The blessing of dispersion in the diaspora
Israel is one of the foundations of Jewish identity, but this does not mean that its government is the government of all Jews. Your prime minister is not our prime minister. Our love of Israel is not love of its leadership. And yet we are a single people
According to Zionist dogma, this decentralization was a disaster, a fall, which the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel would rectify. But it turned out not to be entirely a fall, and the establishment of the State of Israel did not rectify it. It is true that the decentralization of the Jewish People was a consequence of imperial destruction: our proto-pluralism was at first coerced. But in the centuries in which Jewish civilization was created – it is important to remember that our civilization was created in conditions of exile, from the Talmud forward – we discovered the spiritual and cultural advantages of multiplicity. Though Jewish communities sometimes came to each other’s assistance, and the belief in the universal solidarity of all Jews with all Jews was a foundation of Jewish life, the various Jewish communities had their own leaders and their own customs, and the richness of Jewish civilization across the centuries was owed in large measure to this internecine diversity.
It is true, as a matter of ideology and emotion, that we are one; but as a matter of political and cultural actuality, we are also many. We no longer have a prophet and we no longer have a king. And the modern values of autonomy and democracy only fortify our sense of the realities, and the blessings, of decentralization. Nahara nahara u’fashtey, as the ancient rabbis approvingly said: Each river flows its own way.
Zionism was a revolution, a magnificent revolution; but like all revolutions, it was built on exaggerations. Some of those exaggerations have been corrected by history and some by historians. Prominent among them is the idea of “the negation of the Diaspora.” Indeed, it was the establishment of the state itself that ironically made this correction: If diaspora seemed anomalous in the absence of a homeland, in the presence of a homeland it seems quite nor mal. (And essential for the homeland
itself: the presence of a Jewish community in the United States is a pillar of
Israeli security.)
The State of Israel is one of the foundations of Jewish identity wherever Jews live, but this does not mean that the government of Israel is the government of all the Jews. Our love of Israel is not our love of its government. This is just as well, since, like many of our brothers and sisters inside Israel, many Jews outside Israel have been alienated by various Israeli governments, and felt distinctly unrepresented by them. Thegovernments of Israel have not all agreed with each other and so we cannot agree with them all. Unlike our brothers and our sisters in Israel, moreover, we Jews outside of Israel have no influence upon the composition of Israel’s governments. We do not vote, which is as it should be, since we are not citizens – except symbolically and sentimentally – of Israel.
Your prime minister is not our prime minister, our president is not your president, and yet we are a single people. Our unitariness has been most obvious, and most affecting, in hours of grave crisis; and there are strains of Jewish politics and philosophy that would like us to believe that it is always an hour of grave crisis. But it is not wise to try to suspend an entire people in a permanent state of apocalyptic excitation (as some of Israel’s enemies attempt to do with their own populations), and anyway it will not work. Ahavat Yisrael(love of the People of Israel) is not another name for hysteria.
About the enormous influence of the prime minister of Israel upon Jews outside of Israel there can be no doubt. Sometimes this influence is for good, sometimes for ill. Sometimes the prime minister uses his influence for larger purposes, sometimes for smaller ones. Sometimes he is motivated by grand historical reasons, sometimes by narrow political ones. If a prime minister of Israel is less popular among the Jews of the Diaspora than he thinks he ought to be, there are two ways to analyze this predicament, and more generally the phenomenon of Jewish dissent from an Israeli government’s policies.
The first is that the opposition is wrong and delinquent in its national responsibilities (in the Netanyahu era,this is usually the view of the Jewish Right). The second is that the prime minister is wrong and delinquent in his national responsibilities (in the Netanyahu era, this is usually, but not always, the view of the Jewish Left).
But the days of a perfect Jewish consensus about Israel are long over – if they ever existed. The prime minister of Israel must justify his actions before the court of Jewish opinion. This is not to say that he should pander to the communities in the Diaspora, or generally conform his actions to what other people believe: not at all. If he believes that he is right, then he should have the courage to do the unpopular thing. Polling destroys leadership. It turns leaders into followers. Yet there are times when a leader must leave politics for history, and by means of persuasion and the other mechanisms of democratic governance change his country’s course. When the stakes are as high as war and peace, politicians without courage should get out of history’s way.
Unfortunately they never do. Whether or not Benjamin Netanyahu is the most influential Jew in the world, I must say that I do not find his influence very salutary. He teaches Jews to be complacent about a demographic and political situation with the Palestinians that is plainly unsustainable, and to think only dark thoughts about Palestinians, and to exploit the Palestinian refusal to come to the negotiating table as an excuse to pursue policies in the occupied territories that will make the achievement of peace even more difficult, and to divert their minds from the subject of peace. He instructs them that the populist turbulence in the Arab world is the wrong time to do something for peace when he also did nothing for peace in the time when the Arab world was dictatorially serene.
You see, it is never the right time. He incites them to panic, even to war fever, about the Iranian nuclear capability when it is not at all clear what he can do about it. He endangers Israel’s relationship with the United States by ignorantly intervening in an American presidential election and recklessly attempting to turn American Jews against an American president. He stands up to the religious parties, to their politics of prejudice and patronage, only when it is politically safe for him to do so. Everything Netanyahu does he does for his political self-interest. He seems incapable of the sort of inner development – it was a kind of soul-transformation, even if these men seemed singularly unsoulful – that made Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon into real men of history. They arrived at new understandings and defied their own pasts and took enormous risks; they were not averse to momentous historical action.
But Netanyahu is passive, petty, righteous, content to watch self-pityingly as problems and threats worsen and to treat his countrymen and himself as victims who can do no better than build walls around their country and target terrorists for assassination. (I have no objection to counter-terrorism, but it is not a grand strategy.) Netanyahu is taking Israel nowhere. He stands for stasis, and for the abdication of bold and maginative statecraft. His only significant accomplishment has been to get himself repeatedly re-elected. But that hardly amounts to “Bibi melekh Yisrael” (Bibi king of Israel). The results of the most recent election show quite clearly that if
the opposition were led by a formidable figure – alas, I do not see one – Netanyahu might be beaten.
Netanyahu is certainly the most famous Jew in the world, but we live in an age in which technology has debased fame: mentions on Google, even in the millions, do not confer authority. They confer only celebrity, which is not – pardon the heresy – the same thing as authority. It is also important to remember that Jews, like other human beings, do not live only, or primarily, in the political realm. They live in many realms and accept many influences. Indeed, the over-politicization of Jewish identity has been one of the more lamentable developments in the Jewish world in recent decades. It is generally foolish to revere politicians. They are very rarely heroes.
