On April 15, 2002, I was demonstrating in Washington, again. This time, I was there officially as Israel’s deputy prime minister, representing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the Israeli government. I joined one hundred thousand Americans, mostly Jews, rallying to support Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield.
As many of us had warned, Ehud Barak’s sweeping concessions at Camp David in July 2000 didn’t bring peace. Instead, Yasir Arafat launched a renewed, vicious war of terrorism against us, starting in September 2000, what the Palestinians called the Second Intifada. March 2002 was especially bloody. Terrorists murdered 130 Israelis, including thirty killed by a suicide bomber during Passover seder at the Park Hotel in Netanya.
For seventeen months, bombs had been blowing up in cafes and buses; people were being shot while driving, commuting, jogging, and drinking coffee. Schoolchildren in our neighborhood, as elsewhere, were killed. I found myself attending funeral after funeral, paying shiva call after shiva call. I watched parents bury their children and children bury their parents. Closer to home, my secretary was injured in a bus bombing that killed one person right near our office. My hurt, terrified secretary was “lucky”—in the twisted vocabulary we developed—because she survived.
Every time I heard a boom, I scrambled, running around until I located my wife and my daughters. I sighed in guilty relief that they were OK, knowing that someone else would be mourning. And they were. Friends died. Friends lost limbs. Friends lost relatives and other friends.
In this atmosphere, saying goodbye to your spouse and your kids in the morning took on a special meaning, an extra touch. We always feared this goodbye might be the last one. As the terror mounted, so did Israelis’ demands that their government protect them more effectively.
Under the Oslo agreements, Israel had withdrawn completely from Area A, leaving no military presence in the seven heavily populated Palestinian cities of Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarem, Qalqilya, Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Jericho, along with 80 percent of Hebron. Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority exerted full civil and security control there. All had become centers of bomb making and terrorism.
The day after the Passover massacre, the security cabinet met. We stayed up all night, debating what to do. With the violence escalating, and hundreds already dead, we had no choice. Launching Operation Defensive Shield, we dispatched troops to destroy the terrorists’ infrastructure. We hit them where they planned their attacks and produced their bombs.
Because these terrorists were hiding in the heart of Palestinian cities, we decided that Israel would not use heavy weapons. We would not drop bombs or mortar shells on populated areas. The IDF would send soldiers house to house. We understood the choice we were making. Trying to limit Palestinian civilian casualties risked Israeli lives.
The worst fighting erupted in the casbah of Jenin. This cramped refugee camp of 13,500 people next to the city of Jenin was the base for at least a quarter of the terrorists who had murdered our citizens. There, amid intense house-to-house fighting, Israeli soldiers killed fifty-five Palestinians. Most died still clutching weapons in their hands or with their weapons lying nearby. Because we went in so close, Palestinians ambushed our soldiers, killing twenty-three. Those were the facts. Now the real story finishes and the Big Lie begins.
First, the Palestinians told reporters specific little lies: that soldiers tied up a Palestinian before shooting him, that soldiers used children as human shields, that soldiers bulldozed dozens of Palestinians into a mass grave. Next, Palestinian leaders like Saeb Erekat made wild charges of five hundred dead and thousands buried alive.
Then, came the experts, confirming what they expected to find. Richard Cook, the head of operations for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), called the devastation the IDF left in Jenin “much greater than I expected.” A British professor of forensic medicine, Derrick Pounder, arrived with Amnesty International. After performing his first autopsy, he was already corroborating what reporters then called “evidence of atrocities by Israeli troops in Jenin refugee camp.”
The limited investigation did not stop Pounder from pronouncing that “claims that a large number of civilians died and are under the rubble are highly credible.” Using speculation, not evidence, he continued, “It is not believable that only a few people have been killed, given the reports we have that a large number of people were inside three- and four-storey buildings when they were demolished.”
The UN condemnations were particularly harsh. Even a fair-minded mediator, whom I knew well and respected, Terje Rød-Larsen, called Israel’s actions “morally repugnant.” He said that Jenin was “totally destroyed,” and added that “expert people here who have been in war zones and earthquakes… say they have never seen anything like it.”
Within two weeks, Rød-Larsen was downplaying these exaggerations. By then, however, it was too late. By the time the Israeli version was corroborated thoroughly and the Palestinian lies exposed publicly, the facts no longer mattered. The Jenin Massacre of the Truth had become the accepted story. As one veteran BBC correspondent, James Reynolds, admitted, “Those two words”—Jenin and massacre—became linked. “First impressions are very important. And perhaps, despite all the other reporting at the end, they are never rubbed out.”
The Washington rally, held as this modern blood libel spread globally, was a typical Jewish event. So many people felt so strongly about attending the rally—which was organized in a matter of days—that too many speakers spoke for far too long. Normally, when placed on an overly ambitious speakers list, I enjoyed being the guy who kept it short. A few well-chosen lines are better remembered and deeply appreciated.
This time, however, I broke my rule. Even as the rally organizers whispered to me on the podium, “Finish up, Natan, really, really,” I shared my firsthand account of the battle of Jenin in context. I detailed for the crowd the reasons why Israeli troops entered the casbah, the ethical decisions we made before the operation, the constraints we imposed on our soldiers, and the high price we paid.
I took my time because I felt we were at a delicate turning point. This wasn’t the first accusation against Israel of a gross human rights violation. Since 1948, historians have been fighting about what happened when irregular Irgun forces attacked the Arab village of Deir Yassin and dozens of Arabs died. In 1982, the official Soviet newspapers we received in Chistopol prison blasted Israel for perpetuating the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Years later, I learned how Israel’s military, judicial, and political systems had tried clarifying which Israelis failed to stop the Christian Phalangists from killing Palestinians in Lebanon, with Ariel Sharon being fired as defense minister as punishment.
This time, I didn’t need to rely on historians or military investigators. I had witnessed everything from my cabinet seat and participated in the delicate decision-making. If decent people could believe such outrageous lies about us and actively spread them, I thought, then the situation had turned very dangerous indeed.
On the Washington Mall, I faced an easy audience. Looking into the crowd, I saw many of my comrades from previous battles: those who had visited us in Moscow, those who had marched with us for Soviet Jewish freedom in Washington, and those who had helped us start the Zionist Forum and launch Yisrael B’Aliyah. Despite their nervousness, despite the need to reassure them that these accusations were lies, it looked as if we were all united again, struggling for Israel’s right to exist.
But the more I looked into the crowd, as the rally went on and on, the more disturbed I was by this familiarity. If I recognized so many from my generation, I started wondering, where were the next generations? Where were my friends’ kids? How were they reacting to the “Jenin massacre” lies?
