It’s been one of those months, with its renewed call for “balance” and “honesty” in discussion of Israel. First there was the Goldstone report, with its accusations that Israel committed war crimes during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. Goldstone was followed by the J Street Conference, celebrated by many as an opportunity to demonstrate their devotion to Israel by encouraging the US to get tough with it, to force it out of the militant and pro-occupation mind-set it has allegedly forged for itself.

Then there was the appearance in English of Tel Aviv University Prof. Shlomo Sand’s new book, The Invention of the Jewish People, with its claim that the concept of a Jewish people was a late invention, which the Zionists cynically manipulated to justify their taking land from the indigenous Arabs. Finally, verging on the surreal, Donald Bostrom, the Swedish journalist who authored the article accusing Israel of harvesting organs from Palestinian victims of Cast Lead, was invited to a conference in the Negev.

The utterly predictable responses are not terribly interesting. On one side of the divide, there are those who assail Goldstone for unfairness, J Street for allowing its campus activists to drop the “pro-Israel” portion of its “pro-Israel, pro-peace” moniker, Shlomo Sand for shoddy and self-hating scholarship and the Dimona Media Conference, which invited Bostrom, for utter naïveté.

There may be much merit to these accusations, but they have a serious downside, as well. Too often, those who rush to Israel’s defense have no interest in the undeniable suffering on the other side of the border. In knee-jerk fashion, they strive to silence any criticism, even in cases when its policies might well be wrong.

But no society benefits from an absence of criticism, and no nation improves without vigorous debate. Could we be effective parents without letting our children know when they disappoint us? Citizenship may not be all that different. In the long run, support that seeks to suppress debate will do us as much harm as good.

BUT ON the other side of the divide is a growing group so insistent on dialogue that it’s no longer clear to what they are most fundamentally committed. When a group of American rabbis visited Jerusalem last week, one of them remarked that it was unfortunate that Ramallah wasn’t on the itinerary. “Why visit Ramallah?” another member of the group asked. “Because Ramallah is also part of our story,” was the response. “More than Holon? Are you distressed that we’re not visiting Holon?” was the question that followed. To that, the first rabbi had no response.

Why, indeed, should Ramallah matter to us more than Holon? And why hide our pro-Israel position (if that’s really what we are) simply to appeal to more college students? Had Theodor Herzl adopted that stance with the sultan, or had Chaim Weizmann been bashful in London, would we have a state? Had Golda Meir been self-conscious about her convictions in the face of an American community not entirely certain that a Jewish state was a good idea, where would we be? One shudders to imagine.

Have we become so utterly addicted to dialogue with our enemies that we would rather visit their cities than our own? Have we lost the ability to say, “If you breathe new life into the age-old blood libel, we will shun you”? Would we invite Alfred Dreyfus’s accusers here for dialogue, were they alive today? We have real enemies. Have we so lost sight of that that we forget that anything we say, to paraphrase Miranda, “can and will be used against us”?

If those who insist on silencing any critique of Israel fail us because their passion threatens to squelch the debate we desperately need, those passionately committed to open debate suffer from the opposite problem – they do not recognize that they are unwittingly playing right into the hands of those determined to destroy us.

Take Sand’s book, The Invention of the Jewish People. It is, ostensibly, nothing but an academic hypothesis. Why all the tumult, numerous young American Jews have asked me. Perhaps Sands errs in some of his claims, but so, too, do many academic tomes.

What’s so dangerous is clear on the Amazon page for Sand’s book. Take a look at the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section. There’s Avi Shlaim, the well known post-Zionist, and his Israel and Palestine: Reflections, Revisions, Refutations. Next to it, sporting a cover with both a swastika and a Star of David, Debating the Holocaust: A New Look at Both Sides, as if there’s actually something to debate. Then, Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide. And Palestine in Pieces: Graphic Perspectives.

Surely, Sand must have known how his book would be used.

But there are critics of Israel who genuinely do not wish to do it harm. And these people ought to bear one central fact in mind: In today’s climate, anything we say can, and indeed will, be used against us.

Yes, there is moral failure and dangerous shortsightedness in refusing to hold ourselves and our government to standards of which we, and our children, will be proud. Of course Israel needs nuanced moral critique; no true lover of Zion would want that critique silenced.

But there is also suicidal folly in denying what we know: Were the UN to vote today on the creation of Israel, the motion would fail. The outcome of November 29, 1947 would not be repeated, for the world has decided that Israel was a mistake. No other country anywhere is subjected to debate as to whether it should exist. And that is the fact that matters more than any other.

Given that, the ultimate question is the one that the biblical Joshua posed to the angel (Joshua 5:13): “Are you with us, or do you seek our destruction?” It is frustrating, and tragic – but right now, in the world in which we live, those are our only choices.

We don’t know each other, though I’ve known of you and your work for some time.  Like many others, I recently read your “How I’m Losing My Love For Israel” in the Forward.  Because you write so articulately, and because your column has attracted such widespread attention, I’m taking the liberty of responding.

The truth is, you and I agree about a lot.  We’re both worried about some of what’s happening to Israeli society.  We’re both tired of all the equivocating (though probably for different reasons).  We’d both love some real leadership around here.  We’d both like peace.  And we’re both exhausted.

That exhaustion is the first reason you give for that fact that your “love [for Israel] is starting to wane.”  But frankly, Jay, when you began to write about your exhaustion, I began to lose you.  For, I have to confess, I don’t see the connection between exhaustion and losing love, or between exhaustion and committing oneself to what’s right and just.

I suspect that the Partisans were pretty exhausted, and they might even have debated some of their own tactics; but those were the least of their problems.  Their main worry was that evil might triumph and transform their world into an uninhabitable hell, and their bone-aching fatigue notwithstanding, they committed their lives to making sure that human freedom survived those who wished to eradicate it.

