The siren the next morning is the perfect response. Stillness and silence – because no words suffice. Like the Biblical Aaron when he lost his sons, the very best that we can do is to do nothing.

But what are we really commemorating? On one level, obviously, it’s the enormity of the loss, the indescribable suffering of broken human beings, many of whose names are lost forever. It’s the unspeakable human capacity for unmitigated evil, the fact that seventy years later we are a people reborn but still broken, a people renewed and yet deeply and perhaps permanently scarred. And silence is, perhaps, the only response to the fact that the older we get, the less we comprehend.

For me, the silence is about all that, but also more. It is about the undeniable fact that though much has changed, too much remains the same. Hatred of the Jew –always illogical, often deadly and forever morphing to fit the times – continues, largely unabated.

There’s Iran’s obvious venomous rhetoric. And there’s Greece, where the Golden Dawn party, which regularly employs Nazi references, now sits comfortably in Parliament. Ukraine’s Svoboda party openly uses inflammatory language about Jews. In Hungary, the University of Budapest Student Council recently began keeping lists of Jewish students; Hungry’s Jobbik party, the country’s third largest, is expressly anti-Semitic. In the United States, where constitutional protection of free speech has virtually no limits, a vicious anti-Semitic underbelly of the internet has found a home for hundreds of web sites that Europe would never permit.

That is why the placement of Yom Ha-Shoah and Yom Hazikaron one week apart from each other was so brilliant. To most observers, the perennial hatred of the Jew and Israel’s interminable conflict with its neighbors have little to do with each other. The former, many say, is a despicable phenomenon that any decent human being must decry. But the second, they insist, is very different. It is a national conflict, a festering disagreement between two peoples about how to share one land, or even, perhaps, the desperate but legitimate campaign waged by a stateless people to achieve the same sort of sovereignty that the Jews won for themselves some sixty-five years ago.

But are the two really so unrelated? Is it really true that hatred of the Jew on the one hand, and Palestinian rejection of Israel on the other, are so thoroughly disconnected?

Hamas wants us to understand that they are not. That is why, as the ceremony at Yad Vashem was still unfolding, they launched a rocket towards Israel. It was fortunate that no one was hurt and no damage was caused; but it was unfortunate that the international press paid almost no attention to the hapless attack.

There was nothing accidental about the timing. “Us, too!” Hamas was saying. “At precisely the moment at which you pause to reflect on all that the Shoah still evokes in you – understand this. Even that, we will desecrate. Not because our national conflict takes precedence, but because we, too, will not rest until you are destroyed.”

It sounds counterintuitive, but sadly, it’s not. Too many people today simply have no idea that significant elements of Palestinian nationalism have long been tied not only to aspirations for sovereignty, but to hatred of the Jew no less. Haj Amin al-Husseini linked early Palestinian nationalist aspirations to the Nazi effort, seeking Hitler’s assistance in opposing the creation of a Jewish state. Mahmoud Abbas, on whom Barack Obama and John Kerry still pin their hopes for peace, wrote a doctoral dissertation on the link between Nazism and Zionism. He insists that he would not write that dissertation now, but is that because it would be impolitic, or because he knows that all the “research” for his doctorate was bogus?

If what drove the Palestinians was nationalism and not hatred, why would have Gazans have elected Hamas (Hitler, too, was elected, of course) – choosing continued conflict instead of a real future – when Israel departed the strip in 2005? And why would John Kerry have to offer Abbas concessions simply for the act of returning to the negotiating table?

With all this in mind, it’s worth revisiting President Obama’s recent trip to Israel. In many ways, the visit was a great success. His speech at the Jerusalem Convention Center, in particular, repaired much of the damage of his Cairo speech, evoked Jewish historical connection to the land, Israeli vulnerability, and acknowledged Israel’s yearnings for peace.

So why did the speech leave me worried? Because while it became clear that Obama understands Israel better than he did, it remains far from certain that he understands that the Muslim rejection of Israel is far more than a national issue and that it is deeply tied to the very sentiments that are at the heart of Yom Hashoah. Yom Hashoah and Yom Hazikaron are not as distinct as we might like to imagine. Not for naught does the eerie siren mark both days.

Zeev Jabotinsky has long since fallen out of favor in most circles. But Jabotinsky merits mention in this context, for both his beliefs and his prescience. Belief-wise, he held a view, now held by very few, that both Jews and Arabs were “natives” to this land. But he was also virtually prophetic, acknowledging that while there would be many Jews who would acknowledge Arab “indigenousness” in this land, there would be very few Arabs who would ever say the same about the Jews. That fact, he concluded, meant that the conflict would endure for far longer than many of Zionism’s leaders wanted to admit.

Without question, there have been Zionists whose ideological passions have been rooted in hate, and Israel has not done nearly enough to root them out. But as a whole, Zionism has been about something much more lofty, and the question that Obama, Kerry and others need to ask themselves is this: “Is the resistance to settling this conflict that the Palestinians continue to exhibit all about negotiations, or is about something much darker, a toxic hatred, the resurgence of dogma that the West would like to believe is on the decline, but is not?”

The seemingly inconsequential rocket attack on Yom Hashoah ought not to escape the notice of the West. In its own pathetic way, it speaks volumes about the difference between Jewish and Palestinian nationalism, about the difference between a movement rooted in the desire for sovereignty versus a movement rooted in hate.

Progress will come to this region only when leaders of the West make it clear, especially to Israel’s neighbors, that they have finally learned to recognize the difference.

Mr. Khalidi is wrong. There is, in fact, a middle way. It is the way that the Obama administration should have adopted long ago. In this middle way, Israel makes concessions, but Palestinians formally accept the permanence of a Jewish State in the Middle East and own up to their role in the creation of their miserable reality.

Israelis, sadly, are infinitely more likely to do their share. When Khalidi writes that the United States is “continuing to uphold and bankroll an unjust status quo that it helped produce,” he conveniently omits any mention of how Israel’s presence in the West Bank began. He says nothing about Jordan’s foolish decision to join the losing fray in 1967 and omits entirely the famous Khartoum Conference at which the Arabs responded with “no peace, no recognition and no negotiations.”

That, I assume, is also the fault of the US? And of Israel? The middle way, which Khalidi would have us believe does not exist, begins with adults taking responsibility for their past actions and saying what has to be said so that life can move forward. How does the following quote by Nabil Shaath, head of foreign relations in the Fatah movement, which aired on ANB TV in July 2011, move us forward? “The story of ‘two states for two peoples’ means that there will be a Jewish people over there and a Palestinian people here. We will never accept this – not as part of the French initiative and not as part of the American initiative.  We will not sacrifice the 1.5 million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship who live within the 1948 borders… We will not accept this, whether the initiative is French, American, or Czechoslovakian.”

So there, we have it. No Palestinian responsibility for 1967, no Palestinian willingness for there to be a Jewish state. That is what Khalidi would like Obama to endorse? Those who care about a better future in this region can only pray that Obama had the sense to tell the Palestinians, in no uncertain terms, that there is always a middle way, and it is never too late to grow up.

