I admire Michael Chabon so much–he wrote the line, "My homeland is in my hat," in the Yiddish Policemen’s Union –that when I read his op-ed about the Gaza flotilla raid in the New York Times I tried to do a mind-meld and believe with him in the need for a Jewish state. The Passover dinners he talks about in the piece are mine, and his beloved “seichel,” Yiddish for shrewdness, is my mother and grandmother’s highest value (I have none). I walked up Lexington Avenue thinking of ways to believe in Partition, to save the Jewish state–some way to repartition the place so that you might actually preserve Jewish sovereignty and avert the political/moral crisis that is coming. Because if you know Jewish life, and Chabon is right in the middle of it, you know with a kind of helplessness that a great number of really smart Jews love the Jewish state.
Chabon’s theme is that the raid was “blockheaded,” and though he pities the nine killed, his devout sympathy is for the Jews. The essay is all about how Jews, notwithstanding our tradition of exceptionalism, turn out to be as stupid as everyone else. I don’t think he believes this. I don’t think I believe it. (Certainly we are more entitled than other people. How else could a novelist spend a whole essay talking about our history of persecution and say nothing, not a word, about the collective punishment of 1.5 million Gazans.)
Chabon says that the first reaction of all Jews to the news of Israel’s actions was, How blockheaded! I didn’t feel that way, the Jews on the boat didn’t feel that way. But Chabon doesn’t mean all Jews, he means Zionists. And he has a serious Zionist point to make here: because of the Jewish sense of chosenness we are held to a higher standard, but if we gave up our exceptionalist airs, we could be judged like everybody else:
Let us not, henceforward, judge Israel or seek to have it judged for its intelligence, for its prowess, for its righteousness or for its moral authority, by any standard other than the pathetic, debased and rickety one that we apply, so inconsistently and self-servingly, to ourselves and to everybody else.
They are singling us out.
I certainly single Israel out. Because it’s an American extension, because its answer to its neighbors is the root of a dangerous ideology of permanent war with the Arab world, because it was set up on my behalf, and because it is making a nationalist claim about history that I have bet against with every important choice I have made in my life.
The Jewish state won’t be saved by Chabon’s thinking. It will require a more serious effort at humility: it will require an earnest effort to hear the Palestinian story and understand the central (novelistic/Leon Urislike) truth of the flotilla event, that 600 internationals, motivated by the political savagery of the Gaza siege, made such a large personal sacrifice to get on those boats, spending millions of dollars. Chabon’s essay is a proof of what Dan Luban said on Tablet about liberal Zionists, they are dithering and self-involved. They glorify that over-expansion of global charity that was the world’s answer to Jewish refugees–Partition, in 1947–and ignore the fact that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been refugees for 62 years, their children’s futures routinely blighted, many of them living in Gaza.
That’s not blockheaded, it’s blockhearted.
