By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The battle of the consulate in Jerusalem

Although the Biden administration may wish to reopen the consulate in Jerusalem that previous president Donald Trump closed, it does not want the issue to become a wedge in Israeli domestic politics or weaken a government it considers “more moderate than its predecessor,” according to David Makovsky, a senior adviser to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations during the Obama era. Whereby more recently, there has been pressure from 35 Republican senators who have introduced a bill to prevent the US Consulate from being opened and to keep its operations strictly within the confines of the American Embassy in Jerusalem.While Israel itself narrowly averted the threat of early elections.

 

The way to Zionism Part Three

 

In part one, we noted that in the wake of the Kishinev pogrom, the constant fear of pogroms and revolutionary ferment drove many Jews to political activism. Initially detailed by Steven J. Zipperstein’s “Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History,” some of these distortions, as well as the role Kishinev played in spurring, for instance, the alignment of American Jews with Leftist politics. The Jews’ enemies, too, concluded the pogrom, widely disseminating “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in the years that followed.

In part two, we detailed how the USA and Boston became the ‘New Jerusalem’’And many that time believed there was no need for Zionism in the United States; the Jews thought they had cracked Herzl’s dilemma of how they could live in peace. 

A book titled Tour of the Holy Land in 1695 shows no Islamic nation at all. “Most of the land was empty, desolate, and the inhabitants few in number and mostly concentrated in the towns of Jerusalem, Acco, Tzfat, Jaffa, Tiberius, and Gaza. Most of the inhabitants were Jews and the rest Christians. There were few Muslims, mostly nomad Bedouins. ... In the Galilee capital, Nazareth, lived approximately 700 Christians and in Jerusalem, approximately 5000 people, mostly Jews and some Christians. ... In Gaza, for example, lived approximately 550 people, 50 percent Jews and the rest mostly Christians.” 

During the Mandate period, the Arabs of Palestine generally considered themselves to be Syrians and Palestine to be Southern Syria. Early in 1919, Arab Muslims in fourteen Palestinian municipalities, call­ing themselves the Muslim-Christian Association, presented a petition to the Paris Peace Conference, deliberating about the postwar fate of Syria, Palestine, and other former Ottoman posses­sions.

As we have seen, the Jewish ethos of exile and return was shaped in the sixth century BCE, around the destruction of the First Temple and the subsequent Babylonian exile. 

In April 1669, their world turned upside down overnight. Religious hatred against the Jews led Queen-Regent Mariana of Spain, the widow of Felipe IV, to expel the Jews of Oran. Their desperate pleas fell on deaf ears; they were expelled within eight days, and their synagogues were converted to churches.

Therefore, it is difficult to find a place anywhere in the world where temporary prosperity for the Jews was not followed by downfall, despair, and disaster. Contemporary North America and Australia are possible exceptions as countries that embody the dual vision of a liberal nation, which allows and even encourages the presence of thriving diasporas in their midst as part of their pluralist creed.

The importance of the Balfour Declaration foremost came from the fact that all major Allied powers endorsed it. And whereby in 1917, there was not yet a League of Nations or a United Nations.

Most of the population left or were expelled from Arab countries in the decades following the founding of Israel in 1948 and now reside in Israel or Western Europe, with a few in the United States and Latin America. As of 2018, Morocco had a Jewish population of 2,200, while Tunisia had a Jewish population of 1,100. Smaller Jewish populations of 100 people exist in Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Some Arab countries, such as Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Jordan, are no longer home to Jewish communities.

 

Liberal American Jews struggle to reconcile with the USA as their permanent home.

Today this situation has become very different where the Jewish American far-left sees support for Israel, the “occupying power,” as an abject betrayal of its values. While both Israel and other mainstream sections of American Jewry treat this fringe as beyond the pale, they are disturbed when the major US figures, like Senator Bernie Sanders, snub liberal Zionists. In 2020, Sanders boycotted AIPAC’s annual Policy Conference, calling the organization “a platform for leaders who express bigotry...and [opposition to] basic Palestinian Rights.”

However, despite their criticism of Israel, liberal American Jews struggle to reconcile with the United States as their permanent home. Life is good, they have no plans to move to Israel, and they foresee their children and grandchildren as Americans. International relations scholar Michael Barnett, himself a liberal American Jew, admits that, despite their achievements and prosperity, “American Jews can still feel as if they are outsiders, in danger of overstaying their welcome…[and] privately, many American Jews worry that their amazing run of luck will end.” 1 

Non-Orthodox American Jewish conservatives draw surprising inspiration from the liberal Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who understood that a desire for community in a cosmopolitan world would lead Jews to embrace religion as a moral framework not just as a matter of tribal belonging. It was Niebuhr who persuaded Will Herberg, the American-Jewish intellectual who embraced Americanization, to remain Jewish.

While many American Jews refused to accept the notion that their religion set them apart from their neighbors, even secularizing the Bar Mitzvah ceremony into a general rite of adolescence and entry into American society, Niebuhr vigorously defended the preservation of a particular Jewish identity and became one of the most vocal Christian supporters of the Jews’ right to political self-determination in their historical homeland. He did so in defiance of liberal Jewish theologians and many of his Christian peers, who rejected sovereignty and power in favor of universalist ethics. Niebuhr fiercely attacked the pacifistic Christian worldview adopted by many Jews, which aspired for an amorphous liberal, Christian, universalistic utopia. 

At World War II, Christian pacifists believed that no dictatorship was so dangerous as to justify the United States entering the war. Niebuhr, however, argued that it was not only absurd but also criminal to think that Hitler might be defeated through passive resistance.2 He became an avowed Zionist and argued that only an independent Jewish state would do justice to Jewish religion and culture. He cheered Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War. After his death in 1971, when liberal Christians criticized Israel’s control of Jerusalem in the journal he founded, Christianity and Crisis, his widow demanded that his name be removed from the masthead.3

The Six-Day War, which mobilized many American Jews in defense of the Jewish national cause, also turned many evangelical Christians into supporters of Israel. In the Netanyahu era, senior Israeli officials are often much closer to the evangelicals’ messianic religious worldview than to the outlook of liberal Jewry in terms of values and foreign policy. But liberal Jews’ long-term emphasis on universal values and recoil from the evangelicals’ religious fervor was mainly rooted in centuries of experience, which showed that anti-Semitism was inherent in Christianity and nationalist movements. The commitment to liberal activism was an important component in American Jews’ efforts to forge alliances with other minorities in the United States, including the African American civil rights movement, out of an understanding that strengthening American cosmopolitanism would also help Jews worldwide.

Recent years, however, have seen a sea change. Until recently, some liberal American Jews threatened that if Israel’s behavior were to bring Zionism and liberalism into tension, they would have to opt for the latter. But Israel seems to have taken little notice of this threat and has entrenched its alliance with non-liberal sections of America. For some quarters of evangelical Christian society, loyalty to Israel has become a critical, defining element of American patriotism. 