Behind the closed doors that have had Jerusalem traffic snarled these past few days, one can only hope that Obama might also have said something along these lines to the Palestinians:

“Mr. Khalidi and Mr. Shaath, we Americans hear you. We understand that you would like a better life, and we’d like you to have one. But not only do we hear you, we also see you. And what we see, we don’t like so very much. America stands for certain things, and quite frankly, the society in your region that embodies the values which we consider sacred is not yours, but Israel’s.

“Democracy, for example. Israel has again proven that its democratic system is robust and energetic. When was the last time you had a real election, with real opposition? Or how about freedom of the press? You still believe that jailing people who poke fun at Mahmoud Abbas on Facebook does your society credit? We don’t. And why is it that gay Palestinians are desperate to get into Tel Aviv? Have you considered staying out of people’s private lives and protecting them rather than tormenting them?

“How about freedom of association? Can you imagine protests in Ramallah anything like those that regularly take place in Tel Aviv? Why not? “Or freedom of religion. Even if life as a Muslim is not ideal in Israel, it’s infinitely better than life as a Christian in Gaza or the West Bank, isn’t it? Why is that? And why does ‘Palestine’ still insist on becoming a Jew-free state? Do you really think that America can, in good conscience, promote the creation of a state that does not want Jews as citizens? And what about the rights of women and the ongoing phenomenon of family honor murders [in which fathers have their adult daughters executed for having sex outside of marriage] that still take place in both Gaza and the West Bank? You’re not ashamed? Well, we, for our part, are horrified.

“Mr. Khalidi, when you wrote in the Times that ‘An even bigger obstacle is Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing government, hellbent on territorial expansion,’ did it not make any impression on you that despite the rants of people like Mr. Shaath, Israelis just voted en masse for the center and clipped Netanyahu’s wings? Does that tell you anything about them? It’s beginning to tell us quite a bit.”

Sadly, we’re not terribly likely to hear anything like that from President Obama, now or in the near future. But it’s the only thing that would work.

Calm (not a treaty to which so many are addicted, but enduring calm) will come to this region when the Palestinians recognize that time is not on their side, that the world will help them create a state when they embrace the values that the West believes make for human life with infinitely greater dignity.

When, in our “debate” a couple of weeks ago, I asked Jeremy Ben-Ami, of J-Street, why he does not believe Nabil Shaath and why he continues to think that Israeli departure from the West Bank would change anything, he had no answer. He simply refused to address that issue. Obama is thus in good company. Too many people, including politicians, some American rabbis, Jeremy Ben-Ami and others, are so fixated on a “deal” that they’ve forgotten entirely about values and fairness.

It’s time for a middle way. Netanyahu said again this week that he’s ready for a historic compromise. Is Shaath? Is Khalidi? Why is there no middle way? Because Khalidi and the Palestinians reject it: “The overwhelming dominance of Israel over the Palestinians means that the conflict is not one that demands reciprocal concessions from two equal parties,” Khalidi wrote in the Times.

“Reciprocal concessions” are out of the question? Then so, too, is any hope for progress.

One can only hope that behind all of this week’s gridlock, the Americans were clear and that they said something akin to: “There is a middle way, even though you reject it. And when the Palestinians begin embracing it, they’ll have a future. Until they do, however, they won’t. And the responsibility will be exclusively theirs.”

What are the chances that anything like that actually happened?

The minute Rabbi Stav walks into the room, you cannot help but sense that you’re in the presence of a different kind of rabbi. This is a rabbi who served in the IDF, as have his children, who cares about the larger issues of Israeli society.

Seeking evolutionary rather than revolutionary change in the way that the chief rabbinate works, Stav is known largely for the work of his organization, Tzohar, which has sought to create a much more user-friendly rabbinate for the citizens of the State of Israel. More than 3,000 couples have been married by Tzohar rabbis, and they widely attest to an experience that was infinitely warmer, more respectful and religiously meaningful than what they would have received through the standard Israeli rabbinate.

Stav’s campaign is picking up steam. Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu party endorsed him some time back, and Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid has now done so as well.

But what’s interesting is that despite the undeniable breath of fresh air that Stav would represent, he has received sometimes only tepid responses from non-Orthodox Diaspora communities, who understandably detest Israel’s hopelessly corrupt, misogynist, intellectually stultifying, ultra-Orthodox, non- Zionist rabbinate.  [DG: It takes a particular kind of rage to evoke this rather distasteful graffiti, which can be found in many part of Jerusalem:]

This lukewarm response to Stav, though not entirely incomprehensible, is a mistake. True, neither Stav nor Tzohar as an organization are pluralists in the American sense of the word. Tzohar rabbis have publicly stated their opposition to Israel’s recognizing non-Orthodox conversions. At a meeting I attended with Stav, he noted that as the rabbi of Shoham, he would allocate funding to any 40 families who wished to create a Reform or Conservative synagogue, but then added, “Thank God, that hasn’t happened.” For American Diaspora leaders used to a different form of discourse, there’s nothing terribly comforting about conversations like those.

But before anyone writes off Stav, they ought to ask themselves, why have those non-Orthodox synagogues not come to be? Under Stav, Shoham appears to have become a place where a much wider swathe of Israeli society feels comfortable in the “mainstream” Orthodox community. That will be little consolation to those who believe that Reform or Conservative Judaism have something important to offer Israeli society, and that the message must get out. Understandable though their perspective is, it’s a short-sighted one in this instance.

POLITICS, OTTO von Bismarck noted, is the art of the possible. Stav’s candidacy ought to be viewed in that light, even by those who might prefer a radically different system in Israel. There is going to be no separation of “church” and state in Israel anytime in the near future. There is going to be no non-Orthodox chief rabbi. American pluralist notions are just that – they are American, largely foreign to European and Israeli culture. That may change, or it may not, but in the meantime, Jews who care about the future of Israeli society would be wise to seize opportunity where it awaits them.

Israel faces a plurality of existential threats. Iran is the most obvious, but others are equally dangerous. And one of those is the danger that young Israelis will simply stop believing in the importance of the Zionist project. When young Israelis no longer believe that Israel matters, they will leave and Israel will fade away. There is absolutely no guarantee that Israel will still be around in 65 years, but if it is to survive, it needs a younger generation of Israeli Jews that cares.

Yet there is little reason for these young Jews to be terribly committed to Israel if they know virtually nothing about the Jewish tradition, or if what they do see of it turns them off. Jews of all walks of life ought therefore see Stav’s candidacy as infinitely more than a painful compromise due to the lack of any alternatives.  It represents a decision to give Judaism in Israel another chance, and in so doing, to extend Israel’s lease on life.

Stav would undoubtedly conduct the rabbinate in ways Diaspora leaders find either distasteful or problematic. An example: Tzohar rabbis have not sought to abolish the classes for prospective brides that the rabbinate requires. A skeptical critic might ask, “Why not? If even Tzohar rabbis insist on teaching these classes to couples who have no intention of conducting their private lives in accordance with the dictates of Jewish tradition, isn’t this more of the same?”

