Unlike other cities where Israel overcame Palestine, here Palestine is still felt. Unlike other places where modernity overcame the past, here the past is present.
Do I wash my hands of Zionism? Do I turn my back on the Jewish national movement that carried out the deed of Lydda? LIke the brigade commander, I am faced with something too immense to deal with. Like the military governor, Gutman, I see a reality I cannot contain. Like the training group leader, I am not only sad, I am horrified. For when one opens the black box, one understands that whereas the small mosque massacre could have been a misunderstanding brought about by a tragic chain of accidental events, the conquest of Lydda and the expulsion of Lydda were no accident. They were an inevitable phase of the Zionist revolution that laid the foundation for the Zionist state. Lydda is an integral and essential part of our story. And when I try to be honest about it, I see that the choice is stark: either reject Zionism because of Lydda, or accept Zionism along with Lydda.
...
... I think about the tragedy that took place here. Forty-five years after Zionism came into the valley in the name of the homeless, it sent out of the Lydda Valley a column of homeless. In the heavy heat, through the haze, through the dry brown fields, I see the column marching east. So many years have passed, and yet the column is still marching east. For columns like the column of Lydda never stop marching.
-Shavit, My Promised Land, 131-132
... Israel's 1950s are not defined by misfortune but by a fit of human greatness. Against all odds, most of the Holocaust survivors of the housing estate make it. Against all odds, Ben Gurion's Israel pulls through. Ze'ev Sternhell will become a professor of political science. Aharon Appelfeld will become a great novelist. Aharon Barak will become one of the most respected jurists in the world. The children of Louise Aynachi will also do well. Arie Belldegrun will become an extremely successful doctor and investor in Los Angeles. Yehudit Fischer will become a professor of Hebrew literature in Boston. The surviving Teicher boy, Shlomo, will become one of Israel's best dental surgeons. Yehudit Spiegel will become a psychologist and entrepreneur who, together with her husband, will launch a billion-dollar medical company. In the most astonishing way, Bizaron will have become a hub for Israel's future meritocratic elite. Many of its sons and daughters will conquer their professional worlds. The Israel into which I am born in late 1957 does not only overcome its horrific past, it launches a radiant future.
-Ari Shavit, My Promised Land, 172-173
The distortion opening Meir Ariel’s third album, Yerukot (Yellow Blue), was the first jarring note. Then came Meir’s voice, angry and taunting. The song, “Midrash Yonati” - literally, “commentary on My Dove,” a rabbinic metaphor for the Jewish people - was a vehement attack on the settlers, who seize land “like a thief in the night.” Invoking a saying of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook about the Western Wall - “There are people with hearts of stone and stones with hearts of people” - Meir lamented, “Stones in the heart of Jerusalem / … She doesn’t pursue justice, doesn’t want peace / because there is no peace without justice” - a play on two biblical verses.
Meir’s critique was no mere left-wing polemic but a religious disputation. Meir was insisting that settlers had distorted the Torah he had come to love. He drew on the Exodus from Egypt, the apocalyptic prophecy of Ezekiel, the love between God and Israel in the Song of Songs. Meir’s protest was so layered with biblical and rabbinic references that almost every line required commentary.
“Midrash Yonati” was a philosophical argument for how Judaism understands the holiness of the land of Israel. Just as a Jew relinquishes mastery over the world every seventh day, he surrenders control over his land every seventh year. The laws of shmitta, of leaving the land fallow on the sabbatical year, apply only to the land of Israel, a reminder that one cannot entirely posses holy.
Meir didn’t minimize the enmity of Israel’s neighbors. The modern exodus of the Jews resembled the first exodus, when the Israelites stood on the shore of the Red Sea, with Pharoah behind them and the unparted waters before them: it was, sang Meir, the same dangerous procession “on the way to the sea.”
But existential threat didn’t absolve Israel from moral responsibility. The generation of Jews privileged to return home must be especially worthy, because they are the repository of the dreams of the Jews in exile: “The lands beyond the sea are behind us / We are their longing.”
-Yossi Klein Halevi, Like Dreamers, 443-444
I hesitate to comment further on the state of Israel in the context of a Jewish theology because I accord the state no theological meaning. I am a religious Jew and a secularZionist, which is to say that I do not believe the founding of Israel to be "the first flowering of our redemption," as the chief rabbinate's prayer puts it. I accord no messianic or protomessianic meaning to the existence of a Jewish state. The scourge of anti-Semitism, a deep blight on the Western, mainly Christian, moral conscience, reached a point at which Jewish life in Europe became impossible. The Zionists were right in seeing the crisis coming well before 1933, a reality hotly denied by others at the time. We Jews need to create a society of our own. ... Perhaps we did not fully realize how deeply our values would be put to the test in employing them to bring forth a new social and political reality.
