Jewish World
There has been a spate of articles recently about how Jews in liberal democracies round the world have moved politically rightward in response to the global left’s increasing antipathy toward Israel. In a handy round-up of the trend over at FrontPage Magazine, Daniel Greenfield cites data showing that in Britain, Canada, Australia and France, a majority of Jews now vote conservative. The one glaring exception, of course, is America – which begs the question why.
Greenfield’s answer is that non-Orthodox American Jews care less about Judaism than their counterparts overseas, and therefore inevitably care less about Israel. And certainly, that’s part of the answer: A 2013 Pew poll showed that Jewish affiliation has declined markedly among American Jews, with only 68% of Jews born after 1980 considering themselves “Jews by religion,” compared to 93% of those born in 1914-27. And among the 32% that define themselves as “Jews of no religion,” a whopping 67% raise their children “not Jewish,” 79% have non-Jewish spouses, 54% say being Jewish is of little or no importance to them, and 55% feel little or no attachment to Israel.
Nevertheless, young Jews in other countries also intermarry more and are less Jewishly identified than their grandparents. So even if the decline has been steeper in America than elsewhere – an assumption for which Greenfield brings no evidence – it’s hard to see that alone as sufficient to explain this political divergence.
What’s missing from Greenfield’s answer, of course, is America itself: the anomalous fact that non-Jewish Americans are overwhelmingly pro-Israel. That certainly isn’t the case in Europe. And as an annual BBC poll shows, it isn’t even true in Canada and Australia, whose current conservative governments are staunchly pro-Israel.
Consequently, Democratic politicians are rarely as anti-Israel as their counterparts overseas, because being anti-Israel is still bad politics in America. Thus, for instance, they routinely support arms sales to Israel, whereas left-wing politicians abroad routinely oppose them. Nor does the American left’s animus against Israel spill over into blatant anti-Semitism as often as it does in, say, Europe. So for now, liberal American Jews still feel as if they can support the left without having to repudiate their Zionism or their Judaism – something that’s increasingly no longer possible overseas.
But even in America, that may not be true for long. As Sohrab Ahmari and Noah Pollak explained in detail in COMMENTARY this month, the Obama Administration and its Democratic cheerleaders have been steadily defining pro-Israel downward. During last summer’s Gaza war, for instance, the administration relentlessly criticized Israel over Palestinian civilian casualties, halted arms shipments in the middle of the fighting and urged Israel to accept a cease-fire dictated by Hamas patrons Qatar and Turkey, all while declaring itself to be unstintingly pro-Israel.
And on American college campuses, the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is rapidly disappearing. See, for instance, the case of UCLA student Rachel Beyda, who was rejected for a post on the university’s judicial board solely because she was Jewish, until a faculty adviser intervened.
Thus if American Jewish liberals don’t want to go the way of their counterparts overseas – i.e., if they want to be able to continue voting left without feeling that they are thereby sacrificing their Jewish and Zionist identity – they need to mount an urgent campaign to convince their own political camp that any good liberal should also be pro-Israel. That’s far from an impossible case to make, since it has the advantage of being true, as I explained in detail in a COMMENTARY article in March. But conservatives can’t do the job for them; only liberals can persuade their fellow liberals.
And if American Jewish liberals don’t make that case, then in another decade or two, those that still care about Judaism and Israel are liable to find themselves exactly where their British, Canadian, Australian and French counterparts are now: forced to hold their nose and vote conservative, because anything else would be a betrayal of their Jewish identity.
Originally published in Commentary on May 19, 2015
In honor of this week’s 5th Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism, I’d like to propose a new definition of the term: Anti-Semitism is when Jews, alone of all the world’s religions, are denied the right to decide for themselves what their religion’s core tenets actually are. Nobody would dream of telling Christians that, for instance, their religion really has nothing to do with Jesus. Nobody would dream of telling Muslims that their religion really has nothing to do with the Koran. Yet a growing number of people seem to feel they have a perfect right to tell Jews that their religion really has nothing to do with being part of a nation.
Thus you get people like Jannine Salman, a member of the Columbia University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, blithely telling the New York Times last week that Jews have no call to feel their religion is under attack by strident anti-Zionists, because “There is a bifurcation: Zionism is a political identity, Judaism is a religious identity, and it does a disservice to both to blur the line.” And never mind that neither the Bible nor 4,000 years of Jewish tradition recognize any such bifurcation.
Indeed, the concept of Judaism as a religious identity devoid of any national component is so foreign to the Bible that nowhere in it are Jews ever referred to as adherents of a “religion.” Rather, the most common Biblical terms for the Jews are bnei yisrael, the children of Israel, and am yisrael, the nation of Israel. The rough modern equivalents would be kin-group and kin-state, though neither captures the Biblical imperative that this particular kin-group and kin-state be committed to a particular set of laws and ideals.
That’s also why the modern Hebrew word for religion, dat, is a Persian import originally meaning “law” that is found in the Bible only in books such as Esther and Daniel, which take place when the Jews were under Persian rule. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the man who revived Hebrew as a modern language, tried hard to base his modern lexicon on ancient Hebrew roots. But there simply isn’t any ancient Hebrew term remotely equivalent to the modern conception of religion.