But no, it is not. To abolish the classes would mean engaging in conflict with the chief rabbinate and undermining Tzohar.  So Tzohar rabbis use the classes to speak about issues of Jewish identity, the Jewish values of the Jewish home, and in the process, do discuss nidda, too.  Is it a bad thing for the Jewish state to hope that couples getting married will have at least some discussion of how Judaism might infuse the character of the home they are about to create?

The evaluations of these courses suggest not.  Nachman Rosenberg, Tzohar’s executive vice president, asserts that the preponderance of those completing evaluations wrote that they did not know that there were in Israel religious Jews who were so open, that they had expected the worst from these classes but had had very positive experiences.
That’s more than a curiosity; it’s an indication of how critical a renewed rabbinate could be to restoring Israelis’ sense of purpose, and how much we’ve lost by having the rabbinate we’ve had for far too long.

Israel’s last elections illustrated that one day of voting can usher in a radically more hopeful period for the Jewish state.  Most of us are not eligible to vote for the chief rabbi, but we have reason to express our views, to support those who support change, and to recognize what is at stake.

The Israeli rabbis and politicians who will vote for the chief rabbi have an opportunity to embrace a critical strategic objective that ought to be shared by all Jews who care about the future of Israel. We have an opportunity to end the long festering conflict between the Jewish state, the Jewish tradition and Israel’s Jewish citizens. We have an opportunity to renew that which had always made Israel great – a sense of shared purpose, a belief in shared destiny and a commitment to mutual responsibility. 

Purim is therefore an appropriate time to consider a delightful rabbinic passage that reflects on the challenges involved in surviving without sovereignty.  It suggests how land and nation, so completely interwoven in contemporary Zionist thought, were seen as inextricably linked long ago, when the restoration of Jewish sovereignty was but a dream. 

As the biblical Book of Esther (1:10-15) relates,

On the seventh day, when the king was merry with wine, he commanded . . . the seven eunuchs who ministered to King Ahasuerus, to bring Queen Vashti before the king wearing the crown royal, to show the peoples and the princes her beauty; for she was very beautiful.  But Queen Vashti refused to come at the king’s command . . . ; the king was incensed, and his fury burned within him.  Then the king said to the wise men, who knew the times . . .  What shall be done to Queen Vashti for failing to obey the command of King Ahasuerus?

For the rabbis, this passage was an invitation to interpret; in the talmudic tractate which deals with Purim (Megillah 12b), we find the following:

“And the king said to the wise men.”  Who are the wise men? — The Rabbis.  “Who knew the times”: that is, who knew how to intercalate years and fix new moons.  He said to them: Try her for me.  They said [to themselves]: What shall we do?  If we tell him to put her to death, to-morrow he will become sober again and he will require her from us.  Shall we tell him to let her go?  She will lose all her respect for royalty.  So they said to him: From the day when the Temple was destroyed and we were exiled from our land, wisdom has been taken from us and we do not know how to judge capital cases.  Go to Ammon and Moab who have remained in their places like wine that has settled on its lees.  They spoke to him thus with good reason, since it is written (Jeremiah 48:11): “Moab hath been secure from his youth, and he is settled on his lees, and has not been poured from vessel to vessel, neither has he gone into exile.  Therefore his fine flavor has remained, and his bouquet is unspoiled.”

It is a playful passage.  The rabbis, who are mere subjects of idolatrous Babylonian rulers, use this passage from the Book of Esther to allow themselves a flight of fancy.  Like children who imagine themselves as sports heroes or the president, the rabbis ask, “Who were those wise men with whom the King consulted?” “Us!” they insist.  “We, the rabbis, are those to whom Ahasuerus turned.”  In their reverie, they have become insiders in the king’s court, valued for their counsel.  They based this, in part, on the somewhat obscure phrase “who knew the times.”  What does the Bible mean when it says that the king’s advisors were men who “knew the times?”  It means, the rabbis imagined, those who knew how calculate the dates of the Jewish calendar year.  And who was that?  The rabbis, of course.

But the rabbis don’t allow themselves to daydream for long.  So fear-filled are Jewish lives that even their reveries are littered with the dangers that life regularly forced them to confront.

The king is furious with Vashti, who humiliated him by refusing to appear in his court (the rabbis explain her refusal by assuming that he had wanted her to appear naked), and now must decide how to deal with her. So he turns to his new trusted advisors, the rabbis, and asks them what to do.  The request for counsel scares them, for the king’s request for advice draws them into an impossibly dangerous situation.  If they suggest that he pardon Vashti, he may think that they have impugned the authority of the throne.  If they suggest that he execute her, however, what will happen to them when the drunkard Ahasuerus sobers up and asks for the Queen?

The rabbis, therefore, have to escape the very predicament their reverie has created.  Having imagined a world in which they have insinuated themselves into the king’s court, they now have to escape from it.  To do that, ironically, they must disparage themselves and suggest that the king turn to the Moabites, synonymous in biblical parlance with implacable enemies of the Jews.  And why do the rabbis suggest the Moabites?  Because unlike the Jews, Moab has never been exiled from its land.  Like a fine wine which has aged on its lees, Moab has not moved for eternity.  Exiled from their ancestral homeland to Babylonia, the Jews are not a fine wine.  They are a cheap version, no longer able to adjudicate capital cases.  If the king wants real experts, he ought to turn to Moab, their mortal enemies.

It’s a charming tale, but also a devastatingly self-deprecating one.  The emotional need for an adolescent reverie in which one genuinely matters is itself a sign that maturity and self-confidence are either yet to come or already lost.  But to then be terrified of the very imaginary world one has created is even worse. And, finally, to escape that artificial world by granting your mortal enemy the coveted position you just imagined for yourself makes the entire affair even more demeaning.

This rabbinic tale, though, is no mere child’s play.  It is, in its own way, derivative of an ancient Jewish political philosophic tradition which, like modern nation-state theory, argues that the ideal for human beings is one in which peoples disperse “by their lands, each with their language, their claims, and their nations.” (Gen 10:5)  The rabbis are painfully aware that even the most alluring of fantasies of power and normalcy, as long as Jews are bereft of sovereignty, will remain just that—fantasy.  Exile, by its nature, robs them of ethnic authenticity.  Genuine peoplehood requires homeland and sovereignty; even the powers of reverie can do nothing to change that basic facet of the human condition.

In typical rabbinic fashion, however, this sobering rabbinic fantasy cannot help but close with a redeeming glimmer of hope.  In offering Moab as substitute adjudicators, the rabbis have injected Moab into the very peril from which they had to extricate themselves.  Now Moab will have to deal with the king’s wrath, whether they pardon Vashti or execute her.  Moab will meet the nasty end that the rabbis barely avoided.

The rabbis even cite a biblical basis for this prediction.  The very chapter of Jeremiah which asserts that Moab has “settled on his lees, and hath not been emptied from vessel to vessel,” foretells a very different end for Moab:

On all the rooftops of Moab and in its squares, there is nothing but lamentation; for I have broken Moab like a vessel no one wants, declares the Lord. . . .  Moab shall be destroyed from being a people, because he hath magnified himself against the Lord. (Jeremiah 48:38, 42)

Even in depths of the Jews’ exile, to which no end was in sight, the rabbinic tradition could not help but imagine a day in which the enemies of the Jews would be subdued and the Jewish people would return, sovereign, to its ancestral homeland.  Their fundamental political claim, that ethnicity and its culture can best thrive in what today is called the ethnic nation-state, is out of vogue today.  The awarding of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union is perhaps the most obvious reflection of this contemporary disposition.

