UNTIL RATHER LATE IN LIFE I NEVER THOUGHT THAT FOR an Israeli born in Israel there could be any other model of Jewish identity aside from an Israeli one: dogmatic, absolute, and homogeneous. This identity, which seemed so attractive during a certain period of my life, became complicated and embarrassing during other periods. It was very well-suited to the Orthodox lifestyle into which I was born. There is only one truth, and all secondary principles are derived from and subsumed within it.
My mother, for example, didn’t really care if her granddaughters married men who were professionals, what they looked like, or what opinions they held. The only question she ever asked was “Does he put on tefillin?” She didn’t have comparable questions for her grandsons’ brides, because her Orthodox Judaism did not regard women as having any significant binding religious identity in their own right. In the Orthodox world I formerly inhabited there could be no Orthodox Jew who had more than one pair of tefillin, more than one truth, more than one definition, one question, or one answer. Our Orthodoxy was not limited to the religious realm alone; it was an organized worldview that extended out to everything else.
My total Israeli Orthodoxy limited my own truth, as well as my Jewish and universal truths, to a very local worldview. The Israeli truth took captives, and the Jewish truth was held prisoner. But no longer. “My soul still longs for freedom,” as the poet Shaul Tchernichovsky wrote. I wish to bring this freedom of the soul from every end of the earth to all my relatives, to an Israeli reality that is so tortured and complicated.
My daughter Avital and her partner Yonatan have lived in New York for several years now. She is completely secular, and she has nothing but disdain and scorn for all the religious institutions and rituals in Israel. “We,” she and her partner announced, “will never get married. We love each other, and we don’t need any institution to authorize us to build a family or to bring children into the world.” I appreciate their purely principled stance, and I agree with them. And so, it’s hard to describe my shock when I learned that they had begun attending synagogue and participating in various communal activities in New York.
“Why, Avital?” I asked her, perplexed.
“Because here no one is judging me,” she responded. “Here it’s just fun. No one remarks on when I show up, or why I wasn’t there last week. No one cares if I walk to synagogue or take the subway. No one dares to stick their nose into my spiritual affairs. No one measures the length of my skirt and my sleeves. Here I’m free.” I understood, and I was even a bit jealous.
In New York, where she discovered an alternative to the Israeli way of life, I discovered running. I spent a lot of time outdoors. I loved that blend of the city and the greenery within it and around it, and I was inspired by the multitude of runners who fill the parks and gardens. I started running myself, perhaps to feel part of this phenomenon. I came back to Israel from one trip with leggings—tight running pants to avoid chafing, the latest thing in athletic technology. One of the local papers published a paparazzi photo of me, with the caption, “Avrum Burg was seen running vigorously around the Knesset in tight leggings. What, him too?” In the United States, running was a sign of a healthy lifestyle, but here, in lower Jerusalem, running in leggings awakens all the homosexual demons from their slumber.
As the years went on and I took on various public roles, I again and again encountered these deep gulfs in the spiritual make-up of Jewish life. In the West, if you declare, “I believe in democracy, I’m bound by the Constitution, I fight for the legal equality of all citizens—men and women, believers and atheists—I support the separation of religion and state and advocate for an equitable distribution of common resources,” you are essentially a run-of-the-mill democrat. If you make those same statements in Israel, affirming those very same values, you are a traitor, an unpatriotic fifth column, and the rest of those derogatory terms. In Israel, they never informed me that there could be any kind of Jewish soul other than ours. But there, in the Jewish community in North America, I learned a completely new Jewish vocabulary.
JEWS AND WORDS WERE BORN TOGETHER LIKE CONJOINED twins. But sometimes they are conjoined in uncomfortable places. I’ve sat in many meetings about ways of improving the relationship between Israel and the diaspora. Each time a zealous Hebraist took his turn to speak—and there was always someone—he would put forth the same proposal, dressed up exactly the same way: “We need every Jew in the diaspora to learn a hundred words in Hebrew, because Hebrew is what we all have in common.”