And that’s also why the model for conversion to Judaism, unlike in most other religions, explicitly includes embracing a nationality as well as a creed. The rabbinic Jewish commentators don’t agree on much, but they do agree that the original source for conversion is the book of Ruth, and specifically one verse in it: Ruth’s promise to Naomi that “thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.” In other words, simply adopting the Jewish God wasn’t enough. Ruth also had to adopt the Jewish nation.
Clearly, individual Jews are free to reject the national component of their identity, just as individual Christians and Muslims are free to reject various tenets of their religion. It might leave them with a very diluted religious identity (see, for instance, the 2013 Pew poll, where the number-one response to the question of what American Jews consider “essential” about being Jewish was remembering the Holocaust). But in the modern democratic West, nobody would deny their right to do so.
That position is, however, a very different matter from non-Jews telling Jews that they must reject the national component of their identity. When non-Jews start trying to dictate what Judaism does and doesn’t consist of, that’s anti-Semitism. When non-Jews insist they know better than Jews do what being Jewish entails, that’s anti-Semitism. When non-Jews demand that Jews reject the religious identity prescribed by both the Bible and a 4,000-year-old tradition, that’s anti-Semitism. And it’s about time we started calling it by its rightful name.
Originally published in Commentary on May 13, 2015
The Obama administration’s inexplicable denial that last month’s attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris could possibly be anti-Semitic overshadowed yesterday’s other interesting tidbit from the anti-Semitism front: German Jewish organizations are furious because a blue-ribbon panel set up by the German government to advise it on fighting anti-Semitism doesn’t include a single Jew. It’s hard to imagine that a panel on, say, prejudice against Muslims or blacks would exclude representatives of the targeted community. But the more serious concern is that a panel without Jews will ignore one of the main manifestations of modern anti-Semitism, as exemplified by another German decision just last week: a judicial ruling that there’s nothing anti-Semitic about torching a synagogue to protest Israeli actions in Gaza.
The case involved two German-Palestinian adults who threw Molotov cocktails at the Wuppertal synagogue in July, causing 800 euros worth of damage. The court decided the attack wasn’t anti-Semitic and therefore let them off with suspended jail sentences and community service. And why wasn’t it anti-Semitic? Because, said the court, the perpetrators were simply trying to bring “attention to the Gaza conflict” then raging between Hamas and Israel. And of course there’s nothing anti-Semitic about attacking Jews in one country to “bring attention” to acts by other Jews in another country; they’re all Jews, aren’t they? Doubtless the court would be equally understanding if Israelis torched a German church to “bring attention to” this abhorrent ruling.
Nor is the ruling an aberration; it’s quite representative of elite German thought. Last year, Prof. Monika Schwarz-Friesel of the Technical University of Berlin published a study that analyzed 10 years’ worth of hate mail sent to the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the Israeli embassy in Berlin. To her surprise, only 3 percent came from right-wing extremists, while over 60 percent came from educated members of “the social mainstream.” And these letters weren’t mere “Israel criticism”; they contained classic anti-Semitic statements like “It is possible that the murder of innocent children suits your long tradition” or “For the last 2,000 years, you’ve been stealing land and committing genocide.”
Needless to say, educated elites in other European countries aren’t much better. Last month, for instance, a BCC reporter drew fire for implying that the kosher supermarket attack in Paris was somehow justified because “Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well.” And just last week, Britain’s Sky News “apologized” for showing footage from the Gaza war above a strip saying “Auschwitz remembered” during a Holocaust Memorial Day interview with Britain’s chief rabbi; the “apology” defended the original decision as “logical” even while admitting that in retrospect, it was “unfortunate.” After all, what could be more logical than implicitly comparing a war that killed some 2,100 Palestinians (and 72 Israelis) to the deliberate extermination of six million Jews?
Indeed, this comparison is so “logical” to many educated Westerners that during the Gaza war, Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum felt the need to publish a special FAQs section on its website explaining why the war wasn’t comparable to the Holocaust, why Palestinians aren’t victims of genocide, and why Gaza isn’t a ghetto. You’d think this would be self-evident, but in a world where 35 percent of Germans say Israel treats Palestinians just like the Nazis treated Jews, and where Britons loathe Israel more than any other country except North Korea, it clearly isn’t.
In short, modern anti-Semitism can’t be fought without addressing a problem that too many members of Europe’s educated elites refuse to see: The propagators of today’s anti-Semitism come primarily from their own Israel-obsessed ranks, not from the far-right fringes. And one can’t help wondering whether Jews were left off Germany’s blue-ribbon panel precisely because they might have the temerity to point this out.
Originally published in Commentary on February 11, 2015
That depends on how you define democracy – which is why the ‘Jewish vs. democratic’ debate has become so fraught
In response to my column last month on the false choice between Israel’s Jewish and democratic characters, a reader asked a logical question: You yourself argued that Israel has no raison d’etre if it isn’t a Jewish state; being just another Western democracy isn’t enough. So why do you think “Jewish” and “democratic” deserve equal weight, instead of prioritizing Israel’s Jewish character?