The increasingly intimate relationship between the American evangelical right and the Israeli right is rooted in their shared faith in God’s promise to restore the Jews to the whole Land of Israel. Evangelicals are ardent devotees of Hebrew scripture, their children read the Hebrew Bible and pore over the map of the Land of Israel, which they increasingly see as their second home. The Land of Israel is where their savior, Jesus Christ, was born; it is where he preached his Gospels and was crucified and rose from the dead. Many evangelicals frequently fly to Israel on pilgrimage missions to retrace Jesus’s steps. To a large extent, they believe that the Promised Land belongs to them no less than to Israelis. In the Middle Ages, the wretched Jews of Europe bore witness to the supremacy of Christianity and victory of Jesus Christ. Still, in the Israeli Century, the sovereign Jewish state is the most compelling testament of the impending realization of prophecy and the second coming of Christ at the End of Days. Like Augustine’s conception of “the Jew as a witness,” today, the paradigm has shifted to “the Israeli as a witness.” In this brave new world, we must ask: Have we reached a point where the Israeli-Evangelical alliance might eclipse mutual Jewish responsibility, and does Israelis’ religious commitment to sovereignty over the territories conquered in the 1967 Six-Day War mean that it will prefer a partnership with evangelical Christianity over a covenant of fate with progressive Jewry?

Israel’s continued existence is a genuine challenge given the situation in the Middle East. Still, its preoccupation with security is also a consequence of the Jewish paradigm, the cyclical story of exile and return, which shapes the collective Jewish consciousness. Memories of persecution and trauma profoundly influence this paradigm, but in the Israeli Century, these unpleasant historical experiences are cautionary tales that serve to justify Israel’s power. The Jews and Israel face serious threats, but their sovereign power now means that any attempt to destabilize or annihilate them threatens world peace. If Israel’s existence were ever indeed in doubt, world leaders know it would not hesitate to use its doomsday weapons. This is the essence of the Jewish people’s historic shift, from the condition of “the surprise of chaos” as a stateless minority to a reality of sovereign stability.

Yet today, even third- and fourth-generation Mizrahi immigrants stubbornly preserve their ancestral heritage and revitalize old customs, making them part of Israel’s broader national culture. 

The Moroccan-Jewish festival Mimouna, celebrated at the end of Passover, has become a national festival. 

By contrast, if the young descendants of the original eastern European Jewish immigrants wished to revive the culture of eastern Europe, they would probably not know how, they have no reference points to cling to. As historian Aviad Kleinberg observes, the original Zionist elites did not want to recreate eastern European culture in Israel. They tried to forge “a new Israeli, out of nothing,” returning to their biblical roots and putting the misery of the Diaspora behind them. As such, “the culture that Jews from Islamic lands were expected to adopt was not that of eastern European Jews, but the culture the latter had voluntarily adopted while systematically demolishing their historical roots.” In reality, the Western culture associated with Ashkenazim in Israel today is the culture of the Enlightenment, not the shtetl culture they reviled and discarded.4

The popular discourse over the so-called ethnic divide in Israel between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim is vulgar primarily, shallow, and politically manipulative. But at the core of this divide is a serious concept, that of traditionalism. By looking at Israelis’ dynamic relationship with Jewish traditions, we can work out one of the most important inner tensions in Israeli society, one that will ultimately come to have a powerful effect on discussions of Jewish identity around the world. 

The modern West, including the American Jewish community, accepts the existence of a dichotomy between secularism and religious traditionalism, and this dichotomy was accepted by the dominant factions of the early Zionist movement. Secular Zionism objected to piety and religion in principle, regarding them as restraints on the same personal freedom that so many in the West had fought for in the name of the Enlightenment and the Haskalah. But today, only a small section of Israel’s population is actively hostile to tradition and religion for ideological reasons. Many Israeli Jews who identify as “secular” define themselves as such in opposition to the Orthodox religious establishment and religious coercion and as a statement of their autonomy. Researcher Hizky Shoham writes that there is no real theological debate in Israel between religious and secular factions, and many secular Jews conduct “lives that are partially religious but unaffiliated with a community and at an arm’s length from the rabbinical establishment.” He explains: 

Jewish Israeli society is fairly religious but treats its religion as a non-binding tradition. Modern secularism does not mean a diminution in the importance of the religious tradition and practice, sometimes the opposite. It means that religion is becoming a non-binding cultural reservoir, without coercive powers, a remnant of the past, but a meaningful remnant that mustn’t be forgone. In a modern lexicon, that’s what you might call tradition.5

However, in contrast to the Western dichotomy, Middle Eastern Jews imagine a graded spectrum of levels of religiosity and tradition, where pure secularism is not even a possibility. In a 2018 survey conducted ahead of Rosh Hashanah, 54 percent of Israeli Jews said they believe in God, and a further 21 percent said they believe in a “higher power.” According to the poll, most Mizrahi Jews believe in God; moreover, they believe in his providence and active involvement in the world.6 

In the Israeli Century, traditionalism has become the hallmark of Mizrahi Jews, for whom “ethnic identity and traditionalist-Jewish identity are complementary organs in a complex system of self-definition, which also includes familial, national, gender, and class identities.” 7 In contrast, Ashkenazi identity has become synonymous with European culture, distant and detached from the Jewish tradition. Uriel Abulof argues that many Israelis have developed a “sentimentalism” towards Mizrahi culture, viewing it as a more “authentic” expression of Jewish tradition. The same sentimentalism characterized the “Orientalist” approach of the early secular Zionists towards their brethren in the East.8 

Philosopher Meir Buzaglo offers a synthesis. He argues that the Zionists’ conflation of secularism with Israeliness and Jewishness with the Diaspora is driving a wedge inside the Jewish people. He regards traditionalism as a potential bridge between secular and religious Israelis because traditionalist Jews share many values with their secular and religious peers. “It is neither secularism nor ultra-Orthodox religiosity; it is neither fanatical about the concepts of progress and the Enlightenment, nor is it Haredization. It should also be distinguished from folklore or popular culture, although Judaism in Israel has transferred the ‘crown of popularity to the Mizrahim.”9

Traditionalism, he argues, is the glue that binds a prosperous and pluralistic Jewish culture. Israeli Jewish identity, he says, must step back from rootless, universalistic ideologies, confrontational secular and religious absolutes, and also from ethnic tribalism that glorifies immigrants’ native cultures and seeks to replicate an imagined golden age. Traditionalist Jews inhabit the modern world but retain familiarity with Judaism and their heritage. They exercise judgment in choosing what to take from that tradition—and what they will never accept. For Buzaglo, “Israel is the only place where Jews are compelled to fight for a common purpose, and the only place where Zionism facilitated the existence of secular Jewish life.” Israeli sovereignty liberates Jews to be thoroughly Jewish, completely modern, and utterly Zionist at the same time and successfully resolves contradictions whenever they arise.10

The bond between Judaism and Israeli identity evolved from the early days of the state. It was further tightened with the Likud Party’s rise to power in 1977. Menachem Begin, the first Likud prime minister, is known for opening up the national home and giving a place and a voice to traditionalist Jews of Middle Eastern origin, who had felt like second-class citizens for years. Begin gave greater weight to rabbinical history, not just biblical history, than his socialist predecessors. He spoke of the different ethnic groups in Israel as his “brothers” and sought to strengthen the mutual responsibility between Jews and Israel’s common destiny with the Diaspora. Begin also famously sponsored legislation to bar the extradition of Israeli citizens accused of crimes abroad, out of a commitment not to abandon even criminal Jews to “Gentile” authorities, they would serve their sentences in Israel’s Jewish-run prisons instead.11

The question of home has always included the Jews of the Diaspora. Israel hoped to make Jews around the world feel that it was their national home. Most Diaspora Jews see it as such and identify with it, even if they criticize it. In this respect, they are compelled to engage with the Jewish state because it necessarily impinges on their own identity and condition as Jews. In the past, if Diaspora Jews mobilized to support a “fragile” Israel from the outside, its fiercest Jewish critics are now actively involved inside Israel in the hope of shaping it. All in all, they seek to influence Israel from the inside because the Israeli Century affects their own identity and status as Jews, both in their own eyes and in those of their neighbors. Every important Jewish movement or organization in the Diaspora, therefore, has a branch in Israel.

