Israel as a Rogue State 74

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/who-is-the-we-that-the-jewish-community-stands-for-1.299631

  * Published 07:48 02.07.10
    * Latest update 07:48 02.07.10

Who is the 'we' that the Jewish community stands for?

The increasing black-or-white, with-us-or-against-us nature of
American Jewish life is going to be a loser for the Jewish people,
even if it is a winner for Israel.

By Jay Michaelson,

Peoplehood and support of Israel are two major values of the American
Jewish community. But they are in direct conflict, both in principle
and in practice.

In principle, the values of peoplehood and Israel are on a natural
collision course. Peoplehood - the notion that we are all united
purely by dint of being members of the Jewish people - does not have
a geographic or ideological center. It does not have a particular end
in mind, except more peoplehood and more continuity. And it has very
little actual content. This, as I've explored in these pages, is both
its great strength, as it unites everybody, and its potential great
weakness, since it is low on direction and inspiration.

Support for Israel, in contrast, has a geographic and ideological
center. It does have a particular purpose. And it has a great deal of
actual content, which we argue about all the time: How Jewish should
the Jewish state be? How democratic? How secure? How just? We can
argue about it because there is something there to argue about.

As such, the trajectories of peoplehood and support for Israel often
diverge. And as we have seen lately, in practice, this divergence is
actual, not theoretical.

One of the values of peoplehood is inclusion: creating a Jewish
community where participation is open to people of different
generations, different sexualities and gender orientations, different
nationalities, different levels of education and so forth. But if we
want a community that stands for something - for example, support for
the existence of the State of Israel - then we are by definition
excluding those who do not share that value.

This may be the right decision, but let's be clear that it is a
decision. There are hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of Jews
who say that the State of Israel should not exist as a Jewish state
in its current form. Does the Jewish community (as represented by its
federations, funders, synagogues and other establishment
institutions) want to include them? Or does the community want to say
that their opinions are too far beyond the pale of where we are as a
community? These are two different, valid and competing values:
inclusion on the one hand, support for Israel on the other.

Of course, this principled conflict begs the question of who calls
the shots - that is, who the "we" is. Who determines what the "Jewish
community" stands for? We don't actually take a vote of everyone who
identifies as Jewish, right? In practice, we heavily weight the votes
of those who affiliate more, organize more and, of course, write big
checks. This, too, may be the right decision: Without those big
checks, our Jewish institutions would not exist, and so it makes
perfect sense to care more about what philanthropists think than
about what some vaguely disaffected average Jew on the street thinks.
But let's be clear that this prioritization is also a de facto
decision.

Once again, this makes plenty of sense. Consider the funders who, in
the San Francisco Bay Area, said that they would not give any money
to programs that promote an anti-Israel agenda. They didn't say that
such views should not be expressed - only that they wouldn't pay for
them. When it's put that way, who can argue?

And it's not that those same funders required a Lieberman-esque
loyalty oath or a statement in support of the settlements. Rather, in
the words of the controversial San Francisco federation funding
policy, a funded program simply may not "advocate for, or endorse,
undermining the legitimacy of Israel as a secure, independent,
democratic Jewish state, including through participation in the
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, in whole or in
part."

None of these decisions is ipso facto unreasonable. Yes, some have
noted that "secure" is what lawyers call a weasel word, since it
could exclude just about anyone from consideration, depending on how
it's interpreted. (Then again, "democratic" might exclude Yisrael
Beiteinu.) And yes, it's unclear why all forms of the BDS movement
are so treyf as to be excluded even from participating in federation
events. But surely those who donate money are entitled to determine
how it is spent.

The point, however, is not that such decisions are right or wrong,
entitled or not - only that they are diametrically opposed to the
promotion of Jewish peoplehood. They choose the value of supporting
Israel over the value of including all Jews in participation in the
organized Jewish community.

Though this may seem obvious, it clearly isn't, judging by the way
this intra-communal conflict has played out on the ground. For
example, I recently participated in a panel in the Bay Area called
"Queer Perspectives on Zionism: Talking About Israel in the LGBT
Community." The idea was to provide a space to address two kinds of
alienation: that felt by critics of Israel who feel unsafe expressing
their views in the Jewish community, and the one experienced by
supporters of Israel who feel unsafe expressing their views in the
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, which tends to tilt
leftward on these issues. (Full disclosure: My organization, Nehirim,
receives funding from the Jewish Community Federation of San
Francisco, and the panel was produced by the Israeli Consulate in San
Francisco.)

In helping to assemble a diverse panel, I ran into problems. I spoke
with tenured professors afraid to express their critical-of-Israel
views in public. I spoke to rabbinical students who said that they
didn't wrestle with Israeli politics because they didn't care about
Israel in the first place. I had several people refuse to be on the
panel because they feared for their jobs. And yet, of my eventual
co-panelists, three out of four supported the federation policy, and
many attendees said it was just no big deal.
Well, whether the federation policy is right or wrong, it clearly is
a big deal, because it's got people running scared in a way that I've
never experienced in 10 years of Jewish professional life.

In a way, the choice between inclusion of all Jewish people and
shared communal values is a very old one. Long ago, our community
leaders decided that Jewish Christians (and before them, Israelite
pagans) did not have a place at the Jewish communal table. Since
then, Jewish institutions have banned rationalist philosophers,
nationalist zealots, messianists, communists, proselytizers and
heretics. As long as there have been synagogues, there have been
doors and locks put on them. And, of course, there have always been
donor walls, too.

But there are new elements, as well. As I've learned since publishing
an essay about ambivalence toward Israel here in the Forward (an
essay that has won me awards, garnered hate mail, generated speaking
engagements like the panel in San Francisco, and led to two follow-up
articles explaining that ambivalence does not mean antipathy), there
is indeed a shifting of climate within and beyond the Jewish world.
Outside, once radical views are now commonplace: One friend of mine
in London told me yesterday that most of his friends think Israel
should not even exist as a state - and many of them are Jewish.

And inside the Jewish community, we've seen both the rise of moderate
groups such as J Street and a hardening of conservative positions
among the Jewish "establishment." This has led to some curious
results: As my colleague J.J. Goldberg wrote recently, it's no big
deal to be pro-Israel and anti-settlement in Israel - but to express
such views openly in America might get you fired.

So there is much that is old, and much that is new, in our historical
moment.
The stakes should be clear. If "we" as a community are committed to
support for Israel, then it seems right that those opposed to
Israel's very existence should not receive "our" financial support.
But that commitment comes at the expense of another commitment to
peoplehood and inclusion.

Finally, there is one other value in play: continuity. Surely it
should be clear that the increasing black-or-white,
with-us-or-against-us nature of American Jewish life is going to be a
loser for the Jewish people, even if it is a winner for Israel. If we
present younger, less-affiliated college students with a
black-or-white choice, either for us or against us, they're going to
choose against us, no matter how many Matisyahu records you play at
the Hillel.

Yes, some percentage will eat falafel and wave Israeli flags. But my
bet is that more of those who find themselves on the fence, if we
build that fence higher, will topple over to the other side.

If that is true, then the "for us or against us" crowd is harming
Israel's interests in the long run, too. Because while the Jewish
community may be tighter, more unified and more supportive of Israel
as a result of excluding those whose views are too treyf, one thing
is for sure: It will definitely be smaller.