Israel at 60: a time of pride and reflection

The 60th anniversary of the Jewish state's founding has come and gone. The pundits have pronounced pro and con, and the inevitable scribes from the hinterlands have vented their own obsessions in letters to their editors, some well-considered, but most disclosing only how seriously Washington requires more equitable distribution of the fruits of literacy.

So now that things have calmed a bit, maybe there is some space in the public square for a simple truth to be heard.

Like many Jews, I am unabashedly proud of the state of Israel. But our pride is grounded neither in nationalist jingoism, nor religious fanaticism, nor in obtuse ignorance of history.

We are well aware of the complexity of the problems requiring solution if the Jewish people are ever to be truly at home in the heartland of Islamic civilization.

I do not pretend that the Zionist national project, which made possible Israel's political existence, was without crucial flaws of conception and execution. But I also realize that Zionism was conceived by people who foresaw the annihilation of European Jewry two generations in advance of the deed, and acted boldly to forestall it.

And the flaws in Zionism's execution, committed especially in the aftermath of 1948, were committed by people whose families, for the most part, had been consumed in the incinerators of Eastern Europe and who were themselves threatened with annihilation by their geographical neighbors.

I do not pretend that the defense of national survival on the part of successive Israeli governments for lo these six decades has not entailed egregious violations of values that I (and most Israeli Jews themselves) hold dear. As are many Jews, I am obsessed by these violations and include them in my own list of personal sins.

But I also marvel at how we Americans often minimize far-more-egregious and long-standing violations under far less provocation: The list of peoples dispossessed and displaced by the American "Manifest Destiny" is enough to place Israel's role in the very real historical tragedy of Palestinian Arabs in perspective. Nor need I even mention recent atrocities, such as the Myanmar regime's wholesale neglect of its own population, about which one hears so little from the "opponents of Israeli genocide."

Insisting, as I do, that the perception of gray is crucial in mediating all worldviews of black and white, how do I speak, then, of "Jewish pride" in the state of Israel? Isn't "pride" precisely the product of the isolation of black and white, the dissolution of gray's illusion into its stark components of truth?

Well, my pride in Israel is predicated precisely upon the ability of my Israeli brothers, sisters and cousins to seek the gray in a world in which survival itself often depends upon affirming the false absolutism of black and white.

I am filled with pride, for example, by my academic colleagues on the faculties of Israeli universities who produce brilliant studies of Middle Eastern civilization, especially of its Islamic heritage, and whose work is ignored in the doctrinaire academic cultures of universities in the Arab world and boycotted by the self-designated "human-rights community" of the West.

I am filled with pride when Israeli medical teams are among the first to come to the aid of victims of natural catastrophes in an Islamic land, and are refused entry because of their "genocidal occupation" of Palestine.

I am filled with pride when Israelis who have lost loved ones to suicide bombings, continue to resist the shortsighted comforts of "groupthink" and insist upon the rule of law and human decency in the Jewish state for all its citizens.

Finally, I am filled with pride by the simple refusal of the Jews of Israel to step into the role of satanic, dehumanized "pigs and apes" defined for them by even the children's TV market in, say, Egypt, Iran, or the Palestinian Authority.

I am proud of Israel because, despite every temptation, it continues to embody a transcendent vision of human possibility that it is possible to deny the ultimacy of black and white, to deny the seductions of absolutism, to insist upon the humanity of the Other even while celebrating one's own.

For, at its best, Israel inspires me with the social vision of Judaism: "Why was Adam created as a single individual? For the sake of human solidarity, so that no one might say to his neighbor 'My lineage is superior to yours!' " (Mishnah, Tractate Sanhedrin 4:5)