Holidays like Hanukkah and Purim, despite appearances to the contrary, are anything but child’s play.  They are serious and political, and ought to be seen as persistent, annual rejoinders to the implicit dismissive attitude to the nation-state so common today.  They are, in fact, also reminders that the political worldview at the heart of Zionism, marginalized precisely because of its abiding insistence on the link between ethnicity and territory, is not nearly as new in Jewish consciousness as many people like to suggest.

The rabbis of the Talmud would not be in the least bit surprised that precisely because of its renewed sovereignty, the Jewish people can now dream with a self-confidence that the rabbis themselves could scarcely imagine.

This column first appeared in Jewish Ideas Daily.

]]> http://danielgordis.org/2013/03/03/the-rabbis-of-the-talmud-reflect-on-dreams-fear-nationhood-and-homeland/feed/ 0 http://danielgordis.org/2013/03/03/the-rabbis-of-the-talmud-reflect-on-dreams-fear-nationhood-and-homeland/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DanielGordis/~3/3sbWwxwHybM/ http://danielgordis.org/2013/02/24/2771/#comments Sun, 24 Feb 2013 05:27:46 +0000 Daniel Gordis http://danielgordis.org/?p=2771 If Limmud is so fascinating, why do I usually find myself leaving it with such mixed emotions? What is it about this multi-denominational, volunteer-led, creative out-of- the-box experience that renders me so conflicted, whether I attend it in Nottingham or New York, Los Angeles or (later this year) Australia? The answer actually has nothing to do with Limmud, and everything to do with the country to which I return when I depart it.

Limmud is one of those places where the silos come tumbling down, where the whole point is to encounter Jews who are very much unlike us, and with that encounter, to accept and even embrace the discomfort that such encounters often evoke. Limmud forces us to acknowledge that people whose Jewish lives look very different from ours are not necessarily less passionate or committed, not less open or more fundamentalist, but rather that their experiences, intellectual dispositions, spiritual needs and search for meaning sometimes just took them to places that are different from where we ended up.

At Limmud, one almost cannot but recognize that the danger lies not with those whose teaching and learning we might disagree with, but with those who do not attend, who have no interest, who don’t want to be part of the Jewish conversation. The religious and the secular, the passionate Zionists and the Israel-questioners, the Reform and the Orthodox, the deeply respectful and the unabashedly irreverent at Limmud all have much more in common with each other than they do with those who just don’t care at all. It is always, for me, a powerful dose of optimism in a Jewish world that desperately needs it, a reminder of what we could be if only we weren’t what we are.

SO WHY does Limmud usually leave me so conflicted? Because I’m invariably headed back to Israel, where the silos stand tall, where more often than not, we manage not to meet people who construct meaningful Jewish lives differently than we do, where policy is made top-down and not bottom-up, where authority is derived from politics and not from knowledge, creativity and the passion of one’s convictions.

Yet this year, somehow, as Limmud NY wound down, I had a vague but irrepressible hope that the departure might feel different. Not because Limmud has changed, but because, though we have a long way to go, the Israeli sands are shifting.

The signs are everywhere. MK Moshe Feiglin, not exactly known as a voice of political or religious moderation, has informed us that he has decided it’s not impermissible to shake hands with a woman. And he did so in the Knesset, after his inaugural Knesset speech. Could a newly pluralistic Knesset be working its magic?

Then there was the performance of 17-year-old Ofir Ben-Shitrit, a religious young woman who appeared on the reality show The Voice, with a voice so beautiful and a soul so pure that no one who heard her was unaffected. The secular judges were no less moved when she sang an Andalusian religious song than when she sang a modern Israeli love song. And the reactions? The crowd loved her, but her school suspended her for singing in front of men.

What that did, of course, was make Ben-Shitrit an even greater sensation. Power, the school officials learned the hard way, comes in many forms. And it’s not always top-down.

And bigger than even Feiglin and Ben-Shitrit is the impact thatYair Lapid’s party, Yesh Atid, is having on Israeli discourse, even before a government has been formed. Lapid, the secular Jew not disconnected from Jewish life, who’s found meaning in a Reform shul, has a haredi rabbi (Dov Lipman) as part of his team in the Knesset.

The very same Lapid gave a lecture to haredi students at Kiryat Ono College, telling them, “You won.” Because they are so numerous, such an economic power, so significant in Israeli politics, Lapid told them, they no longer have the luxury of thinking of themselves as marginalized. But with the end of marginalization, he challenged them, should come the end of fear.

“I understand that you don’t want your children to play with my children on the playground,” he said, “and I try hard not to be insulted by that. But can we not find a way to at least be able to live next door to each other?” And should he and his children defend the state, when they and their children don’t, he wanted to know.

Watch the YouTube video and look at the audience. They were listening. They were uncomfortable, but not angry. They were challenged. At long last, Israel is having a conversation. It may be slow, but the silos are cracking.

AND THEN there was the inaugural Knesset speech by Ruth Calderon, also from Lapid’s party, who had the audacity to teach a Talmudic text. It’s her right, of course. She’s got a PhD in Talmud from the Hebrew University. But she’s not part of the religious camp.

Yet, she says instructively, it’s her book, too. It’s her tradition. It’s her music. It’s her voice. And she’s not about to relinquish it to anyone else.

So with class and with grace, this non-religious woman taught a Talmudic text to the Knesset, which includes many men who have studied Talmud for years but had never heard a woman teach a single line of it. That YouTube video, as of this writing, has 150,000 views. Watch it. See the men listening, and some of them squirming uncomfortably in their seats. Witness a new conversation emerging.

And don’t miss Calderon’s line about equal sharing of the burden applying not only to military service, but to the study of Torah as well. Her point, even if unspoken? If Israel is going to survive, it needs a strong military. The haredim can’t leave the defense of the state to secular Jews just because they don’t feel like serving. But if Israel is going to be a Jewish state, then it can’t be only the religious who know something about Judaism, whose conversations are framed by encounters with the Jewish canon. If the draft needs to be universal, so does the study of Jewish tradition. So she opened a Talmud and began to teach.

Unlike in the case of Ben-Shitrit’s school, no one can suspend Calderon. But that didn’t stop certain elements from trying. The haredi publication Kikar Hashabbat (Shabbat Square), which published its editorial about Calderon under a URL containing the words “the generation of the smartphone” (whatever that was supposed to mean), understood the threat.

“They do not want to erase the Torah of Israel,” the article stated. “They do not want us to be a nation like all the other nations…. They want Talmud for everyone, and therein lies the danger.” Suddenly the enemy is the one who doesn’t hate the Jewish tradition, but loves it.

They’re right to be worried. As are the principals of Ben-Shitrit’s school, and all those others who prefer life in silos. For with any luck, all of this is no mere blip on the screen. With any luck, the winds of change are finally beginning to blow.