To say that I accord the state no messianic status does not mean, however, that I refuse to find meaning in the fact of its existence.
-Art Green, Radical Judaism, 145
The great simplifiers are hard at work, but Israel/Palestine has never been a friendly environment for them, and it is especially unfriendly today. They are bound to get it wrong, morally and politically, and that is a very bad thing to do, for the stakes are high. There isn’t one war going on in the Middle East, and there isn’t a single opposition of right and wrong, just and unjust. Four Israeli-Palestinian wars are now in progress.
• The first is a Palestinian war to destroy the state of Israel.
• The second is a Palestinian war to create an independent state alongside Israel, ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
• The third is an Israeli war for the security of Israel within the 1967 borders.
• The fourth is an Israeli war for Greater Israel, for the settlements and the occupied territories.
It isn’t easy to say which war is being fought at any given moment; in a sense, the four are simultaneous. They are also continuous; the wars go on even when the fighting stops, as if in confirmation of Thomas Hobbes’s definition: “For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known . . . ” Throughout the course of the Oslo peace process, some Palestinians and some Israelis were fighting the first and fourth of these wars—or, at least, were committed to fighting them (and their will to contend was sufficiently known so that it could have been dealt with). The actual decision to restart the battles was taken by the Palestinians in September 2000; since then, all four wars have been actively in progress. Different people are fighting each of the The Four Wars of Israel/Palestine four wars at the same time, side by side, though the overall emphasis falls differently at different times. Our moral and political judgments have to reflect this complexity. Taken separately, two of the wars are just and two are unjust. But they don’t appear separately in the “real world.” For analytic purposes, we can begin by looking at them one by one, but we won’t be able to stop there.
-Michael Walzer, "The Four Wars of Israel/Palestine," Dissent, p. 26, Fall 2002
This is a challenging moment for me. I am an American Jew deeply connected personally, professionally, and spiritually to the State of Israel. I have struggled recently through periods of deep disappointment bordering on outrage about actions undertaken by the State and trends that signal the rise of antidemocratic tendencies among the electorate. I have also felt a deep sense of impotence as a non-citizen and non-resident who is both implicated — out of a good sense of Jewish peoplehood — in the actions of the State of Israel, as well as in the behavior of Jewish communal organizations that sometimes give cover to these actions, and are largely incapable, except through complicated networks of influence, to lead toward processes of change.
To paraphrase David Hartman, z”l, Israel has lost the quality of being primarily a “naches machine” for American Jews; it is now exporting meaningful quantities of disappointment.
But the issue now is not me, and it is not Israel; the problem we face is that both the right and the left have misconstrued and misrepresented liberal Zionism. The problem of the moment is not merely one of identities, but of ideas.
Simply put, one of the greatest philosophical mistakes we Jews made following the creation of Israel was the too-quick transformation of Zionism from a discourse of imagination into a discourse of loyalty.
Consider the breathtaking diversity of Zionist ideas and dreams prior to the creation of the State of Israel. In Jewish educational environments such as my own, we were taught to think of these in strict categories. Political Zionism aimed to solve “the Jewish problem” of intrinsic, unending alienation from the structures of power and authority with a nationalist response. Religious Zionism sought to reconcile deep-seated longings for a return to the land and for the messianic age with an open window of political possibility that could achieve pieces of those longings, even incrementally. Cultural Zionism sought to retrieve the spiritual integrity of the Jewish People after millennia of dislocation, dispersion, and cultural deracination.
In this account, in spite of the competition among these ideas, each thinker and movement is afforded a pride of place in a (retrospectively) collaborative project. Some aspects of this wide network of ideas succeeded more than others and had greater staying power within the State once it finally arrived. But this retrospective narrative validated different ideas as partners in the solving of a Big Problem — the absence of statehood and statecraft — and enabled the translation of those ideas to the mechanics of running the state once we had it.
This understanding of Zionism yields a devastating demand for those who would inherit its legacy: Now that we have a state, we focus on defending and protecting what we have. Sure, ideology still persists and matters, and we see the veins and arteries of those ideologies in the living and breathing organism of the state: some bulging at times and others weaker, some infused with oxygen and some starved. Now that the body is born and named, however, our job becomes to shelter it rather than fantasize about what it will be.
There is a different way to understand the story of Zionism, which is to interpret it as a messier, more violent, and yet inherently pluralistic competition of imagination, because pluralism can mean that no full knowledge of truth is possible, and because power structures are such that no ideology is capable of seizing the kind of consensus or authority to make other ideas impossible or untenable.
The real legacy of that moment in Jewish history was not extra-parliamentary relics such as the strange, idiosyncratic World Zionist Congress, whose function was to fantasize about what might be possible, or even the State itself, but the shared, collective project engaged in a diverse dance between pragmatism and fantasy.
