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Center for Faith in
Practice
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ISRAEL AT 60: A PERSONAL TESTIMONY
By
Yehezkel Landau
Faculty Associate in Interfaith Relations
Hartford Seminary
The following reflection was first offered at the Monday Chapel service at
Hartford Seminary on May 5, 2008.
“Now, therefore, if you will truly obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you shall be my treasure among all peoples; for all the land/earth is mine, and you shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests and a holy people.” Exodus 19:5-6
This past April 5 marked the 30th anniversary of my arrival in Israel. I came on an El Al plane from New York, courtesy of a rabbi who bought me a ticket so that I could work and study at his academy in Jerusalem. Almost immediately, I knew that I had “come home” in a spiritual sense and that my personal destiny was forever linked with that country and its people, made up of different national, cultural, and religious groups, each with a distinct identity that needed to be honored. Over the next months and years, I became a dual American-Israeli citizen, married my former wife Dalia, who had grown up in Israel, and together we built a home in the southwest corner of the Holy City that includes our 20-year-old son Raphael, now a soldier in the Israeli army, and four endearingly neurotic dogs. We also established, together with Palestinian Muslim and Christian partners, a peace education center in her childhood home in Ramle called Open House. This center for coexistence and reconciliation has a powerfully symbolic story behind it, which can be accessed at www.friendsofopenhouse.org.
I was the last member of my immediate family to arrive in Israel and the only one who stayed. This is because I did not go as a tourist, or as a pilgrim, but as a prospective resident and citizen. The Jewish yearnings in my soul had intensified to the point where I needed to experience life in Israel first-hand. While still in the U.S., it pained me deeply to watch the evening news and vicariously suffer the indignities of Palestinians and the existential dread of Israeli Jews. I felt that, as a faithful Jew who identified with the Zionist homecoming, as an interfaith educator, and as someone committed to seeking inclusive justice and the reconciliation of wounded, angry, embittered hearts, I might be able to contribute to the alleviation of people’s suffering.
As Israel approaches its 60th birthday on May 8, and Raphael his 20th birthday two days later, I have been reflecting on what these anniversaries and birthdays mean to me, as milestones along my own journey of faith. I want to share some of these reflections with you and invite your responses, through personal conversations or e-mail communications in the days to come.
What does it mean for me to have two passports, one American and one Israeli? When I look at them, I see that my Israeli passport has many more “security” stickers than my American one. This is one indication that Israelis face a greater degree of insecurity, or anxiety about their physical safety and the safety of their loved ones, than do most people—whether they travel on an airplane, or on a public bus, or simply walk through a crowded market.
How should one respond to this sad fact of life? Many Israelis are simply resigned to it; others deny or suppress it; while others work to change the situation so that the insecurity stemming from endless war will be supplanted by the security that comes from a just and lasting peace.
But I want to stop here and ask you a question: When an Israeli says that he or she feels deeply insecure or afraid, what is your initial reaction—in your gut, your heart, and your mind? Do you try to put yourself in that person’s place and share vicariously the existential anxiety caused by years of terror attacks, wars, and belligerent rhetoric from declared enemies (nowadays including Hamas, Hizbollah, and the Iranian president)? Or do you find yourself reacting more or less like this: well, if the Israelis would just end their occupation of Palestinian territory, or if they would change their oppressive policies and, instead, accord Palestinians the dignity and freedom they are entitled to, then they would not have to live in fear. Perhaps you go even further and think: if those Israelis would stop insisting on an exclusively Jewish state and would share the land with the Palestinians in a binational, secular, democratic state, then they would not be subject to ongoing attacks from their neighbors, and their children could grow up without the traumas that rob them of a normal life.
If you have this kind of reaction, you are not alone. Many Palestinians, and other Arabs, share these notions, and that is understandable. But there are many people outside the Middle East who hold similar views. If you are among them, then you are probably reacting from what my late friend Donald Nicholl called a conditioned “ideological reflex.” Donald was a brilliant and profoundly compassionate lay Catholic theologian, who served in the early 1980’s as rector of the Tantur Ecumenical Institute between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, where I taught part-time. He made a powerful point when he said: if we try to “explain” politically motivated violence by resorting to an ideology that apportions blame to one side or another, we are denying the horror experienced by the victims and absolving the perpetrators of any real moral responsibility for their actions. One does not have to be a principled pacifist to appreciate that, in so doing, we deny, or at least distort, the common humanity shared by the victims, the perpetrators, and ourselves.
