An exchange earlier this year between Haaretz and the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua on dual loyalty:
Q: Do
you feel anger toward diaspora Jews? If your children were to decide
tomorrow not to live here, to live abroad, would you be angry at them?
YEHOSHUA:
“I’ll say one thing: If you go somewhere else, then identify with it
fully. If an Israeli leaves Israel and moves to New York, then go
ahead, now Harlem is your brother, you pay taxes to the Americans, you
live with them, you’re responsible for all the American issues. Take
the Americans and identify with them completely.”
This beautiful statement reminds me of pagan scholar Adrian Ivakhiv‘s statement on NPR not long ago that exiled peoples tend to nurse narratives of grievance and thereby fail to see the land right under their feet. He was not speaking of Israel/Palestine, but the criticism obviously applies to Jews who live here and sanctify Jewish Jerusalem, as well as to Arabs who were expelled from Jaffa and only think of Jaffa 60 years on. I don’t know what the answer is. Immediate reparations, so the wound is not cherished? Acknowledgment, apology. After all, not many Jews long for central Europe, and those who do can often go back there.
The Yehoshua interview was translated by Aryeh Amihay, a religion student at Princeton, for his blog Mostly on Israel–and passed along to me by the redoubtable Sky Redoubt.