Today, Diaspora engagement with Israel is critical for the preservation and cultivation of Jewish identity worldwide. It has led to the creation of Birthright Israel, among other initiatives, which has brought more than half a million young Diaspora Jews to visit Israel. Birthright’s backers hope these trips will make Diaspora youth feel a profound sense of tribal belonging and understand their historic role in safeguarding the Jewish people; this hope appears to be substantiated by recent long-term studies comparing the Jewish engagement of former participants versus non-participants.12

But alongside recent initiatives to bring Israel and the Diaspora closer, another trend is emerging, the Israeli right-wing, governing in coalition with ultra-Orthodox parties, is leading Israel away from the liberal Judaism of the Diaspora. Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress and a politically conservative figure, complained about this in the New York Times. He wrote that Israel’s religious-nationalist tendencies, which are being anchored into law, imperil a sense of shared destiny between Israel and the Diaspora, partly because of the tension between Orthodox hegemony and democratic values: 

These events are creating the impression that the democratic and egalitarian dimensions of the Jewish democratic state are being tested…. As many leaders, educators, rabbis, and parents will attest, passing the torch to this younger generation is already a difficult undertaking. But when Israel’s government proposes damaging legislation, this task may well become nearly impossible.13 

The argument with American Jewry has escalated in recent years. Many feel that Israelis are damaging what they define as Judaism and sabotaging their reputation in the United States. But Israelis believe that they are busy defending the national home and Judaism, while spoiled Americans have the luxury of constantly criticizing and preaching universal morality from a safe distance. For many right-wing Israelis, liberal American Jews are a lost cause, if not a hostile crowd. Haggai Segal, the editor of the national-religious Makor Rishon newspaper, wrote that Israel’s attempts to encourage them to immigrate are “good for the soul and one’s conscience, but hopeless.… Our brothers in the Diaspora will continue assimilating en masse even if we break into a heavy sweat to strengthen their ties to Judaism and us. It’s a waste of money, a waste of emotional energy, and most of all a waste of time.”14

Segal, convicted of membership in the radical Jewish Underground and violent attacks on Palestinians in the 1980s, speaks for a growing segment of nationalist Israeli society that does not regard liberal American Jews as an asset for the Jewish people. This approach is growing more prevalent among the younger generation of religious-nationalist Israelis, even if the older generation remains wary. Rabbi Chaim Druckman, an elder of the Religious Zionist world, reacted with dismay to Segal’s remarks, saying, “I am shocked! There are Jews who are out at sea, and some people are telling them, Drown!”15

The disagreement over the future of the territories has also caused divisions within the Diaspora itself. After 1967, some Diaspora Jews supported expanding the country’s borders to include its newly acquired territories; many even leaped at the opportunity to be pioneers, make history, and personally settle in Judea and Samaria, which are now home to around 60,000 American Jews. As strange as it might seem, many Jews who moved from the United States to West Bank settlements saw the settlement enterprise as a continuation of the American Jewish liberalism of the late 1960s. They associated the values of the civil rights movement in the United States with the right of Jews to settle in their ancient homeland.16 But today, the question of Israeli settlements is making it increasingly difficult for liberal American Jews to reconcile their support for Israel with their progressive values. 

Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the “national camp” embraced the ultra-Orthodox parties as inseparable from the Israeli right-wing. Shas and United Torah Judaism used to be thought of as non-Zionist parties. Still, their followers hold increasingly extreme nationalist positions, calling for full Israeli annexation of the occupied territories, and exhibit extreme hostility towards Arabs.17

They also dispute the basic entitlement of liberal Diaspora Jews to a share in the Israeli national home. In 2015, the late religious affairs minister David Azoulay said that Reform Jews were not Jewish but trying to “fake” it and did not observe religious law properly. He even called Reform Jews “a disaster to the people of Israel.” 18 And yet the Nation-State Law enshrines Israel’s obligation to “act, in the Diaspora, to preserve the ties between the State and members of the Jewish people,” and “to preserve the cultural, historical and religious heritage of the Jewish People among Jews in the Diaspora.”

In recent years, new ground has emerged to strengthen the bond between Israel and the Diaspora in the global economy. This includes collaborative initiatives between Israeli and Diaspora Jews to promote investment in Israeli start-ups. Israel is also known as a hothouse of groundbreaking innovation and life-saving medical research. Thus, efforts are made to combine its technological prowess with the tremendous abilities of Diaspora Jews in a process that also reshapes old patterns of Jewish philanthropy. 

A wealthy country in its own right, Israel will no longer go hat in hand to its wealthy American uncle. For years, many American Jews willing to donate to Israel did not see the country as a good place to do business. But now, at the core of this vision for the future of global Jewish cooperation are commercial and scientific ventures underpinned by their partners’ sense of a common identity. Israeli Jews will find a force multiplier for their innovation, and American Jews will receive a boost to their national-tribal identity. This interaction between the Diaspora and the Start-Up Nation will provide commercial opportunities, reinforce their Jewish identity, and strengthen their sense of mutual responsibility. 

If Zionists sought to negate the Diaspora in the twentieth Century, and Diaspora Jews saw a fragile homeland that needed their support and protection, the balance of global Jewish responsibility has shifted in the Israeli Century. Today, Israel has become a strong and confident home, in the eyes of both Israelis and Jews worldwide, including many of its critics. While the vision of the negation of the exile, which was so central to early Zionism, has not entirely disappeared, it looks completely different in the current Century.                                                                        

 

But whose home is it?

By gaining an independent state, the Jews also gained a special power to define the boundaries of their nation, just like other sovereign states can decide who may enter their territory or become citizens. The shift the Jewish people underwent, from being a stateless nation to having a nation-state, also reformulated the historical question of identity, “which is a Jew?,” which had preoccupied them since the Babylonian Exile. In the current Century, the answer to this question is chiefly expressed through the Law of Return, which sets the criteria for who is considered Jewish and automatically entitled to citizenship. Initially passed in 1950, the Law of Return allows one to belong to Israel’s Jewish majority community based on one’s extended kinship ties. In 1970, the law was amended to include anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent, a definition deliberately meant to echo the Nazi-era Nuremberg Laws. If you are Jewish enough to be persecuted for it, the reasoning went, you are welcome in our home. Yet the definition of who is a Jew for Israel’s official religious authorities, who control marriage, divorce, and burial, requires one to be born to a Jewish mother or formally undergo Orthodox conversion. 

