During the Passover holiday I went on a picnic with family and
friends. My brother and his boy were visiting from Los Angeles,
and five carloads of parents and children made for Park Britannia,
a scenic spot 40 minutes southwest of Jerusalem, via a sliver of
Palestinian territory and then a lovely road through Emek Ha'elah,
the verdant valley where David, we are told, slew Goliath. I told
my nephew to look real hard and maybe he could spot the rock that
felled the giant Philistine. He's only 7, but he wasn't buying.
We feasted on tuna salad and matzah, debated whether it was
okay for Ashkenazim to eat kitniyot (legumes) on Passover
-- my view being, if Rabbi Ovadia Yosef can do it, who am I to do
otherwise? -- and then took a walk through the remarkable olive
grove of Ajur, home to some of the oldest and gnarliest olive
trees you'll ever see. Wildflowers decorated the hillside, storks
glided overhead. Several of the trees, hollowed over the centuries
by the elements, were filled with rocks to keep them from
collapsing. My brother, an artist, recorded the timeless landscape
with a sepia crayon.
Who planted the olive trees? A sign at the trail head, courtesy
of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), told us in Hebrew and English
that "farmers" cultivated these trees, which are now tended by an
Israeli youth group. And who were these "farmers" -- Crusaders,
Turks, Zionist pioneers? For all the sign says, they might be
olive-growers from Mars. The fact that they were Palestinian
Arabs, who fled the now nonexistent village of Ajur in 1948, never
to return, is not part of the JNF's narrative of reclaiming the
barren Jewish homeland and making the desert bloom.
To learn what happened to Ajur and hundreds of other vanished
Arab villages, you might turn to a masterful book just published
by the University of California Press called "Sacred Landscape."
The author, Meron Benvenisti, is a former deputy mayor of
Jerusalem and a well-known Israeli gadfly who airs his
iconoclastic views in a regular column in Ha'Aretz. Benvenisti
doesn't reject the Jewish claim to Palestine -- far from it. He
also assigns the Palestinians an ample share of blame for the
national disaster they suffered in 1948. But he also insists that
attention be paid to the Palestinian story and to the historical
landscape of the Land of Israel before it was reinvented by
Zionism.
Voices like Benvenisti's are controversial in Israel, to say
the least (not to mention among American Jews). In 1998, the
22-part documentary series "Tekumah" ("Rebirth") aired by Israeli
Television to mark Israel's 50th birthday, provoked a storm of
local criticism for its warts-and-all account of Israel's
founding. Similarly, when it became known last summer that the
Education Ministry had approved junior high school texts that
include a "revisionist" view of the 1948 War, the airwaves and
op-ed pages were filled with dire warnings that instilling guilt
feelings in Israeli youth would undermine the morale essential to
defending the country against its enemies. It's a reasonable
worry, to be sure, but along with many other Israelis, I believe
that we are mature enough as a nation to cultivate a sense of
empathy with the Palestinians and to resist demonizing them.
Whether the Palestinians are equally ready in return is, of
course, another question, which lies at the heart of the problem.
Still, we push on with the Oslo peace process -- we have no
reasonable alternative. And one day soon the Palestinians will
proclaim their independence. When Israel took that step in 1948,
the Palestinians took notes; now they're doing it. It's
inevitable, and by now most Israelis realize that. The world will
recognize their new state, whose borders and relationship with
Israel remain to be negotiated. Like all countries, it will have a
capital, possibly in Abu Dis, an Arab village just east of
Jerusalem that Prime Minister Barak, as I write these lines, is
planning to hand over to the Palestinians along with two others,
Azzariye and Suwahara. Barak's political opponents say the
handover will have a domino effect leading to the division of
Jerusalem and God knows what other dire consequences. I'm willing
to wager that not one outraged Israeli in a hundred could find Abu
Dis without a map, but as it goes around here, so it will continue
to go.
As Benvenisti points out, the Six-Day War conveniently shifted
the moral battleground from the country as a whole to the West
Bank, enabling Israeli peaceniks to shed any responsibility for
ruined villages like Ajur -- of whose 600 houses only three
survive, one of which is home to chamber-music concerts at Moshav
Agur -- and instead righteously demand that Israel return the West
Bank to the Palestinians.
