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THE INSIDE HISTORY OF THE ISRAEL
LOBBY
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Professor Yakov Rabkin offers us an
unusual book. It is not history, because it does not present
a narrative of Jewish opposition to Zionism, nor a systematic
analysis of its causes and development. It is not polemic--though
Rabkin's sympathies are clear, he presents the arguments of others
far more than his own. It has too much anecdote and too many
vignettes to count as philosophy; it is too philosophical to
count as politics or sociology.
Jewish Opposition to Zionism not only defies categorization; it
also belies its title--at least for most of us. There have been
other books, collections of essays, on Jewish opposition to Zionism.
They contain essays by such 'modern', secular Jews as Norman
Finkelstein, Uri Avnery, Norton Mezvinsky, Israel Shahak, perhaps
early works by Martin Buber or Alfred Lilienthal. Often as not
they argue the cause of the Palestinians and appeal to such standards
as international law, or the Geneva Convention, or the UN's Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.
None of this will be found
in Rabkin's work, yet his title is appropriate. Rabkin brings
us into the world of the anti-Zionist orthodox, for whom Zionism
is the antithesis of Judaism and the destroyer of everything
properly speaking Jewish. This may seem like an irrelevance today,
or at least as a topic of very limited interest. By Rabkin's
own account, the numbers of these orthodox anti-Zionists are
small, and their influence has declined steadily over the last
century. To many they are a lunatic fringe; to most they are
a force with little political future. But Rabkin teaches us about
realities we could never understand without his help. He deepens--that's
utterly accurate here--our understanding of Zionism and Judaism;
he reveals what the former has done to the latter; and in the
end his message could not be more contemporary or more relevant
to the present conflicts in the Middle East.
I had, when I was young, some
religious instruction in Judaism--in a conservative, not a reform
temple school. I grew up among Jews whose piety varied from,
well, none, to extreme. I came away with a general picture of
Judaism and Jewishness we all shared. God had promised Israel
to us. Our people had been exiled for various sins--God seemed
kind of picky about worshiping idols and such. Then we endured
a series of catastrophes and evils, from the destruction of the
temple to the medieval persecutions to the pogroms of Eastern
Europe. These were dwarfed by a horror such as no other people
had suffered--what I knew as Hitler's Final Solution and what
today get the pseudo-Biblical tag, The Holocaust. Yet the Jewish
people arose from these ashes to found Israel, a refuge, a defense
and, frankly, an instrument of vengeance against past and present
enemies. We fought and fight for justice, for others as well
as ourselves; we take pride in our strength; we stand on guard
against the greatest evils, the evils of racial hate. We are
reborn.
One could quite easily pass
from this to quite strong opposition to Israeli policies without
altering the narrative substantially. Israel's cruelties 'betrayed'
our fine ideals, 'made a mockery' out of the traditional Jewish
love of justice. Jews, who had suffered so much, should understand
the suffering of the Palestinians--not to mention that we should
also stop inflicting it. And the growing number of Jews who stand
up to protest Israeli crimes testify to the persistence and renascence
of true Jewish ideals. Against the false 'beacon of democracy'
that is Israel, its Jewish critics hold up the true light of
justice and compassion.
Rabkin not only destroys this
narrative; he shames those who subscribe to it. His attack departs
from what may seem an unpromising bit of theology. God--he reports
the orthodox account--did not give the land of Israel to any
race or 'people' in our sense of these words. He gave it to those
who obeyed him, who lived by the Torah and His commandments,
and only so long as they did so. In this sense alone did He give
it to the Jews. And God was no mere stickler for what we may
think of as the trivialities of ritual. 'His' people had sinned
deeply, and for their sins they were in exile. To undo this exile
was to compound the sin. No greater defiance of God and corruption
of Jewish religion was conceivable. The Jews would return to
Israel if and when they returned to God's ways, not before. Those
who came back under the power of the gun--no matter how religious--were
no Jews at all, but apostates and enemies of God. And this is
why Zionism, which preaches redemption without repentance, and
which trusts in armies and nation-states rather than God, is
the enemy and destroyer of Judaism, of the Jews. Israelis have
been known to revel in their pride, even their arrogance. Orthodox
Jews preach humility and see strength, not in tanks or missiles,
but in the very demanding, very difficult business of accepting
suffering and God's will.
At first glance, secular readers
may find all this unconvincing and unenlightening. Real Jews
follow God; they don't sin--this seems quaint. That the Final
Solution was a punishment for sin seems positively offensive.
And what sort of world do we live in? The sort that can be illuminated
by some strait-laced, moralistic theology from a distant past?
Yet one needn't embrace the
theology to find in it a revelation. Judaism and Jewishness,
it seems, need not be an exercise in unending self-congratulation
and competitive victimhood. It need not be a racial creed either;
the 'chosen people' are not chosen in virtue of birth or blood
or kinship. In fact they are not really 'chosen' at all--God
is not their spouse or sugardaddy but their ex: the divorce was
the fault of the Jews themselves, and remarriage is a possibility
but it will take some very serious, very costly effort. There
is a message here even for those Jews who no longer worship any
God.
'The Judaeo-Christian tradition'
turns out to be no empty phrase. It refers, at least in part,
to a morality that can survive apart from religious faith. Like
Christianity, 'true Torah Judaism' sees pride not as a virtue
but as a cardinal sin. More important, the orthodox creed insists
that Jews have not inherited some moral carte blanche from their
sufferings. They should not advertise their victimhood or promote
themselves. Instead of trumpeting 'their' achievements--as if
the accomplishments of brilliant Jews were some badge of racial
superiority--they should take responsibility for their misdeeds.
They should seek, not power, but to live peaceably with others,
not in 'their own state' (the orthodox view states and peoples
with just suspicion) but in whatever state they find themselves
to be. In other words much of what is labeled 'antisemitic' by
Zionists today--the denial of the specialness of the Jewish people
or of any sense of entitlement proceeding from their sufferings--becomes,
in the light of orthodox critiques of Zionism, something much
closer to ordinary morality.
There is much else in Rabkin's
book--priceless anecdotes, suppressed history, ruthless analytical
critique and a valuable portrait of what real religion should
look like. There are even important reminders of some very basic,
all-too-contemporary facts. One hears, for example, that orthodox
Jews in Israel are exempt from army service and subsidized in
various ways. One might suppose that this is simply an Israeli
tribute to piety--far from it. The subsidies and exemptions enjoyed
by orthodox Jews are part of a compromise that reconciles them
to cooperation with the Zionists, a movement they generally abhor:
support for their religious life and exemption from defending
Israel are the price the orthodox exact for limited cooperation
with an enterprize they reject. Rabkin asserts that most orthodox
Jews in Israel do not recognize Israel's right to exist. If this
were more widely understood, it would be much harder for secular
American Zionist Jews to condemn this position as antisemitic
and cognate with Islamic fundamentalism.
Rarely does a work on what
may seem an esoteric subject offer such urgently important insights.
I doubt anyone can read this book without coming out much the
wiser for it, and in many different ways.
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