Tag Archives: aliyah

The End of Zionism?

12 Tue Dec 2017

Posted by in Israel, Middle East, Opinion and Response

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The Reform Jewish movement’s response to US president Donald Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to the holy city may only be the first incontrovertible sign that the ideology of Zionism has come to an end. To be certain, the diaspora has never in concurrence with the policies of the Israeli state but for decades now, the gap between them and the Jews in Israel has been widening. This latest manifestation from J Street, the Union for Reform Judaism, and their fellow travellers is an unpleasant yet not wholly unexpected wake-up call for the community as a whole.

An end to Zionism does not imply the politics of post-Zionism which questions the very foundations of the Jewish state. Rather, it recognises that most of the Diaspora who wish to immigrate to Israel have already done so and the different environments in which sabra and diaspora find themselves has, over decades, altered their perspectives on some of the core issues that concern the Jewish community. An end of Zionism, for our purpose, does not question the existence of Israel or even comment on the ethics of central issues of identity and existence such as the drafting of a constitution, Judea and Samaria, the Orthodox Rabbinate, counter-terrorism, or foreign relations within the region.

There are several indications that Zionism may be on its last legs, if not over. One benchmark is Jewish immigration to the Holy Land. It is no secret that the numbers of Jews making aliyah to Israel have been dwindling over the past several years. The first couple of years of the Jewish state understandably saw a high number of olim arrive from Europe and the Middle East, while another spike in numbers occurred after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The highest immigration has been from the Soviet Union and its successor states, with approximately 1.3 million immigrants over the years. Less than a tenth of that number made aliyah from the United States in the same period. To be fair, American Jews have historically been opposed to Zionism, initially seeing it as a wrinkle in their efforts to assimilate into mainstream American society. The ideology was only made palatable by Louis Brandeis when he refashioned it as a cultural project of rebuilding Palestine as a Jewish home towards which American Jews need only make financial contributions.

Jewish immigration to Israel last year fell to 27,000 new arrivals of which 70 percent were from Russia, Ukraine, and France – whose combined Jewish diaspora population is barely 10 percent of the total. These numbers are even more depressing when considered in context of yerida – Israelis leaving the country to settle abroad. Since 1948, the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics estimates that over 720,000 Israelis have emigrated; US Department of Homeland Security figures reveal that some 250,000 of those have settled in America. This means that the net flow of people has been from Israel to the United States rather than the other way around. Of course, emigration does not necessitate a rejection of Zionism and may well be in most cases for the usual reasons of employment and education. Nonetheless, the primary call of Zionism seems to have weakened on not only the diaspora but even a small number of Israelis who left in search of material prosperity. As the Jews of the Anglosphere generally indicate, prosperity cools the fervour of Zionism.

The unspoken truth about aliyah is that American emigration has been viewed as most important. After all, it is not just the most populous Jewish diaspora but also the most prosperous one as well. The American attitude of “buying into” Zionism with their wealth irked several of the early Zionist leaders and many saw the refusal to move to Israel as a deep betrayal. Yet the same attitude was common even among European Jews before World War II and the Shoah – 19th century Zionists found it difficult to convince European Jews to move to Palestine or even to financially aid the few pioneers who made the first aliyah at the end of the century.

The tension between aid and ideology can be seen even today. Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tzipi Hotovely’s statement at Princeton deriding American Jewry for not serving in the military was denounced by her own prime minister while everyone else studiously ignored the real meaning of Hotovely’s words – service in the Israeli Defence Forces – and loudly proclaimed that US Jews have proudly served in the US armed forces. Regardless of the differences between American Jews and Israelis, it was poor politics to insult the most useful if irritating of diasporas.

Besides prosperity, another factor that has spelled the demise of Zionism is the relative safety in which Jews around the world live today. Anti-semitism is indeed still present and at times lurking just below the superficial calm, even in the new Zion of the United States, but the dangers are nowhere near as severe or mainstream as a century earlier. The irony of history is that the greatest physical threat to Jews in the world today is exactly where was supposed to be their place of refuge – Israel. The security in the diaspora has led many of them to come to different conclusions about the internal and external challenges that face Israel.

One area of disagreement has been Israel’s Palestine conundrum and the plethora of issues that it contains – the international boundary, civil rights for Palestinians, counter-terrorism. As Israelis – even on the Left – are quick to point out, life is substantially different in Morningside as compared to, say, Pisgat Ze’ev, in terms of rocket attacks, shootings, stabbings, vehicular attacks, and suicide bombings. Yet more and more of the diaspora seem to see Israel as the aggressor whose occupation of Arab lands after the Six-Day War is the immediate cause of violence. The same thinking is evident in how American and Israeli Jews think about the Iranian nuclear threat.

