Israel and the Diaspora

A.B Yehoshua, one of the great and most respected Israeli writers, has been wildly outspoken against what he feels are the core differences between Israel and the Diaspora. He believes Jewish life in Israel is complete, not so life in the Diaspora.
In 2006, he was as invited to a symposium in the Washington about the future of the Jewish people, in which he stressed his opinions on this matter generating great controversy; the Americans felt “insulted” by what they felt was a criticism on the part of Yehoshua to their true Jewishness or their closeness to Israel.
They failed, in my view, to understand that as much as Yehoshua was criticizing them, he was doing the same for his Israeli counterparts who chose to move and live somewhere else, simply because Jewish identity has been “mobile”, a “garment” as he calls it, then it can be changed or exchanged for another garment in times of trouble while maintaining the “mobile” Jewish spirituality.
I completely agree with Yehoshua’s assessment; there is no way in that a Jewish life outside of Israel could be compared to life in the Diaspora, not even in the US which is most respectful of Jewish identity and values. As Yehoshua argues, for better or for worse, Jews in Israel are linked by territorial boundaries, are governed by Jews, pay taxes to Jews, serve in a Jewish army, defend Jewish settlements or expel their fellow Jews from them; the political, social and cultural life in Israel is shaped by the Jews living there, by the outcomes of their daily lives. This is a fact, we Jews in the Diaspora do not share and fail to understand; it is certainly difficult if not impossible to grasp what daily life in Israel means if not living there; one can imagine their joys and grievances, but there is no way one can truly share in their experiences, not from afar. What better example than the one Yehoshua gives; this symposium was held on the eve of Yom Hazicaron, Memorial day in Israel for fallen soldiers and victims of terrorist attacks, a grim day in Israel, where not one citizen is devoid from the terrible reality of having lost a father, a son, a relative, a friend, or an acquaintance. There was not even one mention of this fact on the symposium by other than Yehoshua. So, do we truly share the same experiences? Do we really hope for Israelis to understand or respect Jews in the Diaspora when their “contribution” to the State, even though significant, has been mostly economic, or political?
Only if we, in the Diaspora acknowledged this reality we’ll be able to build a deeper more meaningful and stronger relationship that would benefit both the Jewry in Israel and the countries of the Diaspora.


Following is the speech given by A.B Yehoshua

The meaning of homeland
A.B. Yehoshua
Just before I entered the hall for the symposium in Washington that inaugurated
two days of discussions on the future of the Jewish people in light
of the century that has passed since the founding of the host organization
(American Jewish Committee), my youngest son phoned from Israel and
told me about how moved he was by the memorial ceremony, in which he
and his wife and toddler daughter had just taken part, for the fallen of
Israel’s wars. I made a brief comment to the panel’s moderator about the
fact that the symposium was taking place on the eve of Yom Hazikaron,
Israel’s Memorial Day, and I hoped that, amid the many congratulatory
speeches at the start of the evening, this would be noted and that we might
also all be asked to honor the Israeli Memorial Day, as customary, with a
minute of silence. But this didn’t happen. And Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s
Independence Day, due to be marked the following day, received only faint
and brief mention from the speakers.
I do not cite this as a grievance, but rather as a symptomatic example
that may also explain my gloomy state of mind at that symposium, given
that the deep and natural identification that a large portion of American
Jewry once felt with Israeli life has been steadily and seriously weakening in
recent years. All of the participants in the subsequent discussions agreed
that, for some years now, a slow process of disengagement of American
Jewry from Israel has been intensifying. The reasons are numerous and
complex, and related both to the fact that the “Israeli drama” has lost many
of its attractive features for American Jews, and to the accelerated processes
of assimilation occurring to varying degrees within America itself.
Missed opportunity
Even though the title of the symposium was “The Future of the Past: What
Will Become of the Jewish People?” I may have been the only one to begin
by talking about the failure of most of the Jewish people to foresee in the
twentieth century the depth and vehemence of the hostility toward it,
which eventually led to an annihilation unprecedented in human history.
“The Jewish texts,” which many Jews today consider to be the core of their
identity, did not help us to understand better the processes of the reality
around us. The Jews were too busy with mythology and theology instead of
history, and therefore the straightforward warnings voiced by [Ze’ev]
Jabotinsky and his colleagues in the early twentieth century—“Eliminate
the Diaspora, or the Diaspora will surely eliminate you”—fell on deaf ears.