The GI’s who slogged their way across Europe, up the cliffs of Normandy and across the frozen, bitter winters of that blood-soaked continent, were pretty exhausted, too, I’d imagine.  Yes, many of them were kids, following their orders.  And many of them were probably distraught that innocent Europeans were getting killed by the thousands in the process of saving the west.  But many, I would also like to believe, knew that what they were fighting to preserve was infinitely more important than their own personal exhaustion or the tragic innocent losses that war always entails.  Or even their own lives.

That clarity of purpose was, in the end, why we won, and why you and I live in democracies where we can write and say whatever we like.  Had the Partisans and those GI’s given in to their fatigue, would you and I have the very liberties we so easily take for granted? I doubt it.

So, yes, we’re exhausted.  And, if you’ll forgive me, I suspect that those of here are more exhausted than are those of you over there.  Life here is conducted under a pervasive cloud of exhaustion that my most of American friends simply don’t comprehend.  It’s the exhaustion that comes from coming home at the end of the day and finding on your door a diagram distributed by the Home Front Command showing you how many seconds you have to find shelter if a missile should be aimed your way.  What do you do with that information?  Ignore it?  Or put it on the fridge as the sign instructs you to, so you can live with the looming warning every time you go to get a glass of OJ?

But that’s really the least of it.  The real exhaustion here comes from sending a smart but relatively naïve nineteen-year-old daughter off to the army (in Intelligence, in this case) and have her begin to learn things about Israel’s enemies that she will never be able to discuss.  The exhaustion comes from the hollow look of an unfathomable sadness in her eyes when she’s home, from her bewilderment at the evil of which human beings are capable – an awareness a young woman shouldn’t have at that age.  And you grow exhausted because you want to take care of her, to protect her.   But you can’t.

You can’t take care of your kid because this is Israel.  Because she can’t tell you what she knows.  She can’t talk to you about the human capacity for hatred that she now confronts every single day.  And because this is Israel, you can’t take of her – because here things are reversed.  She’s out there taking care of you.  So you get into bed each night knowing that you’ve sacrificed a part of her innocence and her youth on the altar of your beliefs and ideology, and you wonder, each and every day, if what you once thought was a noble life choice might have been the most unfair thing you ever did.  That, Jay, is more exhausting than I’d ever imagined it would be.

She’s out of the army now.  But her brother’s not.  And there are those days, only once every few months, when I’m either leaving the house in the morning to go to work or coming home at the end of the day, when on the sidewalk outside our building are two IDF officers, and it appears that they’re walking to our entrance.  Then comes that split second moment of breath-stopped horror, the fear that they’re coming to our house, bearing tidings that would be ­wholly unbearable.  It’s only happened three or four times, but it’s enough.  They walk past the building, Jay, barely even nodding to me because they’re in the middle of a conversation, unaware that I’ve even noticed them.  But I’m a mess.  Drenched with sweat.  Shaking slightly.  Knowing that the rest of the day or the evening is going to be a utter waste of time.

And at moments like that, you want to call your kid.  Not for anything in particular; just to tell him that you love him.  That you miss him.  That there really isn’t a moment when you’re not thinking about him, or praying that he’s OK.

But you can’t.  Because he can’t use his phone.  Because he’s busy.  Because he’s out there protecting his parents.  And his brother.  And his sister, who used to protect him.  Simply because when he was a very little boy, we decided we wanted to live here; and now he’s out there, doing this, year after relentless year.  Loving Israel is exhausting, Jay, you’re right.   But really, it’s way more exhausting here than it is over there.

So the real question isn’t whether or not we’re exhausted – lots of us are tired.  (I keep this picture on my desktop for those moments when I feel exhausted … to remind myself that no matter how tired I am, there are people out there (this is not my kid) who are way more exhausted than I am.)  The real question, I think, is not whether we’re exhausted, but rather what we do with our exhaustion.  What makes all the difference is not our fatigue, but what keeps us going when our tank feels empty, when it feels like all that’s left is fumes.

Like you, Jay, I know that I was raised on an image of Israel that doesn’t really exist.  Maybe it never did.  Like you, there were open fields in Jerusalem that I used to love (for you, it was Churshat Ha-Yaraeach) that are now filled by large apartment buildings.  But when we lived in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, our older neighbors used to reminisce about the days when our neighborhood had been all orange groves.  Did they stop loving America because fields got built on?  I didn’t sense that.  When we live in America and watch fields get built up, we sense progress.  But when it’s a field in the Israel of our youth that’s now gone, we feel betrayed.  What’s that about?  Maybe it’s time we all moved beyond puppy love and ventured into something more mature, a sort of love that knows that the object of our love cannot, and should not, remain unchanged year after year, decade after decade.

Like you, Jay, I am concerned about some of the injustices that Israel commits.  But unlike you, I could never be “more relaxed [in Berlin] than in Jerusalem.”  You wrote very compellingly that you felt relieved that though there was political baggage in Berlin, “none of it was mine.”

But you know what I love about this place, Jay?  I love that all the political baggage is mine.  The Palestinians.  The Israeli Arabs.  (Some of) the Haredim.  A collapsing educational system.  Murders on the streets with a constancy we never used to have.  A nation of roads and drivers that kills many more Israelis than our enemies do.  That’s all my baggage.

But living here, my baggage is also the sight of young secular and religious Israelis going from restaurant to restaurant, inspecting not their kashrut, but how they treat their workers, and depending on what they find, giving them a “social kashrut” certificate.  It’s the sight of many hundreds of people coming out to hear Rabbi Benny Lau on the Shabbat afternoon before Yom Kippur in a synagogue that couldn’t begin to accommodate them all, because, they knew, he would be the one guy in the city among all the derashot that afternoon who would tie whatever he was saying to a vision for a different kind of society, and call on them to do something about it.  Living here is about spending a morning on Sukkot, going to the Church in Kiryat Yearim and joining a capacity crowd of Jews and Christians, largely secular but also some people wearing kippot, listening to the choir perform Bach motets on precisely the spot where the Ark of the Covenant once rested.  It’s about the vision of people who, no matter what CNN will tell you, really can live with people who are different from them; it’s about a blending of the ancient past and the complicated present, of setting aside the equivocations of which you write so articulately for a beauty about which you say very little.  Living here is about feeling the pulse of people who still have hope, who desperately want to build something different here, and who would never dream of saying aloud that they’ve given up.

