In another land of freedom American Jews had their own struggles with the loyalty dilemma that Zionism posed. The nascent Zionist movement provoked anxiety in Louis D. Brandeis, its revered American leader. In his memorable equation of Zionism with Americanism, he proclaimed: “To be good Americans, we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists.” Brandeis tried desperately to obliterate the conflict over divided loyalty that has tormented American Jews ever since.
Nor have Israelis, especially intellectuals on the left, evaded the tension between parochial Zionism (even “racist” to some misguided radical zealots) and the universalism they must embrace to gain acceptance beyond their academic confines and Tel Aviv beaches.
Professor Oren Yiftachel, a political geographer at Ben-Gurion University, identifies Israel as an undemocratic “ethnocracy.” The fictionalized history of Tel Aviv University professor Shlomo Sand liberates him from “tribal Judeocentrism.”
Just last month three prominent Israeli authors – Amos Oz, David Grossman, and A.B. Yehoshua – capitalized on their fame to seek public appreciation of their righteousness. They signed a petition proclaiming that Israel’s “security and existence depend on the existence of a Palestinian state side by side with Israel….based on the June 4 1967 borders.” Yet those borders, memorably identified by the late foreign minister Abba Eban as “Auschwitz borders,” are precisely what enticed the Arab attempt to annihilate Israel.
Times of Israeleditor David Horovitz drew an especially odious comparison (December 17). “When you internalize afresh…how the Nazis steadily deprived German Jewish citizens of their equality in the 1930s,” he wrote following his recent trip to Germany, “you want to scream out at the irresponsibility of any Israeli politician who would make it easy for the hordes of waiting critics to contend that the Jewish state is moving to render its Arab minority less than equal.”
Such distorted moral equivalency is appalling, even though Horovitz quickly asserted: “I’m not drawing a parallel between the Nazis’ racist laws and Israel’s mercifully aborted ‘Jewish state’ bill initiatives; I’m saying don’t be a facilitator for those Israel-bashers who would seek to do so.” In translation, Israel must not affirm its identity as a Jewish state lest it offend its sworn enemies.
Despite such anguished rants from Jewish liberals, palpably fearful lest their reputations be sullied by “the Jewish State to be called Israel” proclaimed in 1948, its identity seems overdue for reaffirmation. Where better than in an Israeli Basic Law?
