The State of the Jews

A wonderful discovery, Dr. Emmanuel Navon of Tel Aviv University and his blog For the Sake of Zion.

He expresses beautifully the consensus feeling among most Israelis. Shlomo Sand may be sexy in a certain foreign milieu, but he is so radically disconnected from the Israeli discourse and Israeli identity that no one even bothers to challenge him here. The Jewishness of the Israeli state is so obvious, and ethnic Jewish identification so universal that Sand is little more than a circus curiosity in this country. Only abroad, among those profoundly ignorant and exceedingly loud about Israel, can he find his groupies.

Navon’s latest captures the hypocrisy of the likes of Tony Judt and Sand, and should be read by, well, Judt and Sand. Unfortunately, their academic credentials don’t seem to drive them to self-critical reflection.

One wonders what happens when Navon and Sand pass each other in the hallways of Tel Aviv University.

Anyway, here’s Navon:

The understandable frustration with the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has led some people to suggest that, for the conflict to abate, one of the two protagonists must give up. But what if both sides prove relentless forever? A Freudian answer to that question has recently been devised by (you guessed it) Jews: explain to the Jews (but not to the Palestinians, Heaven forbid), that they don’t actually exist, and they will stop fighting for their “imagined self.”

It is logically undisputable that there would be no Israeli-Palestinian conflict if there were no Israelis or no Palestinians (or both); that there would be no anti-Semitism if Jews didn’t exist (though even that is debatable); and that there would be no car accidents if cars hadn’t been invented….

This is the underlying argument that Shlomo Sand is promoting in his book The Invention of the Jewish People. A historian of modern French and European history at Tel-Aviv University, Sand is no expert in the Ancient Middle East and in Jewish history. His book has been dismissed and ridiculed by scholars of Jewish history as a cheap and embarrassing piece of falsifications and propaganda. Even Tony Judt (also an expert on modern European history, and also an anti-Zionist Jew), had to admit that Sand’s contribution to the knowledge of Jewish history “is at best redundant” (”Israel must unpick its ethnic myth,” Financial Times, 7 December 2009). Judt does not dispute that Sand’s book is academically sloppy, but he argues that this sloppiness is irrelevant (if not forgivable): What counts, according to Judt, is the point that Sand is trying to make.

For Judt, “the perverse insistence upon identifying a universal Jewishness with one small piece of territory … is the single most important factor accounting for the failure to solve the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio.” In other words, one of the central tenets of Judaism is “perverse” and is “the single most important” reason for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So Jews must abandon one of their strongest beliefs –a belief that gave them hope and helped them survive throughout two millennia of exile. On the other hand, the fact that Islam holds that a land that was once ruled by Muslims must be “liberated” from “infidels” is not a problem. Nor is the fact that the Palestinians insist on invading Israel with millions of descendants (or alleged descendants) of the 1948 refugees, or that they deny the very existence of the Jerusalem Temple. The problem is not Muslim theology or Palestinian myths. The problem is Jewish faith.

Just wondering if you noticed: The New York Times politely calls Prof. Shlomo Sand a liar – not for his theories on the origins of today’s Jews, but for pretending his ideas were either new or proven.

In his wonderful “History of Zionism,” Walter Laqueur chides the post-Zionist historians by saying that what is true in their work is not new, and what is new is not true. Shlomo Sand, former campus radical turned publicity-hound professor and wanna-be destroyer of Jewish nationhood, seems to have written his book precisely to fit that description.

Patricia Cohen of The New York Times explains:

Mixing respected scholarship with dubious theories, the author, Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University, frames the narrative as a startling exposure of suppressed historical facts.

…

Professor Sand, a scholar of modern France, not Jewish history, candidly states his aim is to undercut the Jews’ claims to the land of Israel by demonstrating that they do not constitute “a people,” with a shared racial or biological past. The book has been extravagantly denounced and praised, often on the basis of whether or not the reader agrees with his politics.