At first, I listened raptly. After all, words are the foundation of human civilization. And there’s no reason for the Hebrew language not to be the foundation for a renewed Jewish civilization. Back then I had still not mastered any language; I knew how to communicate and express myself, but not how to listen. And even when I listened, it was just for my own needs, not to really pay attention to the voice of the other. So, I didn’t understand that these Hebraists too were trying to impose their Israeli sensibilities and were not prepared to listen to the different sensibilities of millions of Jews who are not Israeli and often not Zionist. Their identity is diasporic and not necessarily Zionist. Their Judaism is comprehensive, but not bound to this place. It is fully independent and liberated, though not sovereign and ruling. During my first years in public life I could not conceive of a worldview that was not Israeli, or a Jewish tradition that was not sovereign, but rather diasporic, full, interesting, deep, tolerant, pluralistic, and almost entirely unapologetically so. I’ve since learned a thing or two.
Beginning in 1982, my adult life unfolded on the flight paths between Israel and America. The scope of America captivated me. I acquired many key life skills there. My English is very American. In America, they are fully accepting of those with imperfect language and communication skills. You don’t need to know the complete writings of Mark Twain in order to participate in the American conversation. It is enough just to watch television and read newspapers and contemporary literature in order to engage with them.
It was in America that I taught myself public speaking—how to stand before an audience. And here I must make an important distinction: I learned there how to open my mouth and declaim, but not how to open my ears and listen.
Every time I traveled to North America, I made every effort to be there on a Sunday. I was addicted to the evangelical channels, to the orations of charismatic preachers who saturated the American media. I sat for hours glued to the screen, hypnotized. I tried to learn from them how to stand before a crowd of thousands of impassioned believers in stadiums, rousing them with talk of miracles and ancient texts, like the ecstatic communion of the preacher with his disciples. Their ministers’ words, however, seemed as trite and simplistic as the hollow words of Torah taught by many rabbis in Israel.
On the other hand, the blend of mass fervor and individual charisma, of television and stardom, was staggeringly new for me. Instead of a television in the closet—like my yeshiva rabbi had—here was someone just like him, appearing on television himself. I’m embarrassed to say that it was there that I learned how to be a modern Israeli politician, speaking in a way that could not be more different than the sterile sermons of the study hall and casuistry of my teachers and parents’ home. To this day, whenever I stand before an audience, I often suddenly find myself using techniques I learned there—energetic movement across the stage, dramatic pauses, raising the voice and whispering, moments of humor to break up the monotony, and excited flourishes to rouse the crowd.
There was one televangelist in particular whose techniques were spellbinding—Jimmy Swaggart. When he sensed that his audience was not 100 percent with him, because he had either aimed too high with his fervor or exaggerated his dramatic flourish, he would stop for a moment, as if he couldn’t think of the next word. He’d ask the thousands of people out there, “Wait, how do you say that again?” and the whole audience would join in to help out its floundering icon. The term “transitional word” took on an entirely different meaning with him. It linked him with his followers, powerfully and intimately, like my parents, who would ask each other the same question: “Wait, how do you say that again?” And then Swaggart would go back to raging and roiling.
It was a magnificent technique, intended not just to bind the audience to him, but also to slow himself down from time to time, to adjust his pace, to breathe, to swallow, to reflect on his next words, which would in any case roll off his tongue like an avalanche. And his manipulative question, “How do you say that again?” sensitized me to the gulf between Israeli Hebrew and Jewish Hebrew. Each time I asked an American Jewish audience, “How do you say that again?” I was surprised once again by the breadth of their vocabulary. They knew Hebrew words that very few in my Israeli community would ever dare to use. The zealous Hebraists in Jerusalem wanted—and perhaps still want—every Jew living abroad to know a hundred words like “table,” “chair,” “hot dog,” “bus,” “government,” “nation,” “boy,” “girl,” and “soldiers.” But the Americans knew words from my mother’s Hebrew, Hebrew words derived from Yiddish. Words like: “repairing the world,” “righteousness,” “charity,” “loving-kindness,” and “justice.” Our Hebrew is practical, useful, applied. Their Hebrew, which came straight from Jewish tradition, was a language of values, morals, and Jewishness. Many of our words are very new; many of their words are very old. And one’s vocabulary is a testament to one’s mental state.
