichto called them ‘enemies of the Jewish people’ who ‘must be condemned’. ‘The time for debates between Jews over Israel is over.’ Wicked enemies and worse than Arabs: can self-hating Jews sink any lower?

The accusation of Jewish self-hatred is not always as explicit as in the writings of those I have quoted so far. One of the features of the Rosenfeld AJC paper and the extreme reaction to the launch of IJV is the way Jewish self-hatred is implied in the use of a certain psychologising discourse or through carefully constructed sentences, which can only mean one thing, but provide deniability because an explicit statement is avoided. Rosenfeld proves himself a past master at this. In an article for the New Republic he indignantly denied that he ever called anyone a self-hating Jew or a Jewish anti-Semite. But when he writes in his original paper that: ‘Anti-Zionism is the form much of today’s anti-Semitism takes’, and then in an extended attack on Jacqueline Rose says she ‘typifies one of the most distressing features of the new anti-Semitism — namely, the participation of Jews alongside it, especially in its anti-Zionist expression’, he is a cat’s whisker away from calling her a Jewish anti-Semite. If anti-Semitism today is mostly anti-Zionism and Rose is an anti-Zionist, ‘alongside it’ or not, then according to this perverse logic Rose is anti-Semitic. (Perverse too is the claim that Rose ‘rhapsodises over Islamic suicide bombers’, since she writes categorically in her new book The Last Resistance of her hatred for the phenomenon.) And in an interview for the Religion Report on Australian Broadcasting Company National Radio, Rosenfeld gives the game away by referring to the UK dissenters as people ‘who have problems with their own Jewish identity, and somehow feel that by dissenting radically from the state of Israel, they affirm something precious about themselves. But I’m not a psychoanalyst, I can’t really deal fully with any authority with the pathologies involved here.’ As head of an academic Jewish studies centre and a veteran scholar, it is almost impossible to believe that Rosenfeld uses ‘pathologies’ without being fully aware that the word refers to self-hatred.

Another widely used form of innuendo implying self-hatred is casting aspersions on the Jewishness of critics of Israel. The charge is that such Jews are estranged from their Jewishness, are outside of the Jewish community, express themselves as Jews for the sole purpose of vilifying Israel, do not love their people and by criticising Israel have renounced a core component of their identity. Melanie Phillips is direct: ‘The history of the Jewish people has always been punctuated by Jews with a troubled relationship with their own ethnic identity who have gone along with or even become the prime instigators — see Marx or Freud, for example — of diabolical calumnies against their own people’. Emanuele Ottolenghi, Director of the AJC’s Brussels-based Transatlantic Institute, tells us: ‘The Jewish intellectuals’ […] crusade against Israel is less about justice for the Palestinians than about coming to terms with their own tortured Jewish identity’. He speaks of ‘their effective alienation from Jewish life, Jewish values and Jewish communities’. Similar sentiments were expressed by key figures associated with the Engage website (set up by a group of mostly left of centre Jewish academics to combat the proposed academic boycott of Israel and unmask people alleged to downplay the strength of current anti-Semitism) in an open letter to the organisers of Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JfJfP), excoriating them for appearing to justify Hezbollah’s anti-Semitic statements — vehemently denied by JfJfP. Shalom Lappin, professor of computational linguistics at UCL, Eve Garrard, a senior lecturer at Keele University, and Norman Geras, professor emeritus in politics at the University of Manchester, wrote: ‘We are confident that when the history of this period is written and the widespread loss of political reason that characterises our age is finally recognised, your group will be properly consigned to a footnote in the long and dishonourable tradition of Jewish sycophancy and collaboration with hostility that has polluted the margins of European Jewry over the generations’ — an unmistakable reference to self-hating Jews.

When a concept is used so indiscriminately, it must either be faulty in itself or widely misused. Historian Shulamit Volkov is blunt about this: ‘Accusations of self-hatred have a long tradition of being applied by one Jew to another, often as part of some political dispute. Present-day Israelis encounter the term all too often in public discourse, where it is used indistinctly and often demagogically, mainly to avoid coping with criticism from within.’

