The Unmaking of Israel, Gershom Gorenberg, Harper, 336 pages
by Noah Millman | January 25, 2012
Gershom Gorenberg is an exception to the rule—more than one rule. He’s an Orthodox Jewish Israeli of American origin, a group that generally tilts sharply to the right in an Israeli context. But he’s decidedly on the political left, an advocate of not only freezing settlement construction but of initiating evacuations “without waiting for a signature on a peace agreement,” of negotiating a two-state solution based on the Green Line (the armistice lines of 1949, the de facto borders prior to the 1967 war), of the separation of synagogue and state, and of true civic equality between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel. More than this, he has a realistic understanding of how the Zionist project must have been perceived by the Arab population of the Levant from the beginning: when he talks about the Palestinian Nakba—“catastrophe,” which is how the Palestinian Arabs refer to the events Israeli Jews call the War of Independence—he doesn’t put the word in scare quotes. But though Gorenberg is a man of the left, he also describes himself as a Zionist, rather than a non-, anti-, or post-Zionist. That is to say, he describes himself as a Jewish nationalist.
The State of Israel is also an exception to the rule—more than one rule. Like Greece and Algeria, India and Vietnam, Kenya and Lithuania, and numerous other states today, it is the fruit of a movement for national liberation, of a struggle, in the words of the Israeli national anthem, to be “a free people in our own land.” Unlike any other movement for national liberation, however, Zionism did not seek an independent state for an already existing nation living in a territory but rather to create a nation and a state out of a people scattered across the globe that had lived nearly two millennia in diaspora from its ancestral home. Like the United States and Canada, Brazil and Argentina, Australia and South Africa, Israel is also a settler state, created by a European population that came not merely to rule but to occupy and to substantially displace the indigenous people. Unlike any other settler state, however, the settlers of Israel understood themselves not to be venturing forth but to be coming home—and though individually any Israeli could make a home in any number of places, as could anyone from anywhere, in aggregate there is no other place on earth that they could call home.
This exceptional man has written a book, The Unmaking of Israel, about that exceptional state and its protracted and deepening crisis. And it is, appropriately enough, an exceptional contribution to the genre.
What is exceptional about the book is the frame within which Gorenberg chooses to tell a mostly familiar story—familiar, anyway, to anyone conversant with the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Gorenberg is not the first person to write a book decrying the human consequences of Israel’s settlement enterprise in the West Bank, and indeed, though he does decry them forcefully it is not the purpose of his book either to document them or to persuade anyone who does not already agree that the occupation has had frightful ramifications for the Palestinians. Nor is he the first person to make the “demographic argument” for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—the argument that Israel cannot remain both a democratic state and a Jewish state if it does not retain a substantial and stable Jewish majority, which would not be the case if the West Bank were incorporated into Israel proper. Indeed, this latter point is now part of the Israeli conventional wisdom—every party to the left of Likud formally endorses it, Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nominally accepts it as well, and even the platform of Avigdor Liberman’s far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party depends on the same premise (which is why that platform proposes trading the heavily Arab areas within the Green Line for the Israeli settlement blocs in the West Bank as part of a hypothetical agreement). But this is also not the primary thrust of Gorenberg’s book; he takes it for granted that everyone understands the basic arithmetic.
Rather, the thrust of the book, as the title states, is to demonstrate that the series of decisions made during and after the 1967 War that resulted in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza set in motion a process that has progressively “unmade” the State of Israel. Indeed, the progressive expansion of the settlement enterprise has so eroded the foundations of the signature achievement of political Zionism—Israel as we now know it—that not merely a “Jewish democratic state” but the state as such is now imperiled.
To make that case, Gorenberg begins by taking the reader back to the pre-state period and the early days of the Israeli state. Before independence, the Jewish community in Israel was subject to colonial rule but substantially governed itself through the various institutions of the yishuv and through manifold Zionist political movements and militias. Once national liberation was achieved, with the United Nations vote for partition and victory in the war of independence, Israel needed to get on with the process of state-building.
