Birthright Israel as an Rx to 'Israel Exhaustion'

Although life in Israel is, overall, delightfully safe and calm these days, these are sobering times for the pro-Israel community abroad. Israel-bashing is all the rage in the Arab world, in European salons and at the UN. It is also becoming an increasingly popular pastime on campuses and even among some "progressive" American Jews, who confess to "Israel exhaustion."

Smart analysts like Rabbi Daniel Gordis, author of Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End, point to structural and ideological shifts that explain why so many more young Jews throw up their hands in exhaustion rather than raising their voices in unison not just to defend Israel, but to celebrate Israel.

"The issue isn't Israel, or utopia," Gordis recently wrote in The Jerusalem Post. "It's America, and the 'I' at the core of American sensibilities." Challenging the community for "basically doing nothing" Gordis concluded: "Try to list the serious Jewish educational enterprises addressing this challenge, asking how American Jewish education can counter America's unfettered individualism, or what Israel could do to help. Can you name even one? Neither can I."

Although I have never played poker with my friend and role model Rabbi Gordis, I will see him, and raise him, on his analysis. Not only do too many North American Jewish enterprises fail to counter American individualism, careerism and materialism - too much North American Jewish life fosters individualism, careerism and materialism. We need think-tanks analyzing this problem, educational, communal and religious institutions countering the problem, and the entire community embarking on a twelve-step program to end our collective addiction to the modern paganism of selfishness, individuation, acquisitiveness, hyper-ambition and greed. Yet we must do this subtly, moderately, because North American individualism, careerism and materialism are also keys to North American Jewish liberty, creativity and vitality. To get the right balance, to find the right mix, we must blend in Jewish values, spirituality, textual learning, an appreciation of history, Zionist passion, a love of Israel, the power of community and the sheer fun of living Jewish, loving Jewish, doing Jewish. 

Read the rest of this post   |  Comments (7)

An open letter in response to J-street's

Dear Jeremy Ben-Ami,

Allow me to respond to your open letter to Ambassador Michael Oren with an open letter of my own.

I share your worry "that the connection to Israel for a large number of Jewish Americans has become strained over time." I love your statement to the Ambassador, and presumably to the entire pro-Israel community, that "what J-Street shares in common with you far outweighs that on which we disagree." As someone trying to figure out how to sing a new song of Zion for the next generation of Jews and as someone who champions "big-tent" Zionism, like there was during the movement's early days, it sounds like you're singing my song.

Alas, when I examine what you advocate and what you ignore, when I read your statements, surf your website and look at your conference program, I am troubled. For starters, I do not see the use of the word "Zionism" anywhere. I wonder if that is tactical or ideological.

I wonder if you would display on your website the following statement:

Year after year, century after century, Jews carried on their traditions, and their dream of a homeland, in the face of impossible odds…. And I deeply understood the Zionist idea - that there is always a homeland at the center of our story."

Those are the words of then-Senator Barack Obama, spoken on June 4, 2008, the day after he clinched the nomination.

Or what about this:

My starting point when I think about the Middle East is this enormous emotional attachment and sympathy for Israel, mindful of its history, mindful of the hardship and pain and suffering that the Jewish people have undergone, but also mindful of the incredible opportunity that is presented when people finally return to a land and are able to try to excavate their best traditions and their best selves."

Obama again. If President Obama is not afraid to affirm Zionist ideals, why do you seem to be?

Read the rest of this post   |  Comments (43)

Noble hopes, Nobel prizes and an ignoble world

Nobel-Prize-award week was yet another split-screen week for Israel, emphasizing the gap between Israel's noble achievements and its adversaries' ignoble aims, as well as between Barack Obama's worldwide popularity and his unpopularity in Israel. Israel must do more to ensure it is a country filled with people like Ada Yonath, who won Israel's ninth Nobel prize, and the first Chemistry Nobel for a woman since 1964. But Israel must also bridge the growing gap between Barack Obama's saintly status in Europe and the skepticism he generates in Zion.

Israelis giddily celebrated Yonath's extraordinary achievement; further proof that this little country has disproportionate impact in bettering this world, in revolutionizing science. The headline of one Jerusalem Post article noting that nine Israelis had won the prize (counting two Sveriges Riksbank Prizes in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel), read: "Closer to a Nobel Minyan." The piece echoed my (and so many others') Jewish parents' questions when we came home from school with a 97: "Where are the other three points?"

Simultaneously, headlines speculated about a third intifada; rather than collecting Nobel Prizes, Palestinians were collecting stones to hide in wheelbarrows on the Temple Mount and building up rage over imagined insults. The latest trigger was the visit of French Christian tourists whom demagogic Palestinians decided were Jewish militants. The Israeli authorities had banned Jewish groups to keep order, but that did not stop the rabble rousers, led by Sheikh Ra'ed Salah, who cries: "if Zionism isn't eliminated, there will not be peace."

