Brian M Downing
A review essay of A New Voice for Israel: Fighting for the Survival of the Jewish Nation by Jeremy Ben-Ami; and The Unmaking of Israel by Gershom Gorenberg.
The entry of the moderate Kadima party into the right-wing Likud government has brought questions as to what the coalition will now do. The powerful bloc could lead to an attack on Iran or a bold effort to establish a Palestinian state. Of course, it could lead to both as a way of silencing, as much as possible, the militant right which wants the former but not the latter. The Israeli Right evidently felt it needed a stronger partner on its left, perhaps in part because of a growing number of thoughtful criticisms of the Right and where it is leading the country.
Jeremy Ben-Ami is the founder and president of J Street, a new interest group for Israel which presents an alternative, more liberal voice to the American government and media. His well-established rivals are the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and allied groups which are conservative, powerful, and associated with the right in Israel.
The author begins with his family history, which though perhaps long and overly involved and seemingly at times beside the point, serves two important purposes: it demonstrates that he has strong familial and emotional ties to Israel and that a long-standing establishment in the US is not always welcome to voices of dissent, even from within the Jewish community.
Ben-Ami’s grandparents emigrated from Russia into British-ruled Palestine during the interwar years and scratched out a living as farmers. In the thirties, his father became a follower of Revisionist Zionism. He saw an impending catastrophe for European Jews and sought to bring them into Palestine, though it meant breaking the law, incurring the ire of British authorities, and entailing violence. His father also served in the Irgun, which fought the indigenous Arabs, the British, and even other Israeli forces once the state was established.
His father and like-minded colleagues travelled to the US seeking Jewish support there for their movement but found opposition from the establishment. Some American Jews were more concerned with political reform in the US; others thought it would raise the troubling matter of Jewish disloyalty to the US; still others thought that a messiah would prevent a catastrophe befalling the Jewish people. Events regarding the catastrophe were proven right yet to this day the Jewish establishment minimizes the importance of Ben-Ami’s father and his colleagues. They are allotted only passing mention in books and small spaces in Holocaust museums in Washington and Jerusalem.
Times have changed and another crisis is at hand. This one involves the damage to Israeli beliefs, institutions, and prospects for survival as a democratic nation. It comes not from foreign danger but from the occupation of the West Bank. Shortly after the land was taken in the 1967 war, Israeli statesmen and at least one general (Yigal Allon) warned that occupation would turn Israel into a colonial power with all the twisted rationalizations and increasing oppression that would entail. He and many other concerned Jews in the US and Israel see that unfolding; a new and more powerful establishment does not.
Ben-Ami sees the establishment in the US comprising AIPAC but many other groups such as the Emergency Committee for Israel (closely tied to Neoconservatism) and Christian fundamentalist groups. He credits them with solidifying bipartisan support for Israel but sees them as representing only the right of US Jews – chiefly the religious right and Neoconservatives. The establishment wields a good deal of power and defends it fiercely. Ben-Ami criticizes it for harsh methods in dealing with congress, for inattention to liberal Jews, and for alienating younger generations of Jews from Israel.
Members of congress and staff members complain that the establishment’s legislative affairs cadre are heavy handed and sometimes threatening. Legislation is to be put on the floor and passed without significant airing. Protests and demurrals lead to accusations of siding with Israel’s enemies. It’s a white-black, us-them approach, and resentment against AIPAC and according to Ben-Ami its cohorts is reaching a critical level.
According to data presented by the author, only a small number of American Jews see Israel as their foremost concern. They are far more interested in the length and breadth of American political life and global issues, many of them humanitarian. Eighty-two percent favor a two-state solution to the Palestinian issue; 69% oppose West Bank settlements in part or completely; 65% want the US to act in the peace process even if it means that Israel must make compromises.
Polls show that younger non-Orthodox Jews in the US are less tied to Israel than their older and observant kin. The establishment is upset and sees this as the baleful effect of secularization, leftist orientations, and detachment from political engagement. Ben-Ami sees the weaker ties to Israel as owing to a generational shift. Younger Jews do not see themselves or Israel as victims of the Holocaust or facing imminent destruction from foreign armies. The Holocaust is a vivid historical lesson but one with limited importance for today’s politics. Israel is a regional superpower and has a sizable nuclear arsenal. Younger Jews are alienated by Israeli policies, which conflict deeply with liberal political orientations. The occupation of the West Bank and continued settlements are offensive and are undermining the country’s democracy.
