Tikun Olam-תיקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

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Since 1999, Daniel Barenboim, music director of the Chicago Symphony, has engaged in a courageous, visionary quest to show that music can provide the bridge among the warring peoples of the Middle East. In truth, the inspiration for Barenboim’s quest came from Edward Said, who describes in Bonding across Cultural Boundaries how he met Barenboim at a London party and, after screwing up his courage, invited him to a late night dinner at a nearby Middle Eastern restaurant where they bonded deeply both as friends and as artistic and political collaborators. So began a remarkable friendship between Jew and Arab Christian and musician and literary critic.

The two first spoke together publicly at a 1995 Columbia University conference on the music and politics of Wagner. The interchange was so successful and stimulating that they continued by recording private conversations and eventually delivered a series of public talks at Carnegie Hall. They then decided to redact all of this material into a book, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society. It is an impassioned discussion about politics and culture, the importance of a sense of place, the differences between writing prose and music, the difficulty of playing Wagner, the importance of great teachers, and the power of culture to transcend all national and political differences——something they both witnessed when they brought together young Arab and Israeli musicians to play at Weimar in 1999. Scott Simon interviewed Barenboim and Said together for NPR’s Weekend Edition (Parallels and Paradoxes NPR Weekend Edition interview) after the book came out.

Their first musical “collaboration” consisted of Said persuading Barenboim in 1999 to perform a recital at Bir Zeit University. It was an extraordinary musical, historical and political moment. In his Op-Ed article in the Times, Said notes that Barenboim’s was “the first recital ever at the [Bir Zeit] University and the first by an Israeli in Palestine.”

Barenboim performing at
Ramallah’s National Conservatory

The New York Times’ Serge Schmemann memorably chronicles in Moonlight and Mendelssohn in the West Bank a later performance by Barenboim at Ramallah’s Palestine National Conservatory:

The old Steinway grand had seen better days, but when Daniel Barenboim drew the first nostalgic notes of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata from it today, 200 neatly uniformed Palestinian students froze in delight.

Music, and especially music of this caliber from a live Israeli master, is not something that has often graced young lives more wrapped up in the daily misery of curfews, roadblocks, dangers and hatreds.

After closing the recital with a four-handed composition performed with a Palestinian pianist, Valdes asks Barenboim to explain his motivation for spearheading a musical project devoted to Mideast peace:

At the conclusion of that recital – believed to be the first in Palestinian territory by a Jewish artist since Yehudi Menuhin played there decades ago – Barenboim joined Arab pianist Saleem Abboud Ashkar in a round of four-hand Schubert. „I felt the need to stretch out my hand, to bring together people who are suffering such animosities,” Barenboim said at the time.

In a similar vein, Schmemann quotes Barenboim’s remarks to the Palestinian Conservatory audience:

“Each one of us has a responsibility to do what is right, and not to wait for others to do it,” he said. “My way is music. What I can do is play music, play music for you, and maybe this way, in a very small way for these few moments, we are able to build down the hatred that is so much in the region.”

In a later interview with Schmemann, he expands upon his earlier statement:

“I’m not a politician,” he said. “I don’t have a plan to end the conflict. But I think the lesson we have to learn from the 20th century is that every human being — small, young as you or older like I — has to think of his responsibility as a human being and not always depend on the politicians and the governments.”

NPR’s Israel correspondent also covered Barenboim’s Palestine National Conservatory visit .

Barenboim and Said’s second collaboration was the West-Eastern-Divan Workshop. Here is how Said described its inception:

Daniel, Yo-Yo Ma and I convened a carefully selected group of 78 Arab and Israeli musicians aged 18 to 25 in Weimar, Germany, the European cultural capital in 1999. Even eight young Syrians turned up, along with Palestinians, Egyptians, Israeli, Arabs and Jews and Lebanese, complemented by 12 Germans.

Barenboim’s vision was for the musicians to live and play together and thus learn how to come to terms with each other’s musical, religious, national and political background. They have done so gloriously throughout Europe. Here is Said’s description of how things went for the young musicians:

During those three weeks, all sorts of surprising things happened: an Israeli soldier-cellist and a lissome Syrian violinist seemed to have fallen for each other, heated arguments about identity and politics dissolved into incredible ensemble playing and everyone was struck dumb with horror during a visit to nearby Buchenwald.