Many of those who are perfectly happy excoriating Jewish critics of Israel by sitting in judgement on their Jewishness would almost certainly object very strongly to Orthodox rabbis in Israel doing the same thing when they claim the right to determine who is a Jew. This exercise in excommunication is absurd as it relies both on mass psychologising and the apparent intimate knowledge of the private lives and thoughts of thousands of individuals who sign critical adverts, join bodies like JfJfP and become signatories to IJV. Focusing on the Jewish collectivity in this way is rather inappropriate. Shulamit Volkov writes that it is ‘a kind of group therapy’ that ‘leaves us with nothing but a collection of skeletons, no longer flesh and blood’.

The touchstone for being a ‘good Jew’ has increasingly become passion for Israel. But it seems that there is a right and a wrong passion. Essentially, caring about Israel can only mean approving of its policies. Disapproval is synonymous with self-hatred.

To these contradictions and inconsistencies must be added a glaring ignorance of how the self-hatred charge has been applied in the past. For the accusers, Zionism represents the polar opposite of self-hatred. But when Herzl, angered by anti-Zionists, painted the weak ghetto Jew, in his 1897 essay ‘Mauschel’, as the bad Jew who speaks with a Yiddish accent, a ‘scamp’, ‘a distortion of the human character, unspeakably mean and repellent’, interested only in ‘mean profit,’ he was using anti-Semitic attributes — and some accused him of self-hatred. The writer Karl Kraus, himself Jewish (and also branded as a self-hating Jew), attacked Herzl for ‘creating another antisemitic movement’. Far from being the antithesis of Jewish self-hatred, some argue that Zionism was actually a display of it.

Even what might be called the cornerstone of evidence for the existence of Jewish self-hatred, the writings of Heine, Weininger, Kraus and Freud, is crumbling. The work of academics such as Steven Beller (on Weininger), Paul Reitter (on Kraus), Jacqueline Rose (on Freud) and Allan Janik (on the entire phenomenon) shows how the Jewish self-hatred label is a crude mischaracterisation.

In a contribution to The Guardian’s Comment is Free blog at the time of the launch of IJV, Jacqueline Rose wrote: ‘When confronted with this challenge [of being called a self-hating Jew], I am always inclined to ask: “What kind of Jew do you want me to be?”’ Or to put this question another way: What is it to be the opposite of ‘self-hating’? Is it ‘self-loving’? Frederick Raphael already answered this in his review of Gilman’s book for the Jewish Quarterly magazine in 1986: ‘The contempt shown by some English Jews (and Americans like Norman Podhoretz) for blacks who cannot “do what we did” reveals, if nothing else, the danger of self-love as a substitute for self-hatred.’ In any event, the tenor of ‘self-hatred’ accusations shows little sign of endorsing the ‘self-loving Jew’ as the ideal ‘good’ Jew. Nevertheless, the question Rose asks is surely the right one because at the heart of the ‘Jewish self-hatred’ mantra is the assumption that there is a standard-issue Jew to which you must conform. This implies that there is a Jewish essence.

Recognising the concept of self-hatred involves accepting two sets of normative assumptions, as Mick Finlay argues in ‘Pathologising dissent: identity politics, Zionism and the “self-hating Jew”’ (British Journal of Social Psychology, June 2005). It is assumed that there is a correct manner and degree to which people should express their Jewish identities in public; and that there is a set of core values and institutions which one should favour. It is also assumed that Jewishness ‘is or should be a primary identity’ and therefore rejecting it or criticising it is somehow unnatural and wrong. For the psychologists who have endorsed the validity of the concept of ‘Jewish self-hatred’, this turning away from your supposed primary identity is a form of psychopathology: a mental or behavioural disorder. But why should this be so? In his review of Gilman’s book Frederic Raphael wrote: ‘The Jew who decides that Judaism is an unappealing religion or that it implies an arbitrary set of rules for living may have perfectly good reasons for rejecting it or criticising it.’ Criticising an aspect of one’s identity does not automatically imply criticism of that identity per se. The concept is fundamentally weak because it fails to allow that self-criticism can be searching and very deep without becoming self-hatred.