Therefore, the burning question is whether the Law of Return is just an entry pass to the State of Israel or to the Jewish people. Based on the Law of Return, hundreds of thousands of Israeli immigrants who received citizenship as Jews are considered not Jewish under a strict halakhic definition even though they regard themselves as Jewish people. For Jews in the Diaspora and many in Israel, this raises a legitimate question as to why converts through non-Orthodox denominations should not be included as well. But for Orthodox Jews, of course, “a subjective sense of belonging is completely irrelevant to the definition of who is a Jew.” 19

Despite the Orthodox monopoly on defining conversions, the reality of the Israeli Century proves that in a sovereign Jewish state, one can effectively join the Jewish people even without a formal conversion at all. According to religious law, many immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who are not Jewish were accepted based on the 1970 amendment and have been deeply integrated into Israeli Jewish society. They speak Hebrew, serve in the Israel Defense Forces, are patriotic, raise their children in the national education system, and adopt Israeli customs, including traditional Jewish rituals. According to halakha, they are not Jewish, but they feel Jewish and identify with the majority in Israel. They have effectively undergone a “sociological conversion,” 20, and the Israeli Jews they marry care nothing for their family trees.

Moreover, the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics distinguishes between “Jews and others” and “Arabs” shows that Israel de facto considers citizens who are neither Jewish nor Arab as part of the broader Jewish population.21 This hints that it might be possible to join the Jewish people by the same principles that permit membership of other modern nations. According to Alexander Yakobson, these “sociological conversions” do not weaken Israel’s Jewish character but only change it, and the nature of Jewish nationalism, in a way that makes it more multicultural and multi-ethnic.22 Notwithstanding the historical debate over who is a Jew and the dominance of the Orthodox rabbinate, it seems that only in Israel can one become de facto Jewish over time even without formally converting. 

Some people have no Jewish family ties whatsoever but were born in Israel to foreign workers and refugees. Many of them speak Hebrew as their first language, have no sense of commitment to their parents’ home countries, become Israeli patriots over time, and effectively join the Jewish people. Israelis who object to the expulsion of foreign workers with Israeli-born children as “anti-Jewish” believe that they should be embraced. One commentator went as far as to say that Israel should transfer its budgets for activities for Diaspora Jews, “who do not speak Hebrew [and] have no interest in living in Israel,” to absorbing foreign workers who speak Hebrew, live in Israel, and are committed to raising families within Israeli Jewish society.23 

Israel’s Orthodox establishment is fighting these trends, annulling conversions that were not performed according to their strict interpretation of religious law, even those performed by some modern Orthodox rabbis in the Diaspora, and subjecting those whose Jewish status is in doubt to stringent restrictions. But they are struggling to hold back the tide; in trying to draw the narrowest possible boundaries for Jewish belonging, they are making themselves increasingly irrelevant to whole sections of the Israeli population. Many Jews in Israel take no account of their pronouncements. 

In the early twentieth century, decades before Israeli independence, Gershom Scholem foresaw that Jewish sovereignty would completely transform Jewish identity.24 The Jewish people in Israel are multicultural and multi-ethnic, and the state also treats Diaspora Jews and “non-Jewish Jews” as belonging to the same nation. Israel is a country of immigrants, which integrated newcomers from Europe and the Arab world and elsewhere to create a melting pot in which the state would define its Jewish citizens’ national and tribal attachments. 

It has also managed to welcome “honorary Jews” into the family.25 The Druze, an Arabic-speaking ethnic community, are intensely patriotic Israelis and have distinguished themselves in the ranks of the Israeli army. They have forged what Israelis call a “covenant of blood” with the state’s Jewish citizens and are “brothers in arms.” Thus, when the Knesset passed the Nation-State Law in 2018, which stated that Jews have an exclusive right to national self-determination in Israel, the Druze community took to the streets in protest at being marginalized. Veteran broadcaster Yaron London warned that if the Druze concluded that their status as “quasi-Jews” became seen as precarious, the survival of the Jewish-Druze national alliance would be thrust into serious doubt. 

Over 20 percent of Israelis are Arabs, and either Muslims or Christians. Among them, ofminority serve in the country’s security forces and feel proud to be Israeli, even if they do not feel they share a common destiny with the Jewish Diaspora. Yet the large majority of Israeli Arabs see themselves as a distinct national minority, separate from the Jewish people; the Israeli state, in turn, treats them with suspicion. Nevertheless, the picture of Israeli Arabs in the Israeli Century is a complex one. They live side-by-side with Israeli Jews in a state of perpetual conflict and profound hostility, but there is also surprising harmony, and many Arabs see themselves as part of a “civil” Israeli nation. 

Scholars have taken different views of the prospects of full integration of Israeli Arabs into the fabric of the Jewish state. Some, like Dan Schueftan, take a pessimistic approach. He argues that Israeli Arabs have become increasingly radicalized since Israel’s establishment and have turned from a defeated party into a large and assertive national minority, which poses a danger to the Jews. In his view, the Arab minority is led by radical forces who identify with Israel’s enemies and deny its legitimacy as a Jewish state. This anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hostility characterizes the elites of the Palestinians in Israel and trickles down to the general Arab Israeli public, resulting in expressions of support for Israel’s sworn enemies.26 When on May 11, 2021, fierce violence of Arab youth erupted in mixed Jewish-Arab towns, amid growing clashes in Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, Jewish Israelis were once again shocked to witness the powerful sense of kinship of Arab-Israeli citizens with their fellow Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The fact that Arab-Israeli rioting took place just when millions of Israelis where rushing to bomb shelters from Palestinian Hamas’s rocket barrage on Tel Aviv and other major cities, immediately awakened the demons of the Second Intifada of two decades earlier, with its deadly wave of suicide bombings. Israel declared a state of emergency in the city occurred Israel’s police chief commented were have not seen this kind of violence since October 2000.” 

Such dramatic events present a challenge to the more optimistic approach championed by scholars like sociologist Sammy Smooha. He speaks about Israeli Arabs undergoing increasing “Israelization.” The Arabs are not part of the Jewish people but feel that they belong to a civil Israeli nation. Indeed, research consistently shows that large numbers of Israeli Arabs are proud of Israel’s achievements and see it as their home. 

The Israelization of Israeli Arabs is also clear from their categorical rejection of the notion of emigrating to other Arab countries, including a potential Palestan Israeli civility consider life in Israel, and especially its economy, as an enormous advantage and view the country their own. When studying abroad, they tend to connect socially with Israeli Jews far more than with Arabs of other countries. The Israelization of Israeli Arabs is also clear from the younger generation’s declining use of the Arabic language. Even amongst themselves, they increasingly speak a Hebraized form of Arabic. In the IsraTheyn a huge growth in the number of Arab students at Israeli higher learning institutions  when studying abroadwhere the main language is Hebrew.27

The tension between the polar approaches about the future of Arabs in the Israeli state, radicalization versus integration, came to the fore in a dramatic fashion in March 2020, a time of both political upheaval and the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. On March 2, Israel held national elections, and the Arab Israeli Party “The Joint List” won a record fifteen Knesset seats, thereby gaining a potentially pivotal role in the efforts to replace Netanyahu’s coalition. The prime minister and his allies immediately denounced the opposition effort to include the Arab Party in “the Israeli equation” as illegitimate and even treasonous. Although they insisted that this was targeted at Arab parties, which are expressly non-Zionist, rather than citizens, many commentators saw it as indicative that Arabs were second-class citizens when it came to political representation, calling Israeli democracy itself into question. 