That’s the reality I confronted a year and a half later, when I visited North American college campuses. A new film, Jenin, Jenin, used doctored footage and heartbreaking “eyewitness” interviews to present the Palestinians’ Big Lie as the total truth. Although the truth had already been exposed in detail, this harsh, impressionistic film embarrassed thousands of young Jews.
Here, then, was the double double cross. Sacrificing for peace and ending up with war was bad enough. That’s your enemy’s fault. But sacrificing for peace and being broadly blamed for causing the war was doubly infuriating. That’s your friends’ fault too.
As terrorism worsened, the need to respond constructively and take responsibility grew. The world was pumping billions into the Palestinian Authority with no strings attached and no benchmarks of progress. I genuinely felt badly for the Palestinians who suffered financially as their leaders stole most of the international aid for their personal use.
I started wondering if the Palestinian territories could be run in a way that would transition to democracy and build economic independence. After April 2002, when President Bush identified democracy as the best tool against Palestinian terrorism, I thought we finally had a chance to make the PA a test case for Bush’s vision.
In late spring 2002, I proposed a new Marshall Plan for the Middle East. I modeled it loosely on Secretary of State George Marshall’s post–World War II initiative, which helped rebuild Europe while protecting its democratic institutions. “Here’s our chance,” I told Ariel Sharon, “to cultivate Palestinian civil society, dismantle terrorism, and offer a model for the world, all done under the auspices of the United Nations, the United States, Israel, and the Arab countries that recognize Israel.”
These parties would direct huge resources toward the Palestinians. But every grant would be conditional, linked to specific, measurable progress in four areas:
• Economic independence: promoting Palestinian businesses that were viable, profitable, and protected from Arafat’s racketeering
• Refugee camps: closing down the slums and committing to improving the Palestinians’ quality of life in new villages, while eliminating this powerful symbol, exploited over decades, of Zionism’s supposed criminal nature
• Education and incitement: using the schools to cultivate democratic values while ending calls for violence against Jews in the media, the mosques, and the schools
• Dissent: encouraging more democratic voices, which required the free world to pressure the PA to stop punishing candid critics.
Over the decades, as the West has propped up the PA with billions, experts have launched numerous plans to help build a Palestinian state. My proposals differed from the pack because all the reforms, every joint venture and investment, would advance one central mission. Every Western dollar would strengthen individual Palestinians’ independence. Not one penny would strengthen the dictators. The return on investment had to be institutions fostering a free, healthy civil society, nothing else.
After three transitional years of such rebuilding, with a civil society starting to blossom, elections would yield a new government, dependent on its people and accountable to them. Peace negotiations between representatives of two peoples, when both sides depend on the well-being of the electorate, have a real shot at success.
The Israeli press pooh-poohed such a quixotic project. So I did what every Israeli who wants to get heard does: I pitched my article in America, in this case, to the Wall Street Journal. Democratization, I argued, must boost the people’s freedom, not their oppressors’ power. The West must wean the Palestinians from their leaders, not tighten the leaders’ grip on the Palestinians. Rather than sloppily bombarding dictators and terrorists with more cash to steal, the free world should be disciplined and strategic. It should encourage joint ventures with independent businesspeople while funding genuine civil rights organizations, independent trade unions, bold women’s organizations, and democratic student groups. These are the counter forces that build freedom instead of one-man rule.
Israeli experts vetoed my naive ideas. Our generals, intelligence people, and diplomats kept telling me that dreaming of civil society among the Palestinians was utopian and would never happen. Our European, American, and UN friends kept running money through Arafat, then Abu Mazen—bankrolling the problems that needed solving.
When I opposed the initial Oslo peace approach, Yossi Beilin, Shimon Peres’s deputy foreign minister, told me, “Natan, developing democracy will take decades. Nurturing a Palestinian civil society is a twenty-, thirty-, or forty-year project. We are bringing peace now. We’re going to have peace in the next three to five years.”
There’s the failure. The buzzword was “peace process.” But the real approach stemmed from the impatient, unrealistic slogan “peace now.”
Here we stand, thirty years later, with more tension, more suffering, more victims and much more hatred. Despite all the hype, the peace process hasn’t started yet. It will not come from one American president or another. It has to emerge from within Palestinian society.
In the brief period between the Washington rally and my first campus confrontations, many political changes occurred at home. In January 2003, Israel held elections again. It ended up being Yisrael B’Aliyah’s last electoral round. As some of us expected, the more our party succeeded in integrating Russians into Israeli society, the less the Russians needed us.
Terrorism became an unanticipated accelerator. The intense, ideological, life-and-death debates pushed aside our quality-of-life issues. Our attempt to unite right and left collapsed as the two sides clashed ever more brutally. In 2003, only two of us, Yuli Edelstein and I, were elected to the Knesset.
Number three on our list was Marina Solodkin. Marina was a constituent-services miracle worker. When she started, she was a relatively recent immigrant, having landed in Israel in 1991. We thought we would teach her a thing or two. Instead, she schooled us in the art of being loyal to the electorate, spending her days and nights answering mail, visiting the poor and disgruntled, and fighting bureaucratic misfires or abuses.
I felt I owed it to our most loyal voters to keep her in parliament. I resigned from the Knesset shortly after the elections, yielding my seat to Marina, who was next on our list. Keeping Marina in the Knesset acknowledged that, even as Yisrael B’Aliyah faded away, we, its leaders, remained committed to its core voters. Under Israeli law, giving up my seat did not prevent me from serving in the cabinet.
Our party accepted Ariel Sharon’s proposal to merge with his ruling Likud Party. As a result of our agreement, I joined the cabinet with a more modest position: minister of Jerusalem and Diaspora affairs.
In truth, whatever big excuses history provided, whatever rationalizations we had, and whatever witticisms we remembered about our party committing suicide by succeeding, the 2003 elections delivered an unpleasant blow. It’s never fun to lose.
Looking back, I realize that the timing of our party’s demise offered me a great gift. During the next two years I had no party responsibilities, no Knesset responsibilities, and no big ministry to run. My newfound freedom liberated me to concentrate on the issues that interested me, especially Israel-Diaspora relations and the connection between freedom and security. Over the next two years, I would write my book with Ron Dermer explaining my disagreement with the Left and the Right about their attempts to divorce any questions of democracy from a quest for peace, and I would concentrate on the growing fight against the New Anti-Semitism.
I visited thirteen North American university campuses in the fall of 2003. This was not a typical lecture tour. I did not just want to speak at large public meetings. I sought intimate forums to learn what students, especially young Jews, were thinking about Israel, and how the growing campaign against Israel affected them. At my first campus visit, a student told me after my speech, “For me, as a liberal Jew, it would be better if Israel didn’t exist.”