The self-hatred concept seeks to turn the normal into the abnormal. In Germany and Austria in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the accusation of self-hatred was levelled at those criticising aspects of Jewish culture, involvement in progressive movements and literary forms, expressing hostility towards other Jews, espousing anti-Semitic stereotypes and using anti-Semitic rhetoric, demonstrating a low level of public identification, supporting Zionism or opposing it. Yet all of these could be explained in other ways. For example, criticism traded between Jewish sub-groups is quite natural and, argues Finlay, ‘similar to those of commentators throughout history who find fault with the morals, manners, superstitions, or language of the poor of their own countries’. Even the use of anti-Semitic rhetoric is no proof of self-hatred. It was common in arguments over Jewish identity in the nineteenth and twentieth century and, as we have already seen, pressed into service for Zionism and for those who opposed it. These behaviours or views are only evidence of self-hate if you accept the essentialist definition of Jewish identity assumed by the accuser.

Finlay shows decisively that the psychologist Kurt Lewin’s ‘description of self-hatred is clearly a judgement about disloyalty and is a rallying call to American Jews. [He] concluded his paper [‘Self-hatred among Jews’] by suggesting that Jews should be asked to sacrifice more for the group.’ This argument looks uncannily like the ‘conceptual’ underpinning of the deluge of self-hatred accusations levelled at critics of Israel today. We have seen that for people like Rosenfeld, Phillips, Ottolenghi, Sharan, Wistrich and others quoted earlier, Zionism and Israel are core Jewish values, and rejecting them is a pathological act consonant with deliberate estrangement from the group. But there has never been a time when all Jewish denominations and groups have accepted Israel and Zionism as core values. Today, hundreds and thousands of strictly Orthodox Jews, many of whom live in Israel, utterly reject the notion that the modern state of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism have anything to do with Judaism. The venom of the ‘self-hatred’ accusers is reserved for those labelled ‘progressive’, ‘left-liberal’, ‘left-wing’, for whom Israel and Zionism do not play the role in their Jewish identity which their accusers determine it should do. Some, motivated by the values of social justice which are central to their Jewishness, may well feel that their sense of Jewish identity is affirmed by opposition to the policies of the Israeli government. But to the self-hate accusers there are no legitimate differences of opinion among Jews on key elements of Zionism and Israel.

The concept of the ‘self-hating Jew’ strengthens a narrow, ethnocentric view of the Jewish people. It exerts a monopoly over patriotism. It promotes a definition of Jewish identity which relies on the notion of an eternal enemy, and how much more dangerous when that enemy is a fifth column within the group. It plays on real fears of anti-Semitism and at the same time exaggerates the problem by claiming that critical Jews are ‘infected’ by it too. And it posits an essentialist notion of Jewish identity.

Could the widespread and increasingly indiscriminate use of the self-hatred accusation be a sign of desperation on the part of the accusers? Dissenting voices on Israel have certainly strengthened and multiplied in recent years. Twenty years ago in Britain there were one or two rather small groups promoting a left-wing non-Zionist or anti-Zionist approach, who were regarded as hate figures by the Jewish establishment. Today there are more than a dozen critical groups. Some encompass the views of many hundreds, if not thousands; some are not left-wing. How much easier to dismiss their arguments by levelling the charge of Jewish self-hatred than by engaging with them.

It is too much to hope that by revealing just how bankrupt a concept ‘Jewish self-hatred’ is, discourse among Jews on Israel and Zionism could become more productive, both for Jews themselves and for the sake of achieving justice in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Too much is currently invested in this demonising rhetoric. But if we could edge it closer to the rim of the dustbin of history, we’d be making a start.

Antony Lerman is the director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and is writing here in a personal capacity.

The verbal bitterness between Jews over the Israel-Palestine conflict is intense. If words alone could kill, there would be significant fatalities. Some might say this is asymmetrical warfare. The conventional pro-Israel forces deploy accusations of Jewish self-hatred and anti-Semitism; the guerrillas who strongly criticise Israel deploy claims of apartheid and human rights violations. Anti-Semitism, apartheid and human rights violations are recognisable phenomena and it’s entirely possible, though increasingly difficult in the Israeli context, to have rational and evidence-based discussions as to whether claims about them are justified. Jewish self-hatred, however, is altogether different. It damns an individual or a group as psychopathological. And in recent years the concept has become remarkably popular as a way of explaining what drives the growing number of Jewish voices and organisations expressing various forms of severe criticism of Israel. But does ‘Jewish self-hatred’ exist?

