This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
What a political week that wasn’t political in any sense of moving toward a better world. Yes, I’m thinking about the Presidential debate – my Presidential debate hangover persists – but also on the devolving Syrian situation. Turkey now has Parliamentary backing for further military action against Syria. Now take a look at Iran. The drop in the currency rates there is alarming. More unrest in the streets with the predictable government crackdown is ahead. On the Palestinian front, their seemingly endless cycle of decline continues. Obviously, it can’t go on forever. How many times that has been said?
What is forever in historical terms? It’s a lot longer than forever in personal terms. However, the personal is more intense. Becoming homeless, going hungry, having a child injured or killed in the streets, this is the personal side of “forever” in history. Whether in Syria, Iran or Palestine, history only accounts for the overall suffering experienced in personal tragedy.
If history is the ultimate judge of injustice it is also abstracted from the suffering of the individual. History does not heal all wounds.
In the meantime, the Israel newspaper industry is experiencing downsizing, protests and strikes. Threatened are such dailies as Maariv and Haaretz. Behind the problem is what’s ravaging the print news industry everywhere. Of course, in Israel, there’s an added twist. That added twist is the infamous Sheldon Adelson, a staunch supporter of Prime Minister Netanyahu and late great Newt Gingrich.
To undercut the liberal newspapers, Adelson has made his new national daily Israel Hayom free to consumers. It has become the largest daily circulation in Israel. In the larger sense, the paper isn’t free at all. It is wholly subsidized by the billions Adelson has made in questionable, even criminal, enterprises.
The “consolidation” of the print industry is a global trend. Nonetheless, what’s happening in Israel and its relation to Jewish identity is important. Consider, for example, how the relatively free wheeling discussion of issues in the Israeli press has bolstered Jewish dissent in Israel and America. In doing so, newspapers like Haaretz, have marked Jewish identity in profound ways.
Reporting on the other side of Israeli policies has allowed Jewish dissidents to anchor their dissent with the Israeli stamp of approval. Therefore, Haaretz has functioned somewhat like B’Tselem in the Jewish political/identity arena. Haaretz may be serving broader historical function. Founded in 1918, Haaretz, like B’Tselem, has encapsulated the Israeli debates about the policies of the Jewish state over the years. In doing so, Haaretz has similarly documented the vibrancy of Jewish history and its end as well.
Haaretz is likewise emblematic of one of the most serious trends in Jewish life that has largely gone without comment. I’m thinking about Israel’s decline as a Jewish intellectual and identity battlefield. Whereas once, Israel generated debate and dissension which then could link with Diaspora debate and dissension, now Israel and its policies are mostly argued against. The decades of territorial expansion and occupation have taken their toll. The productive tension of hope and disappointment has dissipated. Many Israelis who embodied this tension have gone into geographic exile.
As the political situation has spiraled out of control, careful thought has diminished. The recent Peace Now video on the choices before Israel – either withdraw from the territories and maintain a Jewish state or experience the agony of a bi-national state that empowers Palestinians – is so out of date that its argument feels like they emerged from a time-capsule. However intense the debates of yesteryear were, today the video inspires little more than a yawn and charges of racism.
Israel has been the engine of Jewish dissent for decades. It has also been the engine of Jewish identity. Even those like Judith Butler who herald Jewish as Diaspora-centered cannot escape the fact that Israel has accentuated the Diaspora’s feeling of self-importance. Now Israel is shutting down on many fronts.
Though some like David Gordis call Jews to return to the Israel-fold, nobody in their right mind thinks that the post-1967 American love affair with Israel can be reignited. Everything Jewish has been moving in the opposite direction for decades. It will continue to do so. Yet few have contemplated what the finalization of that movement will really mean for Jews around the world.
Whatever one thinks of the different sides of Israel as a state in formation, those days are over. Even the settler spirit known for its simplicity and ruggedness is long gone. Today, settlers insist on government subsidies, the most sophisticated technology and swimming pools.
The settler retains only the violence that formed Israel as a Jewish state. There are some who believe that the original violence that created Israel as a state is the very same violence we witness today in occupied Palestine. Perhaps this is true.
The pages of Haaretz carried part of this history. In its own way, Israel Hayom will cover part of this history moving forward.
We have lived through a sea-change in Jewish life. The end isn’t pretty.
As the song goes, we weren’t promised a rose garden. Still, few thought that Jewish history would wind up indebted to Sheldon Adelson’s casinos.
This is one of the most profound posts I have seen yet on Mondoweiss. It tells me that the root of the “Middle East Conflict” is the issue of Jewish Identity. It should have been obvious from the beginning but Marc Ellis brings it out in no uncertain terms.
The violence (and other-denying Israeli feeling of justification in using lawless violence, despite what anyone else thinks) may be the single most important thread running through Zionism-in-practice from 1945 (or even earlier — think Jabotinsky) til today.
Hillel once offered words to explain to non-Jews that the core of Judaism is to NOT do unto others [presumably including non-Jews] what you’d like the others to NOT do unto you.
Oh!, happy words. But did he mean them? One wonders.
Many Jews (especially Israeli settler zealots and the Israeli militarists, AIPAC, Adelson, et al.) act as if this explanation by Hillel had been made with intention to mislead and, if so, the most natural “reading” of Hillel’s words is that by “others” he meant “other Jews”, even though he was talking to non-Jews at the time.
Or, perhaps, Hillel meant what he seemed to mean and it is other Jews who have abandoned any Jewish concern for the rights of non-Jews. (Perhaps from a wonderful feeling of omnipotence whereby they are assured — rightly or wrongly — that the others CANNOT “do unto Jews” and, as there is nothing to fear, there is also no reason to withold the hand of violence.
Sorta wish American and European “Christians” (to say nothing of the sort of Jews who lent a helping hand in the American racial revolution of the 1960s) and others would get into the act, especially as to Israeli lawlessness.
thanks marc. i was wondering if someone was going to write about the recent developments of the state of press in israel and the implications. important discussion.
If the link between Israel and Diaspora Jews is weakening, do we really have a Jewish nation that encompasses Jews worldwide, or is Jewish nationhood confined to Israelis?
I just got an email from Barnie Frank asking for donations to stop wealthy moneybags like Karl Rove and the Koch Brothers from taking us over–no mention about Sheldon Adelson, when he’s such an obvious inclusion in Barnie’s sample of rich/influential right wing tyrants in plutocratic America. Gee, I wonder why?