It seems that these two vocabularies also reflect the different values, conceptions, and worldviews of these two nonidentical twin communities. I flitted between Israel and America hundreds of times. I was in Afula and then New Jersey, Sderot and then El Paso. Back and forth. I felt fortunate, because I lived at once in both universes, in Israel and in the diaspora. Here and there. Seventy-eight percent of world Jewry lives in Israel and the United States, and I, lucky guy, got to live in both. I learned to distinguish between our existential definitions and theirs. The Jewish identity of American Jews revolves around the religious axis. If they are somewhat nationalist, it is a very different nationalism from that of their Israeli sister. Public space, communal life, and the Jewish sphere of private life are largely defined by religious concepts, holidays, customs, and traditions: the huge Chanukah menorah in the main square of the big city, or the Passover Seder in the White House. Shabbat is a weekly opportunity to engage with friends and community, and bar and bat mitzvah celebrations are often the first occasion for real engagement with one’s Jewish identity. Israeli Judaism, in contrast, revolves much more around national definitions. The State, an entity that did not exist just a few generations ago, defines, binds, and rallies the Jewish populace in Israel.
After many years of constant back-and-forth between here and there, I arrived at an impasse. My identity is not defined by the totality of Israel nationalism, but I’ve also learned that the pluralistic, innovative Jewish identity of North American Jews is not enough to fill the void inside me. My late sister was a linguist. Once she taught me that biblical Hebrew has a vocabulary of about eight thousand words. In the Mishnaic period, that number doubled, and in the Middle Ages another five thousand words were added to the mix. There are about twenty-five thousand words that have shaped some of the greatest works of human culture. But in modern Hebrew there are two hundred thousand words, and contemporary English has nearly a million. In this gulf between Hebrew and the languages of the New World, I lack a new language with terms, concepts, and an internal grammar, which Hebrew today, and its speakers, cannot provide.
I REMEMBER VERY CLEARLY THE MOMENT IN THE EARLY 2000s that my national language fell apart. I was sitting in a Jerusalem café with Barbara. I had known her for a long time, always exchanging hellos, but not more than that. Her partner, Phil Pinchas, was for many years the leader of the Conservative Jewish, or Masorti, community in Israel. My children had been members of its youth movement, Noam. I always considered him to be a kind of spiritual pioneer, who had the courage to confront, sometimes almost alone, the powerful establishments of religious conservatism in Israel, with which I had been personally familiar. I sat opposite her, a short woman who spoke fluent scholarly Hebrew with an American accent, and suddenly I felt a powerful current flowing from her toward me.
She told me about a project she had started in Sweden called Paideia, a one-year program of Judaic studies for young Jews from across Europe. Among other things, she said, “European Jewry was always a body of ideas.” From then on I wasn’t listening to her anymore. I said yes to all her requests, and was transported by her words to the highest heavens.
I understood. To be precise, I began to understand. Barbara didn’t know that with her powerful words she had opened one of the doors that had been locked for me all my life. I knew that there was a Jewish world much broader than what I was familiar with. I sensed it, but my consciousness refused to acknowledge it. The heart conceals from the mouth, in the words of an Aramaic saying. Until Barbara came and uncovered what was obscured and hidden. For many months I listened and tried to understand my feelings. I listened to the students of Paideia in Stockholm. Young Europeans, looking no different from my children here and my friends and their children in North America, along the universal range between jeans and H&M fashion. Up until the moment when the conversation with them began and the substantive differences emerged almost immediately, they were European intellectuals. Some of them Jews, for whom it’s natural to come and study the Jewish texts and sages, and some not. Their coming to Paideia was understandable given their geographic and spiritual circumstances.