Which is why, Jay, I can’t imagine leaving this place, and angry as I sometimes get, I could never write about losing my love for what we’re building here.  Because I know that this is our last chance, and I know without a shred of doubt that the robust Jewish life that exists everywhere – in Manhattan as well as in Los Angeles, in London no less than in Johannesburg – exists because of Israel.  Two generations ago, Jewish life in America wasn’t the Jewish life that you and I were raised on.  It wasn’t nearly so secure after the war.  And though 1948 made a bit of a difference, the secure and self-confident American Jewish life that you and I take for granted really emerged in 1967, when Jews around the world finally stood tall because they were no longer the objects of history, but were now the shapers of their own destiny.

Would that 1967 war prove to have a very complicated aftermath?  Yes, it would – we’re still trying to figure it out.  But it changed everything, Jay, for me and for you.  For my neighbors and for yours.  I can’t imagine a world in which I’d want to be alive in which this country didn’t exist; which is why I’m constitutionally incapable of saying that I’m losing my love for it.

That’s the real difference between us, Jay, and it’s the reason that your exhaustion leads you where it leads you, and mine leads me to dig in my heels.  You write that as you notice your love starting to wane, you feel a “sadness that accompanies the end of any affair.”

That’s a fascinating metaphor.  Because at the end of an affair, most people put their lives back together by telling themselves that despite the pain of the moment, there will be someone else.  “A lot of fish in the ocean,” we told each other in college when relationships broke up, which was to say, “she’s not the only one out there, and she’s not the last one you’ll love.”

Which may have been true of our youthful relationships back then, but it’s not true of Israel.  This is the only one.  This is the last chance we get.  We lose this, and the Jewish people heads into dark, uncharted territory that I don’t think you or I can begin to imagine.  You yourself wrote that you “still awed by the tkuma, the resurrection and rebirth of my ancient people.”

You’re absolutely right.  This country is the very foundation of the resurrection and rebirth of our ancient people.  Given that, how dare we not love it, even with all its faults?  Is love Israel exhausting?  Of course it is.  Does it require lots of equivocation?  Yes, it does.  Is it very unpopular in lots of circles?  No question.

But it’s bigger than me.  And it’s bigger than you.  It matters more than all of us.  So given that, I don’t think we have a right to exhaustion.  Or, if exhaustion is inevitable, then the only thing I think we have a right to is a few hours of sleep, until we get up the next morning, roll up our sleeves and get to work again.

Because loving Israel isn’t like an affair.  It’s a totally different thing.  In a relationship, the person I love and I both matter – more or less equally, I guess.  But not here.  In this, I don’t matter.  You don’t matter.  Only justice matters.  Only the future matters.  Only the Jewish people’s survival matters.  And without this place, there is no future, no Jewish people.

Given that, what’s the alternative to a deep and abiding love?  I can’t think of one.  So tonight, I’m going to roll up my sleeves and head off to shul.  I’m going to put the news out of my mind, and for a few hours, I’m going to forget about the equivocation, about the fatigue.  I’m going to hold on to my son, the one kid still left at home – and when the singing starts, I’m going to dance.

Shabbat Shalom, Jay, and Chag Same’ach.

Neve Gordon Is Not the Problem

Intentionally or not, Neve Gordon, senior lecturer and head of the Political Science Department at Ben-Gurion University, has unleashed a firestorm in Israeli academe. His recent op-ed in The Los Angeles Times declared that Israel is an apartheid state, and that it ought to be boycotted to “save Israel from itself.”

Sensing a public relations debacle among their American supporters, the president and leadership of BGU distanced themselves from his comments and hinted that he ought to resign. Predictably, other Israeli academics leaped to Gordon’s defense. Most interesting, however, was the outrage Gordon’s column has evoked among many American Jews. Some are so beside themselves that they are now threatening to withhold their financial support from the university.

To be sure, Gordon’s argument is deeply flawed. He writes as if Israel sought or enjoys controlling the Palestinians, making no mention of the fact that it captured the West Bank in a defensive war that it did not seek, or that more than once (most recently with Ehud Olmert’s election in 2006) Israelis have chosen leaders whose campaigns called for relinquishing those territories. Add to that his failure to admit that the Palestinians still refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist and continue to call for its destruction, and one can appreciate the fury of Ben-Gurion University’s American supporters.

The fury these American Jews are suddenly expressing illustrates how little these very supporters know about the system of higher education in Israel to which they are so deeply committed. Is this really their first glimpse into the widespread and long-standing hostility of Israeli academe to Jewish statehood? Gordon has been espousing this viewpoint for years. He regularly writes for anti-Israel publications, holed up with Yasser Arafat during the siege of Ramallah, and has on more than one occasion likened Israel to Nazi Germany. But he’s always enjoyed the steadfast support of the university, to its very highest echelons. His views are widely held among his colleagues.

Nor is BGU unique here. Coming to Gordon’s defense, Tel Aviv University professor Shlomo Sand stated outright that Israeli universities are not Zionist institutions and should not be. They are about scholarship, he insisted, not about the Jews or their state.

There are non-Jews and non-Zionists at these universities, he claimed, and the universities must serve them no less than anyone else. And at Hebrew University, the crown jewel of Israeli academe, the long-term influence of the binationalists involved in the university’s founding has also been well documented.

Indeed, the only thing that is surprising about this latest turn of events is that American donors are surprised. For, to those who know even a bit about Israeli academe, the anti-Israel posture of many departments is really yesterday’s news.

