For Lasting Peace, Israel Must Be Content To Be A Homeland For All Its Citizens—Not All Jews

By Allan C. Brownfeld

As the world—and U.S. policymakers—focus upon the continuing Israeli-Palestinian impasse, it is important to examine a serious stumbling block along the path to any lasting settlement which has been long ignored. That is Israel’s continuing claim to be the “homeland” not only of its own citizens—but of Jews throughout the world. It is, after all, to make room for the hoped-for emigration to Israel of millions of Jews who are citizens of other countries that there is an unwillingness to withdraw from the occupied territories and compromise in accepting the reality of a Palestinian state.

For many years, the State of Israel and the adherents of Zionism in other countries have maintained the position that Israel is the “Jewish homeland,” that Jews outside of Israel are in “exile,” and that a “full Jewish life” can be lived only in the Jewish state. In our own country, even the leaders of Reform Judaism recently adopted a statement of principles holding that Israel is “central” to Jewish life and encouraging aliyah, or emigration to Israel.

On a visit to Germany in 1996, Israeli President Ezer Weizman declared that he “cannot understand how 40,000 Jews can live in Germany” and asserted that, “The place of Jews is in Israel. Only in Israel can Jews live full Jewish lives.”

In 1998, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called upon American Jews to make a “mass aliyah” to Israel. The head of the Jewish Agency, Avram Burg, declared that the synagogue in Western countries is the “symbol of destruction,” and that the new center of Jewish life should be the state of Israel.

In 2000, Israeli President Moshe Katsev called upon Jews throughout the world to make aliyah and argued against “legitimizing” Jewish life in other countries. In a book published in 2000, Conversations With Yitzhak Shamir, the former Israeli prime minister declared: “The very essence of our being obliges every Jew to live in Eretz Yisrael…In my opinion, a man has no right to consider himself a part of the Jewish People without also being a Zionist, because Zionism states that in order for a Jew to live as a Jew he needs to have his own country, his own life, and his own future.”

It can be said that Israel’s abnormality began with its declaration on May 15, 1948 that it was a state not of the people living within its borders, but of the “Jewish people” everywhere. The Law of Return, which gave Jews the right to emigration and citizenship, codified this “Jewish people” concept when it held that, “The State of Israel considers itself as the creation of the Jewish people,” and endowed every Jew with the right to permanent settlement.

The vast majority of Jews throughout the world reject the idea that they are in “exile.”

David Ben-Gurion declared in 1952 that, “The State of Israel is a part of the Middle East only in geography, which is, in the main, a static element. From the more decisive standpoint of dynamism, creation and growth, Israel is a part of world Jewry.”

The Israeli High Court in January 1972 declared: “There is no Israeli nation apart from the Jewish people residing in Israel and in the diaspora.” Clearly, if Jews outside were to be considered part of the state and were to be “ingathered,” room had to be made for them.

In her book The Fate Of The Jews, Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht notes that “…the Zionists chose to create a state by superseding the indigenous population and culture of Palestine and ingathering from all over the world descendants of Jews who had not lived there in any number for 2,000 years and who no longer shared language or culture or anything else except the identification ‘Jewish’…Zionism has always been a minority position among Jews and remains so; otherwise, there would not be so many Jews unsettling in Israel.”

In 1917, at the time of the Balfour Declaration, Jews were only 10 percent of the population of Palestine. By 1946, Jews were still only 31 percent of the population. Moshe Dayan once declared: “We came to this country that was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state here…Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages…There is not one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”

The attitude of many Zionists was expressed by Joseph Weitz when he headed the Jewish National Fund: “It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country…There is no room for compromise on this point!…We must not leave a single village, not a single tribe.”

Israel’s current prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has called repeatedly upon American Jews—and Jews in other countries—to emigrate to Israel. During the battle over the Falkland Islands, Sharon said that British and Argentinean Jews were in a war “that does not belong to them.”

The fact is that the vast majority of Jews throughout the world reject the idea that they are in “exile” and that Israel is their real “homeland.”

While Jewish organizations in the U.S. place Israel at the “center” of their agenda, for American Jews Israel remains a largely peripheral interest.

Israel a Peripheral Interest

In their study The Jew Within: Self, Family and Community in America (Indiana University Press), authors Steven M. Cohen, associate professor at the Melton School for Jewish Education at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Arnold M. Eisen, professor of religious studies at Stanford University, explored the foundations of belief and behavior among moderately affiliated American Jews.

The authors report that, “Their connection to Israel…is weak, as is the connection to the organized Jewish community in America. They take for granted the compatibility of being both Jewish and American; this is simply not an issue anymore…They want to be Jewish because of what it means to them personally—not because of obligation to the Jewish group…or the historical destiny of the Jewish group.”

When asked about their emotional attachment to Israel, just 9 percent of respondents answered “extremely attached.” Professors Cohen and Eisen stress that, “It is no longer uncommon to find lukewarm-to-cool attitudes to Israel coexisting with warm-to-passionate feelings about being Jewish…Israel is not central to who American Jews are as Jews—and so the need to visit it, or learn about it, or wrestle with its importance for the Jewish people is far from pressing.”

Indeed, if there are some Jews who view their homes in the U.S., or England or France or Argentina, as “diaspora” and “exile,” they are a small but vocal minority. In his new book, Home Lands: Portraits Of The New Jewish Diaspora, Larry Tye shows that Israel is clearly not the only place in which Jews can fully live their faith, and is not viewed by most Jews in the world as, somehow, their genuine “homeland.” Beyond this, he urges that the very term “diaspora” be eliminated.