After Palestine was taken over by the British, the Balfour Declaration
of 1917 promised a national home for the Jews, and if during the 1920s,
when the country’s gates were open wide, just a half million Jews had come
(less than 5 percent of the Jewish people at that time) instead of the tiny
number that actually did come, it certainly would have been possible to
establish a Jewish state before the Holocaust on part of the Land of Israel.
This state not only would have ended the Israeli-Arab conflict at an earlier
stage and with less bloodshed—it also could have provided refuge in
the 1930s to hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews who
sensed the gathering storm, and thus would have significantly reduced
the number of victims in the Holocaust.
The Zionist solution, which was proven as the best solution to the
Jewish problem before the Holocaust—when the Communist revolution
cut off Soviet Jewry, the gates of America were closed because of the
Depression, and European democracies were destroyed by fascism and
Nazism—was tragically missed by the Jewish people. And if it weren’t for
those few (less than half of 1 percent of world Jewry) people who, a hundred
years ago, believed and actually sought the fulfillment of the need
for the sovereign normalization of the Jewish people in its ancient homeland,
the Jewish people could have found itself after the horrors of World
War II just wandering among Holocaust museums, without even that
piece of sovereign homeland that still offers some solace for the disaster
that occurred.
But such a tough and piercing reckoning, coming from such an
old-fashioned Zionist premise about our painful and tragic missed
opportunity in the past century, is not welcome at the festive opening of
a convention of a Jewish organization that, like many other Jewish organizations
at the start of the twentieth century, shunned, if not actively
opposed, the Zionist solution. Better to talk about all the Nobel Prizes
and prestige garnered by Jews in the past century, about the intellectual
achievements of Freud and Einstein, and about the tremendous contribution
that Jews have made to Western culture. Therefore, right from
the start, I felt like I was spoiling the nice, pleasant atmosphere with my
anger. And instead of joining in the celebration of the wonderful spirituality
of the Jewish identity, and of the cultural renaissance in America,
and instead of extolling the texts that we must learn and the Jewish values
that we must inculcate, I tried nevertheless to outline at least a fundamental
boundary between Jewish identity in Israel and Jewish identity
in the Diaspora.
This is no easy task nowadays. Many Israelis would disagree with
me as well. The basic concepts of Zionism have either been pulverized
beyond recognition within the normality of sovereign life, or usurped in
a distorted and grotesque way by fascist rightist ideologies or radical postmodernism.
And this is where the conflict between myself and my listeners
arose. (Not with all of my listeners, actually. Some, mainly Jews who had
some Israeli experience, came up to me after the discussion was over to
express deep solidarity with what I’d said.)
I did not talk about “the negation of the Diaspora.” The Jewish
Diaspora has existed ever since the Babylonian exile, about 2,500 years
ago, and it will continue to exist for thousands more years. I have no
doubt that in the future when outposts will be established in outer space,
there will be Jews among them who will pray “Next year in Jerusalem”
while electronically orienting their space synagogue toward Jerusalem on
the globe of the earth. The Jew has a wonderful virtual ability to express
his identity with consciousness alone. The lone Iraqi Jew in Baghdad
after the American conquest or the two Jews sitting in Afghanistan are no
more or less Jewish in their foundational identity than the chief rabbi of
Israel or the president of the Jewish community in America. The Diaspora
is the most solid fact in Jewish history; we know its cost, and we are
aware of its accomplishments and failures in terms of Jewish continuity.
In fact, the most harshly worded statements concerning its theological
negation are to be found scattered in the “core” religious texts; there is no
need for an Israeli writer to come to Washington to talk about the negation
of the Diaspora.
All of the reports suggesting that I said that there can be no Jewishness
except in Israel are utterly preposterous. No one would ever think of
saying such an absurd thing. It is Israel and not the Diaspora that could
be a passing episode in Jewish history, and this is the source of my compulsion
to reiterate the old and plain truths that apparently need to be
repeated again and again. Not just to Diaspora Jews, but to Israelis, too.
Jewish identity in Israel, which we call Israeli identity (as distinct
from Israeli citizenship, which is shared by Arab citizens who also live in
the shared homeland, though their national identity is Palestinian)—this
Jewish-Israeli identity has to contend with all the elements of life via the
binding and sovereign framework of a territorially defined state. And
therefore the extent of its reach into life is immeasurably fuller and
broader and more meaningful than the Jewishness of an American Jew,
whose important and meaningful life decisions are made within the
framework of his American nationality or citizenship. His Jewishness is
voluntary and deliberate, and he may calibrate its pitch in accordance
with his needs.
