Humanistic Judaism, August 1967
The world is still astounded by the smashing military victory of the Israeli people. The incredible destruction of the Arab armies in such a short period of time by vastly outnumbered troops and highly vulnerable air squadrons has altered the map of the Near East and revised its balance of power. While many observers had predicted the ability of Israel to defend itself, few had foreseen the deadly efficiency of its skill. Even the ludicrous incompetence of the Arab military leadership cannot detract from the superb efficiency of Dayan’s army.
The startling events are still too close to our experience to provide us with the perspective of accurate prediction. Until the smoke settles and the verbal hysteria abates, the future of Nasser and Hussein, Suez and the Syrian heights, will be difficult to calculate. While Russian passivity and restraint are good for peace, the humiliation of the United Nations is not. The inability of the Soviet Union and America to agree exposes U.N. powerlessness and reduces its procedures to the level of verbal aggression therapy. The justice of the Israeli victory is no compensation for the failure of world unity.
However, from the Jewish point of view, there are implications of the Israeli triumph that reveal certain Jewish realities which are often overlooked. The behavior of the Israelis and the reactions of Diaspora Jewry in the hour of crisis enable us to see ourselves as we really are. Illusions are dispelled. Several basic Jewish existents emerge from the fray.
(1) The war crisis has dramatically disclosed that the most compelling factor in Jewish life is still the state of Israel. Thousands of Jews who remain utterly unmoved by the appeals of religious discipline and theological doctrine, for whom both the synagogue and Jewish culture evoke only indifference, responded with unstinting sacrifice to Israel’s danger and with total exultation to her victory. Even the most assimilated members of the community whose cultural milieu is pure Anglosaxonism identified passionately with the peril and the triumph. It was as though the Jewish ego and Jewish self-esteem were inseparable from the survival of the state.
The cause of the phenomenon is hardly mysterious. In a world where antisemitism has historically created the status of the Jew and defined his identity, group self-consciousness is manifested in a sense of shared fate and common social destiny. The state of Israel is the first effective embodiment of Jewish resistance to the age-old hatred. Its destruction would be psychically catastrophic. For one Israeli soldier marching confidently to Suez is better therapy for the nervous bourgeoisie than a thousand interfaith banquets.
It has recently been asserted that American Jewish interest in Israel is waning and that the acculturated Western Jew is displaying declining interest in a distant Near Eastern state. The recent crisis proves this false. The non-Zionist Jew who may even find a Hebrew milieu repellent, and who would resist any personal residence in Israel derives immense ego support from its presence and success. The sociological truth is that the most dynamic institutions in any Jewish community are the Israel oriented philanthropies. The satisfactions they yield are vicarious. But they seem to cope with Jewish insecurity far better than any local indulgence.
(2) No phenomenon of modern times has been more harmful to the Jews than nationalism. For European chauvinism has usually gone hand in hand with a paranoiac fear of outsiders and racial antisemitism. No people has suffered more from the ravages of narrow patriotism than the Jew. If he was politically an internationalist and cosmopolitan, it was an act of self-defense. Ethnic tribalism was his most dangerous enemy.
But, underneath the sophisticated cover of the Western Jew, lurked the sting of national rejection and the desire for an environment of total acceptance. Jews responded to the nationalist terror by becoming nationalists themselves. Zionism was born out of the Jewish need to “normalize” Jewish existence, to find in group solidarity and territorial concentration the cure for alienation. For the victims of the holocaust the cult of urban individualism was emotionally unsatisfactory.
It is, therefore, an insensitive observation to assert that many European and Latin American countries could have absorbed the large numbers of Jewish refugees after the Second German War. Neither economic prosperity nor objective physical safety were the issues. The emotional security of “belonging” to both people and land was the indispensable requirement. Jews would gladly die for any nation which merged their ancestral memories with patriotism.
Jewish nationalism is the only vital force in Jewish life today. No other cpmmitment can evoke the discipline and fervor of the passion. There is no existing religious or political creed in any Jewish milieu that can match it. The cool courage and group discipline of the Israeli people derives from more than the individual will to live. It arises out of the deepest conviction that the survival of the Jewish state is worthy of supreme sacrifice.