Answering that requires defining “democracy,” because in recent years, two almost antithetical concepts have been sloppily – or perhaps maliciously – subsumed under this term. One of these concepts is frequently at odds with Israel’s Jewish character. But the other is as vital to the Jewish state’s continued existence as the body is to the soul.
Democracy’s original meaning, which today is sometimes called “thin” or “procedural” democracy, was a system of government in which governing requires the consent of the governed (though for practical reasons, such consent is usually granted via elected representatives). Consequently, its requirements are limited to those necessary to achieve this purpose, such as regular elections, checks and balances among different branches of government, and certain rights essential to enabling the democratic process to function, like freedom of expression or the right to due process.
Most democracies also grant rights that go beyond the bare essentials. But these additional rights acquire their validity only through the consent of the governed, granted via legislation or, more commonly, via democratically adopted constitutions. Procedural democracy doesn’t mandate the conferral of nonpolitical rights like, say, a “right to marry”; it mandates only those rights essential for democracy to function.
The newer version of democracy is sometimes called “thick” or “substantive” or “liberal” democracy. But despite that deceptive word “democracy,” this version is in many ways less a system of government than a religion.
Like any religion, it contains both positive and negative commandments that govern not only political, but also moral and social, life; the only difference is that these commandments are called “rights” instead. Thus, for instance, legalizing gay marriage is obligatory, because there’s a “right to marry,” but restricting abortion is forbidden, because a woman has a “right to control her own body.” These positions have nothing to do with the mechanisms of government and everything to do with dictating social and moral norms.
And like any religion, “substantive democracy” derives its commandments (aka “rights”) not from the decisions of the people’s elected representatives, but from a higher authority that trumps such decisions. In traditional religions, this higher authority is God, whose commandments are revealed in holy writ like the Bible or Koran. The origin of substantive democracy’s commandments is less clear: Sometimes, adherents simply assert that these are “fundamental human rights” known to and obligatory on everyone, however hotly contested they are. Other times, they cite the amorphous holy writ known as “international law,” which consists largely of pronouncements by unelected officials in UN agencies or organizations like the Red Cross, whose decisions were never approved by any elected government.
But whatever the source, disciples of substantive democracy clearly believe such a higher law exists. That’s why the High Court of Justice could rule in 2004, for instance, that people have a constitutional “right” to a “minimal dignified existence” guaranteed by welfare payments, with the court being authorized to decide whether existing welfare payments meet this standard. The fact that the only body in Israel actually authorized to enact constitutional legislation – the Knesset – had rejected proposed Basic Laws guaranteeing this and other “social rights” no fewer than 15 times was irrelevant.
The problem with treating democracy as a religion, however, is that no two religions are ever wholly compatible. One cannot, for instance, simultaneously be a practicing Jew and a practicing Muslim, because Jewish and Islamic law sometimes clash. So, too, do the commandments of Judaism and substantive democracy, and when that happens, many Jews will naturally prefer their own religion to the rival one. So if you believe that democracy can only mean “substantive democracy” – i.e., a rival religion – then prioritizing Israel’s Jewish character over its democratic one would make sense.
But procedural democracy isn’t a competing religion; it’s a system of government. And this particular system of government is essential to the Jewish state’s survival, for one simple reason: Any Jewish state, whatever else it is or isn’t, must be one where large numbers of Jews with often contradictory opinions and values – religious and secular, right-wing and left-wing, Sephardim and Ashkenazim, socialists and capitalists – can somehow live together. And no system of government is better at enabling people with wildly different opinions to coexist than democracy.
First, this is because democracy offers everyone the hope of ultimate victory – the possibility of persuading others to enact your ideas into law. In reality, achieving anything usually requires compromising. But the very existence of this hope is enough to keep most people working within the system instead of leaving in despair or turning to violence to impose their views.
Second, democracy excels at finding the kinds of messy compromises which, despite satisfying nobody, give each side enough that neither finds it intolerable. The current state of gay rights is a classic example. Liberal democrats consider gay marriage a fundamental right that the state must grant. Orthodox Jews consider homosexuality a serious religious offense that the state mustn’t endorse. The compromise is that Israel doesn’t permit gay marriage, but effectively grants gay couples the same rights as married couples. And since both sides get something (the de facto benefits of marriage for gays, no official sanctioning of religiously prohibited behavior for Orthodox Jews), both can live with it, even though neither is happy.
This brings us back to the body-and-soul analogy I began with. Judaism is Israel’s soul. As I argued last month, if Israel ever ceased to be a Jewish state, it would soon cease to exist at all. But democracy is Israel’s body – the framework that enables millions of contentious Jews to live together despite their disagreements, and without which the state would soon implode.
Like any living creature, the Jewish state needs both soul and body to survive. On its own, neither is enough.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on February 4, 2015
The proportion of Jews who value both equally has plunged, due to years of being told it’s either-or
The 2014 edition of the Israeli Democracy Index, released last week, offers both encouraging and disturbing findings. The latter include a dramatic drop over the last five years, from 48.1% to 24.5%, in the proportion of Jews who accord equal weight to Israel’s Jewish and democratic characters. Though the figure has declined steadily since 2010, last year was the first time “both equally” failed to win a plurality. In fact, it dropped to last place, behind both those who prioritize Israel’s Jewish character (38.9%) and those who prioritize its democratic character (33.5%).