Israel’s first leader, David Ben-Gurion, pursued this aim in, again, a manner very familiar from other post-colonial states. The party of liberation established organs of the state—or took them over from the colonial power—but did so in such a manner that these organs were bound up, at least initially, with that same party, with the “losing” parties required to dissolve their pre-state institutions, particularly militias. The only “battle” Israel fought to achieve this goal was to sink the Altalena, a ship carrying arms for the Irgun, Menachem Begin’s right-wing militia, when the Irgun refused to hand those arms over to the Israel Defense Forces.
This decision by Ben-Gurion is Gorenberg’s object lesson in what it means to have a state: by using force early and decisively, Ben-Gurion assured that the state would have a monopoly of force, and would therefore be a state. It’s also a decision to which the losing party has never reconciled itself, and Gorenberg recounts how the Israeli right has made a rallying cry of the Altalena over the years. But for all the hand-wringing about Jews firing on other Jews, it’s worth pointing out that Israel made the transition from a revolutionary national movement to a functioning state more successfully than many other decolonizing countries, particularly given the nature of the challenges it faced. (Most notably the need to integrate an enormous wave of mostly poor immigrants that, while sharing a sense of common peoplehood, was divided into wildly different cultural and linguistic groups.)
But with the dramatic victory of 1967, Israel was tempted by the conquered territory to reverse this historical progression and revert to the pre-state condition of being a national movement. Israel captured two different categories of land in 1967. The Sinai and the Golan Heights were recognized by the world generally as the sovereign territory of Egypt and Syria. While Israel planted settlements in both areas—and actually annexed the Golan Heights—the nature of the conflict over these territories is an inter-state manner and will be resolved in the usual way between states. (As indeed it was with Egypt after the Camp David accords.)
The West Bank and Gaza, however, were neither annexed nor administered according to the Geneva Conventions for occupied territory. They were settled without regard to the law, rather in the manner of Jewish settlement in the pre-state period, except with a combination of active and passive state backing: active when the settlements were planned by the Israeli government, passive when they were established by “wildcat” settlers and then retroactively approved, a process that has accelerated during the years since the Oslo accords. The Israeli state broke its own and international law, but more alarmingly from the perspective of the integrity of the state, it encouraged private parties to believe that they were acting patriotically when they broke the law and forced the state’s hand, all in an effort to establish “facts on the ground” that would (those responsible presumably thought) redound to Israel’s benefit—or, more properly, to the benefit of the “Jewish national movement,” since Gorenberg’s contention is that this activity in fact damaged Israel as a state and since it wouldn’t be correct to talk about this or that activity benefiting an entire ethnic or religious group like “the Jews.”
Since 1967, Gorenberg relates, the settlement enterprise has undermined the Israeli state top to bottom. It has fostered secrecy and corruption in government. (There is no proper accounting anywhere of spending on settlements; the figures simply aren’t kept.) It has inspired messianic religious groups that do not recognize the state as the final authority over questions of territory or war and peace and then encouraged these groups to greater and greater influence within the armed forces—because they could be relied upon to serve in the territories without loss of morale—raising the specter of a split in the army should the government ever decide to withdraw from the West Bank. And as relations between Jews and Arabs in the West Bank took on the character of an armed ethnic contest, this dynamic has been imported back into Israel proper, where private groups—frequently with some degree of state support—have engaged in campaigns to “Judaize” predominantly Arab parts of the state.
Again the story is familiar. Less so is the framing. Gorenberg, though he is outraged by the plight of the Palestinians, is not really writing about that plight. Nor is he writing from an anti-Zionist perspective. Rather, he is writing from a deeply Zionist point of view. Zionism, we tend to forget, was not a self-defense movement. It was a nationalist movement. Nationalism tells a people a story about what it means to be free—that being free means being part of a self-conscious, self-governing, sovereign, and independent collective. Losing consciousness of one’s national group, being governed by other groups, failing to achieve independence and sovereignty on par with other nations—these are signs of unfreedom. Of immaturity. The Jews before Zionism were, from the perspective of this narrative, either an exceptionally immature nation or not a nation at all. The goal of Zionism was not simply—or even primarily—to provide for a “safe haven” for Jews fleeing persecution by the Czar or the Nazis. The goal was the spiritual rejuvenation of the Jewish people by molding them into a nation like other nations and achieving independent statehood.