Balancing the ideal of a Jewish polity with the canons of
justice and democracy is a tricky affair, to be sure. In America,
democracy is an axiom. Immigrants unschooled in democratic values
imbibe the common creed in the process of their naturalization.
Citizenship is granted only after completing a course of study.
People who don't get with the program don't become Americans. In
Israel, however, no Jewish immigrant has ever had to pass a
citizenship test. You qualify as Jewish under the Law of Return
and zap, you're an Israeli. Most Israelis derive from countries
with no tradition of democracy (or religious pluralism). No
surprise, then, that many Israelis have a fuzzy concept of
democracy.
A significant number, for example, believe that the full
benefits of democracy in Israel should apply only to Jews -- not
to the descendants of those people who planted the olive trees in
Ajur. And for many Israelis, democracy means the license to wield
decisive parliamentary power while at the same time reserving the
right to flout the rule of law or shirk civic responsibility. A
government commission charged with finding a creative compromise
on the thorny issue of drafting ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students
has just come up with a pareve proposal that will only marginally
increase the number of ultra-Orthodox in the military. The
perceived power of the charedim may be the single biggest
reason that so many Israelis are, ironically -- indeed tragically
-- turned off to Judaism in the very country that was invented in
order to preserve and protect it. Of the many fascinating
paradoxes of Zionism, this is also the saddest.
This, and not denominational issues, is what world Jewry ought
to be most concerned about, if you ask me. The religious pluralism
question is slowly working itself out. The Reform and Conservative
movements are pressing on with their court cases, seeking to
compel the state to accept as Jews non-Orthodox converts who were
trained in Israel. (Such converts from abroad are, thanks to a
court victory in the late 1980s, recognized under the Law of
Return.) The Reform movement has just inaugurated a program to
certify physicians -- male and female -- as mohalim (ritual
circumcisers), provoking a predictable denunciation from the
Orthodox. But the deeper problem goes far beyond the recognition
of non-Orthodox institutions. As Israel settles squarely into
middle age, it may fairly be asked: How Jewish are Israeli Jews?
In the case of a couple of hundred thousand of our Russian
immigrants, the answer is, not at all. Under Jewish law, you're
Jewish if your mother is Jewish. Under Israel's Law of Return, one
Jewish grandparent -- Hitler's definition of a Jew, and do we
dare, goes the reasoning, be less inclusive? -- entitles you and
your immediate family to become Israelis, overnight.
In a single decade, the Russian immigrants have created a
thriving subculture -- there are some 50 Russian-language
newspapers in Israel -- and have leapfrogged economically and
professionally over longstanding immigrant groups, notably Jews
from Morocco and other Arab lands. This has provoked no small
degree of resentment, which is only exacerbated by the Russians'
widespread indifference to Jewish tradition, exemplified most
gratingly by the proliferation of pork emporia in Israel since
their arrival. And with the conversion apparatus still under the
control of the right-wing Orthodox, non-Jewish Russians are in no
hurry to become Jews.
But the biggest Jewish problem involves the veteran secular
community. Shas leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, by scurrilously
comparing the left-wing Education Minister Yossi Sarid to Haman
and Pharoah, has only reinforced the alienation of secular
Israelis from Judaism. But when the rabbi wondered why Sarid,
instead of assigning secular students the poetry of Palestinian
nationalist Mahmoud Darwish, did not agonize over the fact that
these same students were ignorant of the prayer "Shema Yisrael,"
he had a point. I suspect that the garden-variety Israeli
youngster does, in fact, know the difference between "Shema
Yisrael" and "Beam Me Up, Scotty," but it may well be that his or
her Jewish literacy -- by which I mean a comfortable familiarity
with Jewish tradition -- doesn't go much beyond that. Secular
Jewish leaders of earlier generations -- Ben-Gurion and Begin, for
example -- were steeped in the religious heritage they chose to
transmute into something new. That legacy has been all but lost by
later generations. At the same time, the insidious, widespread
consensus in Israeli society as a whole that right-wing Orthodoxy
does, in fact, represent Jewish authenticity minimizes the
likelihood that many secular, liberal Israelis will be inclined to
reembrace their roots.