Like the lawyer, a secular Muslim, a Shiite from Azerbaijan who worked for NATO, who realized that she didn’t sufficiently understand the West and came to study Judaism for that purpose. Or another person of part-Jewish descent who came to study Judaism in order to know and better understand. And a third, a Catholic woman who was studying Yiddish poetry because she wanted to restore Yiddish to its grand and missing place in the fabric of cultural life of contemporary Poland. Every one of them had new ideas, daring and inspiring, regarding European life. Just a few hundred graduates who carried on their young shoulders more than a third of the renewal initiatives of the Jewish communities in Europe. They are living a heritage of ideas, of multiplicity, and not reduction. Of constant expansion made possible, after years of sadness and pain, by the reunion of eastern and western Europe.
The young people in Stockholm, Jews and non-Jews together, are not only breaking through the European walls that were once there. In their small cultural patch, they are reviving, almost from scratch, parts of European Jewry that were destroyed, along with their conversation with the non-Jewish environment. A Judaism of ideas as an experimental model that can be much broader and larger. They are growing a third Jewish identity, neither Israeli nor American, but European. For them it is natural and normal, for me it is new and exciting.
EUROPE WAS ONCE IMPORTANT FOR THE ENTIRE WORLD. Today it is somewhere on the sidelines. Its tourist sites are still breathtakingly beautiful, its cuisines admired, and its landscapes well kept, but still, something is missing. It isn’t as important as it was in the past and it does not lead the world. The West talks a great deal about its decline, about the rise of other forces in the East and the Far East that will replace it in coming human history. Every time I go into a bookstore in the United States, I’m amazed by the huge abundance of writing and thought about the end of the West, the collapse of the United States and Europe, or just musings about the end of civilization as we know it. But for me, Europe is still an attractive and interesting place with a great deal of potential. Because new opportunities can spring from the place where all was broken. It is a continent composed of societies and communities that have known how to reinvent themselves time and again, reborn for the future. Maybe I’m a hopeless romantic, but I see what doesn’t exist. At the same time, the Europeans themselves, especially those who are pessimistic and melancholy, can’t see what outsiders like me see.
“Fifty-two percent of the students in Amsterdam schools are not originally Dutch,” a Dutch friend of mine said, struggling to come up with clean language for what she saw as a faulty reality, using a politically correct euphemism.
“Which means?” I asked.
“Which means that in a few more years more than fifty percent of the residents of Amsterdam will be Muslim. We’ve already lost Rotterdam,” she blurted. Unlike her right-wing, Islamophobic partner, she traditionally voted for the social-democratic party. She was thinking about Amsterdam, which for many years was called the “city of freedom,” and I was thinking about the demography of Jerusalem, “the holy city,” and I wondered if it too was lost.
“Malmö has long been part of the Middle East,” a Swedish travel agent warned. “And Israel is no longer Europe,” I responded.
“The Germans control Europe again, nothing has changed. We just wasted two world wars,” claimed a French intellectual in a research institute where I am a fellow.
“No one has the courage to stand up to Russia, it is waiting for our downfall,” was the gist of a discussion there about the future of relations between the new Europe and the new Russia.
There are Europeans who see their own half-empty glass better than anyone else, and sometimes when the atmosphere is conducive to it, and I feel that people are listening, I tell them an anecdote from my parliamentary past.
One day, in the nineties, when I was still a member of the Knesset, I learned an important lesson. There were only a few Knesset members in the plenum. Charlie Bitton, a very kind person, though a very angry Knesset member from the Black Panthers, a social protest movement of Sephardic Jews, lashed out at the finance minister, who stood at the podium. Bitton was dark-skinned, short, and energetic, and the minister was fat, light-complexioned, and almost indifferent. The day’s topic was yet another boring deliberation about the government’s budget. The minister—from my party—was very satisfied with his budget proposal, but Bitton, the social activist who knew poverty and human needs, was not at all.