This is a narrative frame that, in broad strokes, Gorenberg accepts, which is why he is properly seen as a Zionist. Indeed, the whole argument of the book is that by holding onto and settling the territories captured in 1967, Israel has reverted to a mode of existence that Zionism was supposed to help the Jews grow out of. By undermining the authority of the state, the settlement enterprise has revived modes of being and of argument that, from Gorenberg’s perspective, the Jewish people should have grown out of when they acquired the power and responsibility of a state. Indeed, that was the whole point, from a moral perspective, of acquiring state power in the first place. The settlement enterprise doesn’t just undermine the moral case for Israel because it’s an injustice (plenty of states have perpetrated injustices—indeed, far worse injustices—without undermining the case for statehood as such) but because it is evidence that Zionism failed in what was arguably its primary objective.
Gorenberg wrote his book primarily for a Jewish audience. Based on what he has said about the reception when he has gone to synagogues and other venues to talk about his book, much of the opposition from within the Jewish community refuses to be confronted with painful facts, determined to shout down and shut out the messenger with the unwelcome message. But I can imagine a more forthright approach for the opposition. Gorenberg is making the case that Israel has encouraged the reversion to a pre-state mode of being; it has revived a situation where Jews are locked in ethnic conflict with their neighbors rather than dominating an independent state with relations (whether conflicted or harmonious) with neighboring states. But why blame Israel for this? How do we know that the pre-state situation ever really ended? Did the Arab states make peace in 1949? No. Have the Palestinians reconciled themselves to the idea of a Jewish state? No. Have the Palestinian citizens of Israel at least reconciled themselves to it? No. So why should Israel effectively disarm themselves and say: we’ve got enough; we’re not going to fight for more—even though you will continue to fight so that we have less. Why should Israel be the sucker?
I don’t think the proper answer to this is to get back into a debate about the facts, or about who is more and who less justified in their specific actions. I think the proper answer is in that famous line of Ben-Gurion’s: “What matters is not what the goyim say, but what the Jews do.” The line is usually quoted as a rejoinder to concerns about “what will the world think” if Israel does such and such. But it is equally a proper rejoinder to justifying Israel’s conduct by reference to the hostility of the Palestinians, or anyone else, to Zionism. Zionism’s goal was a sovereign, independent Jewish state in the historic land of Israel, as a means to the moral and spiritual rebirth of the Jewish nation. If the occupation is destroying Israel’s fundamental character, dismantling the state, and corrupting the people, as Gorenberg contends, then Zionists above all should want to end it, as swiftly and comprehensively as possible, and not try to hold out for the most favorable terms—to say nothing of holding out for the approval and acceptance of those for whom the Jewish state can at best be seen as an unfortunate fact of life.
After all, it was always absurd to think that anyone but the Jewish people would ever truly endorse the aims of Zionism, because Zionism was a specifically Jewish national project. That project is properly judged a success or failure by what kind of nation it built, and how. Which is how Gorenberg judges it. And, to his dismay but not despair, he finds it wanting.
Noah Millman blogs for The American Conservative at TheAmericanConservative.com/Millman.
“If the occupation is destroying Israel’s fundamental character, dismantling the state, and corrupting the people, as Gorenberg contends, then Zionists above all should want to end it, ”
The same goes for Israel’s shameful economic and military dependency on the United States. Israel can have no self-respect, no honor, until that dependency has ended.
The point of Tonkin II (himself a prophet of sorts, I’m afraid) squares with the criticisms of the ancient prophets like Isaiah, directed at the monarchs of Israel and Judah past.
Disasters arose time and time again, whenever the state chose to shirk self-respect and independence … some might say God, too … and adolescently ally itself with the Pharoah and the Romans, against the Assyrian and Seleucid Greek powers.
