I am an American-born Jew. I've lived in New York City for most of my 57 years and have never been to Israel. For many in my family those two facts immediately strip me of any right to question or even comment on any Israeli policy or action.
In fact I strongly support the state of Israel. There are family reasons -- I have many cousins over there, though I've never met most of them. I've also always admired Israeli grit and courage. Most importantly, Israel was founded on principles of social justice, democracy, civil rights, and freedom of expression. Its kibbutzim were, for a time, a bold experiment in communal living.
But the truth is that most of what I once celebrated about Israel seems to be disappearing: the commitment to civil rights, democracy, humanism, and freedom of expression. I used to assume that the stress of constant war had only temporarily suspended Israeli idealism because of practical matters of survival.
I now realize that from day one what threatened that idealism was the struggle with an agonizing paradox that Israel has yet to resolve, but will have to very soon. If this seemed revelatory to me, I see now that Israelis themselves have been acutely aware of it, perhaps since the first days of their war for independence in 1948.
The paradox: how can a government simultaneously be theocratic and humanistic -- committed to being a Jewish state, and committed to being a social democracy that values human and civil rights? The 240-year-old U.S. Bill of Rights would be unenforceable in Israel because several of its rights -- religious freedom, of course, but others as well -- are antithetical to the notion of a theocracy. Israel has many non-Jewish -- Arab -- citizens, but under its founding principle it continues to be a theocracy, with a Jewish ruling class, or quasi-class.
After WWII, nations stepped aside and agreed to allow Jews to establish an independent state (though it was under siege before, during and after its inception). This was partly driven -- at least publicly -- by a vertiginous sense of collective shame afflicting much of the world -- a desire to somehow compensate Jews for the malignancies of Hitler and Stalin. 67 years later Israel remains under siege.
In addition to relentless physical threats to its existence, it continues to be (slowly) torn apart by the inertial force of its central paradox: how can it reconcile its founding commitment to remaining a Jewish state with its founding vision of a society that offers equal rights and protections to all citizens, not just Jews?
Equal rights include the right to vote. That renders inescapable the eventual election of an Israeli Muslim as Prime Minister; and the passage of laws that will overturn Israel's existence as a Jewish state. By some estimates the number of Arab Israelis will exceed the number of Jewish Israelis within a few years.
At that point, Israel will face a dark choice: redouble its commitment to theocratic rule, or choose to evolve into a secular democracy. If the choice is theocracy it is difficult to imagine how Israel will avoid instituionalizing a new brand of apartheid. It would become a minority-led regime whose ruling class, though perhaps still humanist in rhetoric, would find itself adopting methods and behaviors that would once have been unthinkable given the painful, 2,000 year history of stateless Jewish repression.
For example: in 1492 Spain, the grip of the Inquisition drove Isabella and Ferdinand to expel the Jewish population. That event is still studied in Jewish day schools, after-school programs, and Yeshivas. It catalyzed terrible suffering, and drove the desperate formation of a highly risky underground population of "false" Christian converts called Marrano's (Jews by night, Christians by day).
If Israeli theocracy continues, how long before the conclusion is reached that the "humane" option is to expel Israeli Arabs? How else can Israel endure as a Jewish state while holding to any claim to at least internal social democracy?
The power of the underlying paradox makes it equally hard to imagine that this will happen as that it won't. Just 70 years after the Holocaust, can Jewish leaders really choose to preside over a social structure that denies equal rights to huge numbers of its citizens solely because of their gene pool and beliefs?
I can't be alone in noting the potential for creating a frightening mirror image of the nations that tormented Jews for millennia. I confess to uneasy feelings of disloyalty as I write this. Growing up in the '60's and '70's, I was warned again and again by my atheistic parents that though I might forget that I was Jewish "the world" would always be ready to remind me.
My parents embraced Israel as a crucial bulwark against the return of state-sanctioned anti-Semitism and future atrocities. They professed humanist values, and I believed them, but for a time they insisted that Jews in the United States were compelled to support every Israeli action without question: "We're not there; we have no right to criticize."
Counter-arguments were met with indignant reminders of the horrors Jews have suffered historically -- most emphatically the Holocaust, which was still an impossibly deep, open wound. Again and again my parents spoke of their awe and admiration that "such a tiny country can continue to beat back Arab aggression". The underlying point: in the unfathomable wake of the Holocaust, the world owed Jews a homeland -- and Jews needed one.