I heard that at York University in Toronto, which had granted me an honorary doctorate in 1982 in absentia, then presented it to me five years later. The ceremony in 1987 had turned very emotional very quickly, as I was surrounded by many Toronto students who had been so involved in the struggle for Soviet Jewry. In those days, the fight for freedom and our national pride in our people and our country overlapped: our liberalism and Zionism reinforced one another. Now, half a generation later, this student—along with many others—was ashamed and announcing a divorce, separating his liberal identity from his Zionism.
The timing of this York student’s sweeping repudiation was particularly upsetting. Israeli troops were fighting daily to protect us. Israeli civilians were still targeted by the waves of terror Arafat unleashed. Yet, when we defended ourselves, the pro-terror propaganda against us intensified.
Especially as America’s global war on terror continued after September 11, 2001, we in Israel’s security cabinet felt we were on the forefront of a shared Western fight. We were defending ourselves while trying to minimize the suffering of civilians caught in the cross fire. Officers from the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere kept visiting Israel to learn how to ethically fight this often shadowy, asymmetrical war. Yet, to hear young, idealistic Jews on many campuses nevertheless echo the false accusations, charging Israel with committing war crimes, was painful and infuriating. Such a disconnect suggested that our lines of communication were malfunctioning and our identities were clashing.
During this trip, I met many enthusiastic Zionists too. These Jews defended Israel on campus proudly. One could sense the Birthright bounce, the positive impact the new Taglit-Birthright Israel program was starting to have on campus. Thousands of young Jews resented the gap between the complicated but idealistic democracy they visited and the evil monster the Jewish state was made out to be by so many.
I enjoyed meeting those Israel activists. But I was particularly curious about the Jews who felt caught in the middle. Some felt a deepening tension between their commitment to liberal ideas and their loyalty to Israel. They commanded the most attention. While some radical, left-wing Jews felt embarrassed by Israel, many more Jews were embarrassed to go public about their support for Israel and Zionism.
During a frank conversation with some Jewish students at Harvard University, one Harvard Business School student admitted feeling caught. She feared signing a petition against the anti-Israel boycotters. She feared joining pro-Israel organizations. She feared identifying as a Zionist. The Harvard campus was so anti-Israel that open identification with the Jewish state could cost her, she believed, and damage her academic future. She knew of at least three professors with influence over her final grades who would probably view pro-Israel activism unkindly. The risk was simply too great for now. “Once I am established in my career,” she said, “I can start speaking on behalf of Israel.”
I could not believe it. I wasn’t in Moscow; this was Cambridge, Massachusetts. This wasn’t a fear society; this was Harvard University, supposedly the center of free thought, of openness, liberalism, and professionalism. The student had made it to one of the world’s top business schools, but she felt compelled to hide her political sympathies there. She reminded me of me, when I was a student at a similar elite institution in the Soviet Union. She was a doublethinker, as I had been in those days, thinking one thing, saying something else to fit in, get along, and get ahead.
Another pro-Israel liberal studying at Columbia University told a similar story. When he campaigned for Israel, he lost too many friends, he said. Once he abandoned Israel politics and instead pushed organic farming, he was popular again. He, too, was an Ivy League doublethinker, who traded his commitment to his people for popularity with his peers.
A few years later, in 2010, the pollster Frank Luntz invited thirty-five MIT and Harvard students, Jewish and non-Jewish, to discuss Middle East issues. Without prompting, some of the non-Jews started attacking Israel’s “war crimes” and America’s “Jewish lobby.” The fifteen Jews mostly sat silently, absorbing the abuse, for hours. Luntz noted that, in the postmodern world, “kids on the left” in particular “have been taught not to judge. Therefore those on the left will not judge between Israel and the Palestinians.”
But something more disturbing happened. When Luntz debriefed the Jewish kids, alone, they defended Israel passionately. He asked why they had not done so to a seemingly friendly audience. Essentially, they told him that because people knew they were Jews, they had to choose their words about Israel carefully. Everyone assumed they were biased no matter what they said.
Watching the video highlights of this encounter upset me. Jews were enjoying a golden age on American campuses. Never before had there been so many Jewish students and Jewish professors, Jewish studies programs and Jewish college presidents. Yet these Harvard and MIT Jews acted like Soviet Jews in so many ways. In the Soviet Union, always conscious that you were a Jew, you kept your internal censor on. You knew your words and actions would be judged differently. Now, on these elite campuses were the early warnings of a hyper-judgmental, suffocating, campus-based fear society, rife with anti-Zionism, the New Anti-Semitism, where people who thought they were the freest Jews in history didn’t feel fully free.
This Jewish skittishness in the world’s strongest Diaspora community made me grateful for my new freedom in Israel. There, I no longer felt the need to go through such mental gymnastics, worrying about what others might say when I spoke up.
In fairness, this silenced majority, these doublethinking students, faced a carefully orchestrated campaign. Nearly every time I rose to speak in public, I spied what became a familiar sight: well-dressed students in kaffiyehs sitting toward the front, ready to ask tough questions. Sometimes the questions were pointed but fair. Usually they were hostile and vaguely referenced some form of violence the questioner had endured. I am sure some questioners indeed suffered. But the questions often had the same phrasing, with many questioners on different campuses recalling precisely the same personal trial.
These exchanges occurred more than a decade before students started talking about triggering and microaggressions and intersectionality. Jews today are often blocked at the intersection, not welcomed as feminists or LGBTQ activists if they insist on being Zionists. Even then, these anti-Zionist bullies were monopolizing the public space, short-circuiting real debate, shutting down conversation with emotional appeals. I could feel a clear division between those Jews anxious to learn from my responses and those who just wanted the whole problem to go away.
I enjoyed going back and forth with critical students. Without tough questions, without some vigorous debate, no students would change their minds. Without a real dialogue, the harsh imagery of Jenin, Jenin—offering accusations greater than the facts—would continue massacring the truth and alienating liberal Jews from the Jewish state.
The most extreme left-wing students, Jewish and non-Jewish, shut down any discussion. At Rutgers University, I was schmoozing with students just before starting my lecture, entitled “Human Rights, Justice and Democracy—A Jewish Approach.” Suddenly, smush! I was hit in the face with a cherry cream pie. While temporarily blinded, I heard someone yell, “End the occupation! Free Palestine!” My assailant was a Jew who helped found Central Jersey Jews Against the Occupation.
I was hustled backstage. I wiped my face. One of my embarrassed hosts gave me his jacket, two sizes too big. Quickly returning to the podium, smiling broadly, I said, “New Jersey cooks very good cakes. I hope that one was kosher.” The audience cheered.