A state of captivity to the United States’ largesse is fundamentally no different than being capitive to the Babylonians, when it comes to the matter of statehood. Yet the American Jewish community, in the main, curiously chooses to encourage such growth-strangling dependency
Millman is correct. But this is an argument for not building further settlements and dismantling the existing ones outside the Clinton parameters. Someday there must be a Palestinian state, and it must be contiguous and big enough to be viable.
Unfortunately, the chances that a Palestinian state would be a failed, corrupt, impoverished revanchist state, and that Israel would react to any evidence of this in ways that would strengthen reactionary forces on both sides is somewhat in the vicinity of 100% for the near term. Further Jewish colonization of the West Bank should be stopped and reversed as much as possible, but until the U.S. and Palestinians themselves have constructed a viable political system actually capable of self-government, sovereignty for Palestinians is likely to make things worse rather than better.
Not one word about rockets.
Of course most Israelis want to get out of Judea and Samaria, or almost all of it, anyway. A very large majority of Israelis wants to end the occupation in exchange for peace, and a majority would even end it unilaterally if that were possible without making the war worse. They voted for partial unilateral withdrawals from Judea and Samaria when they elected Olmert, who was running on that platform; the election was basically a referendum on further evacuation of settlements and withdrawal. What mooted that plan was continual rocket and missile attacks from Gaza, and the knowledge that attacks from Judea and Samaria would be much worse.
Gorenberg loves to write about Israel’s soul, but he hardly ever writes about the flesh and blood of its real-life citizens. The highest duty of a state is to protect its citizens’ lives from violence. If you want to convince Israelis to end the occupation of Judea and Samaria, don’t talk spiritual stuff like the soul of Zionism. Talk about mundane, physical things like missiles, mortars, and anti-missile defense systems.
Aaron said: “Not one word about rockets.”
28 Israeli deaths and “several hundred injuries” over an 8 year period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel
Sound like numbers from a small border town in Texas or Arizona, don’t they? Maybe instead of wasting our dwindling resources fighting wars halfway around the world for or because of Israel, we should bring our troops home to defend a few of those small American border towns.
I write this as an anti-Zionist and author of a book about historic American Jewish Anti-Zionism. That said, I do consider the current Israeli predicament a tragedy, and that if Israel were to survive as a state with a Jewish majority it should have accepted the genuine two state solution when it was possible 20 if not 60 years ago.
Gorenberg is on to something very important in acknowledging that Israel forfeited the chance to achieve the stated Zionist goal of becoming a normal country when it held on to the territories after 1967. But even this would only be possible with the further step that Gorenberg clearly opposes, to reframe its national identity as “Israeli” rather than “Jewish”. In other words, to restrict its nationalism to its own people and cease to regard itself as the possession of a transnational “Jewish people” and the leader of a revolution of national consciousness among Jews wherever they may live.
As the brilliant and heroic Shlomo Sand writes in The Invention Of The Jewish People, the refusal of the State of Israel to acknowledge the existence of an Israeli nation and renounce its claims to represent a larger “Jewish nation” risks bringing on the destruction of the actually existing Israeli nation, culture, and society.
Would there have been safer locations to establish Israel? Uri Avnery writes that the immigrants to Israel are in conflict with each other. They brought in their cultural differences and that led to conflict.
Outside of traveling back before the common era and slapping an eternal copyright on the Torah, perhaps people can ask God what he wants, and maybe that would lead to a resolution that makes most parties happy. Then write a new religious book on it.
“The goal was the spiritual rejuvenation of the Jewish people by molding them into a nation like other nations and achieving independent statehood.”