The word “diaspora,” writes Tye, a reporter for the Boston Globe, “suggests an existence as unsettled as it is unsatisfying. It describes a homogeneous people uprooted and dispersed from their native land by unstoppable armies or irreversible social forces. It bespeaks a yearning to go back. The Irish know all about having to abandon their homeland and the loss it creates. So do Armenians and Chinese, Kurds and Kosovars. But the oldest diaspora is that of the Jews. It dates back at least 1,900 years, to when Rome toppled the Second Temple in Jerusalem and Jews were scattered across Asia, Africa and Europe. Each time they settled somewhere new, a new persecutor—the inquisitors of Spain, the Russian czars, Hitler and the Holocaust he unleashed—reminded them that they were strangers, with the perils that implied. For…millennia, Jews have vowed to make their community whole again by returning to their homeland, the Holy Land. Each year at Passover Seder, parents and children end by reciting a solemn vow, ‘Next year in Jerusalem!’”

Tye points out that while “the metaphor of a people longing to go home is compelling,” in today’s world “it is also outdated.”

Jerusalem, he says, is an idea, not an address, a metaphor for the day the world lives in spiritual and earthly peace—not a destination for today’s Jews who are, he finds, very much at home in the various nations of the world.

In this book, Tye explores Jewish communities in seven cities on four continents. He found that Jews are more likely to base their identity on their own spiritual experience, not on the religious institutions of the past or the Zionist concept of a separate Jewish nationalism.

The idea that “diaspora Jews are residing in some unnatural exile,” Tye declares, “is a distortion of history. The First and Second Temples, and the golden ages they represented, were relative brief notations on a Jewish time line that is, instead, dominated by diaspora. Abraham, father of the Jews, discovered his God outside Israel. The Torah was given to the Jewish people outside Israel. The most important Talmud, or compilation of Jewish traditions, is the one from Babylon, not the one from Jerusalem. Even during the era of the Second Temple, more Jews lived in the diaspora than in Israel. ‘Displacement,’ then, has been the normal state of affairs for Jews for nearly 2,600 years.”

Focusing on Buenos Aires, Dusseldorf, Paris, Dublin, Boston, Atlanta and the Ukrainian city of Dnepropetrovsk, Tye notes that, “The more communities I got to see close-up, the clearer it became that the Jewish world was being revitalized and reshaped in many ways that…were not reflected in all the books I was reading about the disappearing diaspora and the vanishing Jews of America.”

The place of Israel in Jewish life is far different from the myths which have been created about it, in Tye’s view: “The founding of Israel half a century ago seemed to answer what Jews of the diaspora were longing for. Now, at last, they had a place of their own to go to, a way to end their physical isolation and realize the promise of celebrating a Seder in Jerusalem. That is a potent image, and for more than 50 years its promise and seduction have held the collective Jewish subconscious in a powerful grip. But like many metaphors this one does not fit the real-life aspirations and situations of most diaspora Jews today. It is wonderful to know that there is, finally, a homeland that would welcome us. Yet most of us have finally built secure lives…and have no interest in adjusting to the strange climate and society of Israel. Indeed, the busiest traffic today between Israel and the biggest diaspora country, America, could be called aliyah in reverse, with four times as many Israelis living in America as U.S. Jews living in Israel.”

Freedom to Live Only in Israel

When the former Soviet Union finally opened its door to allow Jewish emigration, Israel was outraged that the majority of Russian Jews preferred other destinations. Israel attempted to force thousands of Jews to resettle there rather than in the U.S. by requiring them to travel through Romania to take direct flights to Jerusalem. The Reagan administration regarded this Israeli effort as violating freedom of choice in emigration. In the end, it failed.

Similarly, Germany’s decision to welcome Russian Jewish immigrants was vigorously opposed by Israel. In the early 1990s, senior Israeli officials told then-Chancellor Kohl to stop taking in Russian Jews who “belong” to Israel. Burkhard Hirsch, former vice president of the Bundestag, recalls that, “I met several times during visits to Jerusalem with high-ranking political groups who said, ‘Why do you let Jews from Russia immigrate to Germany? We need them in Israel.’ Our answer was, ‘What is our right to tell them where they have to live?’”

In one of his first statements as prime minister in March 2001, Ariel Sharon called for Israel to continue aggressively recruiting diaspora Jews and said Israel is “the only place in the world where Jews can continue to live as Jews and withstand the danger of assimilation.”

Even most Israelis, Larry Tye found, “think otherwise…they acknowledged that Jews can live rewarding Jewish lives in places like New York, Paris, and even Dusseldorf.”

Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht declared that, “Zionism has disproved itself, or rather, Israel has disproved Zionism. Zionism was supposed to mean an in-gathering of the exiles, but Jews are not settling in Israel because political Zionism is too negative for them and spiritual Zionism is beyond their reach. Besides, most Jews are content to stay where they are. Life is not always better for Jews in Israel…often it is markedly worse… Israel has always feared it would become a Levantine state, but ancient Israel was a Levantine state, and modern Israel will be accepted by its neighbors only when it accepts the fact that it must face east, not west.”

It is essential for a genuine peace agreement that Israel abandons its concept of limitless nationality. The space required for the fanciful notion of an “ingathering” of those who do not believe they are in “exile” represents a threat of expansion and explains the unwillingness to compromise over the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Those who are genuinely concerned with Israel’s security and long-term well being should help it to understand this reality.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.