The attack backfired. This radical’s violence upset the crowd. Fearing an audience backlash, the usual propagandists slunk out of the auditorium. The loud anti-Zionist demonstration outside, uniting hipsters with black-hatted Neturei Karta Israel haters, dissolved. The crowd that remained was so sympathetic I thought some people might volunteer to join the IDF that night. But there was no real debate either. The opportunity for education had been lost.
The day after I visited Rutgers, vandals spray-painted swastikas on the walls of the local Hillel House and the university chapter of Alpha Epsilon Pi, a national Jewish fraternity. In the meantime, the self-proclaimed liberal professors, who had organized an intense Internet campaign against me as representative of a “Nazi, war criminal state,” continued their attacks.
After I returned to Israel, I wrote an article called “Traveling to the Occupied Territories,” meaning the campuses. My spokesperson pitched it to Maariv, Israel’s main daily newspaper. The young editors there doubted the essay’s relevance to their readers, especially because of its length. Indulging me as a minister, they promised to take it to the editorial meeting Sunday morning.
That Sunday, during our government cabinet meeting, I was called out for a pressing phone call. It was Amnon Dankner, Maariv’s legendary editor in chief. His more provincial junior colleagues had said “no” based on their made-in-Israel tunnel vision. He, however, had been the Jewish Agency spokesman in the 1970s and then a Washington correspondent. “Natan, I am running the whole essay,” he said. “Not because you’re a minister, but because of the message. This is shocking. I had no idea the situation was this bad.”
It seemed that few leaders of the organized Jewish community in North America realized it was that bad either. During my campus tour, I tried to meet with Jewish Federation officials in each city I visited. Through our discussions, I saw that in many cases the campus was a no-man’s-land for Jewish organizations.
For example, when I met with my friends from the San Francisco Federation, they had many complaints about Ariel Sharon’s governmental policies. This was typical of that group. After some back-and-forth, I responded, “I understand your frustrations. Some of your criticisms I accept, some I believe are unfair. But let’s look at something closer to home.”
I wanted to discuss the harassment of Jewish students at San Francisco State University. It was well known that in May 2002, pro-Palestinian demonstrators had menaced Zionist students at a pro-Israel rally there, chanting, “HITLER DID NOT FINISH THE JOB” and “GO HOME OR WE’LL KILL YOU.” The pro-Palestinian group on campus distributed posters of a dead baby with drops of blood, adorned with the words “SHARON,” “PALESTINIAN CHILDREN MEAT,” and the sick explanation, updating the medieval blood libel, “SLAUGHTERED ACCORDING TO JEWISH RITES UNDER AMERICAN LICENSE.” I had tasted a dose of the Jew-hatred there the day before.
I asked, “Do anyone of you contribute to San Francisco State University?”
A number of hands shot up proudly.
“Would the president of the university take your call?” A smaller number of hands shot up, even more proudly.
“Do you know that, of all the universities I have visited, that university is the most hostile to Israel? Even Hillel—the Jewish students’ organization—is banned from campus. And Hillel leaders have been trying to meet with the president for over a year. They only had a chance yesterday, because I, as an Israeli minister, simply brought them into my meeting with him.”
As I detailed the way Jewish students felt bullied, the leaders looked shocked. They admitted that they thought of students as out-of-towners. They defined the Federation’s mission as tending to their local community’s institutions.
The problem was complicated by the growing number of voices within the Jewish community saying that any hostility toward Israel on campus was Israel’s fault. When the New York Jewish newspaper the Forward translated my article and ran it, the headline read “Tour of U.S. Schools Reveals Why Zionism Is Flunking.” That title twist pointed the finger at us, rather than the campus occupiers.
Despite its misleading headline, my article triggered many responses. More and more parents were noticing that the growing anti-Israel obsession in the universities echoed traditional Jew-hatred. Today, there’s a much greater awareness of the problem. Since 2002, the campus has become the center of attention for the organized Jewish community, as well as many new independent pro-Israel organizations.
When summarizing the trip, I told Ariel Sharon that the North American campuses had become the most important battlefield outside of Israel for the future of the Jewish people.
I could not shake off a heavy feeling. I was haunted by the all-too-familiar look on the faces of these new Jews of silence, who felt they had to keep their feelings of solidarity with Israel underground to fit in. I felt thrown backward in time, seeing too many resemblances to the totalitarian world of doublethinkers I had fled. I was also troubled by the look of the smaller minority of Jewish anti-Zionist zealots, denouncing Israel with a venom I had never seen before from fellow Jews.
Although the physical attacks united us as Israelis, the ideological attacks risked dividing us as a people. Our attackers had not only seized the banner of human rights from us, they had turned it against us. I kept wondering how it had happened, and so fast. When I first visited campuses in the late 1980s, I felt at home. All my identities seemed to be in sync. Far away from the Moscow tensions, where many people kept asking me to choose between the fight for Soviet Jewry and the fight for human rights, I enjoyed meeting students who seemed to see no daylight between their liberalism and their Zionism. The struggle for the Jewish state, the struggle for Soviet Jewry, and the struggle for human rights overlapped for them, as for me.
Only a decade and a half later, it now seemed that students felt forced to choose between supporting Israel and campaigning for human rights. Many critics scoffed when I, as an Israeli minister, lectured at their university about human rights.
Admittedly, the optics around Israel and the Palestinians looked particularly bad when viewed from an American campus. And it wasn’t just an image or public-relations problem. Objectively, we really faced—and still face—a serious human rights challenge. Not only is Israel a democracy imposing military control on an unwilling population, but it’s a country that has repeatedly had to fight terrorists hiding in densely populated civilian areas. Yet, wasn’t it also true that we remained the only democracy in the Middle East? Weren’t we the ones often imposing restrictions on our army to wage this difficult war in the most moral manner possible?
When I spoke to sympathetic Jewish audiences, who were obsessed with this gap between our democratic intentions and our tarnished reputation, one question kept coming up again and again: “Why is Israel so bad at public relations?”
Israeli hasbara obviously had its massive failures. But there was a deeper shift taking place. Those who wanted to destroy us had hit pay dirt. The ideological climate was now more welcoming to their worldview. Israel’s harshest enemies’ worst lies took root because they were now being planted in fertile soil, as the once liberal campus turned against the very foundations of liberal nationalism.
One of the first books I read after leaving the Soviet Union had warned about the new risks to freedom emerging from the university’s “politically correct” culture, a phrase everyone was just starting to learn in 1987. The Closing of the American Mind, by the University of Chicago philosopher Allan Bloom, noted, “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: Almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.” Students wanted to live in a “problem-free world.” Learning from the students of the 1960s, who were now their professors, they started seeing Western values as the source of many of the world’s problems, not the basis for common solutions.