The International Writers Festival in Jerusalem was a week of encounter and discovery. Comments from the incendiary discussion between Nadine Gordimer and Amos Oz have been quoted in Ha’aretz and the Boston Globe. Here is their conversation.

AO: As soon as they taught me the alphabet I started to write fiercely chauvinistic little poems. I grew up in a militant, right-wing Zionist family and I wrote Israeli propaganda full of exclamation marks. That’s the beginning of my career and I hope the end of my career will not be the same. I draw the line between writing and politics roughly as follows:

Each time I agree with myself one hundred per cent I don’t write a story or a novel, I write an angry article telling the government to go to hell. The government reads my article and it does not go to hell. (I have been writing the same article for thirty or forty years telling the government to go to hell). But when I have a slight disagreement with myself, when I hear more than one voice in me, then I know that I am pregnant with a story or a novel. To make this distinction very clear to me for symbolic reasons I have two pens on my desk, one blue and one black. One pen is to tell the government to go to hell and the other is to write my stories and novels. I never mix the two because they are different voices.

There is always a certain sense of guilt which accompanies my work. If I wake up in the morning and start work on a novel while the news is full of injustice, violence, savagery and stupidity, I feel guilty for sitting and writing my novel while people are dying a few miles from my home. On the other hand, when I write an angry article telling the government to go to hell I sometimes feel guilty for using my voice, which should be more subtle and complex, for something one dimensional.

But where would we be without guilt? We Jews invented guilt. If don’t feel guilty for a whole day then in the evening I feel guilty for not feeling guilty.

Let me ask you a question, Nadine. How early did you discover that you were living in a wrong society, a corrupt society?

NG: It didn’t come from reading Karl Marx. My awareness of what was wrong in the way we were living came to me by something closer to home. Blacks were forbidden from buying liquor so everyone made home brew. There were raids on white homes where blacks worked. One evening, when I was about ten, there was a hullabaloo in our back yard. My parents and I went out and there were the police ransacking the mattress and belongings of Letty, our house servant. My mother and father stood there and said nothing. This was their private property. Why were the police allowed to treat Letty so brutally? It was incidents like this which made me aware.

My mother was, in many ways, a good liberal. She worked in a group which provided crèche facilities for black children. She also worked with the Red Cross. She believed that things would gradually change, but they both kept on voting for the only party.

When I went, briefly, to university just after the war in 1947, I met a group of white South Africans who had just come back from fighting. They were rebellious and befriended young, politically involved blacks. For the first time I met blacks not as servants but as people. Like me, one black man was writing stories. I realised I had more in common with him than with the young whites. So the human contact brought politics closer. I started to write about what happens within the families and relationships inside political circles. Politics is like a religious faith. It has to be followed, no matter what peripheral damage may be done to human relationships. Some of my black writer friends even had their houses raided and their typewriters taken away.

AO: Fortunately we do not experience anything like that in Israel, but Palestinian writers in the occupied territories do have trouble with the Israeli police. There are some publishing houses in Ramallah in East Jerusalem and other parts of the West Bank, but these are heavily, closely watched and often censored. There is no censorship now in Gaza because Gaza is no longer under Israeli jurisdiction. The military censor decides whether a book is ‘inciteful’. Incitement is the key word.

Your books combine the political reality with the extremely personal. You can tell a love story against a background of political upheaval or tell a story of political upheaval against the background of a love story. Parents and children, brothers and sisters, family stories. After all, the subject of literature is, if I had to reduce it to one word, I would say ‘families’. If you gave me two words I would say ‘unhappy families’. If you gave me more than two words you will have to read all my works.

NG: I have! And I know your bridge-making and your political statements. The deep reality of everything that has happened here comes to me through your stories and novels.

AO: Almost all my characters have political views. Some of them have politics which are diagonally opposed to my own. Such as a certain character in Black Box. He votes for everything I vote against, nonetheless I tried to give him a credible voice and almost an attractive personality, as far as I could. The thing is trying to get inside the character and never use the struggle between the characters as a means of communicating a political message. To write the simplest dialogue between husband and wife over who takes out the garbage I have to be in the shoes of both of them. This is good practice for politics as well because it teaches you how to understand the other without necessarily agreeing with them.

NG: You waited a long time to write about yourself. You told me this was a personal story and it was painful. How did you finally come to write A Tale of Love and Darkness?