The important question in all this is what American philanthropists who are committed to Zionism and to Israel’s higher education ought to do. Surely they can’t really believe that universities will suddenly silence their professors or terminate tenure. What, then, are the options?

These philanthropists ought to look close to home for their answers. For many of America’s great universities developed from an entirely different tradition. Woodrow Wilson, as president of Princeton, spoke unabashedly of “Princeton in the nation’s service.” Columbia College instituted its now-classic core curriculum as an explicit defense of Western civilization. Neither Princeton nor Columbia, like many other great American liberal arts colleges, saw any conflict between superb scholarship and inclusiveness on the one hand, and devotion to country and one’s own civilization on the other.

Is it at all surprising that these colleges have produced an abundance of America’s great leaders?

Israeli education needs more support from American Jews, not less. Rather than withholding their funds, a much more useful response would be to channel their support and their knowledge to create an Israeli version of the “college in the service of the nation.”

How?

Those American philanthropists currently wringing their hands probably have no idea that Israel has not a single liberal arts college to its name. Typical Israeli undergraduates get none of the curricular breadth that an American education usually requires, and as a result, they know almost nothing about Western civilization, the majesty of Jewish intellectual history or even the competing philosophic currents inside Zionism.

In today’s Israel, the People of the Book do not even read their own books. When they read or hear someone like Neve Gordon, nothing in their education has given them the tools to evaluate what he says, or to take him on. They are helpless.

TODAY’S NARROW model of education, in which students essentially study only one discipline, produces excellence, but excellence as technocrats. It does not produce the broadly read, intellectually nuanced people that the Jewish state so desperately needs.

Without dramatic change, Israeli universities will produce only more Neve Gordon’s – scholars of varying quality, who feel no love for the very country that has saved their people. If it learned from American education, Israel might actually begin to cultivate a new wave of leadership, and with it, a generation of Israelis who actually love their nation.

Dr. Gordon is correct – Israel needs to be saved from itself. What Israel needs now is a reconceived notion of the educated Israeli.

It needs a liberal arts college, and the young people prepared to speak constructively about Jewish sovereignty, its challenges, its failures and its future that only that kind of college can produce.

A century ago, who could have imagined that the Jewish state would one day have a world-class army but a failing, collapsing educational system? Whether or not American Jews have the foresight to use their philanthropy to promote genuine change in Israeli academe still remains to be seen. But if they do, Neve Gordon’s op-ed may ironically have goaded both Israel and the American Jewish community into taking the first steps needed to begin to save the Jewish state.

Aug. 22, 2009

It’s not even over, but we can already begin to imagine how we’ll remember the summer of 2009. Haredi residents of Mea She’arim unleashed violent demonstrations when Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat dared to open a parking lot on Shabbat to relieve unbearable congestion. A few weeks later, Jerusalem neighborhoods were once again filled with smoke from burning trash bins, and this time, municipal workers were attacked, because an apparently deliberately starved baby was removed from his haredi mother’s care.

The mayor responded by withholding city services from Mea She’arim, saying (correctly) that he had an obligation to protect the city’s workers. A director of Hadassah University Medical Center, where the baby was treated, was then threatened and had to be assigned bodyguards. The battle lines were drawn.

In Ramat Bet Shemesh, a small band of anti-Zionist, ultra-religious fanatics continued to terrorize other residents for outrageous behaviors like owning a television set. But though the campaign of terror was months old, the authorities still seemed disinclined to intervene. Elsewhere, when a massive gay-lesbian rally was planned in Tel Aviv to protest the murder of two youths in a support center, a 20-year-old soldier from a Nahal Haredi unit was arrested for sending a threatening e-mail, promising the gay community that the next attack would be even deadlier.

His remand was extended, but our memories were not.

THIS IS Israel, and a few days later, we’d all forgotten about him. Indeed, mostly forgotten about all these instances. “They’re a bit extreme,” we tell ourselves. We can muddle through this, too. After all, when you consider that we have Barack Obama, Iran, Gilad Schalit, the economy, swine flu and a few other matters on our plate, how much do burning trash bins really matter? They want to turn their own neighborhoods into a war zone – can we really be bothered?

I suggest that we allow ourselves to be bothered, deeply bothered.

A brief reminder of some American history. Israel, as we all know, is 61 years post-independence. The US was the same age in 1837. That year, Martin van Buren was inaugurated as the eighth president of the United States. Michigan became a state of the union. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales became a best-seller. Horace Mann introduced his educational reforms in Massachusetts, American Presbyterians split into the “new” and “old” schools and Samuel Morse exhibited his electric telegraph at the College of the City of New York.

The parallels to Israel are striking. A functioning political system was in place. The country did not yet have permanent borders. Educational reform was desperately needed. America was a deeply religious, and religiously fractious, country. There was cultural excellence and technological innovation.

Not bad for a country only 61 years old.

But in 1837, 61 years after American independence, Congress was also operating under the recently passed “Gag Law,” designed to stifle congressional debate on slavery. Those who favored the Gag Law hoped to conduct the business of state as usual, without undue attention to that nagging problem of enslavement. Yes, most people understood that there was a deep and dangerous fault line running through American society with radically different conceptions of the kind of society American ought to become, and no, no one knew how to resolve it. What the authors of the Gag Law believed, however, was that what mattered most was conducting business as usual and putting off the slavery debate. They did not want Congress discussing slavery (because many of them supported it), and they wanted to spend their time working on seemingly more pressing and immediate matters.

We Israelis, of course, have no need for a Gag Law. No legislation is required to get us to ignore the massive fault lines running just underneath the surface of our society. We have radically different conceptions of what the permanent borders of this country should be, but no national conversation on the subject. Nor is there meaningful public discourse about how to manage the cooling relations between Israel and its historically most trusted ally. And though everyone knows that we have at least two major populations who do not share a commitment to Israel being both Jewish and democratic, with the exception of a foolish and ill-fated demand for loyalty oaths, no one is terribly inclined to take the issue on.