Four years ago Ben-Ami launched J Street, an alternative to establishment lobbying and public affairs efforts. It seeks to mobilize liberal and younger Jews to support efforts to bring about peace in the region. The establishment is striking back. It presses schools, synagogues, and Hillel chapters on college campuses to deny access to J Street speakers. Donors are asked to boycott Ben-Ami’s organization. Talk radio and mass e-mailings brand him as anti-Israel and even bent on destroying the Jewish state. One email likens his staff to “kapos” – the term for Jewish collaborators in Nazi concentration and extermination camps.
The author presents four themes for his movement. First, supporting Israel isn’t a yes-or-no thing; there must be questioning and engagement. Second, a “my country right or wrong” view isn’t helpful to solving problems or truly patriotic either. Third, supporters of Israel should not ally with groups such as John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, which espouses hostility to Muslims, Catholics, and others. Fourth, support for Israel must not entail opposition to Palestinian causes, including the drive for statehood.
Ben-Ami sees settling the Palestinian issue as more than a moral issue; it is also essential to the security of the US and the future of Israel. He cites American thinkers such as retired general and present CIA chief David Petraeus, former CIA head and recently retired defense secretary Robert Gates, and the prominent realist strategist Anthony Cordesman, all of whom have noted that the Palestinian issue is an obstacle to America’s security interests in the entire Middle East.
A settlement is also vital Israel’s democratic form of government. Ben-Ami sees anti-democratic forces on the rise. Dissent is less welcome than decades ago and it is conducted in an atmosphere of declining comity; the legislature is pondering the formation of committees to look into domestic opponents. Further, thinkers and politicians are pondering implementation of a restricted form of citizenship for non-Jews. This would be the groundwork of a one-state solution with Jewish first-class citizens and Arab second-class subjects – perhaps the goal of some in the establishment and in the far right in Israel.
Gershom Gorenberg is an American-born Israeli and longtime critic of the West Bank occupation and the religious right in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.1 He sees ominous trends in his country’s religion, state, and military but unlike Ben-Ami, he sees the origins of these trends as preceding the occupation and based in the creation of the right back in the forties and in the euphoria of the 1967 victory.
The Israeli Right, Gorenberg contends, developed in the unseemly milieu of European right-wing groups in the thirties. The Irgun et al were not simply a response to the imminent catastrophe, as Ben-Ami says. They emerged in a time that prized strong party organization, decisive action, and the use of extralegal force. (Gorenberg makes no further comparison.) Furthermore, these groups had a vision of Israel as including all of what is now the West Bank and Jordan as well.
After World War Two, the Irgun clashed with Arabs, the British, and the fledgling Israeli Defense Forces under the political leadership of David Ben-Gurion and the military command of Moshe Dayan. The culmination of the latter conflict was a sharp engagement between the Irgun and the IDF in which several people were killed. Oddy, Ben-Ami’s father was in the Irgun force during the engagement and future prime minister Yitzhak Rabin commanded the IDF detachment.
Defeated and outraged, the Irgun movement and its followers (who formed the present-day Likud party of Benjamin Netanyahu) remained at odds with mainstream Israelis. The secularly-oriented Israelis who had fired upon and killed fellow Jews were stained by treachery and murder. An enduring myth came into being which supported violence against unjust actions by the government. Ben-Gurion and his generals guarded against such thought in the IDF, which was largely secular and intended to stay that way. But as Gorenberg goes on to argue, the 1967 war changed that.
In the decade after founding, Israel debated the merits of a written constitution. The US has one; Britain does not. Both are strong democracies. But in a country with strong religious and secular traditions, the matter would be contentious. Religious groups, small and vocal and key to coalitions, did not want a written document, preferring instead to rely on religious texts, some of which of course outline scores of laws that governed ancient Israel. Much of government was left to the legislature, but religious forces won control over marriage, divorce, and parts of the education system. Tensions between secular and religious forces remain with lively debate over the primacy of religious texts or legislative acts. Gorenberg sees this as part of the present-day crisis over the rule of law and democracy itself, which keeps Israel an “ethnic movement” instead of a modern democracy.