The intemperate annexation of the Old City of Jerusalem (which, after all, was in Israeli hands regardless of label) and the emotional resistance to the repatriation of Arab refugees transcends considerations of domestic security. How can a Jewish state return a plot of land which is the symbol of ancient Jewish glory? And how can a Jewish state be feasible when close to one-half of its citizens will be speaking Arabic? The Poles tried to force the Ukrainians to speak Polish; and the Germans tried to force the Czechs to speak German – and to no avail. For each nationalism spawns a new one. And Arabs take a second seat to no-one in feeding on ancient glories and linguistic pride.
It is “comforting” to know how normal we Jews are. The antisemite has acetsed the Jew of being internationalist, cosmopolitan, individualist, and hopelessly urbanized – divorced from any genuine territorial roots and peasant virtue. His accusations are false. Under our sophisticated veneer we feel and think the same way most other people do. De Gaulle may be right; never underestimate the power of nationalism – French, Arab, or Jewish.
(3) The recent war revealed the new image of the Jew. The old image of the nervous and frightened bourgeois, begging for approval and pleading for acceptance is disappearing. The self-confident sabra unafraid to fight and contemptuous of public opinion is replacing it. The Jew used to be identified with obsequous withdrawal from physical battle. Today Moshe Dayan has emerged as the paragon of warrior courage. The current jokes about Arab cowardice and battle incompetence mirror the humor of European conversation half a century ago; only the Jews were the butt of the jokes in those days.
The tables have been turned. The Jew is now identified with one of the most efficient military machines of modern times, and is viewed as the contemporary expert in blitzkrieg. He is no longer photographed as a fleeing refugee, terrified by the power of his conquerors, he is now a conqueror himself, able to express compassion for refugees. The picture of Jewish helplessness which aroused pity, but never respect, has yielded to the image of power.
Vatican displeasure with the Jewish occupation of Jerusalem is derivative of this change. The Church could always deal with the Jew, sometimes even magnanimously, when he was a beggar and petitioner. But when the Church is forced to become the petitioner and to deal with the Jews as authority, figures, no matter how generous or protective the Jews may be, the situation is psychologically intolerable. The Vatican’s psychic dilemma is no different from that of the white liberal who patronize Negroes but cannot work for them.
The new Jew will have to forego the favorite weapon of the old Jew – self-pity. He cannot have his cake and eat it. He cannot plead weakness, reciting the litany of his past sufferings and simultaneously enjoy power. Auschwitz and the victory in Sinai are emotionally incompatible. People who feel strong do not need to twist the guilt-feelings of their neighbors.
(4) In ancient times the Hebrews were a hill-country people who were overwhelmed by the superior technology of an invading sea-people called the Philistines. The Israelites were the backward natives, while the Philistines represented the efficiency of “modern” weaponry. Today, the roles have been reversed. The Arabs are the backward natives, while the Jews represent the skills and competence of European technological success. The Arabs are in the Hill-country while the Jews occupy the sea coasts and the plains. And the Jews possess what the Arabs must acquire for their own entry into the scientific world of the twentieth century.
Jews may cringe at the suggestion that Israel is an outpost of Western cultural imperialism in the Near East. But that is exactly what it is; and there need be no shame in affirming the truth., The Saudi Arabian delegate to the United Nations, with all his denunciations of Western materialism and with all his applause of Bedouin simplicity, cannot disguise the poverty, disease, and fatalistic dullness that has characterized the traditional Arab way of life. The Arabs could use a little Western “materialism”. It might reduce the intensity of their frustration and soften the shrillness of their chauvinistic rantings. A world that realizes the material promises of a Nasser would no longer need Nasser.
A word of caution. Jewish arrogance is both immoral and useless. The way of life which Israel represents in the Middle East is not originally Hebrew or uniquely Jewish. It represents a sharp break with our historic Jewish past. The world of scientific technology is a creation of Western Europe and is hardly the stuff that Talmudic discipline is made of. Moreover, despite our jokes, the Arabs may ultimately acquire the necessary science efficiency in less time than it took the Eastern European Jew or the Japanese.
For humanists, the presence of Israelis as potential technical missionaries is an ideal one. And the quiet courage and competence of the Israeli people is much to be preferred to the childish bravado and whining of the Arab leadership. But intransigent nationalism, whether Jewish or Arab, (which are prevailing realities regardless of our desire), may never allow these personal skills to be properly used.