Bloom explained what, to me, was the astounding reaction of right-thinking liberals, who condemned President Reagan’s speech calling the Soviet Union an evil empire. Bloom’s students preferred to talk about a “tension between values,” which was more fluid, “than the tension between good and evil,” which was too categorical, burdened by its “cargo of shame and guilt.” They sought freedom from this judgmental rhetoric personally and politically. “One does not feel bad about or uncomfortable with oneself” when any conflict or imperfection could be solved with “just a little value adjustment,” rather than having to sift right from wrong.
Over the years, I kept on thinking about that book as I saw the power and intensity of this new brainwashing build. If everything was relative and all identities were equally flawed, if every Western country was caricatured as being defined by “dead white males” guilty of imperialism, racism, and colonialism, even the Western commitment to human rights didn’t matter much. No wonder our future leaders were asking, “What right do we have to impose our values on others?”
Reading Bloom’s book helped me understand so many Western liberals’ continued resistance to raising human rights issues during America’s strategic negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union and when I had sought allies for our big march on Washington. Back in the 1970s, our battle for linkage had been fought against cynical practitioners of realpolitik like Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Now, progressive forces were rejecting linkage ideologically.
It was depressing to hear students in the world’s most sophisticated universities echo the Soviets’ most primitive propaganda, treating imperfect democracies as no better than perfectly awful dictatorships. The Soviets had always enjoyed undermining the democratic West’s moral authority against their immoral regime by essentially saying, “You have your conceptions; we have ours. You make sure everyone can say whatever they want; we make sure everyone can eat whenever they need.”
This assault on democracy hurt the West, hurt America, and particularly hurt the most vulnerable democracy, Israel. While this approach confused Americans, it clearly hurt Israel. If democracy and human rights were only relative values, then Israel’s standing as the only democracy in the Middle East counted for nothing. Year by year, we watched Israel lose its currency in the world as a democratic state.
Even our pride in Israeli democracy started backfiring. Radical liberal voices wondered, “Who needs Zionism importing the liberal democratic ideas of the West to the East?” One French liberal Jewish professor, sounding as if he had just popped out of Allan Bloom’s book, told me that the Zionist idea was wrong, because East is East and West is West, meaning “Western” Jews, with their westernized ideas, should stay out of the Middle East.
By 2003, I saw how much more dangerous these ideas were. The West had indeed won. The Soviet Union had died. But like some mysterious spirits leaving the body as the heart stops beating, certain Soviet and Marxist ideas that undermined Westerners’ confidence in the power of their foundational ideas seeped into the atmosphere. These ghosts of dead Communist ideas were shaping the next hot new intellectual trend, postmodernism.
Although my professor friends love arguing about what postmodernism means, I think the label works here to summarize this broad rebellion against many defining modern, Western ideas and achievements that trace back to the Enlightenment of the 1700s. As the label suggests, postmodernists were always more sure about what they opposed than what they believed.
We all agreed that the Western mind didn’t start closing in America but in Europe. After the trauma of World War II, many Europeans started blaming centuries of endless, pointless religious and national wars on traditional identities and the resulting prejudices. Postmodernists imagined utopia as filled with individuals, not groups, and freed of any borders, let alone nations. John Lennon’s famous song “Imagine” epitomized postmodernism’s political dream:
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace
This postmodern vision attacked the fundamental building block of our world order, the nation-state. In the 1800s, nation builders from George Washington to Giuseppe Garibaldi romanticized their nations. Now, trendy academics taught that Western nationalism was a corrupt tool that created false barriers between people while imposing genuine suffering on the powerless. This belief struck another ideological blow against Israel. In a world where all boundaries were bad, its role as the nation-state of the Jewish people was no longer valued.
A leading postmodern historian, New York University’s Tony Judt, who proudly proclaimed himself “suspicious of identity politics in all forms, Jewish above all,” declared in 2003 that “the problem with Israel” is that “it arrived too late.” Writing as if we didn’t live in a world with 191-plus independent nation-states, he claimed that Israel “has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.”
What a difference from the 1950s and 1960s, when Israel was the poster child of the post–World War II, postcolonial era as a functioning Jewish democratic state. Back then, a young Londoner named Tony Judt felt inspired to volunteer on a kibbutz. Now, Israel earned no points for being democratic, and no points for being a proud nation-state, promising all citizens individual rights while expressing the majority’s culture in the public square.
Israel’s timing wasn’t off—the postmodernists’ timing was. In the Soviet Union, we dissidents struggled against a regime that enslaved people by erasing their identities. We felt that the liberal-democratic nation-state offered the best framework for defending human rights. Yet just as most Soviet dissidents were falling in love with this idea of the nation-state, some Western liberals started rejecting it.
Postmodernism poisoned the atmosphere surrounding Israel quickly, especially because Israel was a small, liberal, democratic, nationalist outpost with a big Palestinian problem. Sloppy vocabulary proved damning. In Ukraine, the word “occupation” often gave us chills. It was the word that evoked the Nazis, mass killings, death camps, the brutalities of world war. I realized that whenever most Europeans heard the word, they kept thinking of the Nazis, whose desire for conquest resulted in their smothering, genocidal straitjacket of an occupation. Few critics bothered to understand the complicated historical background of Israel’s occupation, including Jews’ deep ties to the biblical lands. Even more unfairly, these bashers ignored the dangerous, difficult dilemmas Israel faced in its struggle for survival. It’s that background that created Israel’s on-off, here-and-there, spotted control over Palestinians.
Similarly, when some Americans heard about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they instinctively translated it into black and white, casting the Palestinians as the oppressed blacks and making Israelis the racist southern whites. All these sloppy comparisons reinforced one another. In a rush to demonize Israel, radical leftists saddled the country with the great crimes of the West.
The Palestinian suicide bombing campaign in the early 2000s reinforced these misimpressions about Israel’s occupation. Good people on campus and in editorial suites assumed that those willing to kill themselves to kill others must be really oppressed, so tortured by Israelis that they had no choice but to lash out as they did. As the longtime secretary general of Amnesty International Martin Ennals proclaimed back in 1974 about the Palestinians, “Terrorism comes because human rights are not granted.”
In January 2002, after Wafa Idris smuggled a bomb into Jerusalem while driving a Red Crescent ambulance and blew herself up in a shoe store on Jaffa Street, I remember reading in the New York Times that this evil act was “a sign of the growing desperation of Palestinians.” In England, the Guardian would write that Idris, whom Palestinians celebrated as their first female suicide bomber, sacrificed “herself on the altar of Palestinian freedom.”
