Forty years after the Six-Day War, it is clear that the occupation that was the unintended result of that war has significantly altered perceptions about the State of Israel.
In fact, it is safe to say that for most people today, it is close to impossible to think of Israel without thinking about the occupation of the West Bank and the terrible problems it has created.
This is a shame although an unavoidable one. News about Israel these days is invariably about the occupied territories.
One’s views of Israel are gauged by what one thinks Israel should do about them. People are deemed “right-wing” if they believe Israel needs to hold on to them and “left-wing” if they believe Israel must give them back.
It is even hard to imagine how “left” and “right” were gauged in Israel in 1966. Maybe, as in other countries, one’s place on the political spectrum was determined by economics. But I don’t really know.
One of the sadder aspects of the fixation on the occupation is that it utterly obscures Israel itself. Rarely does anyone discuss the “miracle” that is Israel or the amazing circumstances of the state’s resurrection 2,000 years after its disappearance.
This thought struck me as I listened to an interview with one of America’s great authors, Michael Chabon. He has just published “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” which is already a best-seller just like his “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.”
Yiddish in Alaska?
“The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” is a detective story in the style of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and other “noir” writers of the 1930s and 1940s. However, Chabon’s tale takes place not in urban California, but in the Alaska town of Sitka.
In Chabon’s alternative history, Israel failed to achieve independence in 1948, leaving Sitka as a Yiddish-speaking autonomous Jewish region established as a homeland for European Jews who had fled the Holocaust.
Chabon is particularly fascinated by the idea of a modern country where Yiddish, the language of our European ancestors, is used as a linqua franca.
His Sitka is “A place where not only the doctors and waiters and trolley conductors spoke Yiddish but also the airline clerks, travel agents and casino employees. A place where you could rent a summer home from Yiddish speakers, go to a Yiddish movie,” he writes. He is “entranced” by the idea of “a Yiddish airline, a Jewish owned and run airline” with Yiddish-speaking flight attendants.
Chabon’s idea is, of course, far-fetched. But he misses one point — that in this case reality is stranger than fiction.
After all, until the 1940s, millions of people did, in fact, conduct their daily lives in Yiddish. Most of them lived in Eastern Europe but many lived in the United States, Latin America and then-Palestine.
True, no country ever had Yiddish as the official language. But in large parts of Poland and Russia, everyone spoke Yiddish, including non-Jews who learned it to do business with the Jews. There was even a Soviet republic in which Yiddish was an official language.
Yiddish was as prevalent in Europe, and as commonly spoken, as Spanish is in the American southwest and in large areas of our major cities. As with Spanish in the United States, one could manage well without knowing the country’s “official” language.
So Chabon is inventing a culture that in fact existed, and not long ago either. There are still thousands of people who can and do converse in Yiddish, although not that many flight attendants. Not even on El Al.
So what fact could be more amazing than Chabon’s fiction?
There may be no Yiddish-speaking airline, but there is a Hebrew-speaking airline, with planes flown by Jewish pilots who learned how to fly while serving in a Jewish Hebrew-speaking air force. And there’s a whole civilization called the State of Israel that conducts all the mundane business of daily life in the language of the Bible.
That is amazing, and only the jaundiced view of Israel produced by the occupation could allow anyone not to notice it. After all, unlike Yiddish, Hebrew had almost disappeared as a spoken language 2,000 years ago.
Hebrew was re-invented as a spoken language by a Russian Jew named Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who emigrated to Palestine in 1881 and began creating a dictionary of what he hoped would be a modern language. Ben-Yehuda’s son, born shortly after he arrived in Israel, was the first native Hebrew speaker in 1,800 years.
Today almost seven million native Hebrew-speakers live in Israel. The language of prayer books is now a language of the Internet.
I find it sad that in Chabon’s imaginary Yiddish country there is (as in every city in Israel) a Ben-Yehuda Street named after the self-same scholar who invented modern Hebrew.
It’s ironic and I suppose Chabon intends it to be so. In fact, the whole story Chabon tells is ironic.
Most ironic, however, is that a young Jewish American novelist like Chabon, who is well-versed on Jewish subjects and fascinated by Jewish history, finds an imaginary Israel in Alaska more compelling than the real one that was 15 years old when Chabon was born.
In that, Chabon is not alone. Israel is an increasingly hard sell to those under 50, and particularly to young Jews of college age.
To those too young to remember Israel before the occupation began — and even before the first intifada began in 1987 — the story of Israel is primarily the story of the conflict between two legitimate national movements, Israeli and Palestinian.
Had Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin not been murdered, had Oslo not been thwarted, an Israel at peace might have been able to catch the imagination of young Jews — novelists and the rest — as it did during the years before the occupation when the book and film “Exodus” inspired and moved millions.
The good news is that all is not lost, far from it. Israel lives and is, in so many ways, every bit as miraculous as a Yiddish homeland in Alaska.
But time is running out. Preserving the dream means ending the current nightmare.
M. J. Rosenberg is the director of the Israel Policy Forum’s Washington Policy Center.
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