LET US return to America in 1837. On the surface, despite the rumblings of slavery discussions, America was thriving. But in 1837, the US was only 24 years away from its Civil War. The fault lines would erupt, threatening the very survival of the country that had once hoped to ignore them. Somewhere between 600,000 and 700,000 soldiers would die in the war; brothers would fight on opposite sides, sometimes killing each other. The war would rip the country asunder, and were it not for a leader of the likes of Abraham Lincoln, the US as we know it might not have survived.

With Lincoln, America elected a leader with a vision for the country and with the courage to fight for that vision. He knew that the price might be horrific. It is clear from his writings that he did not relish the bloodletting that preserving the union would require. But he stood fast. There are times, he understood, that one must be willing to say to large blocks of one’s citizens that their vision of the country is not ours, and that we will fight them – economically at first, then using force if we have to – to ensure that the democracy we envision survives, no matter what.

But those were different days. Some people in America knew what kind of a country they wanted and debated the issue fiercely. America wasn’t exhausted by seven decades of war. And perhaps most distressing, there’s no Abraham Lincoln anywhere on our horizons.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu were thinking of Tevye these days. Tevye was, after all, a quasi-pathetic character simply trying to make sense of a world changing far more quickly than he might have ever imagined possible. Having granted his daughter, Hodel, permission to marry Perchik the pauper, he wonders, “What am I going to tell your mother?” He didn’t choose Perchik, and he doesn’t really approve. But he is powerless. And when his wife expresses her dismay, the best explanation he can offer is “It’s a new world, Golde.”

“It’s a new world, Golde” is not a claim that Perchik is the right man for Hodel. Or that he’ll ever make a real living. It’s simply a claim that the rules have changed. And in a world with new rules, people must learn to act and respond differently. Tevye never says that, of course. But he is simple, not stupid; and he intuitively understands that he is going to have to learn to navigate his world in an entirely different way.

Tevye is a not entirely inapt metaphor for Israel. We’re living in world operating according to rules that we’re just beginning to understand. Convinced of the legitimacy of at least much of our position, for years we ignored the warning signs that the world was turning on us, that it has grown tired of the conflict in the Middle East, and that it believes we are the reason the conflict will not subside.

The world didn’t change overnight. We simply weren’t watching.

NOW THERE is no more denying the new ground rules. Barack Obama is not really changing them. Perhaps he is shifting America’s position, perhaps not. But more than anything, he is simply articulating infinitely more clearly than anyone else has what it is that the world has come to believe. And we are going to have to learn to operate not in the world we wish existed, but in the world that does exist. And in this new world, Israel is going to be held to standards that are infinitely less tolerant than the standards to which the rest of the world is accountable.

Consider, after all, events of just the past few weeks. In the aftermath of the Iranian election, much of the world watched with admiration and hope as Iranians took to the streets to insist on their (supposed) democratic rights. When the Iranian government resorted to intimidation, silencing of the press, force and then murder, the world was horrified – but it was also quiet. Where were the mass rallies across Europe and on those North American campuses where students were still to be found calling for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to back down? Where were the heads of state clamoring to get in front of television cameras calling for a new election? To be sure, the world was unhappy, but this was hardly an outpouring of support or of condemnation.

Compare that to the world’s reaction to the Gaza operation half a year ago. To be sure, the circumstances were entirely different. Iran’s election is an internal matter, while the Gaza op was not. And other differences abound. But Israel was responding to eight years of shelling of its citizens in what is undisputedly its territory (unless one disputes the notion that any territory is legitimately ours – which, in fact, is exactly Hamas’ position); nonetheless, even before the urban warfare began, the world was unanimous and vocal that the operation had to end.

An almost deadening silence in one instance. And deafening outcries of excessive force in the other. Welcome to the new world.

OR SUPPOSE that some number of Israeli Arab women decided that they were going to wear the burka as a means of intensifying their personal religious odyssey. And that in response to their decision, Netanyahu said, “In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity,” or that “the burka is not a religious sign, it’s a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement – I want to say it solemnly, it will not be welcome on the territory of the State of Israel.” One can just imagine the world’s outcry, the accusations of religious oppression, comparisons with apartheid South Africa or, yes, Nazi Germany. But substitute “the Republic of France” for State of Israel, and you have precisely French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s words this week – again, to a relatively silent international community of listeners.

Or finally, recall Obama’s twisting in the wind as he came to realize that his outstretched hand to Iran was not going to be shaken as warmly as he’d allowed himself to imagine. Eventually, he gave in to enormous pressure to criticize the Iranian regime’s repressive measures. But his criticism was tepid – he couldn’t get over his fundamental sense that the world ought not meddle in Iran’s internal affairs. A few days later, however, the press reported that Sarkozy had told Netanyahu that it was time to dump Avigdor Lieberman and restore Tzipi Livni. Sarkozy’s advice, apparently, is considered moving peace forward. Obama’s suggesting that Iran recount the vote would be meddling.

THERE’S NO point railing against a double standard that no one is even inclined to deny. Right or wrong, for better or for worse, we need to adapt. Israel is going to have to learn to get ahead of the curve. Had Netanyahu’s speech at Bar-Ilan University, by most accounts a very good speech, preceded Obama’s Cairo address, Israel would have been throwing down the gauntlet, challenging the Palestinians to recognize the Jewish state and to live in peace beside it. But coming when they did, Netanyahu’s remarks were essentially seen as caving in to Obama – too little, too late. That’s what has to change.

In this new world, the spotlight will almost always be on Israel. Settlement building. Roadblocks. Lieberman. We’re going to have to learn to alter that. Make some accommodations, but demand – clearly and unequivocally – that the Palestinians do the same. Netanyahu, or whoever follows him, is going to have to learn to keep the ball, and the world’s attention, squarely in and on their court. Like it or not, Israel needs to take the initiative, time and time again – because nothing else will work.