Meanwhile, I also read our intelligence reports. It turned out that Idris’s husband divorced her after a miscarriage made her unable to have children and she had refused to let him take a second wife. Deemed a “disgrace,” she faced a cruel choice. To restore her family’s honor, she could either be killed by a relative or kill Jews. Such typically Western romanticization of Middle Eastern brutality created the cruel irony. While under terrorist attack, Israel became, after South Africa reformed in the early 1990s, the last remnant of Western colonialism, imperialism, and racism.
The postmodernists’ logic required Olympic-level mental gymnastics. The biggest leap occurred because the postcolonial rebellion after World War II resulted in many national movements in the developing world. Clearly, postmodernists couldn’t reject those nationalisms.
What to do? Improvise.
Postmodernists sang “Imagine” only about Western democracies. At the same time, they gave the world’s victims a pass on so many fronts. Postmodernists learned from Marxism to divide the world between the oppressors and the oppressed. While the nationalism of the oppressor is always evil, the nationalism of the oppressed could be a useful progressive force during some historical periods. Viewing the world through this distorting lens, postmodernists defined powerful Western democracies as inherently bad and the powerless nations of the world as always good.
With that, and considering Israel’s genuine challenges controlling millions of Palestinians, two more switches occurred. First, Israel became defined as only a white, Western, Ashkenazi project, ignoring its dark-skinned Mizrahi majority as well as Zionism’s East-West fusions. Israel also became the symbol of all that is bad, as both a proud nation-state and a supposedly white, Western, colonialist, racist imposition into the Middle East, oppressing the local natives. Second, the Palestinians became the world’s most coddled victims, even getting a free pass when their leaders spread terrorism throughout the world and oppressed their own people.
In the postmodern universe, if there is one absolute value, it’s the value of peace at any price, leaving everyone with “nothing to kill or die for.” The Oslo agreement played into those illusions. Calling it a peace process meant that any supporters of Oslo were pro-peace. That made any critics of Oslo—or of the supposed peace partners’ regimes—anti-peace by definition.
Frustration as Oslo collapsed, after such high hopes, made Israel’s situation even more difficult. With Israel the stand-in for all Western sins, it became responsible for “killing… the Middle East peace process,” in the words of Tony Judt, expressing the opinion of many of his postmodernist colleagues.
Having grown up in a totalitarian regime that somehow found favor with many Western intellectuals, I have seen how people delude themselves once they decide how the world should work. In the Soviet Union, talk about the “struggle for peace as the highest value” camouflaged the real struggle against the West, as well as the Communists’ clever attempts to mobilize pro-peace activists in the West against their own governments.
As with the word “occupation,” the word “peace” can be used to describe very different situations. The Soviets were quite successful at keeping domestic peace by imposing mass slavery. Those of us who became dissidents did what we did because we saw through the Soviet half-truths, which used lovely words to hide ugly situations. Defenders always emphasize the appealing half that’s true, overlooking that there’s an equally large part that’s a lie.
We knew the real value was not peace at any price but peace with freedom. Now, years later, it was disappointing to see, even after the Soviet Union fell, that the old Communist peace con worked. Too many sincere, peace-loving people wanted to believe that the struggle for peace can be isolated from the nature of the regime and the freedom every citizen deserves to enjoy.
When I traveled abroad or hosted foreigners for various seminars and conferences, I devised a little parlor game for journalists and diplomats to expose these half-truths and careful manipulations. “Who are the enemies of peace?” I would ask.
I would list three or four Arab strongmen along with Israel’s prime minister. Then I would say, “Rank these Middle Eastern leaders’ commitment to peace.”
Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s dictator, always won; he was the champion of peace. Over the years, I learned that Hafez al-Assad of Syria, was “trustworthy” and “ready to make peace.” From 2000 on, I heard about how cultured, enlightened, and open Assad’s son Bashar was. After all, he was an ophthalmologist. After 2003, Muammar al-Qaddafi earned the compliment, “He gave away his nuclear weapons.” I usually heard that Yasir Arafat “was doing his best, but he’s got serious opposition,” until the terrorism of the 2000s made that pose farcical. After Arafat died, the same rationalizations returned to excuse Abu Mazen’s behavior.
Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon (until he withdrew from Gaza) were consistently condemned as the worst enemies of peace. I would respond that, as the only democratically elected leader of the lot, the Israeli prime minister must want to deliver peace to his voters. My contestants would shrug their shoulders and explain to me that “democracy has nothing to do with peace in the Middle East.”
Suddenly, the international community seemed to be wired backward: Israel was seen as bad and Palestinian terrorists were seen as good. The polarities were reversed. Israel’s great qualities—as a democracy in the Middle East surrounded by dictatorships, as a Jewish state providing a home after centuries of wandering, and as a proud country defending itself against immoral enemies—were transformed into character flaws perpetuating Israel’s great sin, the occupation.
Most of these intellectuals didn’t wish to destroy Israel. But our enemies who did want to wipe us out discovered they could hitch a ride on postmodern newspeak. The postmodernists provided the road map. Palestinian terrorists and Iranian Islamists followed along, escalating with postmodern rhetoric, from attacking the occupation to negating Israel entirely. The language was similar even if the conclusions differed.
A key bridge builder here was the Palestinian academic and high priest of postmodernism Edward Said, for decades one of Columbia University’s most famous professors. His influential book Orientalism launched thousands of Western guilt trips, with the blame always placed on “us,” never on “them.” In that spirit, he treated Israel as a colonialist project, denying its legitimacy as a Jewish state.
In his book The Question of Palestine, Said warned Yasir Arafat and the Palestinians that if they remained caught in a local conflict between Arab and Jew, they would lose. Instead, he showed them how to exploit the modern media’s “generalizing tendencies” to link their local conflict to the broader fight against Western racism, colonialism, imperialism, and supremacism—what he called “Orientalism.”
With such accusations spoiling the atmosphere, the institution that in 1947 recognized the need for a Jewish state, the United Nations, became the forum that best illustrated how postmodern rhetoric eased so naturally into anti-Zionism.
Perhaps the most dramatic example occurred in the summer of 2001. After years of planning by the United Nations and the human rights community, the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, meant to be a major step forward in the global fight against racism, turned into a festival of Israel bashing. Delegates to the main conference and the nongovernmental organizations’ parallel meeting repeatedly singled out Israel as the main cause of racism internationally.
Although she ultimately condemned the brutal attacks on Israel and Jews, the UN human rights commissioner who presided over the conference, Mary Robinson, had spent years bashing Israel in postmodern terms. The well-respected president of Ireland from 1990 to 1997, Robinson too quickly replaced the traditional, liberal understanding of human rights as objective and fundamental with a Soviet-tinged postmodern notion that the Western concept of human rights was flawed.