Lesley Valdes in Lessons in Harmony (Symphony, January/February 2000) adds further background to the development of the Diwan project:

Youth orchestras proliferate. But until the Divan, it is doubtful there had been one in which Arabs and Jews shared music stands, let alone dormitory rooms – as Barenboim insisted during this experiment in musical and extracurricular harmony. Divan players hailed from Israel (both Jews an Palestinians) and from nations with which the Jewish state has had essentially warring relations: Lebanon, Syria, Egypt. There were also students from Iraq, Tunisia, and Germany, and a few second-generation Middle-Easterners from the U.S.

Valdes quotes Said, who nicely summarizes what the Divan can and cannot do:

„This isn’t about politics, but about learning how to listen to each other and perhaps understand each other better, using our common language, which is music,” Said observed early in the festival. „We are not going to solve the political problems of what is really quite a small land, but we surely should not wait for the politicians before we ourselves can meet.” And, he added, „there is this parallel between life and music: that in an orchestra we have to listen not only to ourselves but to each other, constantly finding the way each passage connects and interrelates to what comes next and what has come before. „If only life followed the rules of an orchestra!” the humanist remarked with a sigh.

Truth be told, this is unfortunately a European venture, based in Europe. The plain sad fact is that this project could not be sustained today in any Middle Eastern country. But one hopes that sometime in the near future the Diwan will perform in all the major capitals of the Middle East.

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Avraham Burg

In August, 2003, Avraham Burg wrote an extrordinary article in Yediot Achronot, Israel’s largest daily newspaper. It is a powerful, elemental jeremiad directed against current Israeli policy and the climate of escapism and denial dominating Israeli society. It was subsequently translated into other languages and printed in Le Monde, The Guardian, The Forward and the International Herald Tribune. I’ve chosen to link to the Guardian version, The Zionist Revolution is Dead.

I quote long passages from the piece simply because of its undeniable power and the chilling message it presents to anyone who cherishes or values what the State of Israel might stand for if it ever lived up to its original promise to be a ‘light unto the nations.’

First a word about Avraham Burg. He was the Knesset Speaker under the previous Labor government (1999-2003). He is currently one of the few Labor representatives who retains a seat in the Knesset. Burg’s father is Dr. Yosef Burg, founder of the National Religious Party and one of those who was “there at the creation” with David Ben Gurion, Golda Meir and others who witnessed the establishment of the State of Israel. Burg is an observant Jew with dovish views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict–quite a rarity in Israel.

So to hear such a person pronounce the death knell for Zionism would be a bit like hearing George Washington’s son announcing that the American dream for which his father fought was on its death bed. To paraphrase a pungent aphorism: “There is nothing like death to focus the mind.”

Though I believe that Burg has somewhat overdramatized his case in order to “focus our minds” and make us realize how desperate Israel’s position is–this doesn’t in any way diminish the power of his words or their immense significance in the current political debate.

The Israeli nation today rests on a scaffolding of corruption, and on foundations of oppression and injustice. As such, the end of the Zionist enterprise is already on our doorstep. There is a real chance that ours will be the last Zionist generation. There may yet be a Jewish state here, but it will be a different sort, strange and ugly.

In the next passage, Burg satirically alludes to financial scandals which Sharon faces:

The opposition does not exist, and the coalition, with Arik Sharon at its head, claims the right to remain silent. In a nation of chatterboxes, everyone has suddenly fallen dumb, because there’s nothing left to say. We live in a thunderously failed reality. Yes, we have revived the Hebrew language, created a marvelous theater and a strong national currency. Our Jewish minds are as sharp as ever. We are traded on the Nasdaq. But is this why we created a state? The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or anti-missile missiles. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed.

Anyone who has ever visited Israel will understand the dark humor in Burg’s reference to a “nation of chatterboxes,” because Israelis love to talk, to argue, to joke, to berate. They are a nation of talkers and storytellers. To hear that the “chatterboxes have fallen dumb” is another dramatic image that reinforces the desperation facing Israel today.

It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun.

This cannot work. Even if the Arabs lower their heads and swallow their shame and anger forever, it won’t work. A structure built on human callousness will inevitably collapse in on itself. Note this moment well: Zionism’s superstructure is already collapsing like a cheap Jerusalem wedding hall. Only madmen continue dancing on the top floor while the pillars below are collapsing.

What is especially telling about the following section is the cause and effect relationship that Burg notes between Israel’s cruel and immoral treatment of the Palestinians and the moral and social decline in the quality of Israeli life:

We have grown accustomed to ignoring the suffering of the women at the roadblocks. No wonder we don’t hear the cries of the abused woman living next door or the single mother struggling to support her children in dignity. We don’t even bother to count the women murdered by their husbands.Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated.