“Charlie, why don’t you see the glass is half full?” I shouted at him, in a support for “my” government policy.
He turned to me, his eyes blazing with anger. “Burg, you Ashkenazi shit, have you ever tried drinking from the empty half of the glass?”
It was so biting and painful a retort that I shut up, silent and embarrassed. In the struggle between my smugness and his suffering I realized that he was right and I was wrong. I respected him then and have liked him since. For his directness, dedication, and courage to go against the flow of where he had come from. As a lesson, I tell my European friends and partners, “You are in such a unique position in history, you are not the Bittons of the world, so why are you so depressed? You have the most wonderful empty half of the glass. Drink from it.” Yes, there are difficulties in your (our) European utopia; racism has not yet fully surrendered, ultranationalism is shocking the foundations of continental solidarity, new hatreds (xenophobia, Islamophobia, and more) join the bad old ones (like anti-Semitism). But still it is such an amazing achievement. The blood-soaked continent has once again renewed itself almost to the level of the biblical prophecy of Isaiah (2:4): “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” So be careful but happy, pay attention, and celebrate it.
MANY YEARS AGO, ON THE EVE OF ROSH HASHANAH, I sat in my car stuck in a typical Jerusalem traffic jam. The air conditioning in the car didn’t work, and the open windows let in only heat and exhaust from neighboring cars. In the car with me were my father and Itay, my firstborn son. The radio report said that the jam was caused by a suspicious object downtown. “You and your Arabs,” my adolescent son snapped at me, the child who knows better than any of them how to cut with laser-like accuracy to the core of my soul. As I was thinking about my answer, my elderly father took the reins of the conversation from the back seat.
“Yingele,” he said with the nickname reserved for me when I was a child. “Everything going on between us and the Arabs is nothing compared to what happened between us and the Germans, and lo and behold, we’re riding in a German car.” It was a battered Volkswagen station wagon. “And with the new Germany we have wonderful relations. The Germans did much more to us than the Palestinians ever will, or than we will do to them. Don’t be angry with me, but in your lifetime, there will be peace between you and them.”
Dad meant it when he said “between you and them,” excluding himself. Until his last day, he was at least half European, contrary to us Asians. His European half saw much larger pictures than just the Holocaust, Jews, and Germans. He had just returned from his first visit to East Germany, to Dresden, his beloved and sad native city. He had seen and understood where it was all going. “The new Europe is a prophetic story,” he would tell me repeatedly, sharing his comprehensive historical perspective. “Who would have believed that Europe, the most violent continent, in whose fields everyone shed everyone’s blood for a thousand years, would one day lay down its swords and become the ultimate continent of peace?”
I thought about him not long ago when I was driving on the highway in Austria and saw a giant billboard encouraging young people to join the Austrian army. What? Austria has an army? It turns out that in western Europe there are at least twenty-seven armies, with twenty-seven chiefs of staff and an identical number of air forces, headquarters, and nattily attired military bands. What do they need them for? It turns out that young people are joining the armies of Europe in order to serve in peacekeeping forces, on missions of rescue, mediation, and separation of forces in the most violent conflict zones in the world. The ways of the world are strange. Until recently, Austrian troops were divided between Israel and Syria. I would have never known about it were it not for a newspaper article that dealt with the difficulties faced by the Austrian logistics units. They were having trouble transporting the traditional portions of pork and Christmas trees to their brave soldiers because of the opposition of Jewish rabbis on one side and Muslim imams on the other. It was as if the messiah had come: Austrian soldiers bodily separating Jews from their enemies.