AO: For many years I would not even discuss my parents with my wife and children. I was too angry with my mother for killing herself and with my father for losing her, and with myself for probably being a terrible child. I was so angry I cut them out of my life for many, many years. When I reached the age, nearly sixty, ten years ago, when I could have been my parents’ parent, I began to develop a certain curiosity, and curiosity is a powerful antidote to anger. If I may digress momentarily I must say that I regard curiosity as a moral quality. I think a curious person is not a fanatic. Curiosity is an antidote to fanaticism, because curiosity means trying to imagine the other, trying to put yourself in another’s shoes. I became curious about my parents and this entailed compassion, tolerance, understanding and a certain smile. I found I could write about my parents as if they were my children. I don’t like calling A Tale of Love and Darkness an autobiography because I’m not even the protagonist of this book – it’s more about my parents. I’m a supporting character: my parents are the main protagonists.

Let us now, Nadine, move into areas where you and I may not agree as much as we have done so far: the popular comparison between Israel and South Africa. I know it is popular in left wing circles around the world to label Israel as an apartheid country. Do you or do you not accept this comparison?

NG: I accept it in certain reserved aspects. But we’ve got to go back to ancient history. I’m white. We whites have no ancestral claim whatever to one square inch of the continent of Africa. We don’t come from there in ancient times. So right away you’ve got a difference. It clearly belonged to the blacks and we invaded. So there is no comparison there. Where there is comparison, increasingly in the last few years, is in the methods your police use in the occupied territories; they seem to do exactly what they like, as if they have been given carte blanche to treat people in the most inhuman fashion. If it is a question of forcibly removing people from their homes, this is exactly what happened in South Africa. So there I would compare the methods used and the fact that you have reserved areas where people are herded in.

AO: In my view, twentieth-century well-meaning intellectuals had it easy because all the major conflicts were clear-cut: fascism and anti-fascism was about good guys and bad guys. You knew exactly who you were for and against. Colonialism and decolonisation was black and white. Vietnam was black and white. Apartheid was about good guys and bad guys. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not. It is essentially a conflict between right and right. Or, more recently, between wrong and wrong. The Palestinians are in Palestine because Palestine is their homeland in the same sense that Norway is the homeland of the Norwegians. The Israeli Jews are in Israel for exactly the same reason. They have no other historical homeland, they never had another home. As individuals, Jews can find homes in other countries but not as a nation. The only place where the Jewish people can have the right to self-determination is in their historical homeland. This is a very small country — the size of Sicily. It’s the one and only homeland of the Palestinians and the one and only homeland of the Israelis. Now what we get is two conflicts for the price of one. To the extent that the Palestinians are fighting to be liberated from Israeli occupation, to have their own independent state, to have their own right to self-determination is unquestionable. But to the extent that many Palestinians want Israel to die; that’s where they are wrong. Now the same applies to the Israelis: to the extent that they want to be a free nation in their own country, it’s unquestionable. To the extent that the Israelis want to swallow the Palestinian territories and get two extra bedrooms for the nation, that’s wrong. This is very confusing because on both sides there are legitimate and illegitimate intentions.

It’s very simple to launch a demonstration against the bad guys, sign a petition in favour of the good guys and go to sleep feeling good. In the case of Israel and Palestine you will have to take a complex attitude because the issues are complex. It is not a black and white issue. That’s why I reject comparisons to apartheid. Apartheid was a terrible phenomenon.

NG: You don’t accept that the methods being used are the same as during apartheid?

AO: The methods used by the Israeli military regime in the West Bank have some common denominators with apartheid. But the condition is essentially different because in the case of apartheid, in South Africa, there was no religious clash. There is a religious clash here.

NG: You’ve got your ultra-religious Jews and of course we don’t even have to name the religious fanatics on the other side. This is a great complication. The Palestinians — a large part of them — deny the right of Israel to exist. And on the other side there is the question of occupying Palestinian territory and the right of return. In 1948 Palestinians were removed from their homes. Now in South Africa why didn’t the liberation movement say, ‘You whites! Go back home!’