Here Burg recognizes that like the French in Algeria and Vietnam and like the Americans in Iraq today Israel cannot kill enough guerilla opponents to keep up with the swell of new recruits added each time you kill another guerilla. This reminds me of that Dutch boy trying to stick his finer into the holes in the dike to prevent a deluge:

We could kill a thousand ringleaders and engineers a day and nothing will be solved, because the leaders come up from below from the wells of hatred and anger, from the “infrastructures” of injustice and moral corruption.

If all this were inevitable, divinely ordained and immutable, I would be silent. But things could be different, and so crying out is a moral imperative.

The following passage is the heart of Burg’s message. The fire, passion and despair for the future burn even brighter than in any previous or subsequent passage of the article. One can tell that Burg himself would love to be the Prime Minister in order to deliver this message to his people. Part of his profound despair lies in his awareness that in the present political climate there is very little chance that he either could become the Labor Party leader or that he could win an election for Prime Minister. Burg knows how to end the conflict. But he also knows that Israel in its present state of historical amnesia and moral blindness would never elect him to do so:

Here is what the prime minister should say to the people:

The time for illusions is over. The time for decisions has arrived. We love the entire land of our forefathers and in some other time we would have wanted to live here alone. But that will not happen. The Arabs, too, have dreams and needs.

Between the Jordan and the Mediterranean there is no longer a clear Jewish majority. And so, fellow citizens, it is not possible to keep the whole thing without paying a price. We cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live here, Arab as well as Jew. We cannot keep the territories and preserve a Jewish majority in the world’s only Jewish state—not by means that are humane and moral and Jewish.

Do you want the greater Land of Israel? No problem. Abandon democracy. Let’s institute an efficient system of racial separation here, with prison camps and detention villages. Qalqilya Ghetto and Gulag Jenin.

Do you want a Jewish majority? No problem. Either put the Arabs on railway cars, buses, camels and donkeys and expel them en masse—separate ourselves from them absolutely, without tricks and gimmicks. There is no middle path. We must remove all the settlements—all of them—and draw an internationally recognized border between the Jewish national home and the Palestinian national home. The Jewish Law of Return will apply only within our national home, and their right of return will apply only within the borders of the Palestinian state.

Do you want democracy? No problem. Either abandon the greater Land of Israel, to the last settlement and outpost, or give full citizenship and voting rights to everyone, including Arabs. The result, of course, will be that those who did not want a Palestinian state alongside us will have one in our midst, via the ballot box.

Burg compares Arik Sharon unfavorably to previous strong-willed Israeli Prime Ministers. His message: “woe to a nation with ‘leaders’ such as these:”

But there is no prime minister in Jerusalem. The disease eating away at the body of Zionism has already attacked the head. David Ben-Gurion sometimes erred, but he remained straight as an arrow. When Menachem Begin was wrong, nobody impugned his motives. No longer. Polls published last weekend showed that a majority of Israelis do not believe in the personal integrity of the prime minister—yet they trust his political leadership. In other words, Israel’s current prime minister personally embodies both halves of the curse: suspect personal morals and open disregard for the law—combined with the brutality of occupation and the trampling of any chance for peace. This is our nation, these its leaders. The inescapable conclusion is that the Zionist revolution is dead.

In the following section, Burg makes a very important distinction between morality and politics by saying that the utter direness of the current Israeli predicament transcends politics. He adds that those who look at the political quagmire as an opportunity for political advantage are doing themselves, their party and the Israeli public a terrible disservice:

This is the time for clear alternatives. Anyone who declines to present a clear-cut position—black or white in effect—is collaborating in the decline. It is not a matter of Labor versus Likud or right versus left, but of right versus wrong, acceptable versus unacceptable. The law-abiding versus the lawbreakers. What’s needed is not a political replacement for the Sharon government but a vision of hope, an alternative to the destruction of Zionism and its values by the deaf, dumb and callous.

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Israel and the Occupied Territories

Whenever I read an article with a title like Tony Judt’s, Israel: The Alternative, I cringe. That’s because whenever someone comes up with an ‘alternative’ to Israel, it’s usually something that subverts, negates or extinguishes the Israel that I, and so many other Jews, know and value. And so it is with Judt’s opus in the New York Review of Books, which blithely sounds the death knell of Israel and ushers in a new and idyllic age of peace and brotherhood between Israelis and Palestinians living together harmoniously in a bi-national state.