As I understand it Jews were never meant to be a nation like other nations. A tribe enjoying humus and felafel by the Tel Aviv beaches is not the reason they were freed from Egyptian bondage. I believe that the resettlement of the land of Israel was for certain part of a spiritual rejuvenation of the Jewish people, but the historic reason Jews exist is to bring the word of God to mankind. Creating a model society where one loves their neighbor as themselves is the goal. For sur enot there yet and when your neighbor is coming to kill you the proper response is to kill him first, but this phase will God willing pass quicly without more bloodshed.On a positive note one can’t help but be hopeful that the future will be bright by witnessing the incredible growth of Torah learning in Israel, along with the blessing of a world class high tech industry allowing for economic growth and military advantage. One sees among the Jews many blessed with large families with children engrossed in learning the bible. At this point the Palestinians are not going to agree to a viable nuclear Jewish State within any borders, and the Israeli Jews will not willingly give up more land without recognition and security guarantees. It’s unlikely that the US will seriously try to enforce a solution, and nobody else is powerful enough, so that means having a State with many minority rights but not a democracy. If the Jews live in the holy land as the bible instructs them it will I believe be good for them, and the righteous of all mankind, including those Palestinians among them. I don’t know for certain, but I hope that at that time we will all welcome a new age of peace and well being.May it come soon in our days.
G-d may argue that Israel shouldn’t exist at all, since the Messiah has not yet arrived.
Wow – this article really takes the cake.
Israel is not only one of the few healthy economies in the developed world, it is also one of the few that does not have negative population growth.
In short, Israel is growing and thriving while the US and EU are shrinking and struggling.
The author and his supporters have elected for the Arab course of action: try to throw a bunch of meaningless half-truths and outright lies to make Israel look bad to cover up for their own failures.
But numbers, unlike authors, don’t lie.
Birthrates don’t lie.
Economic growth does not lie.
Innovation, patents, and preponderance in all spheres of technology do not lie.
Health standards and quality of life indexes do not lie.
I’m sorry the US is having a hard time.
But the US can either buck up or it can join the Arabs in Club and spend it’s time vilifying Israel and the Jews.
As with so many such articles, the only real qualification of the author (and his citations) is that they are Jewish. Neither he nor they have any particular standing, authority, or claim to knowledge.
Jack:
I haven’t read Sand’s book, but from what I’ve read about it his thesis sounds highly questionable.
The origins of the ancient Israelite people are shrouded in mist, and the relationship between that people and the Jewish people of today is undoubtedly complex. The science of using genetic markers to trace the biological history of peoples is still very new, but the evidence that has come in so far confirms a few things: that the Palestinians do seem to be more closely related to Jews than other Arab populations are (suggesting that they are probably descended in part from the Jewish population that remained continuously resident in the country from Roman days), and that the Jewish populations of various countries are somewhat distinct from the surrounding populations genetically and are related to one another (suggesting that they have a common origin). The population to which Ashkenazi Jews are most closely related (based on the limited evidence we have so far) is not Polish or German or Russian but Italian, which suggests that the Ashkenazi Jewish population has its origin in the days of the Roman Empire. Which makes sense; in Roman days, Judaism was to some extent a missionary religion competing with Christianity and the cult of Mithra for converts (its appeal limited primarily by insistence on circumcision).
The Iraqi Jewish population pre-dates the Roman Empire, however, and there is genetic evidence linking it with the Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish populations, which suggests that the founding population of Jews around the Roman Empire does trace back to a common Palestinian origin. What most likely happened is that the founding population in different regions was Jewish males taking non-Jewish brides (mitochondrial DNA, which follows the maternal line, does not show the connections between different Jewish populations that Y-chromosome analysis does), with subsequent generations exhibiting a much higher degree of endogamy.
But of course, none of this actually matters for the question at hand. Nationalism – all nationalism, not just Zionism – is a species of mythmaking. The French nation is a construct; the Algerian nation is an even more unlikely construct; the Indian nation more unlikely still. The myth in the case of Jewish nationalism has roots that are plenty deep enough, regardless of what the genetic evidence says.
The question at hand that you raise is whether there is such a thing as an “Israeli” nation, and whether the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel are a part of it. I think an objective view from both the Jewish and Arab side would be: yes to the first, not really to the second. Israelis are starting to recognize that there is an Israeli culture that is not the culmination of nor supercedes Jewish culture but is a distinct culture of its own, with thick Jewish roots and a dominant Jewish strain, but with other strains included as well. But at the same time, the Arab citizenry of Israel has become more distinctly Palestinian in its consciousness as time has gone on, not less so, more likely to consider themselves Palestinian citizens of Israel as opposed to Israeli Arabs than was the case a generation ago.