In case you are wondering if, by making this observation, I am absolving Israelis of our share of the responsibility for this ongoing tragedy, I assure you that I acknowledge the injustices we have committed, and are still committing, against the Palestinian people in the name of our independence and security. I am deeply saddened and challenged by this state of affairs. I believe that Israeli leaders need to acknowledge the harm we have done and seek forgiveness from the Palestinians for it. (We Jews need reciprocal acknowledgement and remorse from the Arab side, but to be authentic they must be freely offered and not demanded). I am aware that many of my fellow Israelis, and many Jews outside Israel, opt for a conditioned “ideological reflex” reaction of their own when told of horrific violence committed by Israeli soldiers or other security personnel against unarmed Palestinians. They are apt to say: if only they would not hide behind civilians when they fire missiles, or if only they would renounce their radical leaders and choose the path of peace, then we could stop treating them so harshly, for we would then have a genuine partner for negotiations. Or they may go even further: if only they would publicly accept the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, then we could accept a Palestinian state next door without fearing it.
In either direction, such ideological reflexes block the way to peace, for they create insurmountable obstacles in the form of impossible tests or demands. By first projecting an image of an implacable “enemy” onto the opposing side, and then insisting that this alien “enemy” change its essential nature in order to be a trusted neighbor on our own terms, both Israelis and Palestinians fail three crucial tests that go along with being human: on the level of the mind, the test of reasonable assumptions; on the level of the imagination, the test of empathy; and on the level of the heart, the test of sympathy or emotional solidarity.
It is tragic enough when people in the midst of violent conflict are de-humanized in these ways, whether as victim or victimizer—and the truth is that both sides are, at different times, both victim and victimizer. But the tragedy is compounded when outsiders choose sides and apportion blame to one or the other of the warring parties. If that happens, they are no longer capable of serving as effective peacemakers who can build bridges of understanding and trust across the divide.
Israel as a self-proclaimed “Jewish state” ought to be seen as a country like many others, including self-understood “Muslim states” like Pakistan or Indonesia or Turkey. In those cases, too, minority rights need to be affirmed and safeguarded; but no one I know questions the legitimacy of those states or their right to define themselves as Muslim countries, even to institute shari’a law for Muslim citizens if they so choose.
Israel is not a theocracy, nor do most of its Jewish citizens want to live in one. And it is not a strictly sectarian state, though Judaism is the privileged religion. (For example, government offices are closed, and El Al planes grounded, on Shabbat and Jewish holidays). It is, in essence, a hybrid of a liberal democracy and the vehicle for self-determination of the Jewish people. This dual identity creates internal tensions, often contradictions; but Israel is not alone in this regard.
If fair-minded people can accept Pakistan as a Muslim country carved out of a Hindu-Muslim-Sikh-etc. India, also in 1947-48, why can’t they accept Israel as a predominantly Jewish state? The resistance does not necessarily stem from an anti-Jewish double standard, at least not in principle. As I see it, the basic perceptual, and corresponding conceptual, problem is that most of the Jews who became Israelis were not yet living in the land in the late 1940’s. Some of them, Holocaust survivors, were in Displaced Persons camps eager to enter British Mandatory Palestine and rehabilitate themselves, while others were citizens of countries (like the former Soviet Union) that, over decades, prevented Jews from affirming their distinct religious and cultural identity.
The Zionist movement offered these suffering Jews, as well as relatively free and flourishing Jews elsewhere, to trade minority status “in exile” for majority status “at home.” As the late Arthur Hertzberg put it, Zionism is an “affirmative action” program for Jews, with Palestinians paying a high price—sacrificing, in principle, majority status and sovereignty in part of the land; in practice, the sacrifice was even greater, given the displacement and dispossession of approximately 700,000 Palestinians in the 1948-9 war. The resultant suffering, which continues until today, causes most Muslims and many Christians to reject Jewish national rights to independence and sovereignty on moral grounds—while often condoning Palestinian nationalism and violence perpetrated in its name. This is a double standard, based largely on an inability to empathize with what the Jewish homecoming means in existential terms for most Jews, whether they live in Israel or somewhere else. The creation of a majority Jewish state in the Holy Land is much more than a demographic shift. It is a sea change in the Jewish soul and a watershed in Jewish history. With the creation of Israel, Jews are no longer subject to the vulnerability and indignities of powerlessness; even more, they can now define themselves in their own terms rather than being defined by others, too often negatively.
