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The Burg speaks: Zionism is futile

By Ben Harris · April 3, 2008

It’s been less than a year since Avraham Burg – former Knesset speaker, Jewish Agency chief, and scion of one of Israel’s most illustrious founding families – shocked his countrymen with some harsh appraisals of the Zionist enterprise (see an abridged English version of the Ha’aretz story that started the trouble here, and a more apologetic take on Burg in the Forward here). Israel’s leftist critics cheered – “Even impeccably credentialed Zionists cannot deny the truth of Israel’s evil!” – while Israelis either jeered or shook their heads in shocked confusion.

On Tuesday, Burg made his first stateside appearance since the controversy. The first thing to be said about the event is that it was long, nearly two hours long, run-down-the-batteries-on-my-MP3-recorder long. And people began drifting out well before it was over.

So nuanced and sophisticated are Burg’s critiques of the Jewish state that he cannot possibly express them in the pithy sound-bites we journalists crave. Instead, each question presented to him occasioned a background statement, a philosophical argument, a cheesy joke or two, and of course a story.

Since Burg won’t do it himself, here – briefly – are the salient points:

• Aliyah has effectively ended, thinking of Israel as a refuge for the Jewish oppressed is no longer meaningful, and Israeli society has therefore lost any sense of grand ideological purpose.
• Israel cannot find a new purpose because the quality of political intellectualizing is so low – a pathology Burg no doubt believes he stands in stark exception to – which is itself a consequence of Israel’s obsession with the Holocaust.
• The Holocaust has become a religion in Israel, traumatizing the society and making it fearful and untrusting. But fear not, for there is something more powerful than trauma – love. (For the record, I checked and that is not a lyric from a Barry Manilow song.)
• Israel should separate church and state, America-style, and move away from the Judaism of parochial concerns towards a universal, humanist Judaism. (Rabbi Sherwin Wine would have been most proud.)

If you still haven’t had enough, here’s some audio of the event.

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Taking the temperature of Mercaz Harav

By Ami Eden · March 11, 2008

Two different writers take the temperature of the yeshiva attacked last week – and offer different takes on the state of its founder’s vision of a partnership between secular and religious Zionists.

Writing in the New York Sun, Hillel Halkin looks back at the founder of the yeshiva attacked last week, and concludes that his groundbreaking vision of a partnership between secular and religious Zionists is coming undone:

What [Palestine’s first chief rabbi, Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook] did was to provide a powerful intellectual justification for religious Jews to cooperate fully with a secular Zionist establishment — and when this establishment created, after his death, a secular Jewish state, to regard the latter and its institutions as part of a divine plan for Redemption that it was a religious commandment to support and take part in.

As taught at the Merkaz Ha-Rav Yeshiva and the many emulations of it that sprang up, this became the accepted outlook of what is known as Israel’s “national religious community,” which today comprises some half-million Jews or one-tenth of Israel’s Jewish population. And when, after the 1967 war, the territories occupied by Israel in the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria became available for Jewish settlement, it was also this outlook that impelled Gush Emunim to co-opt as much of the Israeli state’s power as it could in order to settle Jews in these areas. The fusion of state power with religious idealism seemed perfectly legitimate from its point of view.

But what the leaders of the religious settlement movement failed to realize at the time was that the same state power that could be put to use by them had a will of its own that also could turn against them. This was what happened in the disengagement from Gaza in 2006, bitterly opposed by the “national religious” community, and it is what is threatening to happen on a much larger scale in the West Bank.

Today, this community, particularly its youth, feels betrayed and abandoned by the secular state it once championed, and increasingly alienated from it.

The murder of the eight students at the Merkaz Ha-Rav Yeshiva cannot, of course, be directly blamed on Israel’s secular government; if anything, the yeshiva itself was negligent in not posting guards and taking sensible precautions.

But the “national religious” community’s enraged feeling that it alone today in Israel is fully committed to the war against Palestinian terror, in which its government is at best half-heartedly engaging while continuing to pursue the mirage of peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, will only be strengthened.

The Kookian vision, which (however far it may have strayed from Kook’s original intentions) has served as this community’s guiding light for 80 years, is now foundering and close to collapse. Needless to say, the Palestinian gunman who chose the Merkaz Ha-Rav as his target was unlikely to have been aware of all this. He did not know the half of what he was shooting at.

Nadav Shragai, in Ha’aretz, is more hopeful:

“The worst Israeli government is immeasurably better than the best diaspora. Ever since the establishment of the state, we have rejoiced in it despite its flaws.” That is what Rabbi Haim Druckman, head of the Bnei Akiva religious youth movement, has been saying over and over again since the uprooting of the Gaza settlements.

Druckman is sticking to his support for the state even now, as the minister of education is being ejected from the grieving Mercaz Harav Yeshiva. ...

In such remarks, Druckman expresses the pro-state religious outlook that Mercaz Harav symbolized for decades, and to which its rabbis still adhere even after last week’s deadly terror attack. ...

“This incident,” [rabbi and educator Benny Lau] believes, “is bringing many back to the main path - to national responsibility, to a partnership with all Jews. And it likely to unite various strains that seem as though they had diverged. This is the spirit of mission and devotion to national goals, from within an outlook of Torah and faith. And it is still very dominant.” ...

