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.
Israel has already failed – in relation to Jewish history – there isn’t any doubt about that. What remains to be seen are the contours of that failure.
Rather than the victory of one side or the other, the failure of Israel and what that failure means for Jewish history is the essence of Jewish civil war.
On its face, fighting a civil war over failure seems ludicrous. If you’re in the trenches, however, you know that fighting over failure is the most lethal kind of warfare. Especially when it comes to a people whose self-identity asserts a destiny.
When you’re up against the wall, there isn’t much room to maneuver. Everything is on the line precisely because there’s so little left. One misstep means all the difference.
History is dodging bullets on the macro-scale. History is also taking a bullet if it has your name on it. In history, it’s either now or then. If you dodge one bullet, there’s another one on its way.
The matter is survival, living another day. So it is for the individual and for communities. Peoples, religions, nations – no one is immune.
Israel fails on the moral and ethical front. It happens everywhere. So what?
Since Israel has failed ethically, only survival remains. That happens everywhere, too. So what?
The ‘what’ are exile and the prophetic – the essence of what it means to be Jewish. Survival without ethics and morals doesn’t do it – Jewishly. That would mean living without a destiny.
Now, we want to say this is true everywhere. We want to affirm that, for example, without an ethical center the United Kingdom or China wouldn’t have a reason to exist. Instead, we believe that the failure of their ethical compass is correctable. They can chart another more ethical course.
Ultimately, the internal standard these nations are judged by is nationalistic. Despite critique from some quarters, the yardstick is the nation-state. What has each nation done for itself and, in doing this, contributed to the world?
Jews who beat their nationalistic chest are seen, correctly, as worldly wannabes.
Take Holocaust literature as an example. Though Holocaust literature implicitly makes the case for Israel, its Jewish nationalism is disguised. When nationalism is admitted it’s a peculiar – Jewish – kind of nationalism.
I think of Jewish nationalism as a weak nationalism. It harkens back thousands of years to a formative event that is revealed in a struggle for the liberation of a people from slavery. It involves a promised land that is a promised future. That future in the land has to be earned through justice and compassion. If that future is betrayed the people Israel and their governmental structure are done for. Israel doesn’t exist just to exist.
Weak nationalism is true of Jewish discourse beyond the Holocaust. The great American Jewish champions of Israel – and Israeli power – speak of Israel as a moral cause, as good against evil, not nation against nation.
One of the functions of the state of Israel is to regularize Jewish nationalism or self-correct it so that ‘Jewish’ before nationalism is the same as British or French or Chinese or Japanese before nationalism. Unfortunately for Israel as a nation-state, that substitution doesn’t work.
When Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, those close to Rabin were invited to their home to sit shiva. Yassir Arafat was invited and came. Arafat sat as a mourner without his kafiya. Benjamin Netanyahu was given the cold shoulder. Leah Rabin’s comment about Netanyahu at that time ran something like this: ‘If Netanyahu and his policies triumph in Israel, my grandchildren will not be living in Israel.’
If that’s nationalism, it’s a most peculiar kind.
Leah Rabin died as the second Palestinian Uprising brewed and as the Apartheid Wall was being considered. Since her statement there have been invasions of Lebanon and Gaza as well as the crushing of the second Palestinian Uprising. Meanwhile, the settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank have grown considerably. Is it just coincidence that Israeli’s permanent leave-taking for other parts of the world – predicted by Leah Rabin – has grown as well? [See a new poll published today: “almost 40 percent of Israelis are thinking of emigrating.”]
Israel is divided economically between the haves and have-nots. It is divided between the secular and religious. What has escaped our attention is perhaps the greatest division in Israeli society – the division between those who remain and those who leave Israel.
The ever growing Israeli Diaspora proves that Israel might be too big to fail but not too failed to leave.
What the Israeli Diaspora likewise proves about Jewish nationalism is that the failure of Israel has produced another exile, the exile Israel was supposed to end. And strange as it might seem at first, the Israelis who leave Israel behind rarely identify with the nation they live in.
Israelis who have left Israel see Diaspora Jews as assimilated to their host culture, which they decidedly are not. But then what are Jewish Israelis doing except replicating the history of the Jewish Diaspora before that assimilation?
Despite their assertiveness of a bold departure in Jewish history, Jewish Israelis live Jewish – Diaspora – destiny full-stop. In the end, they are weak nationalists.
The Jewish civil war is about Israel’s failure. Is it also about the break in Jewish history that Israel was supposed to represent and didn’t?
I am no more a friend of Israel than, say, of Fiji, and I’m not fond of Jewish self-celebration either, but what is all this defeatism (for a state I rather detest), Israel: “Rather than the victory of one side or the other, the failure of Israel and what that failure means for Jewish history is the essence of Jewish civil war.”