MY FIRST MEANINGFUL PUBLIC MEETING WITH EUROPE went badly awry. I was the chairman of the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization from 1995 to 1999. With two close friends, the late Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress, and his secretary-general, the wonderful and fascinating Israel Singer, we declared war on the Swiss banks who had hidden in their safes dormant accounts and concealed treasures of European Jews from the Holocaust period. For months, we clashed with them in all the international media. We mercilessly hammered away at them with the demagogic rhetoric of those who know that the other side cannot respond. The Swiss bankers made every possible mistake. They denied, lied, contradicted themselves, and could not understand where this Jewish avalanche had come from. It was the mid-nineties; the Soviets and Communists were no longer the international bad guys. Fundamentalist Islam had still not made its presence felt in the international arena. The media gleefully pursued the story we had provided about the Swiss bad guys.
I liked this struggle. I took part in meetings in Zurich, where I was accompanied by local bodyguards. The newspaper headlines called me “an enemy of the Swiss public,” and the threatening letters kept coming. I discovered the international political stage and I thought it was right for me. This contest was also rooted in my own desire to understand the Holocaust and deal with it. All I knew was that this was the opportunity of my generation, and maybe the last chance to get a measure of accountability for the survivors and the victims. I had two motivations: the first, to right past injustices despite the time that had passed; the second, to uncover all the information about the economic aspect of the Holocaust. How did the Jews live? What did the grocer in Chenstokhov do with the money he had saved? Who were the beneficiaries of Grandfather and Grandmother’s old insurance policies? What happened to the wedding presents of couples who never raised a family? And where were my grandmother’s earrings?
At some point, at the height of this tremendous struggle, everything went wrong and I retreated. What had been a demand for justice and uncovering the whole truth ended up with me and my colleagues haggling over money. And this realm of Jews and money was precisely everyone’s comfort zone. The bankers understood money, greedy lawyers in the United States filed astronomic class-action lawsuits, Jewish organizations drew up generous budgets, and the anti-Semites enjoyed seeing us fall in line with their stereotype. Without saying a word to anyone I stopped coming to the meetings. I distanced myself. I didn’t have the resolve to come out publicly against my colleagues, but I felt bad inside. Jews and money is a Shakespearean play. It might have fit the diaspora mentality, but not my Israeli perception of the new Jewish identity. It would be almost another decade before I returned to Europe.
THE EUROPE I’M NOW GETTING TO KNOW OFFERS A wonderful model of kaleidoscopic identity. A new patriotism that doesn’t need bloodshed and militaristic violence to preserve and express its patriotism. A Europe struggling to find and preserve all its identities and communities, together with those of its recently arrived new immigrants. The United States of America is an empire that erases identities. True, everyone there is proud of his or her particular roots, but the collective citizenry does not allow or tolerate any nationalism other than the American one.
This America always reminds me of the ancient kingdom of Judea. At its core was the hegemonic tribe of Judah, which swallowed its neighbors and turned the sons of Shimon, along with the Canaanites and the Philistines, into Jews. Today this tribe of Judah lives across the Atlantic Ocean. The kingdom of Judea of North America assimilates everything. In contrast to the United States, the changing and renewed Europe seems to me very similar to the ancient kingdom of Israel, a society of differences. An alliance of the rest of the Israelite tribes that was the bitter rival of Judea. It was not given an adequate place of honor in our collective memory, perhaps because the history we are familiar with was written by the historians of the kingdom of Judea, which outlasted it. But precisely that kingdom can be the ideological basis for a federation of the different. The kingdom of Israel of Europe is a federation with many expressions, pluralistic and varied in its culture and content, mainly because of the experience of its people, who are going through a wonderful metamorphosis. Once when I would think about Europe, it was always two-dimensional: Dad and the gentiles, Israel and the Holocaust. Today it is entirely different.
“Look at this room, look around you,” the late Zygmunt Bauman, one of the great sociologists of our generation, told me. We were in Vienna, at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue, the year was 2012, before Brexit and the refugees, prior to Trump’s era. “What do you see?”