The same month, however, the pandemic exploded nationwide. Suddenly, many Israelis “discovered” that 20 percent of Israel’s medical personnel, including those at its leading hospitals, are Arab doctors and nurses, many of whom voted for the same Arab list that the prime minister denounced as “terrorist.” 

On the other hand, in the face of a global pandemic, many in the Arab communities were also “awakened to the fact” that they were indeed Israelis, protected by the same public health system that protected everyone else. Images of IDF troops distributing boxes of meals and other necessities to Arab communities to reduce potential exposure and prevent the spread of the virus, all during the holy month of Ramadan, were widely seen. The Covid-19 crisis demonstrated how the power of Jewish sovereignty and the mobilization of the state apparatus worked in times of peril for all Israelis, Jews, and non-Jews alike. 

The crisis also brought to the surface the glaring fact that, in times of emergency, Israel prioritized its own citizens over Jews in the Diaspora, who were forbidden from visiting the country, just like all other foreign visitors. Halakha and the State Israel has managed to bring different cultures together, both Jewish and non-Jewish, but there remains an antagonistic divide between the ultra-Orthodox and the rest of Israeli society. The opposition of many ultra-Orthodox Israelis to the modern values of Israeli society is a ticking time bomb, a problem that has become of e even have acute during the Covid-19 epidemic. Is a violent confrontation inevitable. Still, therelate twentieth Century, amid the euphoria of globalization and the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians, some argued that secular fears of a resurgence of old, reactionary forms of religious Judaism were overblown. Yigal Elam wrote that the threat posed by the national-religious and ultra-Orthodox streams was illusory, and “historical Judaism” would soon be overpowered by the unstoppable forces of modernity. Rabbinic Judaism, Elam added, had always been on the defensive when facing progress and modernity, acknowledging its inferiority to its advanced secular surroundings. This was true before the establishment of Israel, and it remained the case in modern Israel, where “historical Judaism” had been fighting a hopeless rearguard battle since 1948 and had “reached the end of the road.” 28

Two decades after Elam’s book was published, is this still the state of affairs? Israel is flourishing, but the forces of ultra-Orthodoxy and religious nationalism are growing stronger politically and demographically, raising fears that the fragile balance between religion and modernity will be upset. Identity polls in Israel show that “religious outlooks, or a lack thereof…mark the deep fissures within Israeli Jewish society. They differentiate of course between ultra-Orthodox, religious-Zionist and traditionalist Jews, but also mark secular Jews.” 29

Many Israelis fear that a growing religious extremism and coercion could deteriorate a culture war into a civil war. The struggle between modernity and Orthodoxy in Israel is playing out in multiple arenas, in the military, in the economy, in education, in culture, in welfare policy, and even on questions of the environment. One of the most acute issues is the role of women in Israeli society, especially in the context of military service, political representation, workforce participation, and personal status issues. The status of women is always a key indicator of any country’s embrace of modernity and democracy. So, when religious Zionist rabbis actively oppose women’s combat service and urge religious youth not to serve in mixed-gender units, many Israelis fear that their modern democracy is in jeopardy. Is Israel’s sovereignty threatened by this extreme religious and nationalist assault on its secular, democratic institutions? When the head of the extremist Jerusalem Faction, Rabbi Tzvi Friedman, tells his disciples that “it would have been better if this state had never been established” and “the army is impure, not sacred,” 30 can we infer that the Israeli Century is steamrolling toward becoming a theocracy? Or is the opposite happening, and do these rabbis’ extreme statements prove that religious leaders are panicking, fearing that their communities are edging closer to the Israeli mainstream? While most of the secular public believes there is religious coercion, the ultra-Orthodox public believes there is secular coercion.31

Indeed, the political sociologist Guy Ben-Porat argues that, despite the trends of increasing religiosity in Israel, there is also a profound movement toward greater secularism. These trends have intensified since the 1990s, thanks to the mass immigration of largely secular Jews from the former Soviet Union and the liberalization of the Israeli economy, opening it up to the world. He also argues that the Israeli public sphere is becoming more universalist and secular, and many religious and ultra-Orthodox Israelis are now exposed to the winds of globalization and uncensored media. This influences their family values, participation in the labor market, and consumer behavior. But he believes this secularization does not attest to a secular political order because the public status, symbols, and leadership of the religious world have all grown stronger, especially in the Netanyahu era, when ultra-Orthodox parties were a permanent fixture in Israel’s governing coalitions. Ben-Porat argues that secularism is the natural consequence of life in Israel and is both a political and apolitical force. It is political because it has caused institutional changes, and apolitical, as it allows individuals, especially those in and above the middle classes, to live a free, unencumbered. For other observers, however, this is a misleadingly rosy picture that downplays the recent shift in the balance between religion and state in Israel in favor of religious forces.32

One of the major forces holding the Israeli collective together is Israel’s security situation, which demands the ongoing mobilization of civilians, especially during times of war (which are becoming smaller and less frequent). Such was the case in late 2001, when the Kinneret Covenant was signed by dozens of public figures and intellectuals who represented the full spectrum of Israeli Jewish society, amid fears that profound divisions it would jeopardize the national effort to fight the horrific suicide bombings of the Second Intifada. The covenant represented an attempt to reach a broad political and social consensus during an acute emergency: We are members of one people. Our past and our fate are linked. Despite the differences of opinion and the divergent outlooks between us, we are all committed to the continuation of Jewish life, to the continued existence of the Jewish people, and to ensuring the future of the State of Israel.33 The security situation does not affect everyone equally, but it has profound implications for Israeli society. Not all Israelis are directly affected by security threats in the West Bank, in communities adjacent to the Gaza Strip, and along the Lebanese border; some are even completely disengaged. Yet the security situation affects everyone, as terrorism and missiles threaten to reach the center of Israel, and even those not directly affected on a daily basis send their children to the IDF and remain committed to the ethos of collective national defense.