We in Israel live in a binding and inescapable relationship with one
another, just as all members of a sovereign nation live together, for better
or worse, in a binding relationship. We are governed by Jews. We pay
taxes to Jews, are judged in Jewish courts, are called up to serve in the
Jewish army, and compelled by Jews to defend settlements we didn’t want
or, alternatively, are forcibly expelled from settlements by Jews. Our
economy is determined by Jews. Our social conditions are determined by
Jews. And all the political, economic, cultural, and social decisions craft
and shape our identity, which, although it contains some primary elements,
is always in a dynamic process of changes and corrections. While
this entails pain and frustration, there is also the pleasure of the freedom
of being in your own home.
Homeland and national language and a binding framework are fundamental
components of any person’s national identity. Thus, I cannot
point to a single Israeli who is assimilated, just as there is no Frenchman
in France who is an assimilated Frenchman—even if he has never heard
of Molière and has never been to the Louvre, and prefers soccer matches
and horse races. I am sure, for example, that some of the British pilots
who risked their lives in defense of London during World War II knew
the names of the Manchester United players better than Shakespeare’s
plays, and yet no one would dare call them assimilated Britons.
Identity as a garment
What I sought to explain to my American hosts, in overly blunt and
harsh language perhaps, is that, for me, Jewish values are not located in a
fancy spice box that is only opened to release its pleasing fragrance on
Shabbat and holidays, but in the daily reality of dozens of problems
through which Jewish values are shaped and defined, for better or worse.
A religious Israeli Jew also deals with a depth and breadth of life issues
that is incomparably larger and more substantial than those with which
his religious counterpart in New York or Antwerp must contend.
Am I denouncing their incomplete identity? I am neither denouncing
nor praising. It’s just a fact that requires no legitimating from me,
just as my identity requires no legitimating from them. But since we see
ourselves as belonging to one people, and since the two identities are
interconnected, and flow into one another, the relation between them
must be well clarified.
As long as it is clear to all of us that Israeli Jewish identity deals, for
better or worse, with the full spectrum of the reality and that Diaspora
Jewry deals only with parts of it, then at least the difference between
whole and part is acknowledged. But the moment that Jews insist that
involvement in the study and interpretation of texts, or in the organized
activity of Jewish institutions, are equal to the totality of the social and
political and economic reality that we in Israel are contending with—not
only does the moral significance of the historic Jewish grappling with a
total reality lose its validity, there is also the easy and convenient option
of a constant flow from the whole to the partial.
Not by chance do more than half a million Israelis now live outside
of Israel. If Jewish identity can feed itself on the study of texts and the
mining of memories, and some occasional communal involvement—and
as long as all those capable Chabad emissaries are supplying instant Jewish
and religious services everywhere on the planet—what’s the problem,
in the global age, with taking the Israeli kids and exiling the whole family
to some foreign high-tech mecca? After all, the core of the identity is
eternal and accessible anywhere.
This is how Israeliness in the homeland will also become a garment
that is removed and replaced with another garment in times of trouble,
just as Romanian-ness and Polishness were replaced by Englishness and
American-ness, and Tunisian-ness and Moroccan-ness were replaced by
Frenchness and Canadian-ness. And in the future, in another century or
two, when China is the leading superpower, why shouldn’t some Jews
exchange their American-ness or Canadian-ness for Chinese-ness or Singaporean-
ness? Just think about it: Who would have believed in the sixteenth
century that within 200 or 300 years, the Jews would be
concentrated in an unknown land called America?
The Jews have proven their ability to live anywhere for thousands of
years without losing their identity. And as long as the goyim don’t cause
too many problems, Jewish perseverance will not falter. If Israeliness is
just a garment, and not a daily test of moral responsibility, for better or
worse, of Jewish values, then it’s no wonder that poverty is spreading,
that the social gaps are widening, and that cruelty toward an occupied
people is perpetrated easily and without pangs of conscience. Since it will
always be possible to escape from the reality to the old texts, and to interpret
them in such a way that will imbue us with greatness, hope, and
consolation.
The national minority among us of the Palestinian Israelis, who
share Israeli citizenship with us, could also make a contribution to this
identity, just as American Jews contribute to the general American identity,
and the Basques to the Spanish identity and the Romanian minority
in Hungary to the Hungarian identity, and the Corsicans to the
French, and so on. The more Israeli we are, the better the partnership we
have with them. The more we concentrate solely on Jewish spirituality
and texts, believing this to be of chief importance, the more the alienation
between us grows.