Fortunately, peace reigned throughout most of Jerusalem, as tens of thousands thronged the Old City for Succot festivities. But once again, it seemed we needed a corollary to Golda Meir's cliché. Meir supposedly said: "Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us." Peace will also come when the Palestinians are more passionate about building their state and society than destroying ours.

Read the rest of this post   |  Comments (4)

Israeli 6th graders learn hope, not hate

On Monday, just before Yom Hazikaron, Israel's Remembrance Day, and shortly after I returned from the Durban Review Conference in Geneva, I was invited to talk about Durban to my son's 6th grade class in Jerusalem. He attends a Dati-Mamlachti, religious public school, Efrata, in Baka. I have spoken to elementary school classes at various Jewish day schools in Montreal over the years, so I have some sense of what kids this age know and don't know about current events, and about Israel. What shocked me - and then in many ways impressed me - (beyond their excellent, polite behavior throughout the class) was how shocked so many of the sixth graders in Jerusalem were by the depth of anti-Israel hatred on display at the Durban II conference.

Read the rest of this post   |  Comments (1)

Message at Durban: I am a Zionist and proud of it

DURBAN DIARY

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University and the author of Why I Am A Zionist: Israel Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today. He is attending the Durban Review conference as an observer.

After four days in the Durban Review conference's upside down, bad-is-good Orwellian world, my soul hurts. Here in Geneva, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is lionized, despite his genocidal threats toward Israel and the United States, despite his regime's sexism and homophobia, despite his government's suppression of dissidents, while Israel is demonized, despite its peaceful aspirations. Here, absolute dictatorships like Libya, Saudi Arabia and Syria condemn imperfect democracies like the US, Canada and Israel.

Amid this travesty, my soul hurts as a Jew, because I reject this libel that Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, is racist.

Read the rest of this post   |  Comments (28)

Remembering the Holocaust after Ahmadinejad denied it

DURBAN DIARY

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University and the author of Why I Am A Zionist: Israel Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today. He is attending the Durban Review conference as an observer.

Thanks to tremendous prep work by the Jewish community along with human rights organizations and democracies ashamed by Durban I, Durban II has been mild. Despite the undercurrent of hostility - and the occasional security threat -- the UN's move from Durban to Geneva worked. The NGO delegates' lounge has the festive schmoozy air of any conference. The streets have been relatively quiet.

Open Letter to our Diaspora Affairs Minister

Dear Minister Yuli Edelstein,

On April 5, Anshel Pfeffer welcomed you as Diaspora Affairs Minister with a bleak open letter in Ha'aretz, lamenting: "What a pity you've been given the emptiest brief of all in Netanyahu's mammoth cabinet." Pfeffer called your portfolio useless and toothless, with no budget, status, or clear mandate.

I disagree. Of course I wish you had a huge war chest and a clear mission. But there is such a vacuum of leadership in this area, and such a pressing need for visionary statesmanship, you can accomplish much as a public leader. Jews in Israel and the Diaspora are thirsting for inspiration. The Minister of Israel-Diaspora Affairs is essentially responsible for promoting, fulfilling - and at this historical juncture - reviving Zionism. You have what American President Theodore Roosevelt called a "bully pulpit" to complete this important task. Good luck with it.

Read the rest of this post   |  Comments (1)

Zionism perverted

Morris Talansky's tearful testimony about how "foolish" he felt when he realized that Ehud Olmert had exploited his "love" - yes, Talansky used those words - exposes the Israel-Diaspora relationship at its worst. It represents the Zionist dream perverted, conjuring a comic book universe where swaggering Israeli sharpies acting like superheroes manipulate the Zionist guilt, Galut (exilebased) insecurity, and Jewish idealism of Diaspora saps. If the mafia supposedly demands omerta, silence, reducing innocent citizens to cowed sheep, the Israeli political Mafiosi now lives by Olmerta - "magiya li [I deserve it] - bullying normally tough Jewish businessmen into becoming easily-conned pushovers.

Read the rest of this post   |  Comments (8)

Why I am a Zionist

Today, too many friends and foes define Israel, and Zionism, by the Arab world's hostility. Doing so misses Israel's everyday miracles, the millions who live and learn, laugh and play, in the Middle East's only functional democracy. Doing so ignores the achievements of Zionism, a gutsy, visionary movement which rescued a shattered people by reuniting a scattered people. Doing so neglects the transformative potential of Zionism, which could inspire new generations of Israeli and Diaspora Jews to find personal redemption by redeeming their old-new communal homeland.

Tragically, Zionism is embattled. Arabs have demonized Zionism as the modern bogeyman, and many have clumped Zionists, along with Americans and most Westerners, as the Great Satans. In Israel, trendy post-Zionists denigrate the state which showers them with privilege, while in the Diaspora a few Jewish anti-Zionists loudly curry favor with the Jewish state's enemies. Jews should reaffirm their faith in Zionism; the world should appreciate its many accomplishments. Zionists must not allow their enemies to define and slander the movement.

Read the rest of this post   |  Comments (18)