For me, Israel has always connoted protection and a sense of safety. In the event of a global return to violent anti-Semitism, Israel will welcome me as Jew without hesitation. When Rabin and Arafat seemed close to a two-state agreement I was thrilled. When a Jew executed Rabin to prevent this I was horrified. These days, the theocratic paradox has become increasingly troubling. A two-state solution seems more likely to lock in, than mitigate, the violent antipathies now extant between Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians.
Antipathy between neighboring countries usually leads to war; in gaining a country the Palestinians might also gain a great deal more suffering than they've already endured. And so -- intellectually, at least -- I've come around to a belief in a one-state solution. But that new state could no longer be a Jewish state -- and this is where my words will horrify some relatives and friends.
Even in the medium-term, theocracy seems impossible to sustain without instituting a new kind of apartheid; arguably that has already happened. There is an alternative: transform Israel into a fiercely humanistic, defiantly secular nation. This new nation would require a constitution, drawing perhaps from Talmudic, Islamic, and Christian sources in a way similar to the U.S. Constitution's connection with Christianity.
But far more than the U.S. Constitution, the new Israel would need to commit to the deepest kind of secularity -- not the U.S. form, which tacitly embraces Christianity and a belief in God -- but a strictly neutral, secular government committed to the protection of all persecuted groups. Israel might then become a home for persecuted Jews, Muslims, Christians, atheists, and so on.
I realize this is impossible now. First, Israel is a tiny country. Second, ideology is now a dirty word, as are idealism, liberalism, socialism, compassion, and so on. Business is the business of the world now; I can picture some who are reading this nodding -- of course it is, what else is there?
Indeed, the most powerful of the new religions are business and science, both of which, paradoxically, seem to carry the invisible imprimatur of the ancient God, despite public battles over intelligent design and so on. And what about fundamentalism? As an amateur student of Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and Buddhist history, it seems clear that the putative religious justifications for today's violent fundamentalism are grounded in grotesque misreadings of religious texts.
The deepest drivers are power and wealth; callous or troubled leaders exploit the desperation of disenfranchised constituents. Today's fundamentalism is -- fundamentally! -- driven by fear, not faith. For example, no core religious text advocates holy war. None even puts the power to declare war in the hands of human beings.
The "Do as I say, not as I do" moodiness of the deity in the Jewish Tanakh may seem close; in story after story the Lord orders his people to commit terrible acts of violence and war. However it is always clear that every order is situational, a function of particular conditions only justifiable by the Lord's putative infinite knowledge.
These orders are not to be extrapolated to a general principle; indeed the Lord has defined the general principle, and left no doubt about his commitment to it, having punished the first violation of a companion law by ordering the worst sort of internecine mass murder (the golden calf incident). The principle -- paradoxical though God's enforcement of it may be -- is "Thou shalt not kill."
At the political level, Israel is theocratic, not theistic; its population may even incline more toward atheism than today's U.S. population, particularly in its leadership class. Israeli theocracy, then, can't hide under the cloak of faith. Over time, Israel will have to broaden its vision one way or the other.
The old vision -- to provide Jews alone with a permanent homeland as protection from expressions of state-sponsored anti-Semitism -- is now bound up in too many cross-purposes to survive without modification. And after the creation of Israel, doesn't "the world" have similar obligations to other populations?
In the U.S. Native Americans were victims of imperial genocide, and African Americans remain targets of violent discrimination after hundreds of years of slavery followed by ongoing racism. But if separate homelands were set aside for all oppressed populations, how would that advance the struggle for universal human and civil rights, tolerance, mutuality, and compassion?
Would it help move us toward a global culture that encourages mutual understanding, respect for difference, and equal rights? Would nationalistic and ethnic segregation by genetics reduce suspicion, mistrust, envy, violence, hatred, discrimination, and intolerance between populations?
Consider that before they built gas chambers, the Nazi plan was "purification" by expulsion. They wanted to ship European Jews far, far away. 50 years later, Bosnians recast purification as "cleansing" (though not of Jews).
I'll cast this, then, as a question: as emotionally attractive as the notion is to this particular Jew, is maintaining Israel as a Jewish state too close to dangerous notions of "purification" and too far from the dream of global humanism and human / civil rights?