“It’s a new world, Bibi,” Tevye would have said. We don’t have to like it. And it may not be fair, or just. But as we are wont to say, “zeh mah yesh” – it is what it is. As Tevye understood, we can either adapt, exerting at least some control over our fates, or we can wistfully long for days when other rules prevailed, even as we get swept away by currents we’ve barely begun to comprehend.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu were thinking of Tevye these days. Tevye was, after all, a quasi-pathetic character simply trying to make sense of a world changing far more quickly than he might have ever imagined possible. Having granted his daughter, Hodel, permission to marry Perchik the pauper, he wonders, “What am I going to tell your mother?” He didn’t choose Perchik, and he doesn’t really approve. But he is powerless. And when his wife expresses her dismay, the best explanation he can offer is “It’s a new world, Golde.”

“It’s a new world, Golde” is not a claim that Perchik is the right man for Hodel. Or that he’ll ever make a real living. It’s simply a claim that the rules have changed. And in a world with new rules, people must learn to act and respond differently. Tevye never says that, of course. But he is simple, not stupid; and he intuitively understands that he is going to have to learn to navigate his world in an entirely different way.

Tevye is a not entirely inapt metaphor for Israel. We’re living in world operating according to rules that we’re just beginning to understand. Convinced of the legitimacy of at least much of our position, for years we ignored the warning signs that the world was turning on us, that it has grown tired of the conflict in the Middle East, and that it believes we are the reason the conflict will not subside.

The world didn’t change overnight. We simply weren’t watching.

NOW THERE is no more denying the new ground rules. Barack Obama is not really changing them. Perhaps he is shifting America’s position, perhaps not. But more than anything, he is simply articulating infinitely more clearly than anyone else has what it is that the world has come to believe. And we are going to have to learn to operate not in the world we wish existed, but in the world that does exist. And in this new world, Israel is going to be held to standards that are infinitely less tolerant than the standards to which the rest of the world is accountable.

Consider, after all, events of just the past few weeks. In the aftermath of the Iranian election, much of the world watched with admiration and hope as Iranians took to the streets to insist on their (supposed) democratic rights. When the Iranian government resorted to intimidation, silencing of the press, force and then murder, the world was horrified – but it was also quiet. Where were the mass rallies across Europe and on those North American campuses where students were still to be found calling for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to back down? Where were the heads of state clamoring to get in front of television cameras calling for a new election? To be sure, the world was unhappy, but this was hardly an outpouring of support or of condemnation.

Compare that to the world’s reaction to the Gaza operation half a year ago. To be sure, the circumstances were entirely different. Iran’s election is an internal matter, while the Gaza op was not. And other differences abound. But Israel was responding to eight years of shelling of its citizens in what is undisputedly its territory (unless one disputes the notion that any territory is legitimately ours – which, in fact, is exactly Hamas’ position); nonetheless, even before the urban warfare began, the world was unanimous and vocal that the operation had to end.

An almost deadening silence in one instance. And deafening outcries of excessive force in the other. Welcome to the new world.

OR SUPPOSE that some number of Israeli Arab women decided that they were going to wear the burka as a means of intensifying their personal religious odyssey. And that in response to their decision, Netanyahu said, “In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity,” or that “the burka is not a religious sign, it’s a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement – I want to say it solemnly, it will not be welcome on the territory of the State of Israel.” One can just imagine the world’s outcry, the accusations of religious oppression, comparisons with apartheid South Africa or, yes, Nazi Germany. But substitute “the Republic of France” for State of Israel, and you have precisely French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s words this week – again, to a relatively silent international community of listeners.

Or finally, recall Obama’s twisting in the wind as he came to realize that his outstretched hand to Iran was not going to be shaken as warmly as he’d allowed himself to imagine. Eventually, he gave in to enormous pressure to criticize the Iranian regime’s repressive measures. But his criticism was tepid – he couldn’t get over his fundamental sense that the world ought not meddle in Iran’s internal affairs. A few days later, however, the press reported that Sarkozy had told Netanyahu that it was time to dump Avigdor Lieberman and restore Tzipi Livni. Sarkozy’s advice, apparently, is considered moving peace forward. Obama’s suggesting that Iran recount the vote would be meddling.

THERE’S NO point railing against a double standard that no one is even inclined to deny. Right or wrong, for better or for worse, we need to adapt. Israel is going to have to learn to get ahead of the curve. Had Netanyahu’s speech at Bar-Ilan University, by most accounts a very good speech, preceded Obama’s Cairo address, Israel would have been throwing down the gauntlet, challenging the Palestinians to recognize the Jewish state and to live in peace beside it. But coming when they did, Netanyahu’s remarks were essentially seen as caving in to Obama – too little, too late. That’s what has to change.

In this new world, the spotlight will almost always be on Israel. Settlement building. Roadblocks. Lieberman. We’re going to have to learn to alter that. Make some accommodations, but demand – clearly and unequivocally – that the Palestinians do the same. Netanyahu, or whoever follows him, is going to have to learn to keep the ball, and the world’s attention, squarely in and on their court. Like it or not, Israel needs to take the initiative, time and time again – because nothing else will work.

“It’s a new world, Bibi,” Tevye would have said. We don’t have to like it. And it may not be fair, or just. But as we are wont to say, “zeh mah yesh” – it is what it is. As Tevye understood, we can either adapt, exerting at least some control over our fates, or we can wistfully long for days when other rules prevailed, even as we get swept away by currents we’ve barely begun to comprehend.

In Perspective: Obama is right, it’s time for honesty

Jun. 11, 2009
Daniel Gordis , THE JERUSALEM POST

In the days leading up to his landmark speech in Cairo, US President Barack Obama said it was time for “honesty” between the United States and Israel. Now he has spoken, and we should respond in kind. For Obama is right – it is time, at long last, for honesty.