It’s best to preface my critique of Judt’s piece with a word about bi-nationalism. In the 1920s, Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, Gershom Scholem, Ernst Simon and a group of likeminded Palestinian Jewish intellectuals created Brit Shalom. These were individuals who deeply mistrusted the triumphalist nationalism represented by Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionists. They believed that the creation of a Jewish state would irreparably harm the future relationship between Arabs and Jews because it would drive a stake (in the form of a nation state) right through the heart of the two peoples.

The bi-nationalists posited the two communities living together in a single state structured much like the catons of Switzerland. The two peoples would separately govern themselves internally, while they would share the state apparatus of foreign relations, economic affairs and other issues best administered by federal power.

I have always held a soft spot in my heart for the bi-nationalists for devising such a thoughtful, even beautiful plan. I even wrote my first academic paper at the age of 17 about them. But the onrush of events left the bi-nationalist plan in the dust. Arabs murdered Jews in Hebron in 1929, Jews struck back. And the professorial luftmenschen who were the bi-nationalists were a lot better in creating ideas than they were in devising practical political means to implement them. For all these reasons, bi-nationalism was discarded.

Yet, Mr. Judt tries to resurrect this old ghost with the fashion theory that if you hold on to an idea long enough it will come back into fashion. Before I launch my critique of Judt’s essay, let me say that I agree with much of Judt’s analysis of the state of contemporary Zionism and Israeli politics. While in places he overstates his argument for dramatic effect, I would definitely agree with him that Israel is in one of the most precarious predicaments it’s ever faced in its history. And the fate of Israel and the concept of a Jewish homeland has never been in more peril. So in a sense these times do call for radical proposals and solutions. Just not Judt’s.

Judt begins with a vivid summary of the current Israeli-Palestinian predicament:

On the corpse-strewn landscape of the Fertile Crescent, Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, and a handful of terrorists can all claim victory, and they do. Have we reached the end of the road? What is to be done?

Then he proceeds to argue that Israel as a Jewish state is no longer relevant in today’s world:

The problem with Israel, in short, is not–as is sometimes suggested–that it is a European “enclave” in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a “Jewish state”–a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded–is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.

Here Judt lays bear his argument and reveals its deep weakness. Israel’s creation becomes, in his words, a “separatist project,” a rather odious term. What of the many other nations in the world whose populations are largely of a single religion (Indonesia, Philipines, Malaysia, etc.). Why do these states have a right to live, while Israel must die to Judt’s way of thinking?

Judt clearly believes that the Zionist concept of Israel as a place for the Ingathering of Exiles has lost its purpose. He would probably argue that Diaspora Jews no longer need to have a Jewish homeland to turn to in the case of anti-Semitic outbursts and violence. How wrong he would be! Can any of us say definitively after the history of this century that we will never again face the race hatred of the Hitlers and Stalins of this world?? I think not.

Judt cogently presents three ‘alternatives’ Israel faces at this critical juncture in its existence:

Israel is quite different from previous insecure, defensive microstates born of imperial collapse: it is a democracy. Hence its present dilemma. Thanks to its occupation of the lands conquered in 1967, Israel today faces three unattractive choices. It can dismantle the Jewish settlements in the territories, return to the 1967 state borders within which Jews constitute a clear majority, and thus remain both a Jewish state and a democracy, albeit one with a constitutionally anomalous community of second-class Arab citizens.

Alternatively, Israel can continue to occupy “Samaria,” “Judea,” and Gaza, whose Arab population—added to that of present-day Israel—will become the demographic majority within five to eight years: in which case Israel will be either a Jewish state (with an ever-larger majority of unenfranchised non-Jews) or it will be a democracy. But logically it cannot be both.

Or else Israel can keep control of the Occupied Territories but get rid of the overwhelming majority of the Arab population: either by forcible expulsion or else by starving them of land and livelihood, leaving them no option but to go into exile. In this way Israel could indeed remain both Jewish and at least formally democratic: but at the cost of becoming the first modern democracy to conduct full-scale ethnic cleansing as a state project, something which would condemn Israel forever to the status of an outlaw state, an international pariah.

He continues by adding a new ‘wrinkle’ to the reasons for the U.S. going to war against Sadaam Hussein:

It is now tacitly conceded by those in a position to know that America’s reasons for going to war in Iraq were not necessarily those advertised at the time. For many in the current US administration, a major strategic consideration was the need to destabilize and then reconfigure the Middle East in a manner thought favorable to Israel.