It is true that a growing number of secular Israelis are taking
up classical Jewish texts in various study groups. But many of
these same people retain a strong suspicion of traditional Judaism
and of rabbis in particular, and as a result are reluctant to go
the next step and become religiously affiliated, even with the
non-Orthodox streams.
The word charedi means fearful, and the ultra-Orthodox
are first of all God-fearing, and also afraid that the secular
authorities -- mainly the Supreme Court -- will erode the
Jewishness of Israel by awarding further victories to the Reform
and Conservative movements. The staunch secularists, for their
part, are no less doctrinaire, fearful that the charedim,
given their druthers, would turn Israel into a Jewish version of
Iran.
But liberal Jews in Israel and elsewhere ought not be put off
automatically by the "otherness" of the black-hatted
charedim. There's a world of wisdom to be gleaned from the
ultra-Orthodox, the chassidim not least. As the great
Galician Rebbe Elimelech of Lizhensk (1717-1787) taught us in his
"Prayer before Praying": "May it be given to me to see my
neighbor's virtues, not his faults." Such a capability is a gift
indeed, one that all Jews are empowered to give themselves, and,
God willing, each other.
Yet for many Israelis, finding common ground with their Arab
neighbors is easier than bridging the gulf between secular and
ultra-Orthodox Jews. Indeed the Jewish state is slowly
acknowledging its overdue obligations to its Palestinian citizens,
a trend which is likely to continue alongside the evolution of
Palestinian autonomy next door. Interior Minister Natan Sharansky,
for example, recently ordered that 150 acres of land that had been
confiscated by the government from the Israeli Arab village of
Kafr Kassem in the aftermath of the 1948 war should, at last, be
returned to the village.
In another case, the Jewish village of Katzir, near Hadera, had
refused to allow Adel Ka'adan, an Arab citizen of Israel (and a
registered nurse working in a Jewish hospital), to buy a lot and
build a home, on the grounds that the town was on Jewish Agency
land and thus for Jews only. The Israeli Supreme Court ruled a few
months ago that the government could not allocate public land for
such a purpose, because ethnic discrimination against Israeli
citizens is against the law -- a landmark decision. Ruby Rivlin, a
leader of the Likud party, declared that the ruling would lead to
"the end of Zionism and the end of the Jewish state." But can it
really be acceptable, after suffering so much discrimination
themselves -- including restrictive covenants in gentile-only
American suburbs -- that Jews should continue to inflict such
unfairness on fellow Israeli citizens who happen to be Arab?
Of course not. Yet the larger picture is all so terribly
confus-ing and anxiety-provoking. Can Jews really afford to let
down their guard, take risks for peace? Hasn't our history proven
that there's nothing so awful it can't happen? Does not the
Passover Haggadah teach us that "in every generation they rise up
against us to destroy us?" What about Syria? Lebanon? Iraq? Iran,
for pete's sake? So King Abdallah of Jordan wears a baseball cap,
so what? And can you trust those Egyptians? And just imagine those
rogue Russian scientists in Khazakhstan, selling plutonium to
terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden.
You ask me how I cope, in Israel at 52? I read, I write, I
dream, I take my kids on picnics. Wearily, joyfully, hopefully, I
seek wisdom from the sages. Listen to the liberating, visionary
words of Martin Buber, from his 1942 essay entitled "Hebrew
Humanism":
"He who has been reared in our Hebrew biblical humanism ... is
not taken in by the hoax of modern national egoism, according to
which everything which can be of benefit to one's people must be
true and right. ... [T]he Zionist movement must decide either for
national egoism or national humanism. If it decides in favor of
national egoism, it too will suffer the fate which will soon
befall all shallow nationalism, that is, nationalism which does
not set the nation a true supernational task. If it decides in
favor of Hebrew humanism, it will be strong and effective long
after shallow nationalism has lost all meaning and justification,
for it will have something to say and to bring to mankind." Amen.