I saw Rob, whose parents are from Jamaica and today is from London; Zia the Englishman, from a Muslim Bangladeshi family, and today his identity is much more augmented; Sayida the German judge whose parents are from Turkey; Andre the Jew from Morocco; Julia from Poland; Ivan the Bulgarian; Gertraud, from the Bruno Kreisky Forum; and the German-born Lars, now living in Amsterdam.
“You understand,” he said, referring me to a quote from his latest book, “this is Europe! Abundant variety is the most precious treasure that Europe has succeeded in saving from the great conflagrations of the past, and offers it to the world today.” Then he expanded on the subject in a lecture, quoting the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer: “To live with the other, to live as the other’s other, that is the basic human task—on both the lowest and loftiest levels. That is perhaps the unique advantage of Europe, which was able and must learn the art of living with others.”*
This could be so fitting for our varied society in Israel, and we can be part of this mosaic. But Israel, unfortunately, has only an American strategy. We have no European strategy, though we need it more than ever. And we don’t leave openings for European influences. We’re attentive to the best of American junk—from food and music to politics and arms, never to the Constitution and civil rights. With Europe, it is even worse; we have nothing to do with the social, cultural, and moral processes at work there. It would be appropriate for us if only because Europe is an accessible tourist destination for the average Israeli, and for Israeli statesmen of recent generations a generous source of guilt feelings, credit on which they can draw for any negative action, injustice, or mistake by Israel, and have European officials sign off on it. Otherwise, from the Israeli political perspective, Europe is a nuisance that Israel would do best to ignore. I have no doubt that Europe has the rare ability for renewal and reinvention. It has done it so many times in the past, and its renewal mechanisms are working now again with full force.
Who would have believed me if I had said during the Spanish Inquisition that one day all of Europe would be a secular continent? I would have likely ended my life on the torture rack somewhere in the dungeons of Madrid. And if I had whispered to Martin Luther that one day there would be on his land a secular sect far bigger than the Catholic sect or its Protestant offspring—one that is completely indifferent to religious differences—I have no doubt what his reaction would have been. And when the Turks were at the gates of Vienna, it is doubtful if anyone imagined that one day there would be a discussion about including Turkey in the European Union, not to mention the millions of Muslim migrants that are changing its social fabric beyond recognition. Who believed 150 years ago that Europe would be the world’s continent of peace? Nobody! Germany and France leading together? Impossible! A small, neutral, peaceable Austria? An Italy that was not militaristic? Peace-loving Nordic peoples? Naïve nonsense. And still, the facts speak for themselves. It’s not easy; new encounters produce discord and dangers. And still, it is happening.
And indeed, something almost biblical is happening to the old continent. European history is replete with all manner of horrors, bloodshed, persecution, and hatred. And now, as if magically transformed, Europe is a continent of peace. Only a few people, such as Stefan Zweig and his colleagues, thought seventy years ago that it was possible and desirable, and that Europe’s politics would look like this. Open borders, a genuine effort to include the other, with all the difficulties and problems, a real commitment to end wars, expand democracy and the discourse on rights, combine a growing economy with social justice, and make peace wherever possible. For Europeans, these are often pressing challenges. But to me and others looking from the outside, it looks like the realization of the ancient prophecy of turning swords into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks.
In 1989, I watched the fall of the Berlin Wall, like the rest of the world, on television. It was strange to see history in your bedroom, like a passive voyeur, like Dad eighty years ago from the window of his room in Dresden. I didn’t think at the time that this wall would open many private boxes that were hidden somewhere inside me without my knowing they were there. I was born in a divided city with a wall running through it, Jerusalem. I came of age when it was divided without a wall, and it remains that way, painfully for me. A wall, I learned in Jerusalem, is not only a structure of concrete and cement. It is first and foremost a state of mind. A wall between people whose foundations are a separation between souls and consciousness. This is the polarized message that keeps coming from “the united city,” from the “eternal capital” of Israeli transience. It seems that the tangible Berlin Wall fell only after the walls in the consciousness of the adversaries collapsed. With an elegant European delay of forty-five years, World War II ended. The time of disconnection ended, and the time of connection began.