Too many analyses of the speech have ignored the fact that it was addressed primarily to the Muslim world, and was delivered in Egypt. And in that setting, Obama insisted that the US-Israel relationship could not be upended. He mentioned the Holocaust, (implicitly) berated Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his Holocaust denial, quoted the Talmud and called on Hamas to recognize Israel and abandon violence.

Not bad.

To be sure, it was not the speech that many Israelis would have written. Obama’s articulated position on Iranian nuclear power is unacceptable, just as an absolute freeze on natural growth in “settlements,” even in places where settlements are essentially cities, is both unfair and thoroughly unrealistic. And linking Israel’s right to exist to the Holocaust is a significant intellectual and moral mistake.

We could go on, but to spend our time pointing to all our disagreements with Obama while avoiding his call for honesty would be a mistake. With stunning clarity, he has told the world where he stands. Now it is time for us to do the same. What are we committed to? What are our red lines? Do we even know?

Ironically, what Obama’s first shots across the bows of both Israel and the Palestinians have inadvertently highlighted for us is that we’re a country that does not know how to be honest, even with itself. For too long we have avoided the national conversation that would have been required for us to have a vision as clear as Obama’s. Now is the time to have that conversation, and then, as Obama has requested, to be honest about what we decide.

WHERE SHOULD we begin? As but one example, let’s begin with some of the questions that the West Bank raises: Are we ever willing to give up the West Bank? For a moment, let’s set aside the obvious security issue and the devastating consequences if Kassam rockets start flying from the West Bank as well. Let’s assume for a minute (a wild assumption, I admit) that the Palestinians decide that it really is time to move on, to abandon terror and accept a division of the land. Are we willing?

I believe that we don’t know anymore. Our unwillingness to state our position is not a reflection of dishonesty or of hiding. It’s simply a result of the fact that we have for so long seen no possibility of progress on the Palestinian front that we’ve stopped asking ourselves what we would do if we could.

So let’s be honest: What would we do?

Are we willing to leave the West Bank, land that is no less ancestrally Jewish and religiously significant than any other part of Israel? If we are committed to staying there permanently, for historical, theological or even security reasons, isn’t it time just to say that? Or to annex it and stop pretending we haven’t made that decision?

When some of us speak about not making any change until the Palestinians have built a genuinely democratic infrastructure (bottom-up, we call it), are we serious? Or do we simply assume that they’ll never accomplish that under present circumstances, so what we’re effectively doing is announcing, though not with the “honesty” that Obama is rightly calling for, that we plan to stay, no matter what?

IF WE PLAN to stay, which could well be defensible, let’s be honest about the endgame. What do we plan for the Palestinian population there? The status quo forever? Are we going to make them citizens, and thus further erode Israel’s fragile Jewish majority? Are we going to give them some sort of citizenship that involves full civic rights but not the right to vote on matters that determine the nature of the state? Is that the democracy we seek? Do we have any alternative? Or are we planning to move the Palestinians to some other location (a plan which didn’t work very well with India and Pakistan, but which worked flawlessly in Cyprus)?

But if, alternatively, we do plan to leave the West Bank, what would we do if it turned into Hamastan, as happened in Gaza? We had no contingency plan for Gaza, and the results have been devastating. Will we make the same mistake again? And if we could solve the security issue, will we force all the Jews on the West Bank to leave? Or will we insist on their right to continue living there, even if under Palestinian rule?

And if Jews do have to be moved, are we accepting the international community’s tacit premise that only Jews can be moved (out of Gaza, and later, out of the West Bank)? Why can’t Arabs be moved? As even Benny Morris has noted, the Peel Commission “recommended that the bulk of the 300,000 Arabs who lived in the territory earmarked for Jewish sovereignty should be transferred, voluntarily or under compulsion, to the Arab part of Palestine or out of the country altogether,” and suggested that 1,250 Jews living in those areas slated for Arab sovereignty be moved as well, in “an exchange of population.”

How has it come to be that what the British once advocated we are too timid to raise? If Jews had to leave Gaza and might eventually have to leave the West Bank, is the movement of (some?) Arabs from Israel so it can remain a Jewish state so obviously out of the question? Why?

THESE ARE the questions we never discuss, because each of our leaders inherits a coalition so fragile that even raising such questions threatens to topple the government. So what if we were to use this new “crisis” as an opportunity?

What if Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu were to begin speaking with the Americans, and with any Palestinians who publicly recognize our right to exist, but at the same time forged a coalition of Labor, Kadima, Israel Beiteinu and Likud, all of which called for dramatic electoral reform? He’d have the votes needed to pass the reform (several plans are ready) and make Israel governable. He’d make it possible for Israelis to finally talk about the issues we never discuss in the public square. He’d end the cynical and self-destructive culture of “Yisrabluff,” and ultimately he’d make it possible for us to form a national consensus about which we could finally be honest – with the world, but more importantly, with ourselves.

Imagine that. If Netanyahu seized this opportunity, Barack Obama, despite everything we didn’t love about his Cairo address, might actually enable us to discuss our vision for the future of Israel.

And with that, Obama may have saved the Jewish state.

The writer is senior vice president of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. His most recent book is Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End. He blogs at www.danielgordis.org.

Jun. 4, 2009
Daniel Gordis , THE JERUSALEM POST

Imagine that Germany, embittered by incessant reminders of what happened during the Holocaust, passed a law forbidding German Jews from publicly marking the destruction of European Jewry. Or that the US Congress, tired of hearing Native Americans recite their tales of woe, made it illegal for them to mention their losses on July 4. If Turkey passed legislation like that, directed at Armenian memories of 1915, we would hardly blink an eye. But if a genuine democracy followed suit? We would scarcely believe our ears.