In part, this is because the Israel Democracy Institute’s researchers deliberately worded the question to minimize the number of people choosing “both equally.” The question asked was, “Israel is defined as both a Jewish and a democratic state. Which part of this definition is more important to you personally?” Thus respondents weren’t given the option of “both equally”; they were instructed to choose either Jewish or democratic, and were recorded as valuing both traits equally only if they volunteered that view despite it not being listed. Had “both equally” been offered as an option, more people would certainly have chosen it.
Yet the question’s phrasing reflects a far broader problem: Like the IDI researchers, a growing swathe of Israel’s Left increasingly insists that Israel can’t be both Jewish and democratic; it has to prioritize one or the other. And by so doing, the left is forcing people to choose.
An excellent example of the current left-wing bon ton appeared in Haaretz last month. In a 5,000-word article, Hebrew University sociology professor Eva Illouz dissected what she considers the old Left’s failings, including its definition of Israeli democracy “as both particularistic, designed for Jews, and universalist, granting equal rights to all its citizens.” This might have been justified initially, when Israel served as a refuge state for Jews, Illouz wrote, but “the very essential core of democracy … consists of the inculcation and institutionalization of universalism. All democracies have universalist social covenants – that is, covenants that enable in principle equality before the law of all their citizens … and in most liberal countries of the world, that universalism has become stronger with time.”
In point of fact, Illouz is wrong; many democracies see no contradiction between particularism and universalism. For instance, as Prof. Eugene Kontorovich noted in The Washington Post last month, seven EU states, including Latvia and Slovakia, “have constitutional ‘nationhood’ provisions, which typically speak of the state as being the national home and locus of self-determination for the country’s majority ethnic group,” while seven others, including Iceland and Greece, have established religions. And as professors Alexander Yakobsen and Amnon Rubinstein noted in a 2009 study, numerous European countries have laws that, like Israel’s Law of Return, grant “privileged access to rights of residence and immigration for ethnic-cultural kin groups,” including Germany, Ireland, Finland, Greece, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Croatia.
Nevertheless, the view that Israel’s Jewish identity somehow contradicts its democratic nature has become almost obligatory among a vocal segment of Israel’s left-wing intelligentsia. And after hearing this view endlessly reiterated by journalists, academics and politicians, ordinary Israelis have increasingly come to believe, as the IDI poll shows, that they indeed have to choose.
The Left wants Israelis to prioritize “democratic” over “Jewish,” and indeed, the proportion that does so has almost doubled since 2010, from 17.0% to 33.5%. But the proportion that prioritizes Israel’s Jewish character also grew, albeit more slowly (from 32.4% to 38.9%). Thus the Left’s gains came entirely from the shrinking pool of those who value both equally.
In short, by demanding that people choose, the Left has destroyed the old consensus that viewed Israel’s Jewish and democratic values as mutually compatible and equally vital. Now, many Israelis have been convinced these values conflict, requiring one to be elevated above the other. And that creates a growing risk of all-out kulturkampf between those who favor Israel’s Jewishness and those who favor its democracy.
In such a battle, everyone would lose. But the people likely to lose most are precisely those doing their best to provoke it – the leftists who, overwhelmingly (72.1%), prioritize Israel’s democracy.
First, the demographics are against them. According to the survey, large majorities of “haredi,” “religious” and “traditional religious” respondents prioritized Israel’s Jewish character, as did a plurality of “traditional nonreligious” respondents. Only among the secular did a majority prioritize Israel’s democratic character. But thanks to higher fertility rates, the first three groups are all growing faster than the secular population – and as noted above, once people have decided to prioritize Judaism, very few switch to prioritizing democracy.
Yet even if, by some demographic miracle, the left did win, it would be a pyrrhic victory – because if Israel isn’t a Jewish state, it has no reason to exist at all. There’s no compelling argument for living in Israel, with its hostile neighbors, wars, terror attacks, mandatory conscription and high cost of living, if all you want is a Western democracy indistinguishable from any other; many Western countries still offer excellent quality of life. Israel’s unique attraction is the fact that it’s a Jewish democracy, the only place in the world where the Jewish people can determine their own fate. And it wouldn’t long survive the loss of that uniqueness.
Thus anyone who truly cares about Israeli democracy should stop demanding that people choose between the state’s Jewish and democratic characters and instead promote a return to the old consensus that both are equally important. Being both Jewish and democratic is no more oxymoronic than being Latvian and democratic or Slovak and democratic. And unlike the doomed effort to elevate democracy over Judaism, trying to persuade Israelis to return to valuing both equally has a good chance of succeeding: After all, it’s what most Israelis always preferred, until the Left convinced them it was impossible.
