Rosner's Domain: Marc Aronson on why he loves Israel but also finds it unsettling

Updated!!! Election 2009: Rosner's Poll Trend 

Marc Aronson is the author of Unsettled, the problem of loving Israel. It is “A deeply personal investigation of an extremely complex moral, political and religious issue by an author whose love for and attachment to the state of Israel is tempered by his commitment to justice for all”. I sent him a couple of questions, and if you have more you can sent some too. We will start with 2 questions and add more later in the week.

Here we go: 

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Dear Mr. Aronson,

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 5. You seem to want to prescribe some new recommended formula of Israeliness to your readers. What will the Aronson-prescribed Israel look like?

A few things seem clear - Israel out of the West Bank, with some accommodation for the largest settlements, a Jerusalem that is in some manner internationalized, and, perhaps most fundamentally, a sense of Israeliness in which citizenship is the most crucial factor and being Jewish, or Arab, or Filipino is a flavor. I don't know how to get there, and I also realize this image runs afoul of what many Jews both in Israel and elsewhere imagine. But as a historian I can offer this example drawn from American history.

In 1790, Congress debated what it would take for an immigrant to be nationalized as an American. Some representatives wanted religion to be the test, and thus to exclude Jews and Catholics. Congress instead said any “free white person” could become American. The challenge of our history has been to remove, in both law and culture, the limiting world "white." I think any progress we have made has made us stronger. Similarly I think an Israel that more fully accepts non-Jews as complete citizens will be a stronger Israel. When I say "more fully accepts" I am not just speaking about rules and law, but attitudes and emotions. I was encouraged to read about the protest in December, when over six hundred Israelis, mainly Jews, came to Umm al Fahm to discourage the march threatened by ultra-nationalist Jews.

I realize that can sound holier-than-thou - like some prissy Sunday School teacher commending "the good child." But I would also like Israelis to know that a deep engagement with your country can mean siding with Israelis who are working for change within Israel. The analogy to me is the 60s when Martin Luther King was called unpatriotic - for example by J. Edgar Hoover. Of course he was not, he was calling America to its highest purposes. And so I hope I am encouraging Americans to ally with your own civil rights heroes - not prescribing some sort of Aronsonian vision.

6. Are you optimistic about the future of Israel? - why?

I am a congenital optimist, and that certainly applies to Israel. I believe you will be strong enough, in both armed might and mentality to deal with violent threats, including Iran. But I also think that, outside of Israel, whether it is J Street, or the new book I just read about, A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism, and Jewish Identity (Verso) many of us who love Israel also hope that a state that is heavily Jewish, and a haven for Jews, can and will become more of a homeland to all of its peoples.

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 3. You ask in the book "can a state be fully democratic and at the same time linked to any religion"? But I can't seem to find the answer. Can it? Can Israel remain a "Jewish state"?

 I am not a political scientist so I suspect I am better at posing this disturbing question than answering it. I see for example in Ilan Peleg's comparative study, Democratizing the Hegemonic State, that when a country has a minority ethnic population that reaches 20% it may do better as a bi-national state. In other words, there could be two Israels in one, a Jewish state and an Arab state (I am speaking just about 67 Israel for the moment). I know that was the argument of the Vision Statement of some Arab citizens of Israel. I must admit though, that image sets my teeth on edge.

Many of my own beliefs were formed by being a child of the mid-late 60s in America where black nationalism split the Civil Rights movement. I distinctly recall being told there was nothing a white person could do to help black people, that we were oppressors. I hated that rhetoric and always felt that there was something fundamentally wrong, inhuman, even self-defeating in that argument for separation. I understand that the language of ethnic separation may be necessary to give a people who have suffered - whether Jews or Arabs -- a sense of strength and identity. I can see how it answers a deep need. But it is antithetical to my sense, and my image, of how we all can best live.

So what does this add up to? Israel must be a homeland in which Jews, and Judaism, flourish. But I agree with Sikkuy that safety and comfort for Jews in Israel ultimately comes from creating a state in which not only civil law but a multi-ethnic sensibility protects minorities and majorities, whatever their ethnicity or faith.

To go back to my own experience - growing up in liberal New York, on the Upper West Side, among artists and writers, I understood Judaism primarily as a set of ethical values and principles. So an Israel that exhibits those values and principles, in particular in its relationship with its own Arab citizens, would be fundamentally Jewish. Isn't that what, for example, Martin Buber advocated?

