From his perspective, what the Six-Day War meant to Americans outweighed the changes it caused in the Middle East. The war cleansed the Jewish American population of the stigmas it had borne, and was evidently worth the stigmatization that the occupation of formerly Arab lands had ultimately inflicted on both Israelis and Palestinians. It’s hard to imagine a purer example of the figure of Israel taking precedence over “actually existing” Israel.
One of the biggest issues confronting Jews today is the way Israel gets “constructed” by both its proponents and opponents in America. When Tony Judt explained that he wasn’t sure whether the controversy that Jewish critics of Israeli policy in the United States have provoked “will change things in the Middle East,” but that “it’s changed the shape of things here,” he made a revealing comment about Israel’s role in American political life. It seems that Israel has become a staging ground for conflicts that, while bearing on its special relationship with the United States, are first and foremost internal struggles. The same goes for debates about Israel elsewhere within the developed world, particularly Western Europe. But given both the size of the Jewish community in the U.S. and the extensive media network devoted specifically to its concerns, the intensity and scope of those struggles is frequently magnified within an American context.
This helps explain the vehemence with which some fellow Jews have attacked people like Judt. Even if he is right that debates within the American Diaspora may not directly impact Israel, the belief that they could matter elevates the significance for their participants. And when liberal journalists like Philip Weiss write about the formation of a new Jewish Left, as he did in a blog entry for the New York Observer on February 7, 2007, they only add fuel to the fire. Acknowledging that U.S. organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace still have a relatively small amount of influence, he found sufficient evidence to assert, “The formerly marginalized progressives are movin’ in.” This kind of analysis is typically sustained by a healthy dose of wishful thinking that reflects both progressives’ thirst for an expanded profile and journalists’ professional desire to perceive a balance of powers within the ideological conflict over Israel. But when repeated often enough, Weiss’s analysis has the capacity to transform its exaggerations into reality. Once the Diaspora Jewish Right feels sufficiently threatened, it’ll respond in a way that produces precisely what it fears. That’s the ironic state of affairs that Judt had in mind when he declared, “They’ve lost control of the debate.”
It’s also what prompted Dan Sieradski, in an entry he posted to his former abode, the progressive blog Jew-school, to make the bold leap of calling this ideological struggle in the Diaspora a “Jewish civil war.” Although Sieradski was skeptical of Weiss’s claim that a unified Jewish Left was making its presence felt—implying that this “movement” only appears like a coordinated force to its opponents—he argued that progressives should aspire to such a goal. While Sieradski admitted that this wasn’t likely to happen, he insisted that the outcome of his “civil war” would determine the future of world Jewry, whether fought by one army—the Zionist Establishment—or two.
Sieradski’s peculiar fusion of sober realism and incendiary idealism—there is no unified Jewish Left, and yet we need a unified Jewish Left to make the “Jewish civil war” a fair fight—shows how difficult it is for members of the Diaspora to rein in the sense of self-importance that animates their ideological moves. If you see yourself as a soldier in a war that will determine the fate of millions, you’re bound to be at least a little politically and culturally myopic. No matter how pure their motives, those who get caught up in events like l’affaire Judt end up behaving much like those who act out their private lives with role-playing games—eventually the distinction between fantasy and reality starts to blur.
REMEMBER, THEY’RE AMERICANS
Or so I would tell myself during my years as the managing editor of Tikkun magazine, one of the most influential and controversial Jewish publications to come out of the progressive Diaspora. Both my childhood in the Middle East and Europe and conversations with my family helped put the ideological struggles between American Jews over Israel that I encountered while working at the magazine into proper perspective, if only because the Israel of my upbringing seemed so much more tangible than the abstraction I would later encounter. To put it bluntly, they reminded me not to make mountains out of molehills. But that’s hard to remember when your attempts to close an issue of the magazine keep getting delayed by the angry outbursts of individuals who haven’t yet had their worldviews decentered.
Because my position exposed me to a steady flow of vitriol, many of those rants blur together. But a few stand out, whether for their extremity, absurdity, or both. I remember one time when the latest issue of Tikkun had only been on newsstands for two days, and negative reactions from our readers were already starting to roll in.
“How could you engage in such lashon harah (shit-talking)?” yelled one particularly irate reader on my voice mail. “I can tell by your last name that you must be Israeli. If so, even more shame on your self-hating soul.”
Dealing with impassioned responses comes with the territory in the publishing industry. But this particular outburst proved illuminating for me. The beautifully crafted article that inspired such rage—written by former Time Jerusalem bureau chief and erstwhile crime novelist Matt Rees for our September/October 2005 edition—steered well clear of the usual hot-button topics of Israel coverage. Rees’s piece examined the failure of Israel’s public health care system to properly look after the country’s mentally ill Holocaust survivors. It was one of those rare gems that every editor who’s serious about social justice dreams of acquiring. Tikkun published it nearly two years before Prime Minister Ehud Olmert found himself besieged by elderly Israeli survivors in concentration camp uniforms protesting his government’s offer of an estimated twenty-dollar-per-month stipend in exchange for keeping their plight out of circulation in the United States.
Yet the article elicited a reaction that I was familiar with from our coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but had mistakenly believed would be less intense in this case. As I can now see more clearly, the caller was so incensed because he believed that both the British journalist who wrote the damaging exposé and Tikkun itself were questioning Israel’s very right to exist. From his perspective, we were disguising our anti-Zionism by commissioning negative social coverage of Israel.
The editor in me was tempted to chalk up this reading of Rees’s article to the legacy of ill will among conservative Jews that Tikkun had accumulated in the nearly twenty years prior to my hiring. But as an Israeli I recognized that the lessons of this interaction extended much further. My experiences at the magazine up to that point should have clued me in that many of our readers approached our content with suspicion and even hostility. In a sense, they expected to have their buttons pushed, and not just by stories about the West Bank. Incidents like this taught me that a significant portion of American Jewry didn’t want to hear about Israel’s failings, period. Because the article so obviously dealt with the ineptitude—or, as some would argue, the callousness—of the Israeli state in caring for its most vulnerable citizens (indeed, precisely those for whom the state was rhetorically created), it struck the same chord as would have a feature on a “break-their-bones” anti-demonstration policy or artillery strikes on refugee camps in Lebanon.
This was the editorial conundrum I repeatedly confronted throughout my tenure at Tikkun. How could I, as an Israeli citizen, take American Jews seriously if they cared so deeply about Israel’s existence, yet so little about its actual functioning? Had their desire to discredit Arab and Palestinian claims to the country impaired their ability to empathize with other Jews? Or was there a magic narrative formula that would let me capture the plight of Israelis while working around the paranoid stance that any discussion of Israeli social justice issues was anti-Zionist code?
I find myself confronting this problem constantly as I try to balance my present life in the Diaspora with my past as a person who had no choice but to identify with Israel.