Much has been said and written about Ed Koch since his recent passing, but one aspect of his life that has eluded the commentators is his little-known role in educating American Jews about the role of Menachem Begin and the Irgun Zva’i Leumi in bringing about the creation of Israel.

When Begin first visited the United States in the autumn of 1948, as the recently emerged leader of the Jewish fighting underground and the Israeli opposition, he was a stranger in a strange land. Most mainstream American Jewish leaders were ideologically more comfortable with David Ben- Gurion and the Labor Zionists, and they followed Ben-Gurion’s lead in treating Begin as a pariah. None attended the Manhattan dinner in his honor.

Some even pressured dignitaries, such as undersecretary of the interior Oscar Chapman, to withdraw from the sponsoring committee. Hannah Arendt joined a group of prominent US Jews, including Albert Einstein and Hadassah’s Irma Lindheim, in publicly denouncing Begin as a “fascist.”

During the 1950s and 1960s, the textbooks used in American public schools and Jewish day schools seldom mentioned the story of the Irgun’s armed revolt against the British. An entire generation of American Jews grew up believing that the State of Israel was created by the United Nations. Thus, when Begin was first elected prime minister in 1977, he was unknown to much of the US Jewish community.

What little was known was negative; many of those who knew anything about him “knew” that he was a “terrorist.”

Begin “rhymes with Fagin,” Time magazine famously wrote.

Ed Koch helped start the process of bringing Begin and the Irgun in from the cold by announcing, during his tenure as mayor in May 1978, that he was making the prime minister an honorary citizen of New York City. Koch’s act was a powerful statement, by one of the most prominent Jews in America, that Begin and the fighters he led deserved to be reckoned among the founders of the Jewish state.

Two years later, Koch gave this process another boost by proclaiming a “Jabotinsky Day” in the Big Apple. He hailed Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionism and spiritual father of the Irgun, as a “legendary statesman, soldier, poet and architect of the State of Israel.” The messages of greeting to that year’s Jabotinsky Centennial Dinner read like a who’s who of the American Jewish establishment, including the leaders of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Bna’i B’rith and Hadassah. The times had changed, and Koch had helped change them.

It was not that Mayor Koch was a cheerleader for the Irgun per se. He also named a Manhattan street after Ben- Gurion. For Koch, what was important was not any specific leader or group, but the fundamental notion that Jews ought to be proud of having fought for their independence. It is easy to detect some of that same fighting spirit in the bold style of political battle that characterized Koch’s own long and colorful career in the public arena.

Koch was not the only one to appreciate the leaders of the Jewish underground.

One recalls, for example, that at about the same time, the newly founded Los Angeles wing of Yeshiva University named its School of Jewish Studies after Begin. These were important signs of the maturation of the American Jewish community. The new generation of US Jews cared little for the old Labor-Revisionist quarrels and took pride in the achievements of the Zionist fighters, whatever their political orientation.

Koch was the public face of a new Jewish attitude. Thirty years behind their coreligionists in Israel, these American Jews increasingly perceived the world as an often hostile arena, in which Jews would achieve little unless they fought for it. Sometimes that meant fighting in court, sometimes it meant fighting the elements in malaria- infested swamps, and sometimes it meant taking up arms. A growing number of American Jews realized that the actions of the Jewish underground had been justified. They recognized Begin was right when he wrote in The Revolt: “Tyranny is armed. Otherwise it would be liquidated overnight. Fighters for Freedom must arm; otherwise they would be crushed overnight.”

Still, this part of Ed Koch’s work remains incomplete. The process of educating American Jews about the Hagana-Irgun-Stern Group fight to establish Israel has a long way to go. Too many textbooks still give the fighters short shrift. To cite one of many examples, an otherwise fine book titled Israel: The Founding of A Modern Nation, which appears on the Anti-Defamation League’s list of books about Israel recommended for “young readers,” notes only that there was a “Jewish resistance movement” that “brought homeless refugees into Palestine in open defiance of the British.” The Irgun and Hagana are mentioned just once, in connection with Arab violence in the 1930s. The British withdrawal from Mandatory Palestine is depicted as the result of the UN partition vote, not as the culmination of a Jewish war for national freedom.

If American Jews want to infuse their children with Zionist pride, they will need to teach them that Israel was created not because somebody handed it to us, but because our forefathers fought for it. Ed Koch deserves credit for helping us remember that.

Co-authored by Daniel Gordis and Raphael Medoff.  From the Jerusalem Post, February 7, 2013.

Though pundits predicted a ho-hum election, the results were dramatic. The two major stories were the significant weakening of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, which lost considerable ground, and the rise of the previously unknown Yair Lapid, who is a staunch centrist and, suddenly, a major player.

All the predictions had been that Israelis would move to the right. They did precisely the opposite.

Why did observers assume Israel would swing right? The Jewish state faces threats from every direction. Iran, declaring that Israel is a cancer, gets ever closer to a nuclear weapon. While Israelis appreciate America’s support, they give little credence to President Obama’s assurances that Iran will not be allowed to get a bomb. His second inaugural address, in which he said that “a decade of war is now ending,” confirmed their intuition that when it comes to Iran, Israel is on its own.

Closer to home, Egyptians elected the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi, who makes no secret of his disdain for Jews or of the fact that if only he could, he would annul the peace treaty with Israel. So blatant is Morsi’s anti-Semitism that when a group of American senators went to meet with him, he launched a diatribe about Israeli policies that had the lawmakers “physically recoil[ing],” according to the account of Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.).

Are 35 years of peace about to end?

In Gaza, Hamas rules with an iron fist and is equally determined to destroy Israel. In Lebanon, Hezbollah essentially controls the country, and, like Hamas, is hell-bent on Israel’s destruction.

Then there’s Syria, where, if Bashar Assad is defeated, it will likely be by forces no less hostile to Israel but much less predictable than he was.

And what about Jordan? Will King Abdullah survive? Should he fall, is there any doubt that he will be replaced by forces more religious and thus, more anti-Israel? Is Israel’s treaty with Jordan also vulnerable?

The single largest conflict, of course, is with the Palestinians. Israelis intuit that Netanyahu lost the international public relations game by not reaching out to the Palestinians, but they also doubt that President Mahmoud Abbas is serious about negotiating.

They remember: When Netanyahu agreed to President Obama’s first request for a settlement building freeze, Abbas refused to come to the table. Abbas still insists that he will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state; he recently claimed that the “Zionists” had collaborated with the Nazis.

Finally, there’s Israel’s own economy. It has weathered the economic slowdown better than many countries, but cutbacks are inevitable, and citizens worry that our stratospherically high taxes might rise further.

Given all these dangers, pundits predicted that Israel, fearful for its future, would lurch to the right, which is seen as being more reliable on security issues. That assumption was fueled by the campaign’s main story until Election Day: Naftali Bennett. An unknown, Bennett took the National Religious Party and reshaped it as the Jewish Home Party, reaching out to religious and secular voters alike, many of them young.

The most famous line from Bennett’s web video was, “There are certain things we simply know aren’t going to happen. ‘The Sopranos’ are not coming back for another season, and there’s not going to be a peace deal with the Palestinians.” Bennett advocated annexing part of the West Bank to Israel, thus ending the pretense of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations once and for all.