So why are we not more distressed by legislation before the Knesset that would criminalize marking the “Nakba” on Independence Day? What kind of a democracy makes it illegal for a group of its citizens to mark the losses they have suffered? And in what kind of democracy can such legislation be proposed without massive waves of protest?

So why no protests here? Surely, few of us pretend that Israeli Arabs didn’t lose very much in 1948. We know they did. Is it that we’re still at war with the Arab world (unlike America and its native population, for example), or that marking the Nakba is tantamount to asserting that Israel is illegitimate, which we cannot and will not abide?

Perhaps. But we’re also witness to something new. It’s a belief in the ability of hastily written laws to correct problems created by decades of failed Zionist education. For years, Israel has done virtually nothing to even try to inculcate loyalty to the state among parts of its haredi population, Arab communities or a younger secular Jewish generation smack in the middle of the country. But instead of asking ourselves what our children ought to be taught, what they ought to read and discuss during their education, some Knesset members prefer to bury our failures beneath legislation.

Yisrael Beiteinu ran its recent campaign largely on the issue of loyalty oaths, claiming that some Israelis (Arabs, mostly) were insufficiently loyal to the state. It was right about the problem, but wrong about the solution, and the Knesset rejected its proposal. So now, the party has a new issue. Israel, it says, is losing the battle over the Zionist narrative. About this, it is also absolutely right. Once synonymous with the greatest human drama of national rebirth, Zionism today is too often a term of disparagement. A new narrative about Zionism has emerged; in this narrative, Israel is a violation of human ideals, not their realization.

SO WHAT is the proposed response to our failing efforts in the battle to tell our story? Let’s just make it illegal for anyone to tell a competing version.

It would be funny, if it weren’t so frightening. Silencing one’s foes has never been the hallmark of self-confidence.

But what if instead of silencing those who disagree with us, or even hate us, we invested in education? Imagine that we actually cared enough about our own past to try to preserve it and to teach it. “What?” you ask. “Israel has made a virtual art form of remembering the past.” But that is only partially true. We’ve done an extraordinary job of preserving the memory of the Holocaust, but a much poorer job of remembering how we built a country to recover from it.

Now that Israel is more than 60 years old, the people who were instrumental in creating this country are dying at a dizzying rate. In recent days, Shlomo Shamir, the last living member of the 1948 General Staff, and Yehoshua Zetler, commander of Lehi forces in Jerusalem, both died. But how many young Israelis know who Shamir or Zetler were? How many know that Shamir was the only general to have commanded units from the air force, navy and ground forces (on the Iraqi-Jordanian front)? Or that he completed his high school matriculation exams at 55 and went on to university? How many Israelis still know anything about the infamous Acre jail in which Zetler was imprisoned? Very few. But now, it’s too late to record their stories for future generations of Israeli students.

EVEN MORE distressing than how little we know is how little we’re doing to try to remember. For the most part, Israelis have paid no attention to the need to preserve this historic legacy.

One person, at least, is trying. An oleh named Eric Halivni has been working on a project called Toldot Yisrael that aims to record the stories of the country’s founders – the men and women who fought, lobbied, farmed, taught and did everything else necessary in the extraordinary human drama called the creation of the State of Israel. But he, too, is being stymied by Jews’ disinterest in their own history. His hopes of creating a video archive containing thousands of interviews have languished due to lack of funding. With heroic dedication, he’s managed to film about 80 interviews thus far, but that’s not nearly enough.

Scanning his small but precious archive is a history lesson come alive. Who knew that Norman Lamm, later president of Yeshiva University, worked in a bullet factory in upstate New York when he was a chemistry student at Yeshiva College, to do his share to create the Jewish state? Toldot Yisrael filmed Lamm telling his story.

Imagine if young Israelis could watch Miriam Ben-Peretz, professor emeritus of education at the University of Haifa, recalling the morning her then-young husband departed with the lamed heh, never to return. Or Yitzhak Navon, later to become the fifth president of the state, recounting how, as a young man in the Hagana, he monitored the airwaves that night and heard the boasting celebrations of the Arabs who had just butchered the 35 men. Fifty percent of Israeli Jews don’t know who the lamed heh were. What will teach them? The Nakba law or a project like Toldot Yisrael?

Yisrael Beiteinu has inadvertently done us a great service, for the Nakba bill begs us to ask: What is really going to win the battle to right the wrongs in the way that Zionism is now perceived? Do we silence Israeli Arabs who obviously have what to mourn, or instead celebrate the lives and accomplishments of Jews across the globe who believed in the rebirth of the Jewish people, and who then devoted their lives to making it happen?

We all know the answer. The only question is whether we still possess the honesty, foresight and determination that winning our story’s battle will require.

But the real news is that contrary to what many expected, or feared, President Obama assumed positions virtually identical to those of Israel’s political center — namely, that the Palestinians must renounce violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist, while Israel must cease settlement building and permit a Palestinian state to arise. Now, Benjamin Netanyahu’s problem is that it’s difficult to distinguish between President Obama and Tzipi Livni. And in Israel’s recent elections, Livni and her Kadima party won more votes than anyone else.

But the major “problem” that the speech poses for Israel’s leaders is that Israelis are finally going to have to make painful decisions about our future. No longer will Israel’s fractious politics provide a curtain behind which to hide. Will we abide a Palestinian state, or are we committed to the present stalemate as a matter of principle? Are we committed to keeping the West Bank (for reasons of security, history or theology), or are we open to withdrawing if a genuine peace accord is possible? If all Jews will have to depart the West Bank, what about Arabs in Israel? For years, we’ve fudged on these painful questions; with President Obama, that may no longer be possible.

Once Israelis grow accustomed to the new tenor emanating from Washington, we may see today’s speech in a different light. Barack Obama may or may not bring peace to the Middle East, but he may well force clarity, and perhaps disciplined policy, on an Israeli society that has long desperately needed it.