Where can we find “the failure of Israel”? On whose terms? Aren’t the right-wing absolutely jubilant? Don’t they control Israel, the USA, and the EU? Haven’t they achieved immunity and impunity w.r.t. international law and humanitarian law? Aren’t they on top of the world? Aren’t they trouncing the Palestinians? Do they desire anything else? So where is the failure?
OK, you want Israel to correspond to your reading of the (old) Jewish religion, with ethics and morals, with a harkening back to this sort of thing: “This is what the LORD says to Zerubbabel: It is not by force nor by strength, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of Heaven’s Armies.” But that (old) religion has been declared “caduc” in Israel; Israel was founded by secularists of Jabotinsky’s stripe. Just as Arafat declared part of the PLO’s founding documents “caduc”, the Israelis have over 64 years showed that, for them, the (old) Jewish religion is “caduc”. This not “failure”, this is triumph of the (new) Jewish religion — the religion of the strong arm which ignores the law of its neighbors.
Even if there were civil war — i.e., something more than the teensy violence of settler zealots against the IOF, which is but a small fraction of the settler zealot violence against the Palestinians and still smaller than the violence of the State of Israel against the Palestinians (since 1948) — how would this signal, and to whom and why would it signal, a “failure of Israel”?
If you are disappointed that Israel is, today, not “moral”, then when was it ever moral? Is this “failure” in your view something new, recent?
And if huge international forces should arise and force Israel to retract territorially back to its 1966 borders (or even farther: forces huge enough for the one are big enough for the other), how would this be a “failure” for Israel apart from the disappointment of its grandiose dreams of seizing territory by use and threat of war — which UN Charter and UNSC 242 deplore?
So, I hope Israel is frustrated, does have civil war — though this would be a big danger for the adjacent Palestinians, always early victims and whipping boys of Israeli violence — and is finally forced to retract territorially. Sure. My dream. But I would not see that as a “failure” of the Jews or even of Israel, any more than losing WWII was a “failure” for Germany or Japan (beyond the disappointment of it all, and a little destruction along the way, of course). But those who so blatantly and energetically and joyfully “live by the sword” cannot complain too much if there is a subsequent re-arrangement brought about by other folks using swords or other forms of power (BDS, sanctions).
On the other hand, the huge support (or lack of vocal criticism) of Israel by Jews in dispora suggests to me the most dreadful moral “failure” of the Jewish people in dispora. But this is nothing new, either.
israel a moral cause?
more like a lost cause
what with 40% of israelis thinking of emigrating
RE: “Leah Rabin’s comment about Netanyahu at that time ran something like this: ‘If Netanyahu and his policies triumph in Israel, my grandchildren will not be living in Israel.’ . . . Since her statement there have been invasions of Lebanon and Gaza as well as the crushing of the second Palestinian Uprising.” ~ Marc Ellis
SEE: “The Dogs of War: The Next Intifada”, By Uri Avnery, Counterpunch, 9/03/11
ENTIRE COMMENTARY – http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/02/the-next-intifada/
● RE: “One of the functions of the state of Israel is to
regularize Jewish nationalism or self-correct it so that ‘Jewish’ before nationalism is the same as British or French or Chinese or Japanese before nationalism. Unfortunately for Israel as a nation-state, that substitution doesn’t work.“ ~ Marc Ellis
● THE WORDS OF A FORMER ISRAELI BACK DURING ISRAEL’S ATTACK ON GAZA IN 2009 DURING “OPERATION CAST LEAD”: “The only thing that could unite people [in Israel] and temporarily brought out more kindness and a sense of cooperation was a feeling of being under collective threat, and in particular a ‘good wholesome war’” ~ Avigail Abarbanel
● SEE: “Israel’s Trauma Psychology and the Attack on Gaza”, By Avigail Abarbanel, Sunday 4th January 2009
SOURCE – http://www.avigailabarbanel.me.uk/gaza-2009-01-04.html
● AVIGAIL ABARBANEL’S SITE – http://www.avigailabarbanel.me.uk/
● RE: “One of the functions of the state of Israel is to
regularize Jewish nationalism or self-correct it so that ‘Jewish’ before nationalism is the same as British or French or Chinese or Japanese before nationalism. Unfortunately for Israel as a nation-state, that substitution doesn’t work.“ ~ Marc Ellis
● MY COMMENT: Uri Avnery refers to this to Herzl’s “white lie”.
● ZIONISM’S “WHITE LIE” ACCORDING TO URI AVNERY (VIA BERNARD AVISHAI), Feb. 2010:
SOURCE – http://bernardavishai.blogspot.com/2010_02_01_archive.html