AO: Which is what many Palestinians are saying to the Israelis. Let’s begin with 1948, an all-out ruthless war. There was a messy ethnic cleansing of both sides. In the territories seized by the Palestinians in 1948 not one Jew was allowed to reside, including the population of the old city of Jerusalem (right behind our backs) who had lived in the old city for centuries. They had been there long before the Arabs. They were cleansed completely at the same time as hundreds of Palestinian Arabs fled or were kicked out of Israel. But let us not forget that, a couple of years later, one million Jews were forcefully kicked out of the Arab Islamic countries so there was a massive transfer of populations on both sides. There is no way the Palestinian refugees of 1948 can return to Israel because if they do there will be two Palestinian states and not one for the Jewish people. The problem of the Palestinian refugees of 1948 will have to be resolved in the future state of Palestine, in the West Bank and Gaza. I am talking about those Palestinians who still live in camps. Those who found themselves new jobs and lives in other countries are looked after. There are tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees who have been rotting in camps in inhuman conditions for sixty years and I’m not going to go now into who’s to blame for their plight. It is not a simple question because the Arab governments wanted them to stay in the camps to provide fuel for anger and fanaticism. They starve them and make them angry so they start making home-made bombs. However, their problem is our problem. If I were negotiating on behalf of Israel, I would have made the issue of the Palestinian refugees in the camps the prime Israeli consideration: Israel will sign no deal unless there is a solution for those refugees in the future state of Palestine. This should be made possible by an international Marshall Plan. Some of the money will have to come from the rich oil-producing Arab countries. And, indeed, some of it will have to come from Israel along with an Israeli recognition of a partial responsibility for the tragedy of these people.

Now the disputed Holy Places, these four square kilometres of Jerusalem behind us. Whose Holy Places are they? My grandmother had a wonderful explanation, although she died before 1967. When I was a little boy she clarified for me, in simple terms, the difference between Jew and Christian. She said, ‘Look, my boy, the Christians believe that the Messiah has been here once and he is coming again one day. We Jews believe he has not been here and is yet to come. Over this you cannot imagine how much bloodshed and hatred and persecution we have suffered. Why can’t everybody simply wait and see? If the Messiah comes saying, “Hello. It’s nice to see you again,” the Jews will have to apologise to the Christians. If, on the other hand, the Messiah comes saying, “How do you do? It’s nice to meet you,” the entire Christian world will have to apologise to the Jews. Until then, she said, live and let live. This is what it’s all about. The question of the Holy Places in Jerusalem should remain unresolved. Everybody should be allowed to pray there. I have suggested that the Holy Places be transferred to Scandinavia for one hundred years, after which they should be returned intact to Jerusalem. By this time we will have worked out something.

NG: I often wish someone had dropped a bomb on them, I’m sorry. But then the ruins would be fought over! It is a ridiculous complication. We are living in modern times; whether we are Jews or Muslims, we have to deal with reality now. And to have to complicate the situation with this problem of the Holy Sites …

AO: To my mind, in Judaism there is no such thing as Holy Sites. The only holy thing is life itself. But you don’t get two Jews to agree with each other. You don’t get one Jew to agree with himself because everyone has a divided mind and soul. So this is a nation of seven and a half million citizens, seven and a half million Prime Ministers, seven and a half million prophets and messiahs, each and every one with their own personal formula of what is Judaism. And this includes the religious people who believe in the holiness of the Holy Places and I have to respect their views out of empathy for difference. We discussed earlier the need to put ourselves inside the shoes of others.

NG: I can’t believe that whatever God’s people believe in can be so destructive. This is not a race conflict. It’s about land.

AO: It’s about land but the fanatics on both sides are trying to turn it into a religious battle. Essentially it’s a real-estate dispute and a tragic one because both the Palestinians and the Israelis are right in claiming this land for themselves. The only solution is a painful compromise between right and right. And I’m a great believer in compromise.

NG: You want a semi-detached house!

AO: My formula for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that they cannot live like one happy family because they are not one, they are not happy, they are not even family — they are two families.

NG: But it’s not a colour thing.

AO: If you look at the audience in front of you, you will see that there is no such thing as a Jewish race. The Jews come in every colour and shape. There are 100,000 Ethiopian Jews in Israel and I am told that when the first aeroplane landed in Israel the religious leader of the Ethiopian community cast one terrified glance at the airport and said to his people, ‘Let’s go back. This is not a Jewish country. Everybody here is white.’ So there is no Jewish race or colour. This is about real estate, which is a version of a struggle for power. It’s the only home of both and therefore the house has to be divided in two smaller apartments.

