In recent months I’ve heard more and more reports of rabbis who say they no longer know how to talk with their congregants about Israel. They feel — correctly, so far as I can tell — that our community is deeply divided, and that the divisions extend to the communities within the whole: to wit, the congregations.
How does one address an audience half of whom regard “Beware: It is 1938 again!” as an applause line, while the other half are outraged by what they see as Israel’s persistent provocations?
Or perhaps it is into three parts that we are divided — the “Who are we to criticize Israel?” crowd, the “How can we refrain from rebuke when rebuke is warranted?” crowd, and a growing number who want the whole matter of Israel to be pushed off-stage, who find it too confounding or too painful to tangle with.
Two parts or three, not necessarily of equal size or equal volume, their public intensity marked and disturbing not only to the rabbis but also to all who call themselves friends of Israel.
Who are these others, those who boo while I cheer, those who cheer while I boo? They cannot be the enemy, but they too blind to be counted as allies, not even as friends.
Shared fears
Relax. There really is a way, after all, to talk to all (or almost all) of us, and that means there is a way for all of us to listen, to comprehend that we are family. That way begins with acknowledgment of the fears we share. It accepts that the vehemence of our public views may well coexist with private pricks of doubt we cannot overcome.
Here’s an example, quite personal: I have written and spoken for many years now, since long before the idea had become a mantra for so many, in favor of a two-state solution. In my view, any other conceivable solution spells death to the Jewish state.
But though that is as deep a conviction as I have, I do not think that a two-state solution, even if achieved, will be a picnic. It is riddled with hazards, both in conception and in execution. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stated conditions for a two-state solution sound more like escape hatches than serious proposals, conditions that will ensure the futility of negotiations.
One can imagine a Palestine with truncated powers, at least during an extended period of transition, but Netanyahu seeks less to truncate than to castrate.
Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism and godfather to Israel’s right-wing, testified before the British Peel Commission in 1937 that the Jewish demand for independence was not necessarily for the kind of empowerment that independence usually implies, but could be satisfied by granting the Jews the level of independence enjoyed by — Nebraska!
Years later, Menahem Begin proposed “autonomy” for the Palestinians of the West Bank — autonomy within a Jewish state. Yet plainly Jabotinsky would never have settled for independence a la Nebraska, nor Begin for the kind of autonomy he proposed for the Palestinians.
So let us imagine that Netanyahu, a feeble heir to the legacy of these two giants, somehow comes to understand the altered circumstances of our time and that a plausible state of Palestine comes to power in the West Bank and Gaza.
Now come the problems: Where shall the borders of that state be? Shall Jerusalem be divided by an international boundary, or shall anyone who enters it from the new Palestine be able to exit it into Israel? How, if at all, will Palestine’s eastern border, its long border with Jordan, be controlled? And how shall the limited water supply be shared between Israel and Palestine?
Above all, how shall both the Jewish state and the Palestinian state deal with their own extremists, those who claim that their nation’s leaders have stabbed them in the back and those who persist in denying the other’s legitimacy?
One can go on, and on, and those whose task it will one day be to negotiate the terms of a solution to the conflict will have to go on and on, detail by cumbersome and contentious detail. And their agreed-upon responses to those “details” will leave many on both sides dissatisfied and suspicious.
House is burning
It grieves me to say all that; I wish it were not so. But it is so, and because it is, I cannot scorn those who feel trapped by the details and who therefore conclude that a two-state solution is folly.
I am as outraged as they by Palestinian extremism and incitement (though I wish they were as outraged as I by Israeli extremism and incitement), and I share their doubts that a comprehensive peace treaty will put an end to the excesses.
Yet I continue, not out of stubbornness but out of Zionist fidelity, to believe that a Jewish state is ours by right. (That does not make the Palestinians wrong. One definition of tragedy: When two rights collide.) And the only way to preserve and defend that Jewish state is to embrace the independence of a new and viable neighbor: Palestine.
Some say the two-state idea is simply not realistic. But if I am right in my claim that only with two states can there be a Jewish state, those who say that the two-state idea is not realistic are defeatists. Some say the two-state idea is too problematic. Theirs is a three-letter error; scratch the word “too,” and they are not wrong.
And then, in any case, there is work to be done now, for the house is truly burning. The escalating conflict between state and religion in Israel is a gathering menace to both. The continuing discrimination against Israel’s own Palestinian citizens is an unacceptable affront to Israel’s stated ideals and commitments.
Can we not speak of such things — or is the Israel we love and cherish all milk, honey, falafel and high tech entrepreneurs?
A writer and educator, Leonard Fein is founder of Moment magazine; Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger; and the National Jewish Coalition for Literacy.
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