Bennett horrified the international community. Netanyahu at least pretended to want a deal, they said, even if he did nothing. Suddenly, Bennett was the hottest item in Israeli politics. Obama snidely opined that “Israel doesn’t know what its best interests are.” The American press and many American Jewish leaders moaned that the Jewish state was about to stumble off a cliff into a hell of its own making.

But those prognostications were based on a fundamental misreading of Israeli society.

While Bennett did well, he did not do as well as had been expected, with his party receiving only 12 seats of the 120 seats in the Israeli Knesset.

That slight rise was completely overshadowed by the exceptional showing of a rising star and his fundamentally hopeful message: Yair Lapid’s new Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future”) party. Lapid’s party received 19 Knesset seats, making him the second largest party, and almost certainly a key partner in whatever coalition Netanyahu manages to cobble together.

This is a profound statement about the very nature of Israel. Surrounded by enemies, beset by internal anxieties, the people did not take the bait of extremists. Nor would they validate the status quo.

To the contrary, Israelis chose to embrace the center. They heard Bennett and were not sure that he was wrong, but they were unwilling to declare peace dead. Instead, they decided to give negotiations one more try, weakening Netanyahu by heaping votes on a new, third way.

Who is Lapid?

Long known to Israelis as a smart, trendy and handsome TV journalist, he is a newcomer to the political scene. He ran as a hopeful pragmatist, neither naïve nor hardline. A secular Jew with personal ties to Judaism’s liberal Reform movement, the members of Knesset from his party will also include Orthodox rabbis.

By no means naïve about the Palestinian refusal to compromise, Lapid still believes Israel needs to talk to them, if only to avoid being perceived as the obstacle. Unlike Israel’s left-wing Labor Party, which ran on a nearly socialist agenda, Lapid is a committed capitalist but nonetheless wants to address issues of economic inequality.

Netanyahu appears to have survived as prime minister, but is more than a bit beaten up. Having performed much more poorly in the elections than he had hoped, he must cobble together at least 61 seats of the 120 Knesset seats to have a majority. Meaning he will likely need both Bennett and Lapid, as well as a few others, to form a true governing coalition.

Taken as a whole, then, what did Israelis do? They reelected Netanyahu, because Iran still looms, and they trust him more than anyone else to make the right life-and-death decisions. But at the very same time, voters are clearly tired of Netanyahu’s bravado. Those convinced that there’s no deal to be had with the Palestinians prefer Bennett’s lack of pretense; those not yet certain clipped Netanyahu’s wings with Lapid’s scissors, hoping that will force the prime minister to give it a serious try.

Jewish tradition is fundamentally deliberative; its central religious text, the Talmud, is a 20-volume conversation, in which both the winning and losing positions are revered and studied. The Jewish state is similarly deliberative; Israeli society is fundamentally “both-and” rather than “either-or.” Israelis want both capitalism and a social conscience. They demand both hard-nosed security and the openness to negotiating. They know that Israel needs both the freedom to defend itself and restored standing in the international community.

Israelis do not give up on hope; in fact, “Hatikvah,” our national anthem, means “The Hope.”

Netanyahu offered no vision for a different future. Both Bennett and Lapid did. Netanyahu paid the price; Bennett and Lapid collected the spoils.

The question now turns to Israel’s neighbors — which, in far too many cases, are her enemies. The Jewish state has proven its moderation, even in moments of great distress. But what about the Egyptians? Gazans? Palestinians?

Americans and Europeans who will hold out hope for an agreement should now say this to the Palestinians and their rejectionist allies: “Look at what the Israeli elections just revealed. They’re not going to compromise their security (Netanyahu). But now, something has changed. Time is not on your side. If you do not deal, they’re eventually going to permanently annex the land you want (Bennett). But for now, they’re still willing to talk (Lapid).

“So stop the evasion. And while you’re at it, look at the country those Israelis have created. You see their freedom of the press? Their attitude to women (more in this Knesset than ever before)? Their openness to gays and lesbians?

“We Americans believe in all those things. Their election has reminded us that they are our natural allies. You want our support, too? Drop the fundamentalism. Stop the hatred. Work with Israel.”

Will they, or will they continue to put disproportionate pressure on Israel to bring about change that it simply cannot accomplish on its own?

Time will tell. But let there be no doubt: Everything now depends not on Israel, but on those very governments that dreaded what Israelis might have done, but didn’t.

“[The] failure of Israel to offer recognition and support for the streams of Judaism with which the great majority of American Jews identify is nothing less than a disgrace,” Yoffie wrote. “American Jews…have had enough. [T]hey will no longer tolerate that Reform and Conservative rabbis are scorned and despised in Israel; they will no longer sit silently while Israel’s official representatives offend them and denigrate their religious practices…. The angry voices are… coming from the heart of American Jewish leadership.”

He suggested, “You could point out that only two million of the 13.5 million Jews in the world are Orthodox, and that the overwhelming majority of American Jews come from the Reform and Conservative streams. You could say that these streams are the heart of our Jewish family and the core of Jewish support for Israel.”

What follows is the response that Netanyahu should send, but won’t.

Dear Rabbi Yoffie, 

Thank you very much for your thoughtful letter. You have dedicated your life to leading American Jewry with wisdom and passion, and I’m honored that we’re discussing these matters openly.

Let me begin with the bottom line: I am committed to addressing the issues that you raise. I will address inequality in allocations to non-Orthodox synagogues, will ensure that non-Orthodox rabbis are invited in official capacities to state events, and yes, I will invite non-Orthodox rabbis to teach at my Bible study sessions.

I will do that not only because it is the right thing to do, but frankly because it would also be good for Orthodoxy. What American Jewish life has in abundance – and that Israeli religious life lacks almost entirely – is an open marketplace of ideas.

Because Orthodoxy in America has no state backing, its leaders must attract their followers with visions of Jewish life that speak to the intellectual, moral, emotional and national instincts of American Jews. American Judaism is richer for that; I would like to play a role in freeing Orthodoxy in Israel from the power base that actually stifles its creativity.

At the same time, Rabbi Yoffie, it’s instructive that you warned me to act before I am “forced to act by the courts.” You may be right that the courts would eventually rule in your favor. But your threat of going the judicial route is tantamount to admission that this issue has no political traction. Isn’t that worth noting? Why are so many more Israelis concerned about the rights of Israel’s Arabs than they are about the rights of Reform (or Conservative) Judaism in Israel?

The reasons are many. But central among them is that Israelis are far from convinced that the vision of Jewish life that Reform Judaism offers can survive. They see epidemic levels of intermarriage, which they know will destroy the Jewish people. They see the wealthiest, most socially accepted, and best secularly educatedDiaspora community that the Jews have ever known producing the most Jewishly ignorant community in Jewish history. They see that outside Orthodoxy in America, virtually no young Jews are conversant with Jewish texts. They know that in most non- Orthodox Jewish homes, one will not find a Mikra’ot Gedolot, a Talmud or any of the other books that have, for centuries, been the backbone of the most basic Jewish discourse.