Sabra and diaspora are also at odds over the soul of Judaism, so to speak. A large and vocal minority of the Jewish diaspora in the United States are Reform or Conservative Jews who resent the monopoly the Orthodox have acquired over important rituals of faith such as marriage, divorce, prayer, and the rare conversion. The latest crossing of swords occurred in June 2017 when the Israeli government reneged on an agreement from January 2016 that promised to set up a plaza for egalitarian prayer at the Kotel. However, the sects have long been at war over the refusal of the Rabbinate to recognise non-Orthodox marriages and conversions and in 1997, the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York even called on American Jews to stop sending money to organisations with Orthodox leanings in Israel. He even called for the dismemberment of the Rabbinate and its network of courts. The theological debate has transformed into a political one largely because of the association of the Israeli state with Orthodox Judaism, a great irony given the strong haskalah influence on Zionism and the beliefs of its early activists.

It is also perhaps not a wise idea for Israelis to emphasise Zionism and a strong Jewish identity, especially as Jews remain a minuscule minority in every country they are present. First, it is clear that these bonds are not as strong as depicted from either side, sabra or diaspora. Second, if the majority communities do begin to believe that their Jewish fellow citizens have a second loyalty, it could create unnecessary fault lines where there are none. It is psychologically understandable that constant additional proofs of loyalty are always required of suspect minorities, be they Catholics in Tudor England or Muslims in the 21st century. Professions of Zionism could well hurt assimilation and though that is what Israel wants, immigration has sharply been ruled out by a diaspora that measures almost as much as the population of Israel itself.

What Israel must also understand is that if it keeps claiming a moral authority on the diaspora, it will open itself to diaspora claims on Israeli accountability to them. Jerusalem cannot continue to speak on behalf of all Jews, even implicitly, if it is not willing to listen to half of them and treats them as a lost cause. The attachment of many Israelis to the diaspora is understandable, not only from a sense of religious community but also a cultural perspective – a full quarter of Israelis today are not sabra and these immigrants retain an emotional bonding with their country of origin. Yet even these immigrants cannot deny that the different kind of “nurture” in Israel plays an important role in shaping opinions.

The dissociation with the diaspora is not its rejection; it is a recognition of the limits of the Israeli state. As Diaspora Minister Naftali Bennett admitted after the neo-Nazi rallies in Charlottesville, Israel cannot protect all Jews at all times. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of the sovereign state to defend its own citizens; situations like Entebbe are few and far between. This does not mean that Israel cease to be a place of last refuge for the Jewish people – we do not have to go as far as Ze’ev Jabotinsky when he famously warned in his Tisha B’Av column from Warsaw to eliminate the diaspora before it eliminates you. While not actively seeking immigration, Israel can still allow a priority status for those making aliyah and provide resettlement assistance. The reality is that anti-semitism is still very much prevalent in the world and it would be irresponsible for the only Jewish state in the world to become like all other countries that restrict immigration.

To the pernickety reader: categories are not absolute – the entire diaspora is not locked in a Kulturkampf with the Jewish state. Personal politics also plays a role and there are plenty of people in Israel who support some of the diaspora’s positions while there is a sizable portion of the diaspora that does support Israeli policies. Nonetheless, the most common denominator in the divide on security and identity remains domicile.

If this is truly the beginning of the end of Zionism, there is nothing to despair. An ideology that was once useful and has served its purpose has been cast away. In its place, Israelis may feel a better-defined sense of nationalism for their state and its achievements over the past seven decades. In the parlance of contemporary political campaigning, this would be a position of “Israel First.” The diaspora are still family but more like distant cousins…from out of town.

American ‘Pioneers’ in the Holy Land

03 Sat Jun 2017

Posted by in Book Review

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Hirschhorn, Sara Yael. City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. 368 pp.

The image that comes to mind when one hears the word ‘settler’ is an angry man in a tallit with a kippah, probably toting a firearm with an ever-pregnant wife trailing him. His attire speaks for his conservatism even before he opens his mouth, telling you that is his land and that Palestinians do not belong there. Yet imagine this person was actually a liberal, probably someone who supported the Civil Rights movement back in the United States or other such causes. Here were liberals involved in an illiberal ideological project. That discordance is the theme of Sara Yael Hirschhorn’s book, City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement. The book’s provocative argument stems from dozens of interviews of settlers the author conducted as well as newspapers and state and institutional archives.

There are approximately 60,000 Jewish-American settlers, about 15 percent, by the Hirschhorn’s estimate, of the total number of Israelis who live beyond the Green Line in the disputed territories. Like most humans, they represent a complicated amalgam of beliefs and values, “combining tropes of messianic redemption with modern-day pioneering, hawkish territorialism with Jewish history, sacred promise with suburbanization, [and] ultra-nationalism with utopian idealism.” Hirschhorn examines the American settlers along three axes of Israeli ultra-nationalism: territorial maximalism, exclusionary ethnonationalism, and cultural hegemony.

City on a Hilltop looks at three settlements in particular: Yamit in the Sinai and Efrat and Tekoa in the West Bank. Immigration to these three particular “Anglo-Saxon” settlements started in the early 1970s, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. The blitzkrieg Israeli triumph affected American Jewry like nothing else. Despite the Zionist call over the past 70 years – slightly less than two centuries, actually – for the diaspora to return to the Holy Land, American Jews had never really been swept by the Zionist fervour and had not made their aliyah. Instead, Jewish American Zionism took the form of political influence and monetary assistance to the new State of Israel. The reverberations of June 1967, however, had a profound impact on not just Israel and the Middle East but also American Jewry. In fact, it tore the community apart between liberal internationalism and Jewish nationalism. Hirschhorn’s work looks at those who chose Jewish nationalism and how they evolved from typical liberal American Jews to…settlers.