Robinson would later recall that, “when I started back in September of 1997” with her UN job, “I was quite taken aback by how many leaders of developing countries told me, ‘Don’t you know human rights is just a Western stick to beat us with. It is politicized, nothing to do with real concern about human rights.’”
She acknowledged, “There was an element of truth in that.”
Over the years, Robinson became well known for excusing Palestinian violence while exaggerating Israel’s flaws. In May 1998, she defended Palestinian riots as “peaceful assembly.” During the contentious lead-up to the Durban conference, she compared “the historical wounds of anti-Semitism and of the Holocaust on the one hand” with “the accumulated wounds of displacement and military occupation on the other.”
With that kind of moral equivocation at the top, anti-Israel propagandists hijacked the conference. Yasir Arafat felt comfortable coming to what was supposed to be a world anti-racism conference and blasting Israel’s “racist, colonialist conspiracy” against Palestinians. He claimed that “the aim” of the Israeli government “is to force our people to their knees and to make them surrender in order to continue her occupation, settlements and racist practices, so as to liquidate our people.” The result was the Durban debacle, defining Zionism as racism.
The accusation was already decades old, but it’s worth comparing then and now, because the charges landed in a dramatically new environment. In 1975, when the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, calling Zionism racism, our small community of Zionist activists in Moscow was deeply concerned. Soviet law did not ban Zionism, but it did outlaw racism. We feared that the UN declaration gave the Soviets a new pretext to claim they were punishing our Zionist activity as “racist,” to weaken any Western protests. The Soviet campaign against us now seemed to have international approval.
Yet, hearing word of the free world’s support—through the KGB jamming—reassured us. America’s ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, denounced this “infamous act.” Israel’s ambassador Chaim Herzog ripped up the resolution in the General Assembly. Most important of all, the free world voted against the resolution almost as one. So at least we could be confident that the free world was on our side. Soviet propaganda would not fool them.
In December 1991, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, the UN General Assembly actually rescinded the resolution. This was only the second time in its history that the United Nations undid an earlier decision.
Alas, ten years later, a massive ideological hijacking occurred. If the first time the United Nations equated Zionism with racism, the West treated it like a match falling into a puddle of water, this time, thanks to postmodernism, it was like a match falling into a barrel of oil. What Moynihan had called a “Big Red Lie” had entered into the international bloodstream. Whereas in 1975 the free world had mocked the attack, a quarter of a century later many postmodern leaders and thinkers from the free world joined the onslaught.
Postmodernism proved to be a great petri dish for growing the New Anti-Semitism—an irrational hatred against Israel resting on traditional Jew-hatred—and transferring it to the academy. What I started calling “islands of Europe”—universities throughout the world—became the ideological control centers for this attack. The result was what we could call the academic intifada.
Now, Israelis could do no right and Palestinians could do no wrong. I visited some of the departments of Middle Eastern studies, many funded by Saudi oil money. Martin Kramer’s 2001 exposé of the anti-American and anti-Israel bias in Middle Eastern studies departments, Ivory Towers on Sand, would note that as early as 1979, Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, would run a headline, “Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates Are Worth Studying.” These countries and the Saudis, he explained, funded academic departments seeking an “instrument of control” over “American public opinion.” Today, tens of billions of dollars later, these aggressive donors enjoy even more influence.
These departments were particularly shameless in spreading pseudoscientific theories presenting Israel as the last colonial state, whose very existence was immoral regardless of borders, a state that should not exist. Their idea of a panel discussion usually involved three or four critics of Israel—ideally one of them an angry Israeli representing the most marginal, unpatriotic views in Israeli society—vying to outdo one another in Israel bashing. These absurdities only made sense when I viewed them through the lens of The Closing of the American Mind. The liberal, nationalist, critical academy I first encountered a decade or two earlier would have resisted these distortions.
I kept being reminded about one story Bloom told about students dodging moral responsibility. He asked his students, “If you had been a British administrator in India, would you have let the natives under your governance burn the widow at the funeral of a man who had died?” Here was an opportunity for students to defend the fundamental Western value of protecting a human life. Yet most students, Bloom reported, “either remain silent or reply that the British should never have been there in the first place.”
This attitude, when transplanted to the Middle East, was striking. These postmodernists would always rationalize Palestinian terrorism by pointing to the “indigenous people’s” need to fight colonialism. And if Israel, a country that sees itself as part of the free world, could not behave like Switzerland, the natural conclusion would become that Israel “should never have been there in the first place.” This new assumption, lurking in the background, explained how that student at York could tell me that, for him as a liberal Jew, it would be better if Israel didn’t exist.
The fact that the pro-Palestinian, postmodern attack against Israel came waving the banner of human rights made the situation for young Jews particularly difficult. Nevertheless, it explained another mystery: how this ideological assault, of all the ideological assaults we’ve endured over the millennia, threatened Jewish unity so profoundly. By targeting the Jewish nation-state in the name of Diaspora Jewry’s core values and Zionism’s liberal aspirations, it puts Israel on the defensive with many Jews, not just non-Jews.
Truthfully, most Jews in Israel and abroad, from left to right, rallied around Israel during this traumatic time, with support, sympathy, and donations flowing to the state. But the intensity of the attack in places that mattered most to Diaspora Jews—academia, the media, and international organizations—using values that mattered to them, showed a worrying vulnerability. Framing Israel as a human-rights abuser was like sending a guided missile aimed at the most sensitive souls in American Jewry. And the growing number of ideological casualties indicated that the polarization would only get worse.
Over the decades, human rights—and tikkun olam, repairing the world—came to be the defining Jewish value for many liberal American Jews. In fact, the idea of human rights traces back to the wisdom of the Torah, saying all of us are created in God’s image. Thirty-five hundred years later, the Zionist movement wove that biblically rooted, liberal, democratic tradition into Israeli political culture. Nevertheless, the notion of human rights plays a different role in the survival strategies of the two largest Jewish communities in the world today, American Jewry and Israeli Jewry.
We can feel deeply connected as a people and believe that we all share one common Jewish journey, but we have to acknowledge that choosing to live in the United States or Israel means choosing to live a Jewish life in two dramatically different environments. One chooses life as a member of the minority in a free democratic society, where it is easy to abandon your Judaism. The other chooses life as a member of the majority in a Jewish democratic state surrounded by hostile dictatorships seeking to destroy it.
American Jews understand defending freedom as preserving a liberal state that won’t interfere with their individual or collective self-expression. Defending identity, for them, means fighting assimilation while keeping Jews committed to Judaism, in a country where they are welcome to fit in as Americans while fading away as Jews.