Even non-Orthodox Israelis (who exhibit many of these same qualities) sense this, and worry. Pushed to the wall, they would admit that you are right that inclusion is only fair; but they would also note that they simply don’t care that much, because they seriously doubt that many of the grandchildren of today’s young non- Orthodox Diaspora Jews will live lives committed to the Jewish People.

You urge me to explore how Reform and Conservative Jews can be drawn into a deeper relationship with Israel, and I will. But let’s stipulate what you and I both already know. For Israel to matter to Jews, Jews must see themselves first and foremost as a people, not merely as a religion. Religions don’t have states; peoples do. The French have a country, but Baptists do not.  The Italians have a state, but Methodists do not. As American non-Orthodox Judaism increasingly recasts itself as a religion in the image of American Protestantism, it is inevitable that the Jewish commitment to statehood will wither.

Rabbi Yoffie, please do not misunderstand me. I know that Orthodoxy also has much soul-searching to do. Many non- Orthodox Israelis are appalled by what’s become of Judaism in Israel. There is often an ugly, even racist quality to some sectors of the Orthodox community, and I wish that our chief rabbis and Diaspora Orthodox leaders spoke out against it more.

Ostensibly religious Jews often speak about Arabs in ways that are despicable; in part of the community, the attitude toward women is reprehensible. All too often, intellectual narrowness comes with singular devotion to the study of Jewish texts; how I wish that the graduates of our yeshivot were interested in studying Aristotle alongside Maimonides and John Locke alongside Tractate Sanhedrim.  But that rarely happens.  Too many of the products of Israel’s religious educational system have little interest in anything outside the tradition. Israel can, and must, be better than that.

We all need to do serious soul-searching.

Whatever form of Judaism is going to safeguard the future of the Jews into the mid- 21st century, it is going to have to be infinitely more grounded in Jewish learning, practice and peoplehood than the vast majority of American Reform and Conservative Judaism’s laypeople are, but far more morally nuanced and open to the intellectual richness of the West than much of Orthodoxy is.

All of us, Israelis and Diaspora Jews, Orthodox and non-Orthodox, are living in an era of collapsing worldviews. Israelis despair of ever seeing peace, and our politics are a response to that disappointment.  Our religious worldviews are also collapsing.

You yourself delivered a deeply moving sermon at the Reform Biennial last year, in which you spoke publicly about how one of your two children has found a home in Orthodoxy, while the other is not involved in the religious dimension of Jewish life. You gave that courageous speech, I believe, because you wanted the 5,000 Reform Jews who attended the biennial not to rest on their laurels, but to recognize that for all its success, Reform Judaism is in danger of being unable to sustain the level of Jewish commitment that any serious Jewish future requires.

So let’s work together. I’ll do as you suggest and work toward greater inclusion.

But you, in the meantime, must engender a serious conversation among American Jews about whether or not the varieties of Judaism that they so desperately want validated in Israel can actually sustain a Jewish future. Many Israelis suspect that they cannot, and I know that you share their concern. We need each other – we need each other’s validation, but we also need each other’s critique. I hope that this exchange is but the beginning of an ongoing exchange of ideas, and look forward to working together for the sake of our people’s future.

Yours,

Binyamin Netanyahu

“What was the hardest thing about making aliya?” people still ask me.

They expect, I imagine, that I’ll say something about our kids going to the army. Or about living in less than half the space we had when we lived in the States. Or, if they knew, they might imagine that I’d mention having one car for four drivers, rather than two cars for two drivers.

For me, though, it’s not that. What’s been hardest has been watching the worldview on which I was raised crash and break like a ship washed violently against a forbidding shore. I was raised in one of those (then-) classic American Jewish suburban families. Democratic voting, opposed to the Vietnam War, passionate advocates for civil rights, my parents taught their kids that most people were reasonable and that all conflicts were solvable. When it came to the Middle East, the prescription for resolution of the conflict was clear – we would give land, and we would get peace. The only question was when.

We were not the only ones who believed that, of course. A significant portion of Israeli society believed the same thing – until the Palestinian Terror War (mistakenly called the second intifada) – that is. Those four years destroyed the Israeli political Left because they washed away any illusions Israelis might have had that the Palestinian leadership was interested in a deal. And, to be fair, why should the Palestinians be interested in a deal? Their position gets stronger with each passing year. No longer pariahs, they are now the darlings of the international community. They have seen the world shift from denying the existence of a Palestinian people to giving them observer status at the UN. If you were the leader of the Palestinian Authority, would you make a deal now? Of course not. With the terms bound to get sweeter in years to come, only a fool would sign now.

Our enemies are not fools. But they are consistent. Hamas’s Mahmoud al- Zahar, in a much-quoted statement, said last year that the Jews have no place among the nations of the world and are headed for annihilation. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared to Egyptian TV that he would never, in a thousand years, recognize a Jewish state. Bibi gave the Bar-Ilan speech, but Abbas refused to return to the table; he still insists on the refugees’ right of return, which he knows would spell death for the idea of a Jewish state. Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi makes no bones about the fact that he would like to annul the treaty between Israel and Egypt. In videos recently posted by MEMRI (which were recorded in 2010, before he was worried about being closely watched), he openly described Jews as descendants of pigs, called Zionists “bloodsuckers” and said that Jews “must not stand on any Arab or Islamic land.They must be driven out of our countries.”

When Bashar Assad falls, will the Syrian victors be more likely to accept Israel’s existence? When Jordan follows, will the quiet on the Jordanian border persist?

ISRAELIS LIVE in a world of utter cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, our region is becoming ever more dangerous and our foes ever more honest about their desire to destroy the Jewish state. And on the other hand, much of the world insists that “land for peace” simply must work; some American Jewish leaders actually urged Israel, even in the midst of the Gaza conflict, to return to the negotiating table. It would be funny were it not so sad and so dangerous.

That is why the upcoming election, sobering though it is, may actually prove important. Israelis across the spectrum are acknowledging what they used to only whisper: the old paradigm is dying.

Naftali Bennett of the Bayit Yehudi party explicitly states that “land for peace” is dead and advocates annexing the portion of the West Bank known as Area C. Yair Shamir of Yisrael Beytenu says that regardless of Netanyahu’s Bar- Ilan speech, the Likud never endorsed a Palestinian state. Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party’s website makes no mention of going back to the negotiating table.

Neither does the Labor Party platform.

Even Meretz recently acknowledged that Oslo is dead.

To give up hope for peace is not to choose war. Egypt’s present and Jordan’s future indicate how little is guaranteed by a treaty; the Palestinian present shows that we can have quiet even in the face of stalemate. What Israelis now want is quiet, and a future. Nothing more, nothing less. And most importantly, no more illusions.

The demise of the peace addiction is no cause for celebration; it is merely cause for relief. There is something exhausting about living a life of pretense; with the death of illusion comes the possibility of shaping a future. After a new government is formed, a genuine leader could actually lead Israelis into a “what next” conversation. Deciding what comes next, now that we sadly know that the idea of “land for peace” is dead, will not be easy. Israel could make wise decisions or terrible mistakes.

But if, as a result of this election, we begin to have a conversation about a future that we can actually have, the Jewish state will be much better off.