I don’t know what was in the minds of U.S. war planners like Paul Wolfowitz or Richard Perle. It is entirely conceivable that they believed the Iraq War would enable Israel to find a lasting, secure peace. If so, they were sadly mistaken. But it’s more likely that they did NOT feel that such a War would directly lead to the solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I don’t believe that the U.S. went to war with Iraq in order to make the world safe for Israel. Rather, the war planners believed that a safer Mideast (minus Sadaam) would make for a safer Israel.

Again, Judt correctly notes the corrosive, stifling affect that Israel has on U.S. politics:

This reluctance to speak or act does no one any favors. It has also corroded American domestic debate. Rather than think straight about the Middle East, American politicians and pundits slander our European allies when they dissent, speak glibly and irresponsibly of resurgent anti-Semitism when Israel is criticized, and censoriously rebuke any public figure at home who tries to break from the consensus.

Anyone who reads the ridiculous Congressional resolutions which, in urging the President to move our embassy to Jerusalem are a shallow attempt to ‘out-Zionist the Zionists.’

He notes the pathetic lack of leadership shown by Presidents like George Bush who basically acquiesce in Israeli bad behavior. The current building of the Apartheid ‘security barrier’ is a perfect example. We say we’re against it. But do we do anything to show Sharon we mean it? No.

Sooner or later an American statesman is going to have to tell the truth to an Israeli prime minister and find a way to make him listen. Israeli liberals and moderate Palestinians have for two decades been thanklessly insisting that the only hope was for Israel to dismantle nearly all the settlements and return to the 1967 borders, in exchange for real Arab recognition of those frontiers and a stable, terrorist-free Palestinian state underwritten (and constrained) by Western and international agencies. This is still the conventional consensus, and it was once a just and possible solution.

But I suspect that we are already too late for that. There are too many settlements, too many Jewish settlers, and too many Palestinians, and they all live together, albeit separated by barbed wire and pass laws. Whatever the “road map” says, the real map is the one on the ground, and that, as Israelis say, reflects facts. It may be that over a quarter of a million heavily armed and subsidized Jewish settlers would leave Arab Palestine voluntarily; but no one I know believes it will happen. Many of those settlers will die—and kill— rather than move. The last Israeli politician to shoot Jews in pursuit of state policy was David Ben-Gurion, who forcibly disarmed Begin’s illegal Irgun militia in 1948 and integrated it into the new Israel Defense Forces. Ariel Sharon is not Ben-Gurion.

This is where I part ways with Judt. “Many of those settlers will die–and kill–rather than move.” Here, I think Judt betrays a rather superficial understanding of Israeli politics and society. Is there a chance for violence if Israel attempts to dismantle settlements in a peace agreement with Palestinians? Absolutely. Might people die? Possibly. But will the settler movement organize the kind of all-out violent campaign that Judt suggests? I think not.

After Israel negotiates a peace agreement, it will in all likelihood be put before the Israeli electorate in a referendum. If such a referendum wins the approval of a strong majority of Israelis, then the wind will be knocked out of the sails of the settler movement. While there might be strong resistance to forced settler removal, it will not be massively violent. I think the settlers would at the end of the day bow to the will of the people. They did this in the Sinai after Begin negotiated its return to Egypt (curious how Judt ommitted this fact in his article?). While it’s true that there were 3,000 settlers in Sinai as oppposed to 250,000 in the Territories, I think the same principal would apply in both cases.

The time has come to think the unthinkable. The two-state solution— the core of the Oslo process and the present “road map”—is probably already doomed. With every passing year we are postponing an inevitable, harder choice that only the far right and far left have so far acknowledged, each for its own reasons. The true alternative facing the Middle East in coming years will be between an ethnically cleansed Greater Israel and a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. That is indeed how the hard-liners in Sharon’s cabinet see the choice; and that is why they anticipate the removal of the Arabs as the ineluctable condition for the survival of a Jewish state.

But what if there were no place in the world today for a “Jewish state”? What if the binational solution were not just increasingly likely, but actually a desirable outcome? It is not such a very odd thought. Most of the readers of this essay live in pluralist states which have long since become multiethnic and multicultural. “Christian Europe,” pace M. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, is a dead letter; Western civilization today is a patchwork of colors and religions and languages, of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Arabs, Indians, and many others—as any visitor to London or Paris or Geneva will know.