…

Since Professor Sand’s mission is to discredit Jews’ historical claims to the territory, he is keen to show that their ancestry lines do not lead back to ancient Palestine. He resurrects a theory first raised by 19th-century historians, that the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, to whom 90 percent of American Jews trace their roots, are descended from the Khazars, a Turkic people who apparently converted to Judaism and created an empire in the Caucasus in the eighth century. This idea has long intrigued writers and historians. In 1976, Arthur Koestler wrote “The Thirteenth Tribe” in the hopes it would combat anti-Semitism; if contemporary Jews were descended from the Khazars, he argued, they could not be held responsible for Jesus’ Crucifixion.

By now, experts who specialize in the subject have repeatedly rejected the theory, concluding that the shards of evidence are inconclusive or misleading, said Michael Terry, the chief librarian of the Jewish division of the New York Public Library. Dr. Ostrer said the genetics also did not support the Khazar theory.

See also the argument I had with Philip Weiss over Sand’s quixotic effort to destroy the basic narrative of Israeli identity: “Anti-Israel, with a dash of intellectual pretense.”

According to JTA, Aftonbladet journalist Donald Bostrom, who spectacularly accused Israeli soldiers of running a massive organ-trafficking operation preying on Palestinian youngsters, is “reconsidering” his story.

Donald Bostrom cancelled a scheduled appearance at a conference in Beirut after a visit to Israel in which he participated in dialogue on the issue, according to Army Radio. Bostrom was in Israel last month for a media conference in Dimona.

The Beirut conference was set to be an anti-Israel hate fest, according to reports.

“The visit to Israel and the fact that I was part of a fair dialogue made me rethink the whole issue,” Bostrom reportedly told associates, according to Ha’aretz.

In an article published in August in the popular Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, Bostrom reported that Israel seized young Palestinian men and returned them to their families with missing organs.

The story, which ran under the headline “They plunder the organs of our sons,” also cited the recent arrest of a New York rabbi accused of trafficking in human organs.

During the Dimona conference Bostrom admitted that his only proof of the organ stealing came from the allegations of the Palestinian families.

Check out what Ha’aretz military reporter Anshel Pfeffer recently did to Bostrom’s story.

Anshel Pfeffer makes quick work of Aftonbladet journalist Donald Bostrom’s claims to innocence over the brutal blood libel he published about Israeli soldiers stealing and trafficking in Palestinian youths’ organs.

Asked at the conference why he had accused the IDF of killing Palestinians for their organs, he replied: “I never wrote that and didn’t claim that IDF soldiers killed Palestinians to harvest their organs. I wrote that Palestinian families are claiming that is the case.”

He accused the media of distorting his report and accusing him of antisemitism for political purposes.

“It is known that there is an international problem of organ trafficking and I mentioned many countries, including Israel. My report has one conclusion, that we should continue investigating the Palestinian allegations.”

But then Anshel, a smart left-leaning Ha’aretz military reporter and a friend, does something absolutely despicable. He quotes Bostrom’s original story:

In Aftonbladet Bostrom wrote that while the Israeli government was running a campaign encouraging Israelis to sign organ donor cards, “young Palestinian men started to disappear from villages in the West Bank and Gaza. After five days, Israeli soldiers would bring them back dead, with their bodies ripped open. Talk of the bodies terrified the population of the occupied territories. There were rumours of a dramatic increase in young men disappearing, with ensuing nightly funerals of autopsied bodies. I was in the area at the time, working on a book. On several occasions I was approached by UN staff concerned about the developments. The persons contacting me said that organ theft definitely occurred but that they were prevented from doing anything about it.”

Bostrom wrote that he had interviewed “many” Palestinian families whose sons had been killed in this way but in the report he specifically mentions only one family.

Who me? Organ trafficking? I was just repeating what “the population of the occupied territories,” “UN staff,” “rumours of a dramatic increase in young men disappearing,” “many” Palestinian families, and “nightly funerals of autopsied bodies” were saying. I never claimed it was true!