Israelis feel compelled to defend their freedom by fighting against numerous enemies seeking their destruction while keeping the state functioning. Defending identity, for them, involves integrating many different Jews into one old-new Israeli Jewish nation.
The Bible introduces us to two heroes who represent contrasting aspects of our heritage: King David and the prophet Isaiah. Each represents a distinct survival strategy. Each symbolizes different routes to Jewish identity. Although a psalmist and harpist, David started out as the young shepherd ready to kill wolves—and giant Philistines—when forced. He ended as the king who, through cunning and charm, united our nation. He represents the impulse to build and defend a sovereign nation in our own homeland.
Isaiah represents our ethical imperative and our message of peace, universalism, and social justice: dreams of lions lying down with lambs. The book of Isaiah also embraces particularism, but modern rabbis and teachers emphasize its liberal dimensions.
While every Jew inherits both lineages, the two communities’ political cultures have different emphases, like two competing political parties balancing priorities. Israelis represent the Davidian party, ready to use brute force to protect Jewish sovereignty when necessary. Liberal American Jews are Isaiahans, most moved by the prophetic teachings, including harsh critiques of power, particularism, and the status quo. Davidians need not negate human rights but won’t prioritize them either. Isaiahans, however, place human rights front and center, both for their sake and for others’.
Davidian Jews also exist in America and Isaiahans in Israel. As with David and Isaiah themselves, both impulses live within every Jew, expressed in different proportions. Just as how, in healthy democracies, passionate debate between rival parties ultimately strengthens the national character, so, too, a constructive debate between Davidian Israelis and American Jewish Isaiahans could strengthen our people. But it rarely happens.
The greatest collision was over the Palestinian question. What Davidians—in Israel and abroad—considered to be a postmodernist, apologetic farce betrayed the basic Jewish patriotism that every good Davidian values. What Isaiahans—abroad and in Israel—considered to be Israel’s too-violent defense of its “indefensible occupation” betrayed the basic liberal Jewish values every good Isaiahan cherishes.
It saddened me that the greatest gap seemed to be opening up between the young, idealistic soldiers serving their country and some of American Jewry’s young, idealistic students imagining a better world. True, when I joined Birthright groups on Mount Herzl, I saw Israelis in military uniforms and Diaspora participants in their civilian garb honoring Israel’s fallen together. But we were hearing more and more stories about the angry, strikingly unpatriotic minority of Isaiahan rebels. The growing fear was that they were not only grabbing the headlines but defining the future of American liberal Jewry.
Even when they were on the fringe, these voices were amplified by intense media coverage and communal hand-wringing. In April 2002, when Israeli troops, at the height of their defense against terrorism, finally surrounded Yasir Arafat’s compound, a young Jew from Brooklyn, Adam Shapiro, visited the notorious terrorist and became an international star. Taking the Isaiahan position to the extreme, Shapiro said he was not acting as a Jew but “as a human being, as an American who has grown up with freedom—seeing what’s happening, the injustice, and wanting to do something about it.”
Shapiro was a rare enough Jew to garner headlines in 2002. But within a few years, my colleague at Shalem College Rabbi Daniel Gordis would describe how many young rabbinical students, raised in universities when Israel was besieged by Arafat’s terrorism, were turning on Israel. One shopped for a tallit that was not made in Israel. Another added the creation of the state of Israel to a list of Jewish moments to mourn. Some even celebrated their birthdays in a bar in Ramallah, posting pictures of themselves online in front of posters “extolling violence against the Jewish state on the wall behind them, downing their drinks and feeling utterly comfortable.”
Putting the PR concerns aside and focusing on our peoplehood problems, I kept wondering, “How could the voice of Israel be heard among Jews through all this sound and fury?” On the grand scale, only through a more effective, honest, even formalized dialogue, appreciating our differences and learning from one another, could we stay together despite being programmed to see things so differently.
Clearly, Israelis underestimated the damage that resulted within the Jewish community from appearing to be against the liberal understanding of peace, human rights, and social justice. And a growing number of young Jews underestimated the real problems Israel faced, with their natural loyalties to their fellow Jews increasingly jammed by the specific propaganda campaign against them and the broader climate of opinion critical of nationalism and Western exceptionalism.
It was also a lost opportunity. In a healthier Jewish political culture, Isaiahans and Davidians would compare their differences to the distinctions between rival political parties in a country’s parliament. One party champions freedom, the other emphasizes identity; one highlights liberalism, the other nationalism. Even while clashing intensely, each faction should be appreciated as the constructive guardian of a valuable dimension of our heritage.
Impassioned but constructive debate between Isaiahans and Davidians would keep rebalancing these important forces. It could even forge exciting, new, Maimonidean golden paths for Israel and Judaism. But because Israelis and Diaspora Jews don’t share the same political stage, and because we often turn nasty when arguing these days, we each fail to benefit from the other’s distinct point of view. The tensions between us fester.
Clearly, improving the dialogue or even just learning to see our differences in context would require a dramatic communal adjustment. More immediately, I looked for concrete steps that I, as a politician, could take to help.
Most practically, as Diaspora affairs minister, I initiated a program through the Jewish Agency to start sending shlichim, emissaries, to this new ideological battlefield of the campuses. The idea was to deploy young Israeli army veterans, who were usually socially liberal and passionately patriotic like most of their peers. They offered a personal touch and a richer perspective to a topic that many students and professors loved to oversimplify. This initiative would become my flagship program at the Jewish Agency years later. Today, Israel Fellows work with students on more than one hundred campuses worldwide.
As we started the program campus by campus, my message to the emissaries was clear: don’t waste your efforts trying to convince our enemies that Israel is better than they think. “That’s not your role,” I told the shlichim. “Your role is to show young American Jews that they have nothing to be ashamed of in Israel. They can disagree with one policy or another of the Israeli government, one politician or another, but Israel and Zionism are much bigger than this stand, that politician.”
As prime minister, Ariel Sharon showed great interest in addressing these internal Jewish tensions. He agreed that we needed to fight for a new Jewish unity within and a new moral clarity worldwide. Looking outward, he also agreed that old-fashioned Jew-hatred had helped fuel the terrorist attacks against Israel and the ideological assaults justifying the violence.
With his backing, I expanded my role as minister of Diaspora affairs to serve as minister against global anti-Semitism too. I turned a small, consultative body that had operated out of the Prime Minister’s Office into the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism. This major international conference in Jerusalem convened the key players in the fight against the New Anti-Semitism. This conference, which still convenes regularly, became my springboard into a larger international fight against this old-new bigotry.