A Growing Rift in the Jewish World?

Yaacov Lozowick
Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
17 May '10

Boaz Neumann teaches history at Tel Aviv University. His political positions have been at the very edge of Israel's radical Left, the camp which can find nothing positive to say about Israel and empathizes endlessly with its downtrodden Palestinian victims. That was then.

In a recent edition of Eretz Acheret, a popular journal of political matters, (March 2010), the editor Bambi Sheleg presented the theme of the month: Since Israelis are arguing ever less about issues they used to find crucial, it's time for this journal to see if we can't encourage more discussion. One of the articles she published was by Boaz Neumann, in which he described the intellectual path he took back to Zionism.

It's a fascinating article (alas, mostly not online). The author admits what the rest of us know, that the anti-Zionist Israelis are profoundly dishonest about the situation we live in, amplifying Israel's sins beyond any plausibility, rejecting the parts of the story where Israel does anything right, and with a determined blindness to the misdeeds of the Palestinians. I've been told he's part of a growing trend, in which intellectuals of the far Left re-examine their positions, recognize their moral and intellectual dishonesty, and rejoin the national community even while retaining a reasonable recognition of Israel's wrongs. Since the camp he came from was never more than minuscule, such a depletion in numbers and intellectual firepower is significant.

Now, compare that with this:

Since the 1990s, journalists and scholars have been describing a bifurcation in Israeli society. In the words of Hebrew University political scientist Yaron Ezrahi, “After decades of what came to be called a national consensus, the Zionist narrative of liberation [has] dissolved into openly contesting versions.” One version, “founded on a long memory of persecution, genocide, and a bitter struggle for survival, is pessimistic, distrustful of non-Jews, and believing only in Jewish power and solidarity.” Another, “nourished by secularized versions of messianism as well as the Enlightenment idea of progress,” articulates “a deep sense of the limits of military force, and a commitment to liberal-democratic values.” Every country manifests some kind of ideological divide. But in contemporary Israel, the gulf is among the widest on earth. [My italics]

Israelis who read the foreign press often have a surreal feeling: the reports purport to be about us, but there's nothing in them that seems even remotely familiar. So also with Peter Beinart's recent article in the New York Review of Books, The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment, from which that paragraph is lifted. He's got a number of themes, but his main argument, if I'm reading him correctly, is that Israel is splitting into two warring camps, one of which is ghastly but slowly winning; that young American Jews (unless they're orthodox) can no longer reconcile their liberalism with Israel's actions and thus are drifting away; and that this is a colossal failure of the leadership of American Jewry (AIPAC et. al.) who fail to confront Israel, allowing it to continue it's downward spiral and alienating America's young Jews.

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