When Napoleon drove the Prussians out of Warsaw and awarded the duchy to King Frederick Augustus I of Saxony, he forced Poland to adopt a French-style constitution, giving all men equal rights. In theory, this abolished all laws that differentiated between Christians and Jews. However, Poland’s new overlords, who did not think Christians and Jews were vaguely equal, did not have to make too much of an effort, the Jews themselves saw this newfangled equality as bad news. “They knew that if they enjoyed the same rights as everyone else, they would also have to bear the same obligations to the kingdom,” wrote Polish-Jewish historian Ezriel Nathan Frenk, “and then they would be unable to avoid military service, which would force them to violate the Sabbath, eat non-kosher food, shave their beards and sidelocks, and commit other crimes against God.” Jewish community leaders in Warsaw lobbied King Frederick and Napoleon to make them unequal again, but since the new constitution could not simply be amended, they requested and duly received a temporary reprieve. On October 17, 1808, the king signed an edict depriving Jewish residents of the Duchy of Warsaw and of political rights for ten years, in the hope that they would use this time to discard all the peculiarities that differentiated them from everyone else. When the Duchy of Warsaw annexed western Galicia in 1809 and brought it under its new French-style constitution, the Jews asked to be exempt from military service, which was mandatory for all males between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-eight. This time, the Jews lobbied Prince Józef Poniatowski, the minister of war, who agreed to grant them an exemption from the draft, in exchange for a special tax of 700,000 złoty a year. Poniatowski wrote to the king of Saxony and said the Jews were not suited for the honor of military service, experience had proven that they could not be trusted with national defense without great caution. The king agreed to exempt the Jews from the draft, and they honored Poniatowski with the nickname “the righteous duke.” 34

Fast forward to the Israeli Century. While religious Zionists hope to shape the religious implications of Israeli sovereignty through military service, many ultra-Orthodox Israelis prefer to dodge the questions of sovereignty and military service altogether. They wish to signal that a truly religious Judaism is hostile to the prioritization of the national interest or at least wants no part in it. In November 2016, at an ultra-Orthodox conference, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was welcomed with all the honors afforded to a Hasidic rebbe. He embraced his (once and future) coalition partners and praised them for being “loyal [and] devoted, with a warm Jewish heart,” and sharp-witted. Yaakov Litzman, the health minister from the United Torah Judaism Party, lavished Netanyahu with praise and said: “Mr. Prime Minister, we trust you and vote with you on every issue, even matters we have no interest in like…foreign affairs and defense [my emphasis]. We demand and receive the prime minister’s support [on matters of] Shabbat, the needs of yeshivas, and the scrapping of the Conscription Bill.” 35

One of the most salient questions facing modern Israel is: What does the future hold for the coalition between the Israeli right and the ultra-Orthodox, and can it last? Whereas the Israeli right defines national loyalty in terms of commitment to Jewish sovereignty and territorial control of the whole Greater Israel, the ultra-Orthodox seem to care less for these issues and some are even actively hostile. The rise of a new governing coalition in June 2021 that opposed the ultra-Orthodox demands and put Netanyahu in opposition showed the limits of what such a marriage of convenience can deliver for them. Ultra-Orthodox natural growth rates have increased dramatically in the last forty years. In 1979–1995, their number doubled from around 140,000 to some 290,000. Over the next twenty years, as of late 2017, their population grew almost four-fold again, rising to 1,033,000, or 12 percent of Israel’s population, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics. The growth rates of the ultra-Orthodox population are the fastest in the developed world, at 4.4 percent a year, compared to 1.4 percent for the rest of the Israeli Jewish population. If these trends continue, it will take them sixteen years to double in size, compared to fifty years for everyone else. Demographers forecast that the ultra-Orthodox will constitute one-third of Israel’s Jewish population by 2050. This demographic bomb will have tremendous economic implications. The average income of an ultra-Orthodox man is 43 percent lower than that of a non-ultra-Orthodox Jewish man. The monthly income of non-ultra-Orthodox households is 65 percent higher than that of ultra-Orthodox homes. Since the average ultra-Orthodox home has twice as many members as other Jewish households, and since fewer ultra-Orthodox men earn a living (and those who do have lower wages), there is a gulf of 171 percent between the income of an ultra-Orthodox home and everyone else. Economists warn that without a dramatic change in ultra-Orthodox growth rates and patterns of education and employment, the existing arrangement will cause the Israeli economy to slow down dramatically and possibly even collapse.36

How did Israel reach a situation where the ultra-Orthodox might imperil the future of the Israeli Century? How could the state have facilitated and encouraged these trends? Can they still be reversed? World War II made Zionism the leading movement in the Jewish world. Before that, the ultra-Orthodox world had been hostile to the Jewish national movement. Yet after the Holocaust, on the eve of Israel’s independence, new, pro-Zionist voices could be heard even among ultra-Orthodox Jews who had survived the destruction of their communities in Europe and reached Israel. Although the ultra-Orthodox regarded Zionism as a fundamentally secular, anti-religious project, the power struggles over the nascent state led many of them, if only fleetingly, to see Israel as a political framework in which “ultra-Orthodox Judaism could also find its place and fight for its values.” 37

Yet as time passed and ultra-Orthodox communities found their bearings, the Hasidic rebbes who openly identified as Zionists disappeared, and ultra-Orthodox hostility to the state became the rule and intensified.38

For the ultra-Orthodox, this ideological split from religious Zionism was critical for the preservation of their distinct identity. Over time, their hardline, uncompromising positions on questions of religion and state have aggravated their rivalry with Zionists, both secular and religious. Brown writes that, on the one hand, this ultra-Orthodox zealotry was moderated by the trauma of the Holocaust and the birth of the State of Israel, “which absorbed refugees from violence and enabled the resurrection of the Torah world.” However, as they settled into their new lives in Israel, and as Judaism became a hot potato in fights over religion and state, their initial sense of awe waned in favor of an internal ultra-Orthodox solidarity and a desire to build a “society of yeshiva scholars.” 39

For religious Zionists, Independence Day celebrates the prophesied “beginning of the growth of our Redemption,” but for many ultra-Orthodox Jews, it is a day of mourning.

The question of who gets to define the Jewish mission and Jewish ethics has become a major bone of contention between the State of Israel and Diaspora Jewry. In the Israeli Century, this question is also at the heart of quarrels and powerplays inside Israel over the nation’s character (i.e, Where does it land on the spectrum from Jewish to democratic?) and the nature of its control of the territories. Diaspora Jews have an important role to play in the debate over Jewish morality, but the moral parameters of Judaism will be defined mostly by the power struggles inside Israel and the battles over the country’s future, borders, identity, and institutions. A. B. Yehoshua argues that today, Jewish values are being tested primarily “by what happens here [Israel].” They “are tested by our actions, not just our words.… This often reveals the ugly face of Judaism, but this is the truth, for better or worse.” 40

Jewish morality and ethics took shape over many generations, first as a tribal-sovereign code of morality, then as religious-communal ethics, and in the modern era, as two competing visions: universal morality versus Zionist state ethics. Before the modern era, the Jewish people were “not a people, except in their Torah,” as medieval philosopher Rabbi Saadia Gaon averred. Their identity and values were based mainly on ethnic kinship and a commitment to halakha and the Torah. But this situation changed with modernity. Yeshayahu Leibowitz observed that since the Emancipation, it has been impossible to agree on a “specifically Jewish ethical content” that all who are conscious of their Jewishness can recognize as Judaism.41

Besides traditional religious ethics, two new types of Jewish ethics emerged. One universalist version of Judaism was built on the principles of the Emancipation and the ethics of citizens demanding equal rights in their countries of residence. The Zionist version of Judaism, by contrast, was built on the idea that only national independence could guarantee Jewish survival. Throughout the Israeli Century, Jews have been arguing about whether the universal ethics cultivated by those who lacked the power of a state and territorial control can be reconciled with the Zionist ethics of a sovereign Israel. Is it even possible to reconcile the ethics of a particularist, realist state with the ethics of an idealist, universalist people? Universalists in the Diaspora sometimes feel that Israel’s state morality demands that they stretch their own morality to legitimize the illegitimate. But in Israel, many also argue that Jews who speak in the name of “universal morality” and criticize Israel’s alleged “immorality” are disconnected from the necessities of preserving sovereign life and are even sabotaging Israel’s international standing.