NG: You know the ancient prehistory. Was there not a time when Jews and Arabs lived together here?

AO: There was a time when Jews lived under Arabs. They were tolerated, well treated but made to remember that they lived under the Arabs. This is exactly what we don’t want. We don’t want either the Palestinians or Israelis to live this way.

Prior to that there was a time when Hebrews lived surrounded by other inhabitants of the land and there were endless struggles. The conflict over this land is as old as time itself. Now some people claim that the Hebrews are not the same Hebrews and the Palestinians are not the same Palestinians. What does it matter? What difference does it make?

NG: As you know I, in my own private, humble opinion, believe there must be two states with frontiers agreed upon. It will be painful, but it is the only way.

I want to push you more on a subject we don’t agree on: the wall. You agree that the wall is invading Palestinian territory but you still think there should be a wall.Who decides where the frontier is?

AO: I would not object to the wall if it had been built between Israel and Palestine, but it’s being built in the middle of Palestine. We have the pre-1967 line in place. This is the basis for negotiation. Essentially everybody knows this, including people who object on both sides. Deep down in their heart of hearts both the Israelis and the Palestinians know that the two state solution will be implemented along the lines of the pre-1967 ceasefire lines. Are they happy with it? Not in Israel and not in Palestine. It’s like an amputation for both and it hurts like hell. But this solution is going to be implemented in the end. I can’t tell you when. It’s hard to be a prophet in Jerusalem: there is too much competition.

NG: You would agree that what is happening in the occupied territories is really shameful for the Israelis and for the Jewish people?

AO: I will use a word stronger than shameful. It is criminal. I think the lasting occupation of the Palestinians by the Israelis is a crime, the crime of Israeli society. Now this crime has circumstances, it has background. It began with an all-out Arab attack on Israel, but nonetheless I regard the lasting occupation as a crime.

NG: Well, I have to agree entirely

AO: On this agreement, on this unhappy note, we must end and thank our audience for their patience.

It is Moses season in America. There are Moses on the radio and Moses on TV. Followers of one Moses hand out fliers at the grocery, followers of another Moses put up signs along the street. ‘Moses 2008,’ shouts a blue sign, ‘Vote Moses!’ shouts a red. There are rallies for this Moses, marches for that one, and every week or so, all the Moses gather together on stage and attack, to the delight of the ravenous crowd, the other’s plan for the Exodus.

‘I promise to lead you out of bondage in the first year of my Presidency.’

‘Oh please, you voted for the bondage last year.’

‘But then I voted against it. Can we keep this

discussion about the Pharaoh?’

‘I’ve been working to fight the Pharaoh since college.’

And so on. It is Moses season in America, and I never liked Passover much to begin with.

I was raised in the ultra-Orthodox community of Monsey, New York. It’s a bit more ultra now than it was then — perhaps then it was just mega-Orthodox, or mondo-Orthodox, or Orthodox Xtreme — but suffocation is an absolute, and suffocate I did. My rabbis taught me that God was violent, that God was vengeful, that God was quick to anger, and that when He got angry, watch out: the Earth just might flood, the blood just might turn to water, another Holocaust just might happen and God just might once again decide to ‘turn His head.’ God, basically, was a prick, and for the first twenty years of my life, my rabbis stood with their hands raised overhead, exhorting us to do what He says if we didn’t want any trouble. This sounds troublingly like what gunmen say when they hold up a bank, only with gunmen, it’s possible the police will rescue you; nobody, unfortunately, is going to kick in the doors of the synagogue and pump God full of lead, so you do what your rabbis tell you and hope the All-Homicidal goes away without killing anyone. A dysfunctional home life only made the problem worse; I might not have believed all the bad news about my Father in Heaven if my father on Earth wasn’t just as violent, just as erratic, just as terrifying as the God my rabbis were telling me about. All of which makes me, 37 years later, a big fan of exodus, but not so much of Passover.

For one thing, I don’t think Moses and me would have gotten along. I don’t trust politicians, particularly those raised in palaces, and frankly, he seems like he was a bit of a reactionary. ‘Oh, the bush told you to confront Pharaoh, did it?’ We do have two things in common, though: we share the same vindictive lunatic of a God, and we both found ourselves in a place that was stifling, restrictive, and which we needed to leave. The trouble is, Moses was heading for the place I was escaping.