The simple truth
I keep bringing up the matter of texts, because in liberal Jewish circles
this has recently become the most important anchor of identity, as evidenced
by the return of manifestly secular people to the synagogue—not
in order to find God, but to clutch onto identity. The struggle for Soviet
Jewry is over; the Security Council will deal with Iran; there is nothing
left but to return to the familiar and the known. As someone who has
spent his whole life dealing with texts—writing, reading, and analyzing—
I am incensed by the increasingly dangerous and irresponsible disconnection
between the glorification of the texts and the mundane
matters of daily life. Instead, I propose that we continue to nurture the
concrete and living value of “the homeland,” rather than the dull and
worn-out value of Jewish spirituality.
In all the Bible, the word moledet (homeland) is mentioned just
twenty-two times, and many of these times in reference to other nations.
The first sentence spoken to the first Jew is, “Go for yourself from your
land, from your moledet, and from your father’s house to the land that I
will show you.” And throughout their long history, the Jews obeyed the
first part of this imperative with great devotion, moving from one
moledet to another with surprising ease. And the terrible end to these
wanderings needs no further mention.
If we don’t want this kind of Jewish mindset (with the help of our
Palestinian rivals for the homeland) to pull the rug out from under our
feet, we ought to reiterate the basic, old concepts to Israelis just as much
as to American Jews who, though they were offended by me, treated me
with exemplary courtesy, perhaps because deep down, they felt that I was
speaking the simple truth.

An apology to those who attended the symposium
Reverberations from the first evening of the conference have made me
realize to my distress that a not insignificant portion of the audience was
offended by the tone of my remarks, as well as by part of their content. I
wish, therefore, to express to them my deepest apologies. Everything I
said about the partial nature of Jewish life in the Diaspora as opposed to
the all-inclusive nature of Jewish life in Israel has been said by me over
the course of many years in the past, both in print and in addressing
numerous Diaspora Jews. Never before did this lead to such an angry
reaction as it did this time. Presumably, there was something in my tone
and imprecise formulation that insulted part of the audience. I say “part,”
because there were also those who came up afterward to thank me—
which does not, of course, compensate for the feelings of the others.
The debate between us is a basic one that goes to the root of things.
But we are one people, and I have never ceased to stress this cardinal
principle. Nor was there anything in what I said at the conference that
called it into question. I am appending an article [see above] that I have
written for the weekly magazine of the Hebrew newspaper Ha’aretz, in
which I deal with my opinions on the matter in greater detail. And once
again, permit me to apologize to anyone whose feelings I have hurt.

A brief epilogue
The storm that arose in the wake of my comments—scores of articles
that were published, for and against, in the Diaspora and in Israel—testifies
truthfully that my words roused (albeit without particular intention)
a raw and dormant nerve. Everyone—those who objected and those
who agreed with my comments—repeatedly asserted that: a) What I
expressed was not new. I have repeated and publicized these views for
many years in many places and have expressed them scores of times to
the Jews of the Diaspora and Israel. (As Alfred Moses, the past president
of the American Jewish Committee and Centennial chair, said, “I heard
A.B. Yehoshua say the same things thirty years ago, and so I invited him
… because I wanted a debate.”) b) There was complete agreement
among supporters and detractors of my views that it was very good that
the debate on this age-old subject was rekindled.
Why the debate reignited with such force now calls out for a sociological
and an ideological study both of the changes that have occurred
in the concept of national identity in the world and how the importance
and meaning of Zionism have lessened among the Jewish people. And
here I wish to make one observation:
Two events of world importance took place during the twentieth
century, only three years apart: A) the Holocaust, an event that has no
parallel in human history, and B) the return of the Jewish people to its
homeland after 2,000 years, also an unparalleled event in human history.
In my estimation, the Jewish people have not yet fully digested the
deep meaning of the failure of the Diaspora outlook as it was experienced
during the Holocaust. And the Jewish people, including many Israelis,
have not grasped the qualitative change that has occurred in Jewish identity
with the return to complete sovereignty. Since the Diaspora mode of
Jewish identity existed for more than 2,000 years, the qualitative change
that has occurred within this identity with the establishment of the State
of Israel has not yet been fully internalized.
Nevertheless, the fact that during the last seventy years the Jewish
community in Israel has been transformed from less than 2.5 percent of
world Jewry to almost 50 percent of that whole proves that, despite all,
the trend from partial Jewishness to complete Jewishness is natural and
true.
A.B. Yehoshua
August 2006