Since 1967, religious Zionists have increasingly accepted the priority of Jewish laws of war and commandments to settle the Land of Israel. In 1992, when Yitzhak Rabin was elected Israel’s prime minister and pursued a peace policy with the Palestinians based on the formula of “land for peace,” religious Zionists and settlers launched an aggressive campaign to discredit him as a “traitor.” It was at that point that extreme anti-state attitudes laid the groundwork for his assassination three years later. Religious zealots even called for mutiny in the IDF. Decades later, such attitudes continued to persist among the more extreme rabbis of the settlement movement. In 2012, Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein decided to close the case against two religious nationalist rabbis, Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur, who had been accused of encouraging “price tag” attacks in their book The King’s Torah, legitimizing attacks on Arabs and their property. The rabbis and their supporters argued that the decision to ban the book, arrest them, and question rabbis who had allegedly endorsed the killing of Arabs was a grievous violation of their freedom of expression. Supreme Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein, himself Orthodox, rejected a petition against Weinstein’s decision to close the case, yet stressed that religious writings were not automatically exempt from laws about incitement. “We’re dealing with a book,” he added, “that wears Jewish garb but is truly anti-Jewish because it defames Judaism.” 42

When the Jewish autonomous center in Babylon collapsed, and Jews migrated to western Europe and North Africa, they entered a period of chaos, without a central authority to govern them. It was against this backdrop that halakhic civil law, or mishpat ivri (“Halakhic law”), developed as a doctrine of social morality. Unlike ritual laws, which focused on Jews’ obligations to God, civil law was about their obligations to their fellow Jews. Also, unlike other forms of law, Hebrew law developed without a unified government to enforce it through coercive powers. Instead, Israeli Supreme Court Justice Moshe Zilberg argues it was an outgrowth of the “moral consciousness” and free will of Jewish communities, living in isolation from their Gentile surroundings. Scattered across the world, the Jews devised a legal system that was “religious in its essence, national in its purpose, and secular in its manner of enforcement.” Hebrew Law was devised as a code of law to govern interactions between Jews in the absence of sovereignty, on foreign soil. Its legal validity was rooted in the collective Jewish consent and commitment to preserving its integrity as a tribe and resisting assimilation until the Jews could return to their ancestral homeland in the messianic age. According to Zilberg, “Every legal provision, commandment, law, and regulation was examined first and foremost in terms of its efficacy for protecting the Jewish people as a people.” 43

This strict and detailed system of law drew no distinction between the ethical and the legal because Hebrew law, like ritual aspects of halakha, was essentially religious law, and in Jewish religious law, crimes against one’s fellows are considered religious offences. Hebrew law incorporated the Talmud, biblical verses, and the great codifications of Jewish law: the twelfth Century Mishneh Torah, the fourteenth Century Tur, and the sixteenth Century Shulkhan Arukh. The Jews adopted and followed these codes of law even though their communities lacked any legal or political means to enforce compliance with them. Rather, the rabbis’ powers of enforcement rested on their own scholarly reputations and expertise in halakha, which had tremendous social force even without the coercive powers of the state. Social sanctions, including divine curses, excommunication, and ostracism, proved effective threats, because Jews did not really have anywhere else to go if they left their communities. Even in the sovereign State of Israel today, many ultra-Orthodox Jews fear being excommunicated if they transgress. They have their own institutions, parallel to those of the state; sometimes they use social sanctions to enforce compliance with rabbinic decrees more effectively than the State of Israel can enforce compliance with its own laws. In modern Israel, one “transgression” that puts young ultra-Orthodox Jews at risk of excommunication is service in the IDF. Naama Idan, an ultra-Orthodox woman who has written about the violent harassment of ultra-Orthodox soldiers by extremists in their own communities, notes that the groups campaigning against the military draft have turned the IDF uniform into “a symbol of a transgression against the ultra-Orthodox world…and transgressors are ostracized.” This threat of violence forces many ultra-Orthodox soldiers to change out of uniform before returning home, fearing for their personal safety.44

In the seventeenth Century, the Sephardic Jewish community of Amsterdam excommunicated Benedict Spinoza for breaking this religious fear barrier. Spinoza argued that there was no reason for Jews to continue obeying Jewish law and ethics in the absence of sovereignty. The Jews were fundamentally a political tribe, and there was no moral significance or gain to religious observance and Torah study, because they would not survive without national independence. Spinoza was the first to reduce the Jews and rabbinical Judaism back to national and political terms. But in the modern era, when Jewish communities in the West started to fray, people started asking what remained of “Jewish” ethics and how they differed from Protestant state morality. Under challenge from modernity, Jews in western Europe and later in the United States redefined morality as the set of values that would allow them to integrate as equal citizens in their countries of residence. When the Haskalah movement started taking root and extolling human reason, Moses Mendelssohn still insisted that the halakhic tradition remained morally relevant in the relationship between man and his Creator. Unlike Spinoza, Mendelssohn believed that religious Judaism still had an important role to play in shaping a modern, rational religion, the biblical commandments did not reveal the divine truth but pointed the way to discover it. He also believed that the Jewish ethical tradition was valuable not only for polities, like the ancient Israelite kingdoms, but also as a philosophical doctrine.45

But the difficulty of practicing halakhic Judaism during the Emancipation led thinkers and rabbis in the West to chart new Jewish doctrines. They created new Jewish creeds, in which cosmopolitan, liberal, or socialist values could go hand-in-hand with traditional principles, allowing the Jews to remain Jewish but simultaneously be like everyone else. However, these Herculean efforts soon got entangled in a web of theoretical and practical tensions. Loyalty to a separate clan, it turned out, was inconsistent with universal morality and ethics. Philosopher Hermann Cohen, for example, who rejected Zionism but still wished to be a loyal German Jew, said that if Judaism got bogged down in politics, it would lose its essence and role as the beacon of universal ethics. A “normal” Jewish state would erase what made Judaism unique. Paradoxically, however, when World War I erupted, he still called on Jews to fight and sacrifice themselves for the German nation. The embrace of universalism, therefore, did not stop the Jews from assimilating into particular non-Jewish national movements. Indeed, it is the nature of universal norms to clash with realist raison d’état.

Israel’s democracy confronts many complicated situations that raise questions about war, ethics, and terrorism, including incidents in which hostile actors use civilian populations as human shields. While Israel insists that it invests more effort in avoiding civilian casualties on the battlefield than any other military on earth, critics contend that its conduct in confronting these challenges is immoral. Such hostility often finds expression through the growing political use of international law to paint Israel as a criminal state. This was the case with the UN Human Rights Council’s Goldstone Report, which accused it of grave violations of international humanitarian law and war crimes during Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip, in the winter of 2008–2009.