An interesting dynamic the book reveals is the ambiguity with which Israel pursued settlements and attracted settlers. On the one hand, there is plenty of vocal support for settlements in the Knesset as well as Israeli society but on the other, it was a struggle for the newcomers to extract assistance from the government in terms of loans, infrastructure, employment, or security, nor did it hesitate to give up the settlements in negotiations. In fact, American settlers were frequently displeased with the Jewish Agency and the Ministry for Immigrant Absorption and exchanged scathing correspondence over the failure of the Israeli government to deliver on their promises.

Americans also ran afoul of the Gush Emunim, the Israeli settler movement, now known as the Ne’emanei Eretz Yisrael. While the Americans saw themselves as pioneers in the Holy Land, wanted clean land records before settling in, and often reached out to Palestinian communities in the vicinity, the Israelis had a more realistic understanding of the situation and were willing to squat on the land, provoke the locals, and kept to themselves. The American immigrants felt alienated by the Israeli government and the could not fit into the sabra social settings either, making the start-up settlements more appealing to them.

The new arrivals from America were usually young, single, highly educated, upwardly mobile, and traditional but not necessarily Orthodox in their religious practice; they came for personal reasons rather than financial ones, struggling with their Jewish identity in the American melting pot. As historian Matthew Frye Jacobson explained, “the question was asked: ‘Given who I am, where do I belong?’ Many even saw their role as an antidote to the increasing “Levantinization” of Israeli civilization and spoke of a “white man’s burden” incumbent upon immigrants from the United States!

The culture clash is visible even earlier, when Jewish American plans for a Shalom City were nixed by the Israeli government upon advice from a prominent Canadian Zionist. The “‘Americans know best’ theme would antagonize many Israelis,” the Canadian observed, “and that the native population would not ‘accept kindly a campaign— let alone an actual city— whose second major goal is to teach Israelis how to live and do things in the American way.'” Later on, the settlement at Efrat would prove these observations accurate.

American idealism came in for a rude awakening when the First Intifada broke out. Palestinians who had interacted with the Jewish Americans for so long suddenly turned their back on them. Worse, the settlements were rocked by violence which the settlers did not see as deserved: it was beyond them to understand that their very presence in the West Bank, despite their earlier friendliness, was an affront to Palestinians. The two intifadas, combined with the Arab-Israeli peace talks and what they perceived as callous attitude by the Israeli government towards their security and holding the land that had been promised them by G-d, served to radicalise Jewish American settlers.

A string of incidents of Jewish terrorism, from the attempted assassination of the mayor of Nablus to the massacre at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, struck the disputed territories. Hirschhorn’s interviews reveal that although most condemned the terrorist attacks, there was still some support for it. Living in a war zone for years, the original liberal ideals of many Jewish Americans frayed. A few returned to the United States but a handful crossed the rubicon into extremism. In a scene reminiscent of that West Wing episode where an Israeli soldier tells Donna Moss that his comrades are good people who were driven to do a bad thing because of the unremitting hostile situation they were in, Hirschhorn also discovered that some of her interviewees who had once marched with Martin Luther King Jr were now contemplating or condoning violence against Palestinians.

This is deeply concerning – if incessant low-intensity conflict drives even some people to extreme acts, that Israel has been at war ever since its creation does not bode well for the peace process or the mental health of its people. It is unlikely, however, that this urgency will be heeded and we risk the creation of more Baruch Goldsteins, Era Rapaports, and Yaakov Teitels.

By the very questions it asks and to whom it asks them gives City on a Hilltop the feeling of a micro-history – there are no great (wo)men driving history nor are there particularly cataclysmic events that realign the priorities and beliefs of millions. Yet history rolls on, shaped by the daily choices made by hundreds of ordinary people. Perhaps the greatest strength of this book is the way the author condemns the settler movement for the dispossession and cycle of violence it causes yet at the same time is sympathetic to the experiences of American Jews. Rather than usurpation or some other politically slanted descriptor, Hirschhorn argues that aliyah is ethnic return migration; despite viewing settlements as an illiberal project, she condemns violence of the Palestinians.

More importantly, the author makes a genuine attempt to walk a mile in the shoes of the American settlers. The result is an uncomfortable picture of rational, idealistic people who yet hold some strong views about Eretz Israel. Some of them, under different circumstances, may have easily been her friends. This brings a sensitivity to the subject that is rarely seen – normally, researchers warm up to their subjects or simply abhor them. Hirschhorn, however, demonstrates a capability to embrace the settlers but reject their project. Readers, even those who strongly oppose settlements, are left with an appreciation of how the other side thinks.

City on a Hilltop is an important contribution to not just the understanding of the settler movement but also to Israel’s relations with the United States as well as its relations with the diaspora. Given how Israel continues to speak for all Jews and how the diaspora has begun to hold the state to a higher standard – such as the recent spat over conversion and a pluralistic prayer space at the Kotel – understanding of such micro-dynamics will be in dire need.