In my own view, the path for Israel to take that is most in accord with the facts would be to move to granting national minority status to Israeli Arabs. The other option would be embracing a bi-national identity for the country as a whole. But, really, this is a conversation that can’t be conducted properly without Israeli Arabs’ active participation. A continuing scandal of Israeli political life is that there’s basically no context outside of academia where this happens, because of the self-reinforcing marginalization of the Arab parties.
Scott Rosen wrote: “In short, Israel is growing and thriving while the US and EU are shrinking and struggling.”
Does this mean that Israel is finally going to get off the US dole and pay us back the hundreds of billions of dollars we’ve given it over the years?
It;s pretty easy to “grow and thrive” when Uncle Sam sends you massive subsidies and fights your wars for you. Most Americans are sick of paying for Israel’s fantasy-land economy – a third of the entire US foreign aid budget for .001 percent of the world’s population.
Noah – Many thanks for your comments.
First, with respect to Sand, you can look up my admittedly laudatory review on Mondoweiss with respect to the finer points of his argument. But the important thing is that the Khazars are not why so many were outraged by the book, but rather because of the underlying premise that Jewish nationalism is a 19th century invention, which as your review indicates is sometimes acknowledged by some doctrinaire Zionists like Gorenberg.
I do not substantially disagree with the conventional wisdom as you describe it, about how most Israelis and Arabs view Israeli identity. I did not mean to suggest that Israeli Arabs are generally included, for better or worse, in the Israeli ethnos. The idealist in me would like to see a binational state, but I would be the first in favor if, once there is an enfranchised Arab majority in Palestine, the Israelis choose to secede in the strip from Tel Aviv to Haifa, about the size of Cape Cod, where 75% of them live.
But you did not address the most fundamental point, which is that if Israel ever became a normal country it would have to renounce its claim to be the possession and representative of the whole “Jewish people”, in other words, the conceit that as American Jews, Israel’s flag is our flag and Israel’s people are our people. On this, please read my biography of Elmer Berger and the American Council for Judaism.
Jack:
I think there’s a difference between claiming to be the “possession and representative” of the whole Jewish people and claiming to represent the national aspirations of the whole Jewish people. The latter statement simply means that, inasmuch as Jews anywhere have national aspirations, Israel is their satisfaction.
The former statement, taken literally, implies a political relationship that doesn’t actually exist – Jews outside of Israel do not in any literal sense “own” Israel, nor does the Israeli government “represent” them, unless they are Israeli citizens living abroad. The privileged place of organizations like the JNF and other organizational legacies of the pre-state period in the political ecology of Israel muddies the waters on this point, and Gorenberg argues that these organizations should be dissolved or their relationship with the state severed. I’m inclined to agree with him on this.
On a traditional reading, the Land of Israel is the “possession” of the Jewish people in perpetuity; there is little or nothing the State of Israel can do to alter this view where it is held.
If all your expression means is that Israel undertakes a moral commitment to protect non-Israeli Jews where they come under serious threat, and/or that non-Israeli Jews undertake to follow the Israeli government’s lead in thinking about their interests as members of the Jewish people, neither strikes me as exceptional. Numerous governments around the world take exactly the former approach to co-ethnic diaspora communities abroad. As for the latter, it’s also pretty common, but I note that it is only likely to work where (a) Israel is perceived by those diaspora communities to be under significant threat, and (b) those diaspora communities do not have countervailing interests of their own. Both (a) and (b) happen to be the case at present with respect to the more Jewishly-engaged segment of the American Jewish community.
For American Jews to say, “Israel’s people are our people” is to say very little more than “Israel’s people are Jews” – to change this would require a change in American Jews’ self-conception as part of the Jewish people. That change may or may not take place, but anything Israel does or doesn’t do has limited bearing on the matter.
As for Israel’s flag – flags are a complicated matter for diaspora communities. I may have a peculiar perspective on this being a New Yorker, where we’re used to seeing just about any flag you like – Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Israeli, Senegalese, you-name-it – flying, without it ever appearing to be in direct competition with the American flag. I’m aware that, to some Anglos in California or Arizona, flying the Mexican flag feels different.