The IDI, as a self-proclaimed champion of “strengthening Israeli democracy,” should lead the way by offering a “both equally” option in this year’s survey instead of insisting on an either-or choice between “Jewish” and “democratic.” It might be pleasantly surprised at the results.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on Jan. 12, 2015
Yesterday, Jonathan Marks dissected the lie of the BDS movement’s alleged commitment to nonviolence–a lie underscored by the South African chapter’s launch of a “fundraising tour” starring Palestinian airline hijacker Leila Khaled. But another lie about the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement was also exploded this week: the lie that it is having an increasing impact on Israel. The truth, according to a new study released yesterday by the Knesset Research and Information Center, is exactly the opposite: Not only has BDS not dented Israel’s economy overall, but Israeli exports have surged even in places where the movement is most active, like Europe.
Overall, the study reports, Israeli exports rose by 80 percent from 2000 to 2013, with exports to Europe rising even more sharply, by 99 percent. But the bulk of this increase has taken place since 2005–i.e., in the years when BDS was most active. From 2005-2013, despite a sharp drop during the global financial crisis of 2009, annual exports to Europe averaged $15.6 billion. That’s almost double the preceding decade’s annual average of $7.8 billion.
Foreign direct investment in Israel has also risen steeply, posting an increase of 58 percent over the last four years alone–precisely the years when BDS was supposedly having its biggest impact.
Most surprisingly, exports from the West Bank and the Golan Heights, which are the primary focus of boycott efforts, rose even faster than exports overall. Consequently, they constituted 3.1 percent of total exports in 2013, up from 0.5 percent in 2000–and the overwhelming majority of that increase also stemmed from exports to Europe. A handful of industries, like Jordan Valley date farmers, have taken a hit, but the impact on Israel as a whole has been negligible.
As the report acknowledged, this is largely because “A major portion of Israeli exports are intermediate products, like electronic components, that sit inside the final products of well-known global companies.” That makes them hard to boycott: How do you boycott the insides of your computer or cellphone?
But it’s also worth noting that even in Europe, where BDS has gained most traction, the movement’s strongholds are found among academics, trade unionists, and unelected EU bureaucrats–i.e., people with no responsibility for the performance of national economies. In contrast, BDS has few champions among elected politicians in national governments, because these politicians are responsible for delivering economic growth to their constituents and view Israel’s innovative tech sector as a potential contributor to this effort.
Consequently, while BDS was making noise in the press, European governments were quietly working to deepen economic ties with Israel. A particularly notable example is the British Embassy Tech Hub, brainchild of British Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould. Founded in 2011, the Hub essentially functions as a matchmaking service between British and Israeli firms, giving the former access to Israeli high-tech and the latter access to partners who can help them grow their businesses and enter new markets. It’s been so successful that other ambassadors in Israel are now consulting Gould on how to replicate his model at their own embassies.
The bottom line is that for all the hype about BDS, its efforts to strangle Israel have been a total failure. BDS may be thriving in the media and on college campuses, but out in the real world, what’s thriving is Israel’s economy.
Originally published in Commentary
In many ways, the year that just ended was a difficult one for Israel–a war in Gaza, terror in Jerusalem, escalating international opprobrium, a slowing economy. Perhaps that explains why so little attention has been paid to the fact that last year also marked the achievement, for the first time in Israel’s history, of one of Zionism’s longtime goals: In a year where immigration to Israel hit a 10-year high, a majority of the immigrants, for the first time ever, came from the West. In other words, for the first time ever, most immigrants came to Israel not because they had no other options, but because they wanted to come.
Granted, rising anti-Semitism in Europe contributed to the immigration surge; Jews from France, where anti-Semitism has increasingly turned violent, constituted more than a quarter of the 26,500 immigrants. But there’s another factor as well, epitomized by the identical and completely unsolicited comments I independently received from citizens of two different European countries at last week’s Limmud UK conference: Europe, they said, feels dead. Israel feels alive.
And it’s worth noting that neither of the speakers came from one of the continent’s economic basket cases. They came from Britain and the Netherlands, two of Europe’s stronger economies.
Indeed, as Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky pointed out, until not long ago, even French Jews who wanted to leave Europe preferred to go to Montreal. Today, as many as 70 percent choose Israel–and the number is likely to keep growing. A year ago, the Jewish Agency ran one immigration information seminar a month in France, Sharansky said. Now, it runs two a day.
I don’t know whether Tel Aviv’s building boom really outpaces construction in European cities, or whether Israelis really smile more than Europeans–both factors my Limmud interlocutors cited as contributing to their impression of Israel’s vibrancy. But one thing they said is certainly correct: You see more children in Israel than you do in Europe. In fact, Israel is the only country in the Western world with a birthrate above replacement rate.
And in that sense, their assessment is literal truth: Europe’s aging, shrinking population condemns it to slow oblivion, whereas Israel’s relatively high birthrate (3.05 children per women) means it is constantly rejuvenating itself. The very fact that Israelis, unlike Europeans, are still bringing children into the world is a sign that they still believe Israel has a future.
And clearly, many Diaspora Jews do as well–because nobody, no matter how badly he wanted to leave Europe, would opt for Israel rather than another Western country if he didn’t consider Israel an attractive country with a bright future.
“Here you have for the first time, a clear thing,” Sharansky said. “There is a massive exodus from a community in the free world, which has all the doors open to them, and they are choosing Israel.”