From a very young age, I wanted to go. I wanted to run.  I didn’t know where I wanted to go, but I knew I wanted to leave — my community, my family, my God. Consequently, no other story was as frustrating to me then as the story of Exodus. It had the best beginning and the worst ending. Go! it began. Be free! Be liberated! Live your own lives! How excited I was by that. ‘I can leave?’ I thought. ‘That’s cool with everyone?’ But then, somewhere around the middle of the second act, the story takes a turn for the worse. Because from where I was sitting, the place the Israelites were going did not sound like a place of freedom. It sounded like Monsey. It was a place, again, of rules and obligations, another land ruled by a vicious dictator (in fact, according to some, when this Dictator gave them the Holy Rule Book at Mount Sinai, he held the mountain over their heads until they accepted His rules; out of the Egyptian fire, so to speak, and into the kosher frying pan). Check out the Table of Contents if you don’t believe me: the promising Book of Exodus is immediately followed by restrictive Book of Leviticus. The Book of Freedom is followed by the Book of Submission. The Book of Possibility is followed by the Book of Do What I Say. I was hoping for a story of leaving, but this wasn’t what I got; this was a story about digging your way out of one prison only to emerge from the ground, muddy and disappointed, in the yard of the prison next door. And the Warden of this new prison, if my rabbis were to be believed, was even crazier and more powerful than the warden of the last. Here’s what the story said to me, a young boy stuck in a bad place, under the thumb of an abusive father and an even more abusive God: you can run, but you can’t hide. From the introduction to the Artscroll Family Haggadah:

It is a night when every Jew should regard himself as though he were freed from Egyptian slavery, and began the march toward Sinai, where Israel would receive the gift of the Ten Commandments… On the night of Passover, (the nation) came to acknowledge no master but God…

Crap. Here’s the ending I was hoping for:

And all the Pharaoh’s army drowned in the sea, and the Israelites were free. And Moses said, ‘All right, cool, that’s over. Do what you want. I’m heading south, but I’m kind of a sun guy.’ And Aaron went north, because he had some friends who had a ski lodge up there, and everyone else went off on their own, free to do what they want. The End.

Alas.

I didn’t think about this much until my son was born three years ago, and it was his birth that made me, at last, bring to a close my own exodus — an exodus from a poisonous family, a restrictive place, a destructive theology.  It had been a long and difficult journey — not quite 40 years in the desert, but close — and it was around the time of his first birthday that I realized I probably wasn’t going to make it. I realized that even though I had managed to leave my family and community behind, the terror they had instilled in me from such a young age was so hard-wired, so ingrained, that I would probably never rid myself of this God, never stop worrying, every minute of every day, about the cruel traps and painful punishments He was setting for me around every corner. But I also realized that maybe my son could. Maybe my son could live in a land without God, or, at the very least, without this God, this cruel God, this Prick my rabbis had taught me about. And suddenly, there — on my son’s first birthday — was a third thing Moses and I had in common: we don’t reach our Promised Lands, but we count it as the far greater victory if our children somehow do.

In a few months time, my fellow citizens are going to elect a new Moses. Right now, all we can think about is what we’re escaping from: our politicians stand proudly before microphones and cameras, promising to deliver us from the evils of George Bush and Dick Cheney, and behold, the people do clap and cheer, and they dance and sing before their new Moses, be it Moses McCain, Moses Clinton or Moses Obama. But listen, I know these stories, I know how they end, and though I’m as excited as the rest of my nation to be out of bondage, I know that a month, or six months or a year after our emancipation, our new leader will reveal a whole new set of rules, a whole new type of bondage, or, more likely, the same old kind, and I watch them on TV and think ‘Why bother?’ But then I think about my son, and I think about that one Exodus story in my head, that one where Moses heads south and Aaron goes north and everyone goes their own way, that improbable one that really does end in freedom, and I reach over to my nightstand and set the alarm clock for 6:30 AM. It’s Primary Day tomorrow, and the polls open at 7.

Shalom Auslander is a writer. Originally from Monsey, New York, he now lives in New York City. His most recent book, Foreskin’s Lament: A Memoir is published by Picador.