The fact that Israel is obsessively denounced as a criminal state at international forums leads some observers, often justly, to conclude that old anti-Semitism has morphed into a new kind of hatred directed at the Jewish state. Since its early days, the State of Israel has claimed responsibility for “Jewish interests.” Seven decades later, it routinely claims to speak on behalf of Jews throughout the world, and hatred of Jews is increasingly expressed as a hatred of the State of Israel. Indeed, criticism of Israel is often motivated by, or expressed through, old-style anti-Semitism, but it is crucial for Israel to understand that these are two radically different creatures in the Israeli Century. First, the fact that Israel is considered, and considers itself, a power has naturally flipped the moral equation. From the perspective of universal morals, Israel is now Goliath to the Palestinians’ David. Second, even when fallacious statements are made about its conduct, or the facts are deliberately twisted, Israel and its allies around the world have the means to refute these lies and fight for the truth to come to light. In April 2011, in a rare move following years of intense public backlash, judge Richard Goldstone backtracked on the scathing report he had written two years earlier: If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.… While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the UN committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.699 Third, faced with the might of the Israeli state, there is no strategic reason for its enemies to use classically anti-Semitic rhetoric. Such remarks only bolster solidarity inside Israel, engender empathy from Diaspora Jews, and mobilize support for Israel in the West, which is appalled by old-style anti-Semitism. In May 2018, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas provoked fierce criticism for anti-Semitic remarks he had made in a speech in Ramallah. Even the New York Times, hardly a supporter of Israeli policies, called on him to resign, and he was forced to apologize in order to mitigate the damage.46

Fourth, Israel’s national leaders do not consider old-style anti-Semitism a major threat, even if its politicians tend to overuse the term “anti-Semitism” to censure enemies and political rivals. In its foreign relations, Israel meets with, talks with, and strikes deals with its rivals, pursuing a realist approach that tolerates a certain degree of anti-Israel hostility, so long as it can still maximize its national interests and defend itself. Israel and Israelis are less sensitive than Diaspora Jews to old-style anti-Semitism and respond to it with a contempt and hostility of their own. Elyakim Ha’etzni, a key figure in the settler movement, argues that Israelis are fed up with moral dilemmas and the label “the chosen people,” which is understood in so many different ways along social, religious, and political lines that “the Jewish people has no idea what is expected of it.” In contrast to the more messianic elements of the settler movement, he believes that the notion of a national “mission” threatens Israel’s ability to function, arguing that it is time for the Jewish state to stop feeling “obliged to sit at the head of the class like the Jewish child in exile who had to work harder than the native schoolchildren in order to reach the same place.” According to Ha’etzni, Israelis should not stop aspiring to be moral, “as long as no such mission [of ‘chosenness’] is registered in the state’s official record.” He argues: “The State of Israel is a living organism. As such, it needs no justification for its existence. Its existence is its justification.” 47

In Israel, democratic but deeply divided over identity and ideology, efforts to grapple with the question of Jewish morality have increasingly turned to legal battles, often making the courts the supreme arbiters of it. Legal scholar Menachem Mautner argues that in Israel’s early years, when its society was characterized by strong collective norms and solidarity, the Supreme Court mostly kept a low profile, and its rulings had little international resonance. The Supreme Court suppressed, and perhaps even concealed, its true liberal impulses. But as Israel’s internal solidarity began to wane and its society began to open up and embrace liberalism over collectivism, the Supreme Court became more actively involved in promoting liberal values.

In fact, while older American Jews kept Israelis in their hearts in the 1960s and 1970s while having little interaction with them, “today, the traffic in both directions is heavy and steady...more than 40 percent of Israeli Jews have been here and 40 percent of US Jews have been there,” Bronner adds. “Those numbers keep going up. The organization Birthright Israel has taken hundreds of thousands of young American Jews for a free visit.… Israelis seem increasingly unbothered when their friends and cousins spend time in the US, and some end up staying. Nor do Israelis talk about expecting all Jews to join them.… In addition, an estimated 400,000 Israelis now live in the US and are integrated into Jewish communities. Israelis are on college faculties, in Silicon Valley, and on synagogue boards. They own real estate and businesses. Their children remain devoted to Israel, adding another dimension to the relationship. In Israel today, nearly everyone speaks English and absorbs American culture. Over here, Israeli films and TV series such as Shtisel, Our Boys, and Fauda are popular on Netflix and HBO.” 48

With these developments in mind, what will constitute the content of “American Jewish morality” in the future? Is the liberal legacy of Brandeis and Ginsburg enough to sustain it? This question becomes especially acute in light of the rise of the new radical Left, who attack not only conservatives but also the foundations of liberalism as well.49

While religious and politically conservative Jews have always claimed that Jewish American liberalism was an empty vessel destined to disappear because of its failure to encourage tradition and Jewish kinship, today, even the most progressive Jews seem to agree.

Thus, the editors of Jewish Currents recently questioned whether drifting American Jews should continue to subscribe to the morality of Ginsburg’s jurisprudence or even to the story of her journey as Jew in America. “These narratives, one about the Jewishly inflected righteousness of the Court, and one about the reality of the American dream, have run their course.”

They also maintain that progressive Jews cannot see how Ginsburg’s DNA as a justice could remain the guideline for future Jews in America: In conflating Jewishness with American liberalism, we risk condemning it to go down with the ship, and foreclosing possibilities to reckon with and remake our tradition. Ginsburg, who left behind the strictures of traditional Jewish observance, was of generation whose relationship of Jewishness was strong enough to be characterized by rebellion rather than reinvention or rediscovery. That won’t work for us today; at this point, even pervasive Jewish assimilation has ceased to be a source of generative angst and becomes instead a placid reality. To insist on the value of Jewishness in the present is to commit to its remaking. Such a commitment requires us to confront the fact that, admirable though she was, it is materially impossible for us to carry forward the legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

What do the editors of Jewish Currents offer liberal Jews to begin their new path?

Nothing less than the dismantling of the old version of liberal American Jewish identity, smashing it, in their words, as Moses smashed the Tablets of the Covenant. “When we perform teshuva [repentance], we similarly begin from the premise that the pursuit of justice in a terribly unjust world requires a process of smashing and remaking.

A Jewishness that has locked itself in a fantasized vision of the recent American past is deferring its panic about the inability to imagine where we’re headed. We won’t know the shape of what we must build until we’ve taken a nice, long look into the abyss.”

At exactly the time of a deep moral crisis among liberal American Jews, who search for a new Jewish, moral, universal foothold in the face of assimilation, the disintegration of communities, and the increasing alienation from Israel, the Israeli Century will require, more than anything else, Jewish creativity that is both rooted and cosmopolitan, which will find a new balance among the threats, both from within and without, facing Jews in Israel and across the Diaspora. This struggle will be decided in a wide variety of contexts, forums, and communities around the world, but the most important battlefield will be the norms, laws, and values that define the Jewish state itself.

 

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