We're a people that can appreciate nasty, us Jews. Chalk it up to survivor guilt or oppressor guilt, put it down to a legacy of Talmudic and tribal disputation, to a legacy of abuse, or to a tradition of stand-up, the evidence is clear: Two Jews, Three Zingers -- barbed, caustic, and intentionally so.
This may go to explain why members of two groups that would seem to have no common ground -- the pro-settlement, pro-occupation Jewish hard right in America on one hand, and, on the other, the loose community of hard left American Jews who loathe Israel and all it does -- could come together to heap scorn and bile on a common enemy: The Two-State Jews.
Hated by activists of both sides as a yefeh nefesh, a lily-liver, a person of limp and literally negotiable values, the Jew who still believes that such a thing can and should happen -- an independent Palestine next to an independent, truly democratic Jewish state -- merits the nastiest common curse the hard right and hard left can summon: Liberal.
"Why are they so angry?" writer Gershom Gorenberg, an avowed two-state dove, asks in an account of an evening in which he recently addressed an Orthodox congregation in New York on threats to Israeli democracy: among them, the hair-trigger issues of contemporary Orthodoxy, settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Gorenberg, himself Orthodox and American born, though Jerusalem rooted, and thus no stranger to impassioned argument, found himself taken aback by a member of the congregation screaming at him, livid.
"The moderate Israeli left's argument that West Bank settlements undermine democracy and peace efforts is sometimes greeted in the U.S. as treasonous, sometimes as daringly unconventional," he wrote. "Ideas that have gone extinct in Israel still wander the American landscape, as if it were a Jurassic Park of the mind. What's going on?"
That, it turned out, was only the beginning. With the publication of Gorenberg's new book, The Unmaking of Israel, dove-hunting season opened in earnest.
"The only enthusiastic audience for The Unmaking of Israel will likely be found among those who are always eager for a book by a Jew they can use as a shield against a charge of anti-Semitism as they array themselves for ideological battle against the Jewish state," reviewer Lazar Berman wrote in Commentary, the flagship of second-generation neo-conservative U.S. Jews.
"In fact, tensions between Israel as the Jewish national liberation movement and Gorenberg's ideal democracy have nothing to do with settlements," Berman writes, later adding, "In 2011, Israeli democracy is trending toward greater equity and robustness, not toward collapse."
Israelis, knee deep in the effluent of legislation that aims to abrogate rights and the separation of powers, will surely find these observations peculiar -- if, for all the wrong reasons, reassuring.
From the left, Gorenberg has been taken to task for having concentrated too much on Israel and not nearly enough on the Palestinians. He has been attacked for cutting Israel's moderate majority too much slack, for being overly balanced on the Israeli-Palestinian question.
"Clearly he's a liberal throwing a sop to all those classical Zionists who can't bear the thought that they've lost the cherished Zionist dream of an exclusivist Jewish state," writes Seattle blogger Richard Silverstein, who describes himself as a progressive Zionist but one far to Gorenberg's left, and far more profoundly critical of Israel.
"He allows liberal Zionists to clear their conscience by conceding there are things wrong with Israel, while desperately clinging to the concept that Israel, as expressed in contemporary terms, remains fundamentally sound," Silverstein wrote.
Gorenberg has also been hit by shrapnel from the hard left's shelling of the Two-State
target it most loves to revile, columnist Jeffrey Goldberg. It made little difference to many seething critics, slamming Goldberg's strongly positive review of Gorenberg's book in The New York Times, that Goldberg endorses Gorenberg's proposals for making Israel more democratic, or that he shares Gorenberg's belief that the settlement enterprise, and its puppet, the occupation, are destructive to Israel.
What is needed, clearly, is a conversation within the American Jewish community, which allows all points of view -- no exceptions -- to be aired and discussed with seriousness. There are signs of this beginning, but intimidating shouts of reaction as well.
The American Jewish community needs to be more of a family and less of a lobby. More a family and less a place of censure and censorship. More a family and less a war zone of barricaded feuding clans.
In synagogues, campus Hillels, community centers, the rules need to be clear and ironclad. All are welcome, from boycott advocate to settler advocate. No incitement. No bigotry. None. Respect.
Meanwhile, the vigor of the attacks against moderates may lend those on both the hard right and the hard left to believe that their side is on the verge of winning the war over the future of Israel.
"Zionism is truly coming to an end," veteran New York journalist and avowed anti-Zionist activist Philip Weiss wrote this week. The pro-occupation right, meanwhile, churns out articles on a near-daily basis on the death of the two-state solution and the closing of the window on Palestinian statehood.