I’d be curious to know, if you read Gorenberg’s book, whether you are more inclined to agree or disagree with his assessment of what Israel would need to do to become a normal country.
I haven’t read Gorenberg’s book, but having read your excellent review as well as that by my friend Murray Polner on History News Network, I should think that I agree more than I disagree. As I said in my first comment, he is on to something very important.
I have no substantive quarrel with your points about the limitations of “Jewish peoplehood” diaspora nationalism in practice. Nevertheless, the historical fact remains that a Zionist-conceived-and-led apparatus indoctrinated these ideas to American Jewry and basically supplanted or absorbed the historic Jewish religion.
Perhaps it is cranky and selfish of me to want a liberal, theistic, and non-nationalist alternative to mainstream American Judaism. But the fact is that this has emerged in the last several years where it did not exist before (I myself belong to an unaffiliated lefty shul in Brooklyn), providing an alternative that was virtually non-existent for most of the period after the rise of the Zionist establishment in the U.S. during World War II.
And I do think I speak for most non-Orthodox American Jews of my generation in saying that what we want from Israel is, as Yitzhak Rabin might have said, a divorce, not a marriage.
The headline is a bit hyperbolic. I wouldn’t say that Israel is a “failed” state. It could be argued that the post 1967 transformation of Israel from a tiny, beleaguered state surrounded by enemies to a regional military superpower that is ruling over a sizeable population of non-Jews has cost Israel some of its Zionist “soul.”
There are some elements of the Israeli polity that make me very uneasy, for example a party in the current ruling coalition that seeks to remove Palestinians from Israel proper. Would Palestinians be forced to leave Israel? Does that ring any bells?
A traumatized people, poor, dispossessed, in an geographical area their deity ostensibly gave to them; said deity largely jettisoned after WWII for understandable reasons; suffers from an inability to be perfect. Alfred Lilienthal predicted, albeit obliquely, much of what has come to pass. Who can be surprised? How can the belief in government that underwrites the confusion about what went wrong be sustained? Can’t. Will be regardless.
The idea that some “normalcy” could be achieved is insane.
Is there any other country in modern history that has failed more comprehensively to find an accomodation with its environment? The question cannot be whether such an accomodation would have been difficult- there’s no question that the task would have been difficult. But for permitting a clearly unacceptably fragile status to persist, for failing to move with urgency towards reconciliation, while instead spreading uncertainty on every one of its borders, for choosing expedience and short-term gain over long-term agreements, for refusing resolutely to even divulge to the world what its borders are, and for its greatest failing- failure to deliver the kind of freedom from everyday fear that is the ultimate responsibility of the state- for these failures, yes, indeed, Israel is a failed state.
@sharecropper
You wrote:
“Does this mean that Israel is finally going to get off the US dole and pay us back the hundreds of billions of dollars we’ve given it over the years?
Ans:
Probably not. Do you guys plan on paying back China any time soon?
In any event, if you want your money back, you’ll need to ask Boeing or General Dynamics for it.
As for living off the “US dole”, your 2 billion in “aid” to Boeing is less then 1% of our GDP.
You wrote:
“It;s pretty easy to “grow and thrive” when Uncle Sam sends you massive subsidies and fights your wars for you.”
Ans:
Americans have fought for the French, the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, and about 10 other nations. Israel is not among them.
We fight our own wars, thank you.
More to the point, unlike you, we win them.
You wrote:
“Most Americans are sick of paying for Israel’s fantasy-land economy – a third of the entire US foreign aid budget for .001 percent of the world’s population.”
Ans:
You guys couldn’t prop up South Vietnam with a trillion dollars and half a million soldiers. Not that anyone could. But even so-called isolationists Americans persist in a belief that US can determine the fate of other nations. If you think your annual pork-barrel “aid” to Boeing is keeping us afloat then the only one living in a fantasy land is you.
Next time, think twice before you elect a Marxist “Community Organizer” as your President. I know you don’t like him, but your country does and it is a democracy.
“Birthrates don’t lie.
Economic growth does not lie.