Israel itself is a multicultural society in all but name; yet it remains distinctive among democratic states in its resort to ethnoreligious criteria with which to denominate and rank its citizens. It is an oddity among modern nations not—as its more paranoid supporters assert—because it is a Jewish state and no one wants the Jews to have a state; but because it is a Jewish state in which one community—Jews —is set above others, in an age when that sort of state has no place.

Don’t you just love Judt’s enthusiastic proposal that Israel become the guinea pig in his experiment proving the day of the nation state has passed. The theory goes something like this: we westerners no longer identify with our ethnicity or religions as we used to. Even the idea of being British, French, German or American loses relevance in an age of the internet, international travel and worldwide free trade. The world is now a United Colors of Bennetton. All of this is well and good. But I’m afraid Judt’s blithe willingness to experiment with the lives and well being of the Israeli populace is quite callous. Judt isn’t quite ready to give up his own ethnic, religious or national identity. But he would have Israelis do that very thing in the heart of one of the most dangerous and incendiary regions in the world. I’m sorry but that’s not an experiment that I, or most Israelis would want to make.

History is riddled with visionary experiments in democracy bludgeoned to death by authoritarian power. Does anyone remember the liberals of the Weimar Republic crushed beneath the boot of Nazi terror? Why wouldn’t or couldn’t this happen in Judt’s bi-national state? Ah yes, there would be ‘international forces’ (what a vague term) guaranteeing the peace. I don’t know about you, but I feel a bit squeamish having my very life and limb guaranteed by an amorphous “international force.”

Here Judt summarizes the Zionist project which I above called the ‘Ingathering of the Exiles’ in order to show that Israel is now the cause of Jew hatred, rather than the port of refuge it was meant to be:

For many years, Israel had a special meaning for the Jewish people. After 1948, it took in hundreds of thousands of helpless survivors who had nowhere else to go; without Israel their condition would have been desperate in the extreme. Israel needed Jews, and Jews needed Israel. The circumstances of its birth have thus bound Israel’s identity inextricably to the Shoah, the German project to exterminate the Jews of Europe. As a result, all criticism of Israel is drawn ineluctably back to the memory of that project, something that Israel’s American apologists are shamefully quick to exploit. To find fault with the Jewish state is to think ill of Jews; even to imagine an alternative configuration in the Middle East is to indulge the moral equivalent of genocide.

In the years after World War II, those many millions of Jews who did not live in Israel were often reassured by its very existence—whether they thought of it as an insurance policy against renascent anti-Semitism or simply a reminder to the world that Jews could and would fight back. Before there was a Jewish state, Jewish minorities in Christian societies would peer anxiously over their shoulders and keep a low profile; since 1948, they could walk tall. But in recent years, the situation has tragically reversed.

Today, non-Israeli Jews feel themselves once again exposed to criticism and vulnerable to attack for things they didn’t do. But this time it is a Jewish state, not a Christian one, which is holding them hostage for its own actions. Diaspora Jews cannot influence Israeli policies, but they are implicitly identified with them, not least by Israel’s own insistent claims upon their allegiance. The behavior of a self-described Jewish state affects the way everyone else looks at Jews. The increased incidence of attacks on Jews in Europe and elsewhere is primarily attributable to misdirected efforts, often by young Muslims, to get back at Israel. The depressing truth is that Israel’s current behavior is not just bad for America, though it surely is. It is not even just bad for Israel itself, as many Israelis silently acknowledge. The depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for the Jews.

I am always uncomfortable with the idea advanced here that Jews throughout the world would be better off without Israel since it provokes Jew hatred much more than the mere existence of Diaspora Jews in their individual countries. Generally, the theory goes: “Do away with Israel as a Jewish state and you will do away with anti-Semitism outside Israel; because Israel is the chief cause of anti-Semitism today.” To me, this argument is somewhat akin to telling a patient with a brain tumor that he can cure himself by cutting off his head. Sure, you remove the cancer, but what do you have left?

In a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry at will; where cultural and national impediments to communication have all but collapsed; where more and more of us have multiple elective identities and would feel falsely constrained if we had to answer to just one of them; in such a world Israel is truly an anachronism. And not just an anachronism but a dysfunctional one. In today’s “clash of cultures” between open, pluralist democracies and belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno-states, Israel actually risks falling into the wrong camp.