The 1967 victory over surrounding states was seen as improbable in many countries, including Israel. Among more religious Israelis it was for more. It was miraculous – literally. Even more, the acquisition of the West Bank, Golan Heights, and Sinai opened religious eyes to the unfolding of God’s plan. By regaining the old lands of ancient Israel, the path was opening to the redemption of Israel and the world – literally.
Israeli religion, once moderate and compartmentalized, would never be the same: “[T]he world’s spiritual condition was measured by Jewish military power and territorial expansion. Religion swallowed whole the hard-line nationalism of soil, power, and ethnic superiority, and took on its shape.” (p. 92)
Secular forces in the state had their own plan for the West Bank, one tied to the military matter of more defensible borders. The government quickly established settlements in the guise of temporary military outposts. In time they would be neither military nor temporary but the state saw the later religious settlers as useful: “The government was outsourcing a project that combined defense and foreign policy to an ideological camp that read pragmatic restraint as a lack of faith.” (p. 93)
In the early days of the nation the military was a source of pride that had established independence and ended the image of the weak Jew. Chiefly secular from independence to well after the 1967 war, especially in combat units, later events would make it more religious – a troubling trend for Gorenberg.
The occupation of the West Bank and growing Palestinian resistance led to pangs of conscience, objections to policy, and occasional refusals to serve. The same demurrals came with the invasion and occupation of Lebanon in the eighties. As industry boomed, secular Israelis eschewed military careers and went more into computers and medical products.
Pious Israelis moved into the ranks. Religious schools mixed the Bible with Clausewitz and their alumni joined the army, often in separate religious units, often in combat units. West Bank settlers joined as well. The army “was getting soldiers who had no questions about military service in occupied territory. They would not refuse orders on political grounds.” (p. 144) Clergy and soldier have been tied since the days of the Joshua and David, but today the country faces “the influence of a politicized clergy over troops and the dominance of the religious right in [combat] units. The authority of the elected government over its military is steadily being eroded.” (p. 138)
Gorenberg sees adverse implications for the rule of law and the nation’s democracy. Israeli courts have judged at least some West Bank settlements to be illegal, yet government subsidies and protection continue or the government claims its priorities are elsewhere and it cannot get to the settlements just now. Settlers are armed and entrusted with police power. An army officer who refused to follow an order to dismantle a settlement was given a remarkably light sentence and allowed to remain in the army. Some rabbis forbid soldiers to participate in dismantling of settlements. The law of God, which of course they interpret, takes precedence over the law of man.
The 1995 murder of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by a religious man angered by a peace agreement is usually described as the act of a lone individual. Gorenberg insists that this drains history from the assassination. He sees it in the context of rising religious zealotry and declining respect for the rule of law and secular authority.
Gorenberg describes dark trends in Israel, not its dominant political culture. He offers thoughts on reversing the unmaking of his country. Ending the settlements on the West Bank and establish a Palestinian state. Breaking the growing unity between “state and synagogue” – an obvious allusion to the American principle. “Graduating” from being an ethnic movement with vague parameters and rules to a modern democratic state with the rule of law. Disbanding the religious military units which are more loyal to rabbis and texts than to ministers and laws.
1 See The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (New York: Times Books, 2006).
2 See also Yehud Sprinzak, The Ascendance of Israel’s Radical Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
A New Voice for Israel: Fighting for the Survival of the Jewish Nation by Jeremy Ben-Ami. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). ISBN-10: 0230112749. Price US$26.00, 256 pages.
The Unmaking of Israel by Gershom Gorenberg. (New York: Harper, 2011). ISBN-10: 0061985082. Price US$25.99, 336 pages.
Brian M Downing is a political/military analyst and author of The Military Revolution and Political Change and The Paths of Glory: War and Social Change in America from the Great War to Vietnam. He can be reached atbrianmdowning@gmail.com.
Copyright 2012 Brian M Downing