Innovation, patents, and preponderance in all spheres of technology do not lie.
Health standards and quality of life indexes do not lie.”
I think any country the size of Israel would have pretty healthy economic statistics if the United were giving it upwards of $3 billion a year.
@ Scott Rosen
Good point regarding Boeing and the complex, nevertheless
Israel benefits from the weapons transfers which take place
at the expense of the American taxpayer.
Perhaps Israel should make use of its own burgeonng arms
and technological industries and create its own defense system via indigenous funding.
Yes, Israel has fought its own wars but it has relied upon
outside logistical, financial and material help in all of them.
Israel hasn’t won them all, either.
Israel was obviously a mistake–a well intentioned mistake, to be sure, but it was accomplished through means that have had enormous negative consequences for the rest of the world down to this day, and will into the foreseeable future.
Having said that, I certainly don’t expect Israelis to commit national suicide now. The best we can do is to try to muddle through a highly imperfect negotiated solution–which means Bibi has to go.
Growing up in the 60′s, most of my family, and Jewish community viewed the State of Israel as a necessity for one reason only — to provide Jews with one safe haven in the world where another Holocaust — and the thousands of pogroms, Inquisitions and expulsions targeting Jews — would become mush less possible. Beyond that necessity, we hoped and believed that — based on both Jewish history and progressive religious and cultural values — the State of Israel would be a beacon of decency and democracy for the rest of the world.
While Israel is definitely slipped considerably in the latter (although not as greatly as its worst detractors would have us believe), the necessity of Israel’s existence can not be questioned. Throughout its relatively brief history, Israel has provided refuge for hundreds of thousands of persecuted Jews from Yemen, Iraq, the Soviet Union, Iran, and Ethiopia — to name but a handful of nations.
Many of the worst truthful statements we can say about Israel can also be directed toward many established nations, including the United States. And most of these nations have not been at a constant state of war with its neighbors since day one of independence.
I hope and pray that Israel will recover its lost ideological decency. But I feel the same way about my own country and most of the world. At the same time, the necessity and justice of Israel’s continued existence remains beyond question.
It was put best to me this way by a man who is an expert on Judaism: If the Jews of Israel laid down their arms tomorrow and declared they would never fire another bullet, they would be massacred and killed off in less than a year. If the Palestinians laid down their arms tomorrow and declared they would never fire another bullet, there would be peace immediately.
I know neither side is never without sin, but the sins of the state of Israel are far outweighed by the evils of their enemies. There will be no peace in the middle east at all when Palestinians love death the way that Israelis love peace. Furthermore, if all the Jews were relocated tomorrow to America, and the land was returned in the condition it was when they found it, it would just be another failed arab state that had a large percentage of poverty and infighting among rivaling factions of Palestinians.
Sorry, I mistyped. I meant to say as long as Palestinians love death the way that Israelis love life.
Listen my friend we were assigned the following article last year and what Zionist Israel is geared towards is to further cleanse Palestinians. Mr. Gershon lives in a dream world and precisely because of that he ends up aiding this process. See here:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13600826.2011.577031
“Birthrates don’t lie.
Economic growth does not lie.
Innovation, patents, and preponderance in all spheres of technology do not lie…”
I don’t know, I still don’t want my country to switch places with India or China. The pollution alone makes it not worth it.
also:
“If the Jews of Israel laid down their arms tomorrow and declared they would never fire another bullet, they would be massacred and killed off in less than a year. If the Palestinians laid down their arms tomorrow and declared they would never fire another bullet, there would be peace immediately.”
Nothing would happen, because no-one would believe either of them.
Israel would do itself well to accept the 2002 Saudi peace plan, with revision of “right of return”. Accept the Green Line as the boundary of independent Palestine.
Robert Douthett – - All Arab countries endorse the 2002 Saudi peace plan, calling for peace and recognition of Israel within pre-1967 borders. Hamas and Fatah also accepted it.
Jack Ross – - Interesting comments. In England, prior to the First World War, the great majority of upper-class English Jews opposed the Zionist programme because they saw themselves as Englishmen (or women) who happened to be Jewish by religion. A sensible position.