Some of my best friends are Bush supportersJames over at SoxBlog has an interesting piece about American Jews tending to vote Democratic, even though Bush is more “Israel-friendly” than Kerry. James points out that “many American Jews don’t care about ‘Jewish’ issues like Israel,” and clearly sees this as a failure. However, I’m not sure I agree.
My personal views about Israel are complicated. Fundamentally, on a political level, I have no sympathy for the terrorists who have been killing innocents for decades in Israel, but I also sympathize with the displaced Palestinians, and feel that Israel has not always dealt with the situation in a way calculated to (a) respect human rights or (b) decrease the amount of violence.
On a “Jewish” level (and that encompasses many levels—my religious faith, my cultural heritage, my mythology, my worldview, my sense of identity, etc.), I have to admit I see Israel as less and less of a “Jewish” issue. I have spent some time in Israel (all told no more than 5 or 6 months), and once considered enlisting for a tour in the IDF. When I was growing up, Israel was as my homeland as much as the United States, in my mind. As a Jew I am automatically an Israeli citizen, and I believe strongly that—particularly in a post-Holocaust world—the Jews deserve a place where they can live without fear of “the next time”.
But as I get older and more cynical, I have begun to believe that history teaches us that there will always be a next time. The history of the Jews is, perhaps more (or at least longer) than any other culture, a history of persecution, and Israel hasn’t changed that. In fact, if you believe that the Muslims hate the Jews and want to kill them independently of the existence of the state of Israel, there is a certain macabre absurdity to deciding to put the Jewish homeland smack dab in the middle of the Muslim world.
But Israel isn’t a failure as a Jewish homeland because it is beset on all sides by enemies who would destroy it. That makes Israel unsafe for everybody. The reason Israel is not that place is because persecution of Jews occurs even in Israel. During my short time in Israel I was struck by two things. First, the “internment camps” for Palestinian refugees and the irony of the Jewish state keeping people in “camps”, and second the fact that religious Jews are marginalized in Israeli life. Israel is a predominantly secular nation, and there is a certain amount of contempt for the religious, particularly the Orthodox. Indeed, some Israelis actually blame the orthodox for perpetuating the violence there.
What I saw there, and what I have observed since, is that while many Jews are Israelis, and many Israelis Jews, the two are not the same. And by conflating the two, I think we have both distilled and diluted what it means to be Jewish. Ours is a history of persecution, but it also is a history of survival. We have survived thousands of years in the Diaspora because our religion, our culture, our history, our traditions, have continued to tie us together, from Russia to Brooklyn, from Ethiopia to Australia. The existence of the state of Israel has inflamed anti-semitism, not squelched it.
Now, as it happens, I like Bush’s Israel policy better than Kerry’s, at least on paper. But that has nothing to do with my being Jewish, it has to do with my wanting to see an ultimately peaceful solution. As a Jew, I think we are better off without a nation of our own—at least one where we are not welcome—as long as we continue to build strong Jewish communities throughout the world. Jewish communitites that contribute positively to the larger communities in which they reside, so that more and more of the global community will stand with the Jews, and not stand aside, the “next time”.
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