4. I have the same problem with another question you ask: Why do so many people hate Israel?

I say that people hate Israel for being strong and seeming weak. Israel is both the proxy for the strong Western world which has been blamed for endless ills, and seemingly an irrational extravagance that ought to be easy to dislodge and crush. Historically, the Jewish people have inspired both of those emotions – fear that we seem too powerful, and a passion to destroy the seemingly small and vulnerable population. Thus there is a real strand of anti-Semitism in the passion directed against Israel.

That is the general framework, but in order to move past those broad strokes, I give readers a quick trot the history of modern Israel. I think that the denial of Israel's "right to exist" is related to both of those strands of hatred: the claim that it was imposed on the region by colonial powers, and that it is an expression of European and American guilt inflicted on Palestinian victims. In order to engage and explore those arguments I go quickly through the stages: the end of the Ottoman Empire, World War I, the Holocaust, 1948, etc. So my answer to the question is both to suggest these basic emotional currents and to relate them to specific historical nodes. And once you move to history - whether it is tracing the birth of modern Israel, or the United States -- it is easy to find actions that reflect both the best and worst of human nature.

I am giving American readers a way to understand the binary positions they read and hear about. In my last book, Race: A History Beyond Black and White, I explored the very short history of the idea of race, as well as humanity's miserable track record with prejudice. I talked in detail about lynching, and eugenics, and the American immigration policies that consigned Jews to death in the Holocaust. My purpose was not to justify anti-Americanism, but, rather, to put current tensions in a historical context. And that is exactly what I tried to do in Unsettled for Israel and the hatred directed against it. .

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 1. You write about events in Lebanon in the early eighties: "Israel had every right to defend itself against the PLO which was at the time a terrorist organization using Lebanon as a base to harm Israelis. But in doing so, Israel assisted in the murder of innocent people".

Would you say the same about Gaza of 2009?

Yes, Israel certainly had the right; the question is whether it adopted the best strategy. Hamas, for its own reasons, felt it needed to provoke Israel - to assert its credentials as the force that would resist, would not compromise. Faced with that, Israel had no simple, good options. As of this morning, I read Olmert saying that the Hamas leadership in Gaza may be ready to accept a real cease-fire. That is a good outcome and suggests the Israeli military option "worked." But today I also read about the pressure on Jordan and Egypt and the danger to the "two-state" plan. I realize that anti-Israel feeling can be whipped up, and ebbs and flows. And I always feel there is a basic unfairness in fury against Israel for using force, when that force is directed against a group dedicated to using force against Israel. Still, I am not certain whether the immediate gain of a more quiescent, or pragmatic, Hamas in Gaza will, or will not, ultimately give Israel greater security if it empowers and emboldens other irredentist forces.

And let's say Israel not only gets a cease-fire, but leaves some troops in southern Gaza to enforce it. Now those troops become a flash point for potential attacks, kidnappings, etc., and, also, there is a high risk of some clash/tension with Gazans that is a human rights, and thus public relations, nightmare. Would that be a clear gain - or is it a tar baby - a quagmire? And yet without some enforcement, what is a new cease-fire worth? So to me this was never a question of "right" but of strategy and tactics.

2. One of your assertions in the book is that "Americans have something to tell the Israeli young people they meet: it is possible to have a different form of nationalism, patriotism, Judaism". Why do you thing Israel needs such advice, and why do you assume they do not know all these things?

I hear the edginess in your question, and it reminds me of how I’ve felt after reading European accounts of America, which always begin with slavery, poverty, fundamentalist Christianity – as if we had never noticed these issues. But I am looking at Israel from an American point of view. Israel encourages young American Jews to come to Israel – via Birthright, for example. You want Americans to know Israel, to admire it, perhaps to join you in Israel, but certainly to “support” it. Fair enough, you have a right to be proud of what you have built in Israel. But don’t we have the responsibility to share our experiences as we learn of yours? If you solicit Americans to come to Israel, I am encouraging those young people to bring not only their Judaism (assuming they are Jewish) with them, but their experience as Americans – and thus not only to take in your country, but to share ours.

As just one example, take education. Our Supreme Court established the principle that "separate is not equal." Yes many white families sought to evade that by moving to whiter (or at least less black) neighborhoods, and there is a toxic strand of nationalism in some black communities. But, still, many Americans teenagers who come to Israel will have had some experience of integrated schooling, while very few citizens of Israel, Jewish or Arab, will have had a parallel experience. I am sure this is no revelation, but just as American kids get a better sense of Israel by visiting it, I suggest that Israelis may get a taste of a more multicultural, multiethnic life by learning of its rewards -and tensions - from Americans.

A number of Jewish teenagers who read my book and have been to Israel were grateful for what I wrote. It gave them a way to speak that was pro-Israel but also true to their own multicultural experience. In fact my whole book maps what it is to be an American Jew who loves Israel and finds it unsettling.