The fact is that both extremes may, in the end, get their wish. If Israel fails to heed warnings like those in Gorenberg's book, if the collective erosion of occupation, settlement, demographics, inequality, and expansion of extremist rabbinic influence is not reversed, both the hard right and the hard left will have been proven prophetic.
First, the two-state solution will be rendered impossible, pleasing the Occupation Zionist right.
The second consequence will not be long in coming: the end of what is left of democracy in Israel, and then the end, through demographics, despair, and desertion, of Zionism itself.
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First published on Haaretz.com
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Sure, you've got 5% on the extreme left -- rolling their eyes to the sky in despair every time they perceive "a blow to democracy" (which is about 10 times a year, every year); then you've got the 5% of extreme right, who roll their eyes in despair every time they perceive an intent to make territorial concessions.
Then, in between, you have the normal people, who just get on with their lives and are usually too busy getting things done to have time for this perpetual head shaking. They usually don't get to write their opinions on HP blogs, as those opinions are too "normal" to elicit interest and sell advertizing.
Those normal, moderate people know that the real reason the "two state solution" is not implemented is not the israeli left, the israeli right or the israeli anything; it is the Arab dishonest "interpretation" of "two states" -- meaning "two states: one for the Arabs, the other for the Arabs, too."
The only interesting fact in this article is just how much extreme leftists and extreme rightists resemble each other: both tend to "see" their ideological beliefs, while being blind to reality.
Beiteinu 15 seats
Shas, 11
United Torah, 5
The Jewish Home, 3
That's 20% of the Knesset ...
Besides this factual inconsistency, I admire your summarizing of the impasse of a two state solution. 1+1 = 1. Could not have thought of something so brilliant.
I did not say 1+1=1; I said 1 (Arab state)+ 1 (Arab state) = 2 (Arab states) + 0 (no Jewish state). From a Jewish point of view, of course, this is in no way different than "one Arab state".
Faced with this dishonest Arab position, Israel's reaction will be:
- Annex Area C, granting the few Arabs who live there the option of: a) apply for Israeli citizenship; b) acquire permanent residency status in Israel; c) receive financial compensation and move to Areas A or B.
- Severe all ties with the rest of the West Bank (Areas A & B) and Gaza. Announce that at the end of a 3-year transition period, Israel will cease to supply services to those territories. Israel will enable them (as long as they keep the peace) to connect their power and water network to that of neighbouring Arab countries, as well as trade (import/export), with the goods being inspected to ascertain no weaponry.
- Israel will declare the cessation of any Israeli interest in these regions. They can join Jordan, join Egypt, declare an independent state or an Islamic Caliphate if they so wish. Whatever they "declare", good-bye and good riddance.
See? There's always a tarnished sort of silver lining. I guess.
The newest generation, the most American in its thinking, does not share the same values as its elders, largely because they have become aware that the social Zionist experiment has morphed into exclusionary political Zionism. This current version is so selective as to discourage “real” Jewish Israelis from marrying their co-religionists across the Atlantic. These young people have recognized as well, that recent Knesset legislation is far from “democratic” with regard to the Palestinian population
Lets start with all the other ME country like Iran Iraq Saudis Afgan
Really? What would the "end of Zionism" look like? How does it end? How would you know if it ended? If G-d forbid Israel ceased to exist tomorrow, would the Jews longing for self determination in its their historical homeland stop? What are the goals of an anti-Zionist activist? I would like details from those that advocate the end of Zionism and the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state to go into detail of their vision of what they want to create in its place. Is it a one state solution? Is it a bi-national state? Is it a Palestinian state? What do these terms mean? Who belongs and who doesn't? Who stays and who goes? What form of government will rule and who decides?
The challegne that the Jewish community has is that the vast majority want to live in genuine peace. The problem is that no one knows how to get there, who can deliver it and who will maintain it. The fear is that any miscalculation can be infinitly worse than the current situation. Take the unilateral withdrawl from Gaza for example.
If, somehow, you could waive a magic wand and place both sides in a single political entity, the result would be 1948 all over again.
Do the "one state" supporters expect India and Pakistan to get back together again too?
Here Arabs, Jews, Germans, Chinese, etc., etc., etc., ALL co-exist because we have a funny thing called JUSTICE FOR ALL, and EQUALITY UNDER THE LAW in place.
So, you CAN have different people co-existing as long as they do it EQUALLY.