It’s a Zionist dream come true. And a wonderful beginning to 2015.
Originally published in Commentary
Overseas Jews are hungry to hear it. And if we don’t tell them, who will?
Last week, I attended my first-ever Limmud conference in England, where I spent a significant chunk of time talking about why Israel is an admirable country and a force for good in the world. As regular readers will know, that’s not my standard practice; usually, I write about all the ways in which Israel still falls short of my aspirations. But my Limmud experience convinced me that talking about Israel’s good points is something all Israelis need to do far more often. There are Jews overseas – and presumably non-Jews as well – who still want to love Israel, and crave reassurance that this is a reasonable thing to do. And if Israelis don’t give it to them, who will?
Granted, there’s a reason why Israelis spend so much time dwelling on Israel’s problems: It’s one of the things that makes this country great. Israel could never have achieved what it has over the last 66 years if Israelis were content to rest on their laurels; it’s precisely because Israelis always want to make things better – even when they’re already pretty good – that Israel in fact keeps becoming better in all kinds of ways. Complaining about a problem obviously doesn’t solve it, but the fact that Israeli public discourse focuses relentlessly on identifying problems, drawing attention to them and discussing possible solutions does generate public pressure for improvement.
Nevertheless, this focus on the negative has a serious downside. I first realized this many years ago, when some friends and I were sitting around a Shabbat table indulging in the favorite Israeli pastime of griping about our country. The eldest of my friends’ children, who was perhaps 10 or 12 at the time, had heard many similar conversations. And suddenly she burst out, “Why do we have to live in such a horrible country?”
Shocked, we all rushed to assure her Israel was actually a wonderful country, and the only place we’d ever want to live. But how could she have known that, when all her life she’d heard us talk instead about Israel’s shortcomings?
And this is doubly true for overseas Jews. Unlike my friends’ child, who had ample opportunity to discover Israel’s good points for herself as she grew older, most Diaspora Jews know only what they hear. And because we take Israel’s strengths so for granted that we rarely feel a need to talk about them, what they hear from us is mostly negative.
This was driven home to me by the first question I received after one of my Limmud talks. Here, roughly, is what this conference-goer said: “I don’t really have a question; I just wanted to say thank you. All the news we hear from Israel is so depressing, and it was so encouraging to hear all the good things you told us!” And others who attended my presentations made similar comments.
That British Jews apparently aren’t getting much good news about Israel from their own leaders strikes me as a failure of the UK’s Jewish leadership. A Jewish leader’s job includes reminding community members of why they should care about the world’s only Jewish state, even when this means swimming against the tide. So especially now, when Israel is unfashionable, Diaspora Jewish leaders should try harder to seek out and share encouraging news from Israel.
Nevertheless, the primary responsibility is Israel’s. Even the most committed Diaspora Jews, those who follow news from Israel closely and visit here regularly, don’t know as much about Israel as Israelis do. And we need to find ways to share all the good things we know.
Perhaps, for instance, Israeli embassies should feature a daily “good news from Israel” section on their websites and social media accounts, so rabbis and educators would at least know where to find such information. Perhaps English-language Israeli papers and overseas Jewish papers should similarly feature a “good news” section on their websites and social media accounts. The question of “how” is really one for marketing and public relations experts, which I’m not.
What I do know, however, is that this is urgent, and that it needs to be proactive: We can’t rely on people seeking out good news on their own. Granted, my lectures weren’t the ideal test; I’m a little-known and not very dynamic speaker. Yet the fact remains that the people hungry enough for good news about Israel to risk attending my talks, simply because they did promise such news, were almost exclusively people over 50. The hundreds of younger people attending Limmud were far more likely to frequent lectures promising criticism of Israel.
And contrary to the accepted wisdom, this is not because of their liberal sensibilities; there’s plenty for liberals to love about Israel. Like the new study showing that 65% of Israeli Arabs are proud to be Israeli, and they trust the Israel Police (!) more than their own political and religious leaders. Or like most of what I discussed in my lectures, ranging from the significant narrowing of Jewish-Arab educational gaps over the last 15 years to Israel’s world leadership in water recycling.
Rather, it’s because younger people have never been given such information, and therefore don’t already love Israel enough to actively seek out more, as their parents and grandparents do. When they are told it, as an impressive experiment this summer in Massachusetts proved, their attitudes change.
For the idea that love of Israel can be inculcated via a “critical” approach is fatuous. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with loving Israel critically; Israelis themselves do so, which is precisely why they gripe about their country so much. But before you can love anything “critically,” you first have to love it.
And aside from their children, people don’t usually love anything without reason. Not their spouses, not their friends, and not Israel. To love something, one must first believe that despite the inevitable imperfections, it has attributes worthy of being loved.
There are many good reasons to love Israel, not least its constant efforts to correct its flaws. But too many overseas Jews no longer know what they are. And if we don’t tell them, who will?
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
For a Shas politico to consider teaming up with religious Zionists would have been inconceivable not long ago
The election campaign’s most interesting development to date has been the reports that former Shas chairman Eli Yishai is considering joining forces with Uri Ariel’s religious Zionist Tekuma party. This is interesting even if, as currently seems likely, it doesn’t happen – not because of how it might affect the election dynamics, but because of what it says about the way walls are crumbling in Haredi society.