The essence of Zionism, or of Jewish independence in the young and still struggling State of Israel, remains this: enabling Jews to create their own country, their own multi-cultural society, and above all their own destiny, together with their Arab neighbors who have their own identities and destinies. But this shared challenge can not be realized in a state of war; a just and enduring peace is required to fulfill the promise inherent in the establishment of the Jewish state, and in the long-delayed aspiration of establishing a State of Palestine adjacent to it. For the Arab minority in Israel to enjoy full rights and benefits as citizens, and for the Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem to enjoy the rights and benefits of political independence, both peoples have to transcend their mutually negating identity conflict and the zero-sum mentality that it has engendered.
Palestinians need to outgrow their deeply rooted anti-Zionism, and this requires courageous leadership on their part. But we Jews need, also, to transcend a centuries-old victim script, with a compensatory understanding of “chosenness” that tends to isolate us from the rest of humanity. At bottom, Jewish identity in the modern world, including within Israel, must not be reduced to anti-anti-Semitism, for that is a double negative that holds out little hope for engendering a positive, creative, truly independent identity. I do not want my son or my grandchildren to have such a self-understanding. If we are to be truly free, we Jews need to tap into our deepest reservoirs of spiritual and cultural meaning (grounded ultimately in the Sinai Covenant) in order to become who we are called and meant to be. If we have survived as a people for 2000 years, without a state or an army, then our survival must be in the service of a transcendent purpose, beyond nationalism or statism or territorialism. It must include a fraternal embrace of our Muslim and Christian neighbors, siblings within the wider Abrahamic family and partners in the consecration of the Holy Land. If we are to be, in the language of Exodus 19:5-6, a “kingdom of priests and a holy people,” we first need to recognize that the whole land, indeed the entire world, belongs to God, and that by the grace of God we Jews, along with the Palestinian people, belong to the land. In addition, we need to learn how to use political power in the service of sacred, redemptive ends. Prevailing in a war of survival at the expense of our neighbors is not redemptive; it certainly does not constitute “victory” in any meaningful sense, for it plants the seeds of vengeful retaliation, in the name of “liberation,” once our neighbors are strong enough to get even and get back what they lost.
It is my Biblical understanding that the land of Israel/Palestine remains God’s primary laboratory on earth for the practice of justice and lovingkindness—in Hebrew, mishpat and tzedakah. In Jewish tradition, these are the two main attributes of God, and they are also exemplified in the personality and the human relations of our common spiritual ancestor Abraham/Ibrahim (see Genesis 18:19). Tragically, in Israel/Palestine today these sacred principles are being violated, with an immense toll in human lives and spirits, by a chronic state of spiritual pathology that breeds injustice and violence. Two opposing historical narratives reflect a shared attachment, not just to a common homeland, but also to a scarcity principle selfishly applied to territory, history, and identity.
To overcome these huge obstacles and forge a better future for both peoples, we need to find a way to justly partition the territory, with mutual sacrifice and consent, into two sovereign entities, with Jerusalem as the dual capital of both states. But the groundwork for fruitful negotiations toward this end has to first be laid, through the concerted efforts of parents, educators, mental health professionals, lawyers and judges, journalists and artists, as well as political and religious leaders—in short, through the dedicated labors of individuals and organizations comprising civil society in both Israel and Palestine. The human fabric has to be knitted together, on both sides of the border-to-be, before there can be productive give-and-take on the issues in dispute. One reason why peace plans for this entrenched conflict have so far failed is that a top-down model of social change has been the reigning paradigm. Politicians and diplomats are supposed to engineer a new arrangement yielding peaceful coexistence, and the road to that end is called a “peace process.” The violence in and around Gaza is one result of this faulty way of thinking and acting. If we could, instead, envision and carry out a bottom-up process of social transformation (encouraged by our political leaders), we might have a better chance of securing true peace, with justice and reconciliation, for the coming generations.
In this effort, Israelis and Palestinians are in urgent need of allies the world over. But those allies can not be partisan supporters of only one side; they need to embrace both traumatized peoples in their hearts and work toward the establishment of two healthy states living side-by-side in peace. Only then will dignity, freedom, and security be enjoyed by all, and all of humanity will reap the blessed fruits from the Tree of Life.
Yom Ha-Atzma’ut Sameiach, Happy Israeli Independence Day…and may the corresponding Yom al-Istiklal of Palestine be celebrated very soon.
YEHEZKEL LANDAU is
co-director of the Open House Center for Jewish-Arab Coexistence in Ramle,
Israel, and Faculty Associate in Interfaith Relations at Hartford
Seminary.
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