People have been predicting the end of the nation state about as long as they’ve existed. People have derided religion as the root cause of hatred and division in human society for as long as there have been religions. The universalists positing these theories maintain that if you remove nations and religions then all of a sudden “the lion will lie down with the lamb.” I fear that once Israel gives up its current form and becomes subsumed into a bi-national state, then the lion, in the form of a Palestinian majority surrounded by a sea of Arab countries would gobble up the lamb. I fear that even with an Israeli-Jewish population that might dominate in economic terms, political dominance would fall to the Palestinians. Then the former would play a precarious minority role in their society much like Maronites in Lebanon or ethnic Chinese in Indonesia or Malaysia. Have the Palestinians shown us they would be any more tolerant of minority rights in such a bi-national state than Israel has been of the rights of its Arab minority? I’m not arguing that Israel has been tolerant to its minorities. It has not. My argument is rather that lacking strong political leadership and a longstanding tradition of civic tolerance, no majority in the Middle East, whether it be an Arab or Jewish majority, should be expected to behave like model western-style democrats.

To convert Israel from a Jewish state to a binational one would not be easy, though not quite as impossible as it sounds: the process has already begun de facto. But it would cause far less disruption to most Jews and Arabs than its religious and nationalist foes will claim. In any case, no one I know of has a better idea: anyone who genuinely supposes that the controversial electronic fence now being built will resolve matters has missed the last fifty years of history. The “fence”—actually an armored zone of ditches, fences, sensors, dirt roads (for tracking footprints), and a wall up to twenty-eight feet tall in places—occupies, divides, and steals Arab farmland; it will destroy villages, livelihoods, and whatever remains of Arab-Jewish community. It costs approximately $1 million per mile and will bring nothing but humiliation and discomfort to both sides. Like the Berlin Wall, it confirms the moral and institutional bankruptcy of the regime it is intended to protect.

One of Judt’s greatest weaknesses here is to omit any reference to what this bi-national state would look like. How would it govern itself? How would it guarantee religious freedom? How would it define majority-minority political roles and guarantee civil, political and human rights to both the majority and the minority? How would central (federal) authority be wielded? These questions are but the tip of the iceberg. As far as I’m concerned Judt’s ideas are sandcastles floating in air with little or no substance. The rhetoric sounds compelling and seductive, but how would it really work? Of this, Judt tells us precious little. Below, one finds what might be called “Judt’s Dream” of a bi-national state. It’s heavy on vision and terribly light on a practical mechanism to realize his dream:

A binational state in the Middle East would require a brave and relentlessly engaged American leadership. The security of Jews and Arabs alike would need to be guaranteed by international force—though a legitimately constituted binational state would find it much easier policing militants of all kinds inside its borders than when they are free to infiltrate them from outside and can appeal to an angry, excluded constituency on both sides of the border. A binational state in the Middle East would require the emergence, among Jews and Arabs alike, of a new political class. The very idea is an unpromising mix of realism and utopia, hardly an auspicious place to begin. But the alternatives are far, far worse.

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In today’s New York Times, Edward Rothstein tackles Tony Judt’s incendiary New York Review of Books article, Israel: The Alternative . Rothstein’s critique of Judt’s thesis that Israel as the Jewish homeland is obsolete is at Seeking an Alternative to a Jewish State. Rothstein’s aim is to point out that while Judt’s claims may be overstated they are hardly more radical than the views of Israel’s own intellectuals and political thinkers. I think it is important to point out to those who believe that Israel and Zionism are monolithic entities that there are a wealth of political perspectives expressed in Israeli society from the most bellicose and triumphalist to the most dovish and tolerant. Rothstein writes:

Mr. Judt’s conclusions are also no different from some offered by Israel’s most accomplished intellectuals and no more caustic. In fact, in the Dec. 4 issue of The New York Review, Mr. Judt, responding to his critics, echoes Lenin and describes American defenders of Israel as “useful idiots.” He also argues that they don’t recognize that Zionism is now “the dogma of intolerant, belligerent, self-righteous, God-fearing irredentists.” He actually sounds Israeli.

He notes that while American Jews were cancelling their NYR subscriptions, Israeli letter writers “welcomed the disagreement.” He cites an Israeli playwright, Joshua Sobol, who also envisions replacing Israel with a Jewish-Arab state. And in a letter, the Israeli writer Amos Elon praises Mr. Judt for “cutting through a forest of cliches” with his proposal.

In August, in interviews in Haaretz, two leftists Israelis, Meron Benvenisti and Haim Hanegbi, went even further in their expressions of disgust with Israel’s sins and settlements. “A Jewish state can no longer exist here,” Mr. Hanegbi says. Mr. Benvenisti, who has long argued about the baleful demographic consequences of holding onto the West Bank, sees a binational state as inevitable: “The Zionist revolution is over.”