In case you missed it, Tom Gross caught it on Wednesday:

Not only did Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, today say that negotiating with the United States would be a “naive and perverted” thing to do (Khamenei revealed President Obama has approached him several times through oral and written messages which he has not replied to).

Not only did Israeli commandos today intercept a ship carrying hundreds of tons of Iranian weapons intended for Hezbollah in Lebanon – the biggest ever seizure of arms on their way from Iran to its client terrorist militia, Hezbollah, which Iran plans to use as one element in its attempt to wipe the Jewish state off the map (BBC story and video here).

Mohammad Ali Ramin

Not only did Iran brutalize pro-democracy demonstrators once again on the streets of major Iranian cities today (there are several videos if you scroll down here from France 24, and a report here by BBC Persian).

But in addition Iran has appointed as its new deputy culture minister, in charge of media and communications, Mohammad-Ali Ramin, who previously served as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s top advisor on Holocaust matters and is known as “the brain” behind the president’s strategy of Holocaust denial.

Incidentally, an interesting piece on the possible philosophical roots of Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial ran in the Forward last month. You should read it.

Phil Weiss is angry that Israeli law has no mechanism for intermarriage, since there is no civil marriage and the religious hierarchies that handle personal status law do not recognize intermarriage. He learned of this dark reality, though not its source or reasons, from Shlomo Sand.

I pointed out that Israel’s marriage laws, like its divorces, burials, etc., are not constructed against Muslims or Catholics, but in the old Ottoman confessionalist models, which are agreed upon by everybody.

Now he returns to accuse me of misrepresenting the essential evil of this system:

Well I’m reading Shlomo Sand’s great book now and Gur is I believe misrepresenting the reality. Sand makes it clear that a bar on intermarriage was no leftover accident of history. “In 1953 the political promise to bar civil marriage in Israel was given a legal basis. The law defining the legal status of the rabbinical courts determined that they would have exclusive jurisdiction over marriage and divorce of Jews in Israel. By this means, the dominant socialist Zionism harnessed the principles of the traditional rabbinate as an alibi for its fearful imaginary [sic] that was terrified of assimilation and ‘mixed marriage.’”

It sometimes amazes me that someone can launch a years-long cultural attack against an entire society without knowing some really basic facts about it, such as the degree to which its “ethnic democracy” is a common phenomenon, or the mechanisms for marriage, or the fact that its marriage laws that effectively forbid intermarriage are supported by the minority religions more than by the Jews.

Of course, the problem is not with the singular fact of the year of the passage of the law, but with the thick layer of deconstruction slathered over it by Sand. The law formalized the already-existing Ottoman system, preventing the state from having to take away from the Muslim minority its generations-old sharia courts. The Muslims, Druse and Christians were not predisposed to give these up for a new Israeli jurisprudence. This wasn’t accomplished by Israeli racism – by and large the Druse are admired by Israeli Jews, but still demanded their own courts – but by a cultural commitment of Israel’s religious groups to maintain their traditional collectivist identities.

I neglected to note – and this is important for Weiss to consider – that I am no supporter of the rabbinate. I have done everything in my power, including Jerusalem Post editorials, interviews, etc., to advocate against Israel’s established rabbinate. My own father is a Reform rabbi. My wife’s father is an Orthodox rabbi. When we married in Israel in March 2008, it was in a wedding unrecognized by the state of Israel because neither of our fathers (who together officiated) were recognized rabbinate officials. We refused to invite a state rabbi to our wedding. Our legal standing is through a quickie civil marriage conducted in a Baltimore courthouse a few weeks earlier.