True, Sephardi Haredim have always been less insular than their Ashkenazi counterparts. But even in Shas, jumping ship to join forces with religious Zionists would have meant certain ostracism not so long ago. And Yishai is no fringe figure; he was Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s handpicked choice to lead Shas for years until Aryeh Deri returned to politics, and the party leadership, last year. Thus it’s hard to imagine him even considering such a move if he didn’t think the Haredi world had changed enough that he could do so without severing ties with it.
Nor is Yishai the only prominent Shas figure to buck the Haredi consensus recently. Shlomo Amar, whom Yosef handpicked to serve as Israel’s chief Sephardi rabbi from 2003-13, successfully ran for the post of Jerusalem’s chief rabbi this summer as the candidate of the religious Zionist party Bayit Yehudi.
Clearly, thwarted personal ambition played a role in both developments: Yishai wouldn’t have considered leaving Shas had he not felt marginalized by Deri; Amar turned to Bayit Yehudi only following a feud with Shas’ powerful Yosef and Deri clans.
But the fact that both could contemplate leaving the Shas fold without fearing ostracism from Haredi society reflects the slow but deep change occurring within this society: Even if leading Haredi rabbis are still desperately pretending otherwise, ordinary Haredim increasingly understand that their community isn’t an island sufficient unto itself; it’s part of broader Israeli society, and it’s affected by what happens in that society.
Perhaps nowhere was this more evident than during the recent war in Gaza. Longtime observers of the Haredi world, both Haredi and secular, said the community’s outpouring of support for the army during the war – ranging from care packages for soldiers to “adopting” soldiers to pray for by name – was unprecedented.
Indeed, it went so far that Yated Ne’eman, the party organ of one faction of the Ashkenazi Haredi rabbinic leadership, felt compelled to run an editorial four weeks into the war urging its readers not to forget the real enemy – the Israel Defense Forces. Attempts to recruit Haredim into the IDF are “spiritual terror tunnels,” it declared, while “contact and connection between the Haredi camp and the secular is treif [non-kosher], especially at a time like this.” This reminder obviously wouldn’t have been necessary had Haredi rabbis not felt the walls were in danger of being breached.
This trend has been bolstered by the growing presence of Haredim in the workplace. Among men, the rise has been steady but modest. Among women, it’s been dramatic. According to the latest Central Bureau of Statistics data, the employment rate among Haredi women now exceeds that among Israeli women as a whole. Almost 80% of Haredi women work, an increase of nearly 30 percentage points in less than 15 years. And since the Haredi community doesn’t have enough jobs for them all, increasing numbers are working outside the Haredi community.
But Yishai’s flirtation with Ariel takes this grass-roots change up a level, into the ranks of the community’s official leadership. For Shas, like its Ashkenazi Haredi counterpart United Torah Judaism, always had two fixed principles. And the contemplated alliance with Ariel would violate both.
First, both Haredi parties shun involvement in larger political issues like, say, the peace process; they exist primarily to keep Haredi men out of the army, secular subjects out of Haredi schools and government money flowing to Haredi institutions. Thus after Yitzhak Rabin signed the 1993 Oslo Accord, for instance, Shas ventured no real opinion about the most important diplomatic question in decades; it abstained on the vote. But it did care about remaining in the coalition, with all the financial benefits that entailed, so it kept Rabin’s government from falling over the issue. Similarly, UTJ actually voted against Ariel Sharon’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza, yet in exchange for 30 million shekels for its yeshivas, it personally ensured the pullout would happen by saving Sharon’s government from falling over the issue. On its priority list, the disengagement was simply much less important than money for its institutions.
Ariel’s Tekuma, however, has a very clear diplomatic policy; it opposes the peace process and territorial concessions. No list of which Tekuma is part could acquiesce in uprooting settlements in exchange for 30 pieces of silver. Thus to even consider running together with Tekuma, Yishai would have to be comfortable adopting this policy in lieu of the traditional Haredi position of not having positions on diplomatic issues.
And in fact, he clearly would be comfortable with this; it’s been obvious for years that his personal views leaned right, despite his party’s official neutrality. That’s also true of many Shas voters, if you believe opinion polls. But until now, no leading Haredi figure has been willing to publicly deviate from the consensus that such issues aren’t Haredi business – that their job is to tend to their own institutions, and what happens to the country is other people’s problem.
Second, both Haredi parties have always viewed religious Zionists as inferior; indeed, their party organs often refuse to even dignify religious Zionist rabbis with the title “rabbi.” But even though Ariel represents the more “Haredi” wing of religious Zionism – meaning that Tekuma, like the Haredim, defers to its rabbis on all major political questions – the rabbis Tekuma takes orders from are religious Zionists. Thus for Yishai even to consider running with Tekuma means his rabbis would have to be willing to treat Ariel’s rabbis as equals.