And in Yediot Aharonot, the Israeli daily, Avraham Burg, a Labor Party member of parliament and its former speaker, was just as blunt when he said: “The Zionist revolution is dead.” His indictment was translated in The Forward, then reprinted in The International Herald Tribune and The Guardian and translated again for Le Monde and Süddeutsche Zeitung.

“We were supposed to be a light unto the nations,” Mr. Burg concluded. “In this we have failed.” Instead, he wrote, Israel is constructed with “scaffolding of corruption” and “foundations of oppression and injustice.”

What I find especially shocking about Burg’s comments is that he was the son of the longtime leader of the National Religious Party. His father was one of the Israeli leaders “there at the creation.” The younger Burg sucked the Zionist dream with his mother’s milk. Then he became one of the most powerful leaders of the Labor Party. For him to turn in this direction is indeed dispiriting to those of us who retain hope that someday a moderate, tolerant form of Zionism will come to terms with the Palestinian people and their national aspirations.

Rothstein correctly notes the wild and exagerrated character of some of these Israeli critiques of Zionism:

Like Mr. Judt’s essay, these proclamations are not policy analyses…they are instead moral ultimatums, bitter and sweeping. Mr. Burg may harbor some hope, but the others declare that nothing else is possible, and if that is painful, well, the suffering suits the sin.

Brit Shalom and the Roots of Bi-Nationalism

There is, though, something cartoonish in the indictment. In fact, the self-blame and binational impulse are only partly responses to current problems. In his new book, The Fate of Zionism (HarperSanFrancisco, $19.95), Arthur Hertzberg refers to the “tension between the universal and the particular at the heart of Zionism.” A binational country (the goal of Brit Shalom founders Buber, Magnes and Scholem) promises to eliminate Zionist particularity, shedding it for the sake of a universalist vision.

This tension was present from the very start. In The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul (Basic Books, 2000), the scholar Yoram Hazony followed one of its strands. Theodor Herzl, he points out, advocated Jewish sovereignty. But such imposing figures as Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, Gershom Scholem and other German Jewish settlers in Palestine, in forming Brit Shalom in 1925, opposed Jewish political power, hoping at most for what Buber called a “binational social political entity” binding Arabs and Jews.

That vision persisted, even when it was clear neither party found it attractive (though responsibility for the failure was often laid at the feet of the Jews). When Arabs massacred Jews in 1929, for example, Buber said Jews had provided “the motive for the religious fanaticism.” As late as 1958, Buber accused the Jews of mistakenly following the way of power, saying that the “Jewish people preferred to learn from Hitler rather than from us.”

But the notion that by renouncing one’s identity that a root cause of hatred might be eliminated is also a familiar response to anti-Semitism. Could that lie behind the binational impulse as well? Mr. Judt practically acknowledges as much when he suggests that Israel embarrasses some Jews and inspires what he refers to as misdirected attacks on them.

Here I think Rothstein stumbles. Saying that Brit Shalom advocated a renunciation of Jewish identity is a willful misunderstanding of its real goal. What Buber wanted to renounce was the Jewish impulse toward state power exemplified by Jabotinsky and Ben Gurion from the right and the left. Brit Shalom wished for Jews and Arabs to find a way to live together that involved mutual appreciation and tolerance of their respective religious traditions. Bi-nationalists believed that it would be far better for Jews and Arabs to live together in a confederated state on the order of Switerland than it would be for each community to break apart and create separate loci of political power. For Jews to build their own state, maintain their own army and weave their religious institutions into the state appartus–Buber felt that all of this would drive Jews far from Arabs and remove the ability for peace and rapprochment. And who can say that he was wrong?

In truth, had there been the will on both sides and the moral and political leadership to embrace the bi-national vision, the history of the Middle East would be hugely different.

But to those like Judt who argue that bi-nationalism today is the answer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I say they are tilting at windmills. With religious and political extremists dominating the discourse both among Israelis and Palestinians, how can anyone seriously believe that a bi-national state in which each side renounces its wish to dominate the other is really possible or even desirable?

I say that the best we can hope for now is for the two peoples to eventually live in their own separate states. Perhaps at some point in the future there will be enough trust, tolerance and economic cooperation between the two sides so that ties might be strengthened. But this is something that will not come easily or soon.