Why did we let this Zionism go? There were urgent demands once the State had been created, and these befell both its Jewish inhabitants and their diaspora brethren, who substituted philanthropy and advocacy for the physical work of nation building as acts of loyalty to the project. But Zionism then became essentially only a means of perpetuating the political choices that had emerged from the pre-State ideological mess — choices now invested with the imprimatur of majority choice, political leadership, and gradually, precedent.
This was a great loss to the Jewish people, and the costs have not been fully realized. The transformation of a language of longing for a place, into the mechanics of loyalty to a place in which we have arrived, is a dramatic, emotionally wrought choice we did altogether too quickly, and whose emotional consequences we have suppressed at our peril. Our historical narratives of actual arrival in the Promised Land are few and far between; we have far, far more stories, from the banishment from Eden through the Babylonian Exile and beyond, of wanderings and alienations, accompanied by a ceaseless longing to return home. This longing for home is an essential feature of what it means to be Jewish. By what hubris do we now pretend that the fantasizing of the possible is easily replaced by mere perpetuation of new status quos?
Retrieving Zionism as an imaginative discourse for the Jewish people is the best answer to the “crisis” of liberal Zionism. To the left, I say: Separating Judaism and Zionism and treating them as discrete projects is a deep misunderstanding of both. Zionism is the discourse of what the Jewish people can make possible in the longing for a return to Zion.
It may manifest in different choices and may translate to different political realities, but a Zionist Jew sees opportunity and is challenged by what is not present to make it so; it has been, and could be again, the greatest project of Jewish spiritual, religious, political, and cultural renewal our people has ever seen.
To the right, which accuses liberal Zionists of betraying Israel with their agitation that it be better, I demand to know: When did Judaism tolerate — much less legislate — complacency?
-Yehuda Kurtzer, "The Politics of Loyalty," The Jewish Week, May 27, 2015
Yes, Zionism can lead to excess of rage. It can inspire folks to deny others basic human dignity, the same way that anyone else’s nationalism can. It can turn ugly when the desire for “mine” becomes the desire to deny “yours.” But that is not the Zionism of the Jewish people. It was not Herzl’s Zionism. Our bid is just to be a nation like the other nations.
Well, not exactly like all the others. It was hoped that Israel would not enslave anyone. It was hoped that Israel would treat the strangers who lived among its people with justice and equality. It was expected Jews would not throw rocks at passing Arab cars and that we could make room for other dreams and other visions and other nations to settle near by or live in peace among us.
Zionism remembers the vulnerability of the Jews living without a state of their own and so it balances the needs of others to thrive in their own orchards and the needs of the Jewish community to become itself, at last, a nation without a foreign ruler, without a wicked king appointed by a distant empire, but a place where the Jewish story can be told by free men and women with confident voices in safe places where their Jewish children can learn and grow without fear. In other words a nation just like the French or the Spanish or the Poles who are not racist for waving the French, Spanish, or Polish flag or singing the anthem they learned at school.
If this return had happened in 1776 then the state of Israel could easily have acted in the way that America did—a way that came to be viewed, rightly or wrongly, as “normal.” It could have marched its Palestinians out beyond its borders and the crime of it, the pain of it, would have lost its immediacy, no cameras, no reporters on the ground. Native Americans were stripped of their land and their culture trampled and no one saw it on the news and by the time anyone could weep for them, the deed was done and could not be revoked. America had slaves for a hundred and fifty years and was indeed a racist country and remains so in some places. Think of the faces of the men and women who lined up to mock the entrance of a few Black children into a white school in Alabama. That is the face of racism.
If Israel was a normal country like Iraq or Syria the ultra-Orthodox would be at war with the citizens of Tel-Aviv who go to the movies on Shabbat. The followers of this rabbi or that would take to the hills with their guns. If Israel was a normal country like Mexico its citizens would be afraid of the police and the drug cartels would appoint the chief of police. If Israel were really normal the Ashkenazi Jews would arm themselves against the Sephardim and civil war would take the lives of Jews just as civil war decimated the population of young men in America as boys lay dead on battlefield after battlefield, leaving mothers to grieve and sweethearts to weep and children to grow up without fathers. That is our normal.
So, it might be not such a good idea to be a normal state. And while it might not be entirely fair to hold Israel to a higher standard, I do in fact expect that Jews will hold back the killing hand, the truly racist call, and that Zionism would be, could create a decent place, where a variety of religious approaches could co-exist and secular folk could walk about unmolested. It is a dream, but not an impossible one.
-Anne Roiphe, "Is Zionism Racism?", Tablet Magazine, April 13, 2015