I don’t like this system. I think the “state church” of Israel has utterly politicized Israeli spirituality and collectivized Israeli religious identity. Without getting into the real suffering the haredi-controlled rabbinate is causing to agunot and would-be converts, the greatest tragedy is that the politicization of religiosity has had the effect of making Israel a spiritual wasteland. I yearn for the day – and I teach in a high school program and premilitary academy to bring it closer – when Israelis look to American Jews to discover how to construct authentic personal spiritual journeys.

But for all that, it’s simply not the reality to claim that the system was born primarily as a means of preserving Jews from religious intermarriage. That misunderstands the motivations of the early years of the state, and ignored some of the most basic identity structures of Middle Eastern religions – where religion is more akin to tribes than to the individualistic confessional faiths of the United States.

Consider: How much is the Sunni-Shi’ite split in Iraq to do with theological difference, and how much tribal? Are the Christians of Syria merely a confessional difference, or a collective tribal one? Or the Druse in Israel, who have an intermarriage rate estimated at 1% despite commonly dating Jews during our shared military service, and who live in their own villages apart from the Arabs or the Jews – are they primarily an American-style religion or a Middle Eastern tribe?

Weiss doesn’t prove anything by quoting the date of the passage of the law and then Sand’s ideological interpretation. He must show not that the Jews of Israel identify collectively like all other Middle Easterners, but that their personal status laws go beyond that and are motivated by a special prejudice against minorities. Since he can’t prove it, he interprets it.

I grew up with these attitudes in American Jewish life. They’ve faded a lot since I was a kid. But in Israel they were memorialized in law. Later Sand writes that even the liberal secular Supreme Court Justice Aharon Barak said, “A Jewish state is one in which Hebrew Law plays an important part, and in which the laws of marriage and divorce of Jews are based on the Torah.”

Here is Weiss’ main mistake: believing that at their core Jews are the same in the US and Israel, and therefore the values of one can easily judge the other. American Jews have transformed into a Protestant-style individualistic faith. Israelis, perhaps 60% of whom hail from the Muslim world, have transformed the notion of Jewishness into a Middle Eastern religion-affiliated national collective that draws more from Muslim world identities than from Zionist ideology.

This is a vast gap in the basic structures of identity, and the two communities (which are together 80% of all Jews) will have to start learning about each other in order to begin to understand each other better. In the meanwhile, it’s not legitimate to offer cheap and easy indictments of the other community. Israelis are fond of saying that American Jews are either disappearing or living on “borrowed time.” Both are false, and come from an Israeli misunderstanding of what it means to live one’s Jewishness as Americans. Some Americans (still a small minority) believe Israeli Jewish nationhood is somehow a warping of the essentially religious nature of Jewishness. True, it’s a deep change, but no deeper than the American spiritualization of Jewish identity. After all, the shtetl Jew was not merely an autonomous citizen with a spiritual affiliation. He was part of a feudal corporate system that identified Jews as a distinct group with distinct living areas and separate legal obligations.

Jews have been many different things in different periods, and both Americans and Israelis are new kinds of Jews. Neither is “wrong.”

As for Aharon Barak, again, this is a twist of the truth. Some of the influence of Halacha in Israeli law includes, for example, viewing the prostitute as the victim, and the pimp and client as its perpetrators. That Israel draws from millenia of Jewish legal thought is not bad, as long as it is subject to oversight over the question of equality and the Basic Laws.

There are more responses to my claims in the comments on Weiss’ site, but I can’t respond to them because I’m awaiting approval as a commentor. These include the claim that what I wrote about “German ethnic origin” in article 116 of the German constitution isn’t there at all. This is a strange complaint. Google it. It’s there. (Search “right of return” on Wikipedia to find it easily.) It refers to East European German-speakers in the post-war period who had nowhere else to go – but had never been citizens of Germany.

Another comment responds to my statements about Israeli marriage law by bringing up the debate over Palestinian family reunification across the Green Line. This is an important question – the Supreme Court decided it on one vote – and I’m happy to get into it if that’s necessary. It continues to be debated to this day. But it has nothing to do with marriage law. Can we stick to one topic at a time?