Jerusalem, Israel, and American Jews

The recent debacle at the UN touches upon a subject that is a source of confusion and rancor among my fellow Jewish-Americans. When, about a year ago, I first expressed opposition to Donald Trump's plan to move the American embassy to Jerusalem I received angry messages from friends demanding why, as a Jew and a Zionist, I did not see the clear logic of acknowledging Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Similar reactions have attended my commentary on Trump's revival of this plan after his having seemed to drop it earlier.

Because most Jewish-Americans assume that there is a single, consensual narrative at the heart of Israeli identity, the controversy over Jerusalem incites significant cognitive dissonance. Most are surprised to learn, for example, that though Israel claims Jerusalem as its capital, it likewise denies having annexed the territory constituting the larger eastern section of the city that was occupied after the Six Day War, and has refused to give its Arab residents citizenship unconditionally. This latter paradox reflects contradictions among Israelis themselves over the nature and mission of their shared state, conflicts that are deeply woven into the history and culture of the Zionist movement.

On the eve of the Six Day War the journalist Geulah Cohen interviewed David Ben-Gurion, the founding prime minister of Israel:

Cohen: Mr. Ben-Gurion, what will you tell your grandson today when he asks you, "Grandpa, what are the borders of my homeland?"

Ben-Gurion: Well, I will answer him, "The borders of your homeland are the borders of the State of Israel as they are now. That is all. There are no absolute borders. Had the Arabs accepted the UN resolution [of 1947], our borders would have been reduced...'Historical borders' is a concept for the coming of the Messiah."

Cohen: Would you encourage an Israeli child to write a song of longing for a greater Jerusalem?

Ben-Gurion: If he wants to write it, he should write it. I would not write one.

[Quoted in: Anita Shapira, Israel: A History. Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2012, 302-3].

Ben-Gurion's perspective here was that of a classic Labor Zionist in the mold of Theodor Herzl. For Ben-Gurion (as it had been for Herzl), Zionism was a secular enterprise, and thus Israel was a nation conceived in secular terms. When and if the messiah came s/he could worry about reconstituting the Kingdom of David, until then the Labor Party and its coalition partners would see to serving and protecting the people of the Jewish state wherever they were lucky enough to be able to hang their hats. Ben-Gurion's Israel served the purpose of allowing Jews to live free and dignified lives in a modern state free of antisemitism, a goal that could be achieved as efficiently in the profane city of Tel Aviv as in the holy city of Jerusalem.

Ben-Gurion's understanding of Israel's identity and purpose was never a universal consensus among Zionists, even before the founding of Israel in 1948- there were competing alternative narratives about the project of Jewish nationhood from the very inception of the Zionist movement. But in May of 1967 it is fair to say that Ben-Gurion's perspective was overwhelmingly hegemonic in the political discourse of the Israeli state, and in the projection of Israel's image to the larger world. The Labor Party had been the overwhelmingly dominant force in the founding and defense of the pre-1948 Yishuv (the organized community of Jewish settlers in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine) and had controlled the Israeli government continuously from its founding after the UN partition.  Within the pre-1967 boundaries of Israel the story that Ben-Gurion had to tell about why Israel existed and where it was going had much clearer and more persuasive explanatory power than any of those promulgated by more religious or more militant nationalists.

The situation changed drastically in the wake of the Six Day War. The dramatic circumstances of the war- the survival of Israel in the face of seemingly inevitable destruction by its Arab neighbors, the swiftness of Israeli victory against insuperable odds- produced a profound emotional catharsis among Israelis and electrified the imagination of observers abroad, especially American Jews. 1967 saw the birth of a newly robust Zionism in the US, as American Jews found inspiration in the Israeli display of strength and military prowess.

As they became more invested in Israel post-1967, the kind of Labor Zionist narrative purveyed by leaders like Ben-Gurion was ill-adapted to inform American Jews' engagement with Zionism. For Ben-Gurion the crucial dimension of the "Jewish State" was its coherence as a state- the fact that it contained Jews was almost incidental. Jews needed a state to protect them because they were arbitrarily oppressed for being Jews, but the fact that the state was militarily and economically defensible was what counted, not that it fulfill any cultural or spiritual goals in service of Jewish tradition. This secular tendency of Labor Zionism could be quite militant in its expression. In the second seminal Zionist text of Theodor Herzl, the novel Altneuland, for example, the great villain is a rabbi who is trying to turn Herzl's Zionist utopia into a theocracy.

For American Jews, who already had a state that they called home, this pragmatic Labor Zionist ideal lacked romance and appeal. They saw in Israel's victory an image of Jewish dynamism and assertiveness with which they desired to identify, but for them the crux of Israel as a "Jewish State" had to reside in its being Jewish. The image that most epitomized what American Jews found fascinating and awe-inspiring in Israel's story was the famous photo of the Israeli paratroopers gazing in rapt wonder at the Wailing Wall on June 7, 1967, just after they had "liberated" it from Jordanian control. The fact that Jews had been barred from access to the Wailing Wall, the holiest site in Jewish sacred geography, had been a grievance of Jews everywhere. The fact that Jews would now be able to reconnect with that part of their history and religion made sense to Jews in the US as a fundamental expression of Israel's mission and purpose. The perspective of American Jews, moreover, was inflected by the fact that they lived among millions of charismatic Christians, for whom Israel was perceived in fundamentally religious terms. Evangelicals saw the reunification of Jerusalem as a miracle that heralded Christ's return, and their excitement and admiration, conveyed through many forms of media, naturally caused their theological reading of events to color the reactions of American Jews.

These intuitive perceptions on the part of American Jews tallied coincidentally with the narratives purveyed by political groups that had been more marginal in Israel prior to 1967 but that steadily gained in influence in subsequent years and decades. Many religious Jews had rejected (and still reject) Zionism and Israel altogether, but Rabbi Abraham Kook and his son Zvi had written theological tracts in which they interpreted the founding of the secular state of Israel as an inadvertent fulfillment of scripture. For them the territorial reunification of Jerusalem had the force of prophecy, and in the years after 1967 their followers grew into the Gush Emunim movement that has established settlements throughout the Occupied Territories, in the hopes of restoring Israel to biblical parameters. Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), the founder of "Revisionist Zionism," constructed his doctrine as a form of classic blood-and-soil nationalism. For him the Jewish State was a secular entity, but rooted in the history and shared cultural legacy of the Jews as a people, thus it had to inhabit the original territory ruled by David and Solomon (found mostly in what is now the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and parts of Jordan). His followers formed the Likud Party, which first took power under Menachem Begin in 1977, and controls the Israeli government now under the leadership of Bibi Netanyahu.

Thus though many American Jews view the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital as an intuitively obvious choice for anyone who supports Israel, in reality such a move is working in explicit support of religious Zionists and Likud Partisans and their particular ideological goals. As I have written in other posts, the religious and ultranational ambitions pursued by Likud and the Gush Emunim settlers are strategically unsustainable. Thus in lending power to them American Jews are unwittingly working against the best interests of Israel, of Zionism, and of global Jewry more generally.

If American Jews are to play a constructive role in supporting Israel, it is time for Zionism here in the US to grow up and put aside childish things. As Ben-Gurion understood, the boundaries of the Jewish homeland are whatever the boundaries of Israel are right now, and if Israel is to remain both a Jewish and a democratic state it must grant sovereignty to the 4.4 million non-Jewish people living in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. American Jews are faced with a choice: they can cling to the romantic notion of Israel as a state that serves Jewish tradition (and see Zionism collapse), or work for a two-state solution so that Israel can continue to nurture and protect the Jewish people as human beings, both in Israel and abroad.