"In the six decades of its existence, the State of Israel, far from solving the problem of anti-Semitism, has exacerbated it, and failed to increase the collective security of its Jewish citizens or alleviate the existential anxiety of Jews around the world."
So writes David Goldberg, Rabbi Emeritus of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in London in his book This Is Not The Way: Jews, Judaism and Israel. I read it after a reference in an article by Max Hastings in the Times recently, knowing that I have strong instinctive and long-standing feelings about the actions of Israel in the Middle East but conscious that could represent an anti-Semitism which I didn't think I possessed.
“When Jewish representatives insist, as the Israel PR Lobby does, on an axiomatic linkage between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, as though they are two aspects of the same seamless, linear continuity, not only are we guilty of sloppy, ahistorical oversimplification but we are also failing to treat a subject vital to our well-being with the intellectual rigour it deserves.”
This book aims to apply that rigour and that is what attracted me to it; I needed to find out what Jews thought of the behaviour of the State of Israel. I have been shocked by its recent actions in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon but am I guilty of not understanding how Jews throughout the world feel existentially threatened?
Right from the beginning, Goldberg makes the distinction between the Diaspora and the state of Israel. Chapter 1 (of 8) is entitled “Zionism triumphant, the Diaspora subservient”.
In Chapter 3 the author explores the history of anti-Semitism, firstly over centuries in Christian culture and more recently (particularly post-Holocaust, post-settlement) in the Muslim tradition, concluding that “we Jews do have justifiable cause to be concerned. Anti-Semitism has always been a light sleeper and requires constant monitoring." Nevertheless he asserts that "it should be possible to distinguish between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, particularly when the latter is not questioning Israel's right to exist but asking critical questions of government policy vis-à-vis Israel being the Jewish state rather than a state for all its citizens".
Goldberg scurries through the centuries to assess the causes and effects of declining Jewishness, through "marrying out", conversions to Christianity and the perceived need to sidestep (real or imagined) anti-Semitic barriers to acceptance, promotions and the like. He discusses the "absurdity" of the Law of Return granting automatic Israeli citizenship to such as immigrants from the Soviet Union but denying them the rights to Jewish marriage or burial. Israel's first government in 1948, under the secularist Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, "granted control over Jewish status to the [ultra-Orthodox] religious bloc as its price for entering his coalition cabinet...hence the unseemly horse-trading that regularly ensues when a coalition government needs to to strike a deal between religious demands on the one hand and the civic expectations of the overwhelming majority of the Israeli electorate and world Jewry on the other...even though less than 20 per cent of the Israeli electorate ever votes for a religious party and in the USA, Israel's staunchest Diaspora ally, about 90 per cent of Jewry is resolutely non-Orthodox."
There are some middle chapters - "Who is a Jew?", "God is dead, long live Behaviourism" and "How 'holy' is Holy Scripture?" - which stretched my patience, being a philosopher-historian's analysis of what Judaism is all about. The author even ventures into whether and in what way God exists and the existence of the universe, things which interest me but which I can find discussed in other sources if I choose to. My primary interest was elsewhere and addressed by the final chapter "Jewish ethics and the State of Israel", which was central to my search for an answer to the question "I abhor the actions being taken by Israel; does that make me anti-Semitic?"
In order to decipher whether I am anti-Zionist I need to understand what Zionism is.
"For more than sixty years now, Judaism as the religion of the Jewish people has been sustained by Zionism, its secular alter ego. The early Zionists, led by Herzl, were adept at appropriating the metaphors of faith - the promise of a 'land flowing with milk and honey', the yearning for 'next year in Jerusalem' - and adapting them to their own secular purposes. In that way, Zionism, the newcomer among Jewish responses to modernity, positioned itself in the mainstream of Jewish history as a fulfilment of, not a rupture with, the Jewish past."
Returning to chapter 1, Goldberg asserts that "the voluntary liquidation of the Diaspora and the ingathering of the exiles in their ancestral homeland would be the consummation of the Zionist vision, not merely achieving Lebensraum but bolstering numbers. Since the state was established in 1948, the constant plaint of its leaders has been 'If only we had more Jews.' More Jews to populate the Galilee; more Jews to make the Negev bloom; more Jews to counter-balance the increasing numbers of Arab citizens of Israel; more Jews to provide a bulwark against the three-times-higher Palestinian birth rate in Gaza and the West Bank. All this because the greatest threat to Israel's long-term viability in a hostile environment is not the military but the demographic one."
He concludes that there comes a point at which all Jews worldwide that want to come to live in Israel have done so. Hence Zionism morphs from the original desire for a Jewish homeland in Palestine to an assertion of its national identity by pushing robustly against any perceived boundaries to its geographical and philosophical existence. He analyses the development of West Bank settlement into effectively an unwarranted land grab. In June 1967 Israel "conquered the Territories [Sinai, Gaza, the Golan Heights and the West Bank] in a justified war of self-defence....settlement building began almost by default...soon though religious zealots overturned the likelihood of selective settlement construction based on military requirements....ever since then, settler pressure groups either of the aggressively nationalist or the religiously fundamentalist variety, or a combination of both, have been the tail wagging successive government dogs. The natural order has been overturned...an original settler population of a few hundred on the West Bank in 1968 has grown to around 230,000 today."
Israeli politicians of all hues have backed themselves into a corner from which they don't know how to extricate themselves, after years of lazy acceptance of the status quo, sneaky admiration for the new breed of Zionist pioneers planting the Israeli flag on remote West Bank hilltops... [so can they] face down settler-posturing and convince a dubious public that a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is at least attainable; that it is in Israel's best interests to have for a neighbour a stable, demilitarised Palestinian state [that] marginalises the the irredentist agenda of extremist factions such as Hamas?
The author concludes that only a "leap of the imagination" in the form of a partnership of its own citizens and Diaspora Jews can change the mindset of the nation.
For me, this has been a been a very worthwhile read. Despite the author's obvious despair at so much of Israeli government policy and action, he analyses all the issues as fairly as he is able and gave me a great deal of enlightenment on an issue which has been brought so vividly to the world in these last two years.
"Whether a Jewish state was the solution to the 'Jewish problem' or merely the new Jewish problem has yet to be decided."