Israel, though, is likely to make much better choices if it is joined in its hardearned realism by forces outside the country too. Now that Israelis are getting honest, the question is whether the international community – and then American Jews – will follow suit. On the former front, there are occasional causes for optimism. The Washington Post, for example, recently acknowledged that the international community’s rhetoric has become an obstacle rather than a help. “Mr. Netanyahu’s zoning approval is hardly the ‘almost fatal blow’ to a twostate solution that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon described… If Security Council members are really interested in progress toward Palestinian statehood, they will press Mr. Abbas to stop using settlements as an excuse for intransigence – and cool their own overheated rhetoric.”

Amen to that. But what about American Jewish leaders? They will likely find admitting that “land for peace” is dying no less difficult than anyone else. Will they listen carefully to what the Israeli electorate, across the spectrum, is saying? I hope so. Because loving someone means helping them to fashion a future that is possible, not harboring an exhausted illusion that can only yield pain and disappointment. The same is true with loving Israel.

In the midst of the cacophony and sobriety of this Israeli election, a new, mature and infinitely more realistic resignation seems to be emerging. Those who care about Israel might see it as failure, as moral weakness or as sad exhaustion. Alternatively, we could see it for what it is – the enduring Israeli desire to live, to thrive and to work not for a future that others pretend is still possible, but rather for one that we can actually build and then bequeath to our children.

Iran still wants a bomb, but the United States and Western European powers insist that as long as the mullahs threaten Israel and the West, they will have only civil nuclear power. Grudgingly Iran continues to allow international monitoring. Half a century has passed since the “civil but not military” compromise narrowly avoided Israel’s 2013 red line. Israel’s not terribly happy about the compromise, but not terribly unhappy, either.

Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt are all firmly in the hands of the Islamists, but of the mild variety, Erdogan-esque. No love lost with Israel in those quarters, but matters are much worse for intellectuals, Christians, women, gays and lesbians, and those economies than they are for Israel. The West pumps in money to ensure that those countries don’t devolve into utter chaos. Israel’s neighbors might love to do it in, but they know that they can’t; America has Israel’s back. So they worry more about repressing the demands for genuine democracy in their capitals and, the occasional venomous outburst about Israel notwithstanding, they essentially ignore the Zionist cancer across their borders.

In Gaza, the heirs to what used to be called Hamas are still in power. Gazans are still poor and overcrowded, but not starving, as a carefully monitored crossing with Egypt allows in food, medicine and building materials. There are some imports by sea, as well, subject to Israeli naval supervision. Every now and then, the regime lets fly some rockets; Israel then pounds them into temporary submission. No one likes it, but no Gazan citizens are clamoring for regime change, so almost everyone in Israel has just gotten used to it.

To the east, Fatah still hangs on. The Palestinians never got real statehood, because they continued to insist that as a precondition for negotiations, the now 10 million Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Syria be allowed to return to Israel; Israel simply refuses.

The Palestinian economy chugs along under a reasonably light Israeli thumb, and because Israel regularly makes proposals for longer-term arrangements and has effectively worked European capitals, international consensus holds that the Palestinians are the real stumbling block. There are occasional dustups about Israeli plans for building housing, but the planned neighborhoods are mostly contiguous with existing Israeli cities. Because Israel has reined in the hilltop settlers, violence against Palestinians has stopped; with the European Union and its post-nationalism now a thing of the past, Europe is not exactly enamored of Israel, but the hostility has dissipated a bit. The rare periodic flare-ups generally pass quickly.

Internally the crushing despair of 2000-2015 has largely dissipated. The economy continues to thrive; Israel remains a mini-Silicon Valley. Hostility among Israeli academics to the country’s very existence has softened, and thanks to some small Zionist and pluralistic colleges, creative and energetic Zionist thinking thrives once again. Ben-Gurion and Berdichevsky would not recognize the issues being bandied about, but they would recognize the diversity, the passion and the commitment to Jewish statehood.

Thanks to electoral reform, smaller parties are mostly a thing of the past. The haredi stranglehold on coalition politics is a memory; haredi kids do not serve in the army, but they do national service, and after that, they work for a living.

Israel still wins many more Nobel prizes than it does Olympic gold medals. That’s a frustration to some, but they’ve learned to accept it. Israel is the Jewish state, after all.

OR.

The Jewish state is much as it was in 2013, only more so.

Iran got the bomb in 2013. Immobilized by battle-fatigue, the US decided it would not attack. It gave Israel the green light, but overwhelming doubt in top Israeli echelons led to successive postponements. When Iran finally detonated a warhead beneath the sea, it was too late to attack.

European hostility to Israel never subsided, and successive Israeli governments turned irritating both the EU and the US into a national sport. In response to repeated European and American demands that building projects cease, the government assured Israelis, “They’ll learn to live with it. We just have to show them we can’t be bullied.”

Germany changed the rules first. Lufthansa stopped flying to Israel, and a year later, Germany refused El Al landing rights. After subsequent dustups, Air France and France followed suit, as did British Airways and the UK. Soon, the only way to get to Europe was by sea. Israelis could still fly to Turkey, though.

At first, it didn’t seem a sea-change. But with the economy in a drastic downturn and wild-eyed mullahs parading their gleaming weapons, the best-educated and thus most mobile Israeli parents asked themselves if raising children in the cross-hairs of nuclear-armed maniacs was moral. Increasingly they departed for calmer pastures. It wasn’t a mad exodus, but the Start-up Nation sputtered; everyone knew that if you wanted to do hi-tech, you had to cross the ocean.

Syrian civil war, which dragged on for years after President Bashar Assad fell, produced several million refugees. Once another protracted civil war toppled the Hashemite Kingdom, there were several million more. Hundreds of thousands made their way into the West Bank, which could not sustain them. Under intense US pressure (American Jews had long since softened their support for Israel on Capitol Hill), Israel agreed to grant tens of thousands of work and residency permits, and then more. The economy tanked further.

With Jews and Palestinians so clearly sharing the space between the river and the sea, and with the mere idea of a two-state solution a faint memory, the UN announced plans for a commission that would study how and when a one-state solution would be implemented. Outside a few staunch Israeli ideological pockets, there wasn’t much resistance. Those Israelis who remained were exhausted. Some members of the haredi community were actually relieved; a shared state would effectively be an Arab state. It would have no real enemies, and at long last, no one would care if they went to the army.

Among Israeli graduate students, the looming new reality was dubbed “The Second Yishuv.” How it would be different from The First Yishuv was a matter of academic debate, as was the question of whether the state that had existed between the two Yishuv periods could have been saved, or whether demography and geography had been too steeply stacked against it from the get-go.

But in the 2060 Olympics, Israel won two gold medals. The athletes had grown up in the States and trained there, but they were technically Israeli citizens.  They figured that they had better chances of making the Israeli team, and they did far better than anyone had anticipated. For a couple of days, Israeli spirits lifted, if only a bit.
SOUND CRAZY? It’s not. The details might be different, of course, but either of these scenarios is distinctly possible. Neither includes a settlement with the Palestinians, and neither requires that a single bullet be fired.

So, Happy New Year. And enjoy voting.