- The world, far from becoming more willing
to acquiesce in Israel's expansion, is becoming less so. The generation
of European non-Jews for whom the Holocaust is a seminal memory is dying.
With them perishes much vicarious guilt. Younger Europeans, not to mention
the rest of the world, are more skeptical about Israel's territorial claims.
They are less susceptible to moral arguments about redress for past horrors,
which have underpinned Israeli actions for almost 60 years. We may hope
that it will never become respectable to be anti-Semitic. However, Israel
is discovering that it can no longer frighten non-Jews out of opposing
its policies merely by accusing them of anti-Semitism.
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- There is also evidence of growing disenchantment
with Israel in the Jewish Diaspora. Feelings have changed since 1948 and
the days when Jews around the world thought it a duty to support "their"
nation in the promised land right or wrong, in good times or bad. David
Goldberg, the former rabbi of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in London, has
just published a book that will rouse plenty of wrath in Israel. Entitled
The Divided Self, its theme is that in modern times the Jews of the Diaspora
have preserved the honor and heritage of the Jewish people far more convincingly
than Israel's citizens.
-
- Goldberg, whom I should acknowledge as
a friend, rejects the Zionist conceit that the only proper place for Jews
is in Israel. He discerns an unhealthy artificiality about the society
constructed beside the Mediterranean since 1948: "to assert itself,
it must be rigid and inflexible. . .
-
- Goldberg defines the virtues of Diaspora
Jews, "adapting to novel circumstances and responding to changing
times", in terms that would rouse the contempt of many Israelis. "Two
thousand years of powerlessness have honed the antennae to detect where
self-interest lies, what is on or not on ... The experience ... of learning
to live circumspectly among more numerous and powerful neighbors is a surer
guarantee of survival than the triumphalist illusions of a mere 50-odd
years of statehood."
-
- Some Israelis would say that this is
the language of the ghetto, reflecting a willingness to defer, even to
cringe; of exactly the kind their state was created to remove from the
Jewish psyche. Yet Goldberg's book reflects a declining willingness among
many Diaspora Jews to write blank checks for Israel, either literally or
figuratively.
-
- It is a painful experience for some Jews
who achieve good and even great things in their own societies to find themselves
cast as sin-eaters for the Jewish state. Most are reluctant to speak out
as frankly against Israel's West Bank policies as Goldberg has, and as
did the late and great Rabbi John Rayner, who came here from Germany with
the kindertransport. But with each generation the emotional distance between
Israel and the Diaspora is growing.
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1801398,00.html?gusrc=rss
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