As though to reinforce Rabbi Lau’s impression, students at Mercaz Harav have been hearing the following from their rabbis in recent days: “We make a clear and absolute distinction between the current government, which is temporary and ephemeral, and the state and our renewed sovereignty in the land of Israel. The state of Israel is a positive commandment from the Torah. The first step in settling the land is not to leave it in the hands of another people, in the hands of another regime, and this element cannot be realized except by Jewish rule - regardless of whether it is Solomon or Jeroboam. The main thing is Jewish rule ... Today, we have been stricken by a great disaster, and with all due understanding of the feelings of wrath and anger at the shortcomings and the terrible mistakes that led to this disaster, we are continuing in the path of Torah and faith as part of the Jewish people in the state of Israel, facing the public, and not with our backs to it.”

This pro-state line is not easy for everyone at Mercaz Harav, and especially not for the young people, many of whom were in Amona and Gush Katif. But at least the rabbis are making it clear that even after the great disaster, their line will not change.

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Israel: Looking good or bad at 60?

By Ami Eden · February 11, 2008

Authors David Grossman and Daniel Gavron offer competing portraits – one sad, one happy – of where Israel stands as it prepares for its 60th birthday.

Grossman, writing in Salon, paints a gloomy picture, arguing that the Jewish state has yet to truly confront that alarming existential lessons of the war with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006:

We have not yet dared to face, open-eyed, this war’s deep and frightening significance. … Go back to the war days. Recall the moments of anxiety, the sense of ever-widening fissures, when it suddenly became clear to each and every one of us that perhaps the army will not always be able to save us, and that there could be a time when a war could end otherwise. …

Israel has immense and impressive capabilities, but what did we see when we looked at ourselves during the war? We saw a powerful hulk groping its way insensibly, lurching hesitantly and clumsily, without any idea of where it was going. We were like a blind giant striking out in all directions, while others much smaller and weaker nipped at his flesh, drawing blood and exhausting him to the point where he might have collapsed at any moment.

The last war put it sharply: More and more it looks as if the things that set Israel going at its birth have lost their potency – its concept and its daring, its confidence in its purpose and values, its desire to create a country that would not only be a refuge for the Jewish people, but that would also transform Jewish existence into a modern civil state. Now, 60 years after Israel was founded, it must find new substance that will fuel its way forward. Without re-creating itself, it will not be able to stay in motion. Too many things, outside and inside, will hinder it. The time will come when Israel will not have the strength to overcome them.

Grossman argues that the problem did not start with Ehud Olmert, but that he is incapable of launching the necessary process of recreation.

A thousand lawyers could not obscure the feeling that this entire country has surrendered, out of passivity and apathy, or out of simple utilitarian considerations, to Ehud Olmert’s determination to hold on to his job, in contradiction of all the rules of good government and moral judgment. This feeling will not leave us as long as Olmert remains in power. It will have a corrosive and corrupting effect, even on those who were ostensibly unhurt by the war. I fear that this exhaustion, this sense of imprisonment, will prevent Israel’s rehabilitation.

The problem, Grossman argues, is that “no one among the candidates to replace Olmert looks like a leader who can alone generate a healing process, and some of them will only hasten the decline.” The solution?

Is there not any way they could unite into an apolitical national emergency force that could mobilize the large number of people who are sick of what is going on here? Those who still remember what we can aspire to, who can still rise above narrow sectorial considerations, because they recognize the danger to the whole? They would have to agree on a few common principles of security, peace, social policy, civil culture and relations between different groups in the country. To do so, they would have to make painful compromises in their positions. They could, for example, form a kind of “shadow government” that would deliberate on weighty questions, free of petty political pressures and intrigues. Such a “shadow government” could propose to the public and the government alternative policies and modes of action, as well as champion a different form of conduct, different public mores. It could be an effective way for spurring the government forward, to return it to its senses each time it is misled by inappropriate considerations or dangerous temptations.

Gavron strikes entirely different, more optimistic chord in today’s New York Times – which reads almost like a direct response to Grossman’s angst:

Something strange is happening to us Zionists in the 60th year of the state of Israel: we are repudiating our astonishing success. If in the 1880s (the start of Zionist settlement in what is now Israel) or in 1948 (the War of Independence) or even in 1967 (the Six-Day War) somebody had said that one day virtually the entire world, including all the Arab nations, would accept the existence of the State of Israel in 78 percent of the land of Israel, he would have been regarded as either idiotically optimistic or clinically insane. That, however, is where we are today. We have won, but we are refusing to accept the result.

It is as if the captain of a team winning the World Cup, a triumphant Olympic sprinter or a victor of Wimbledon were to say: “No, no. There has been a mistake. I didn’t win, I lost. My victory is an illusion.”

Yes, Israel faces problems in the form of Iran, Hamas, Fatah and Hezbollah – but, even in these areas, the picture is not all bad, Gavron argues.

Wake up, fellow Israelis, it’s over, we’ve won! What is more we’ve won a lot: more than 8,000 square miles out of the 10,400 square miles of the British Mandate for Palestine. And most Palestinians have accepted this territorially lopsided resolution of the 100-year-old dispute.

Sill, Gavron concludes, the Jewish settlements in the West Bank pose major problems and a different approach needs to be taken to reaching an agreement with the Palestinians. In the end, he predicts, some sort of binational state is in the cards:

If we cannot summon the determination it would take for a complete pullback, might the world, led by the United States, try to force us to withdraw? It might, but it probably won’t, so we are most likely looking at some sort of single state, bi-national state or confederation. What matters is that we are acting from a position of strength, and we ought to be investing our energy and creativity in working out a long-term solution with the Palestinians that will be acceptable to both of us.

The answer is not “besieging and blacking out Gaza, killing and arresting dozens of Palestinians in the occupied territories every month, and constructing walls and fences between us and our neighbors.”

The political settlement that the world is begging us to reach is the only way to ultimately stop the violence between us and the Palestinians.

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