Consequently, the fact that a Yishai-Ariel union could even be contemplated has a significance far beyond the personal; it represents another step on the road to fuller Haredi integration. And that’s a bit of election news we should all be happy about.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post
We need a law reinstating the constitutional ground rules previous Basic Laws broke, not one that breaks them again
The past few weeks have witnessed seemingly endless debate over a proposed Basic Law defining Israel as the Jewish nation-state. But this debate has focused almost exclusively on the bill’s rather anodyne content, thereby ignoring a far more serious problem: Quasi-constitutional legislation is supposed to reflect a broad societal consensus. It shouldn’t be rammed through with a razor-thin coalition majority.
This might seem like an unreasonable quibble, given that the principle at stake has already been thoroughly gutted by the nation-state bill’s opponents. After all, many of these opponents vociferously defend the constitutional status of the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, which was approved by a mere quarter of the 120-member Knesset (the vote was 32-21); the nation-state bill will certainly be approved by a far larger majority – at least 61 MKs.
Human Dignity and Liberty also violated another fundamental rule: that constitutional legislation can only be adopted by people who actually know they’re voting on a constitution. As I explained last month, most of the MKs who voted on Human Dignity and Liberty never dreamed the Supreme Court would assign it constitutional status and then use it to invalidate subsequent legislation enacted by much larger majorities; if they had, the law probably wouldn’t have passed.
Thus the moment the Supreme Court decided to treat Human Dignity and Liberty as a constitution, it threw the rules of the constitutional game out the window. And by enthusiastically supporting this decision rather than protesting the imposition of a constitution by judicial fiat, many of the same people now protesting the nation-state bill actively collaborated in trashing these constitutional ground rules. So one could reasonably ask why the bill’s proponents should care about these rules now.
Moreover, ever since Human Dignity and Liberty was enacted in 1992, the court has used it to shred the former delicate balance between Israel’s universalist democratic character and its particularistic Jewish one, giving far more weight to the former than the latter. The nation-state bill, at bottom, is nothing but an effort to restore this balance. Thus one could argue that it’s merely a correction to the previous breach of the constitutional ground rules rather than a new breach.
I’m sympathetic to both these arguments. Nevertheless, I think there’s a better solution than creating a kind of constitutional war of attrition, in which each new government exploits its narrow majority to ram through Basic Laws of its choosing in an effort to counteract those rammed through by previous governments. Such a war would be deeply detrimental to Israel’s long-term interests, for two reasons.
First, a constitution is supposed to unify a country by reflecting broad common denominators. But Basic Laws enacted by narrow majorities would have the opposite effect: They would intensify existing divisions on fundamental issues by codifying them into legislation. Since use of the coalition majority would enable the opposition’s views to be ignored, each Basic Law would end up being loathed by a particular sector of society. And seeing laws they hate elevated to constitutional status would increase each group’s alienation from both other social groups and the state as a whole. For proof, just look at how many different groups have been alienated by the court’s abuse of Human Dignity and Liberty.
Second, a welter of conflicting Basic Laws would merely increase the court’s power to effectively run the country, since it would be responsible for resolving these contradictions. There would be endless court cases in which, say, someone claimed that a given law or cabinet decision violates Human Dignity and Liberty, and the government countered by citing the nation-state law, or vice versa. In all such cases, the ultimate arbiter would be the court.
And in exchange for these evils, the nation-state bill probably wouldn’t even achieve its goal of restoring the universalist-particularistic balance, since it would ultimately be interpreted by the same Supreme Court that twisted Human Dignity and Liberty into something it was never meant to be. Does anyone seriously think the court couldn’t “creatively interpret” the nation-state law in a way that similarly distorts its intention?
Thus it would be far more productive to address the root of the problem: the subversion of the constitutional ground rules that enabled a law passed by a quarter of the Knesset to obtain constitutional status to begin with. And this can’t be done by ramming through more “constitutional” legislation via narrow majorities; that would merely further undermine proper constitutional principles.
Instead, what’s needed is a law dictating the rules for passing constitutional legislation, one that would mandate a suitably broad majority. Such a law must also include a sunset provision stating that any preexisting Basic Law not initially enacted by the requisite majority would automatically expire after a given time period unless reenacted by the proper majority.
A law of this type could generate much broader support than the nation-state bill has. For instance, it would almost certainly be backed by the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties, which oppose the nation-state bill, and perhaps even the Arab parties, which have an interest in precluding the passage of Basic Laws like the nation-state bill.
Moreover, it would be virtually impossible for anyone to malign such a law as anti-democratic. I don’t actually think the nation-state bill is anti-democratic, but the fact that it’s something not every democracy has, makes it vulnerable to being misinterpreted as such. In contrast, every democracy requires constitutional legislation to be approved by super-majorities; what could possibly be undemocratic about Israel finally doing the same?
If such a law were passed, I suspect neither Human Dignity and Freedom nor the nation-state bill would survive as Basic Laws. Rightly or wrongly, both have become controversial enough that they could obtain the requisite super-majority only as part of a grand constitutional bargain, and I don’t think Israel is ready for a grand constitutional bargain; it’s still too divided over too many issues.
But since Israel muddled along without a constitution for decades until 1992, there’s no reason to think it couldn’t do so again. And no constitution at all would be much better than a pseudo-constitution rammed through by unacceptably narrow majorities.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post