Editorial

Last month, on a visit to Israel, I heard one of my relatives say something I would never expect him to say. By no means a radical, he had nevertheless decided that a bi-national, Jewish-Arab state is an inevitability and is in any case the best solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Several years ago, this view was an aberration among Israelis. Now it is gaining traction. Israel is in a state of crisis, not only of security but of identity.
At my grandmother’s house, I sat and watched the latest news—municipal workers who had not been paid for six months, thousands of Palestinians who found themselves trapped between the separation wall Israel is now building and the Green Line, which marks Israel’s pre-1967 borders. Most Israelis don’t even watch the news any more but my grandmother still tunes in every night. Her sister came down the stairs to sit with us and together the two of them commiserated about the state of the country, slipping unintentionally between Hebrew and Hungarian as they wondered aloud how things had ended up this way.
My grandmother and her sisters came to Israel after World War II. They were survivors of Auschwitz, eager to build a new future. Though they lived through periods of great austerity, they dreamt of a time when their children and children’s children might have a better life, with education and abundant food, and the freedom to practice Judaism as they pleased. Now, they worry about my cousins, who are having trouble finding jobs, and who cannot marry the way they want because the supposedly secular Israeli state recognizes only Orthodox Jewish marriage. To get a civil wedding license, they have to fly to Cyprus. To get employment, they may have to emigrate.
Meanwhile, my other grandmother lives on a kibbutz that is, like many kibbutzim, slowly privatizing. Every time I speak to her, she seems more distraught at the changes. She was born on the kibbutz, to pioneers who had made aliyah in order to build a new Jewish state, and was raised on the principles of equality and shared responsibility. She fell in love with my grandfather, who had come with his family from Iran when he was just a baby. At the end of the War of Independence, he left the Palmach (the elite unit of Israel’s first army), married her and joined the kibbutz, becoming its first Sephardic member. They raised their children on the same ideology of communal labor and the need to work with one’s neighbors, both Jewish and Arab.
Together, my two grandmothers’ lives encapsulate much of Zionist history: the pioneering parents who helped establish a kibbutz, the escape from the Holocaust to the new Jewish state. And both share the disappointment of dreams that have not come to fruition.
Israel was once seen as the collective realization of our dreams as a Jewish people. We would gather Jews from all ends of the earth, return to the land of our ancestors, and build a just society grounded in our shared morals and values. Today, Israel is a society bruised by never-ending conflict and the occupation of another people. It has the second greatest disparity between rich and poor in the world. And many Jews within it do not feel that they can practice their Judaism as they please. It is a country where people no longer dream. Most are too busy figuring out how they will pay their bills.
With Israel in such a state, with even some Israelis so exhausted they are ready to give up, is there still a purpose to the Jewish homeland? Are the Jews who live there actually better off? Would they not have a better life in the United States (which is no longer in recession, where violence is not routine, and where they can practice their religion perhaps more freely than in Israel)? And isn’t it possible that anti-Semitism might actually decrease if all Jews weren’t held responsible for the actions of the Jewish state?
The number of people asking these questions has grown over the past few months, both in Israel and abroad. As the Road Map founders and the route of the separation fence cuts deep into Palestinian land, and as a one-state solution gains currency in Western intellectual circles, the question comes up again and again: Israel, why bother?
Most Israelis have given up on the concept of Zionism, believing that Israel is just another state, and that Diaspora Jewry should just leave them alone and not project their own aspirations onto an existing country. Israelis must cope with an economy in which one out of every five children is below the poverty line and with visionless leaders who have dragged the majority of Israelis and Palestinians into a three-year war. For many of them, ideology and Zionism are what brought Israel to this point in the first place. All they want to hear now is how the economy will be fixed and how the government will make them safe.
Meanwhile, most Jews in America can no longer tell you what Zionism means. The established Jewish community has made a concerted effort to connect Jews to Israel, but its message is empty. Many Jews know that they must defend Israel against all criticism, but most could not tell you why it should exist. Programs such as Birthright Israel have been set up to develop a connection between young American Jews and Israel, largely because of fears of intermarriage and assimilation. But beyond Israel’s desperate need for our support, and our need to remain Jewish, there are few reasons given for why Israel should exist and why we should care. Instead we are told we must support Israel because it is in danger, and because we are all in danger with it.
Fatigue seems to have set in, in the Israeli government, in Israeli society and in the Jewish world as a whole. Israeli politicians, who should be leading the way, are offering no vision. No one seems to know how to get out of the political farrago, and those that do offer a choice—like the Geneva Initiative architects, or Sari Nussiebeh and Ami Ayalon with the People’s Choice—are marginalized.
Yet there are still glimmers of hope. In the development towns of Israel, there is a small group of dreamers who envision a different Israel and hope to draw the rest of us along with them. They are mostly young people, graduates of Zionist youth movements who are quietly establishing new urban kibbutzim and communes. These new Zionists want to rectify the mistakes that have been made and to make Israel into the society their ancestors dreamt of, actualizing the ideologies on which they were raised—socialism, equality, education and brotherhood.
They live communally, focussing on improving education and the lives of the young. They run coexistence programs in their neighborhoods and work in community centers. Many of them practice a form of free Judaism that incorporates cultural traditions, Jewish texts and a sense of community. And they believe that their way of life will eventually change the Jewish state.
Can they change Israeli society? Perhaps, perhaps not. But in a place where few people allow themselves to dream at all, they are dreaming of a different world. They are creating a powerful and positive definition of Zionism.
If we in the Diaspora still believe that Israel has a purpose, then we too must come up with our own positive definitions of Zionism. We must reach back to understand why the first Zionists dreamt of a homeland for the Jews. And we must look ahead and decide what kind of society we wish to build. For if we are only defending Israel because we feel obliged, and not because we see it as a place where our collective hopes can be realized, then the Jewish state has turned from a dream into a burden.