European individuals toppled barriers well before their political leaders. Gertraud, my friend and colleague, who makes possible most of the European projects I’m involved in, was born in Austria. At a very young age she abandoned the good old but oppressive Austrian world order and moved to Paris. Later she married the Italian Gian Battista and raised his children. He lived in Monaco, she in Vienna again, and the two of them together in Sardinia. She speaks German, Italian, French, and English fluently, and when I met her, she was busy studying Hebrew. She moves easily between eastern and western Europe, between the north and south, between the Middle East and Europe, and especially between the Austrian and Jewish past. She is the most wall-free person I know.
I got to know my friend Ivan through her. He was born in Sofia, but every time I look for him he is in another city somewhere in the world. He is a fascinating partner to many discussions and thoughts, and very wise in the ways of political history and political science. He has a penetrating worldview and a rare ability to connect deep historical currents with the latest headlines, and to explain almost everything that is incomprehensible in our contemporary life. He is a Bulgarian whose children study in Vienna and who is a member of some very prestigious American research institutes. “How do systems collapse, how do empires end, how does a culture vanish? I know. I was born there,” he says of himself and the European environments in which he lives.
Martin is the president of the European Parliament, born in Germany, a socialist. He is fluent in English, German, and French. He is proficient not only in the political register of those languages, but in the cultural, literary, and spiritual depth of every one of them. He understands the Middle East better than many, knows the inner recesses of Turkey, and is familiar with every nuance of European politics. He is attentive to everyone, but also expressive. He may become the leader of all of Europe one day.
Danny Cohn-Bendit is Jewish. His parents escaped from Germany to France during World War II and returned when it was over. Danny grew up in Germany, and in the mid-sixties arrived in France to study. He was the leader most identified with the student unrest in Paris in 1968. He later returned to Germany, always active and involved. An intellectual and an activist. In Germany, he became the deputy mayor of Frankfurt. At the end of the nineties, he returned to European politics, this time from the French side, as the candidate of the French Green Party to the European Parliament.
These are all my friends. Unlike me, whose identity is only Israeli, their identities are complex from birth, layered and sophisticated. They broke down the walls of Europe long before masses of Berliners took hammers and pickaxes in hand and smashed the concrete wall. All these were what my father was and could have been were it not for that cursed war and this country, afflicted by the war’s malignant metastases. Maybe I’m wrong, and he would not have managed to break down his own walls. Maybe his great spiritual affinity with Jewish Eastern Europe and its shtetl romanticism would have bested him. But we—his children and grandchildren—could have been… actually, I can’t bear the thought. It’s too difficult and frightening.
And still, “Europe is a body of ideas.” It gave birth to movements of religious reformation, psychology, and the sciences, unique aesthetics, ideologies and philosophies, churches and beliefs, Zionism and Jewish Orthodoxy, and ultra-Orthodoxy. Not necessarily religious, not essentially nationalist. But generating ideas and trends. Part of it expelled Dad and me before I was born, and part of it made room even for people like me. It was a place of paradoxes, from which humanity’s worst ideas emerged, along with some of the worst ideas of contemporary Judaism. But the seeds of equality were also sown in it, the sanctity of the different, human liberties, and everything that is sacred to me. And in the midst of all these, the Jews of central and western Europe were like the fermenting yeast causing the dough to rise. In recent times Europe has also been the most fascinating laboratory I know for searching for the place of the “other.” Again, at the forefront of Western and global innovation.
After many years, actually most of my life, in which I was just a total Israeli, I find myself more similar to my parents. Today I have a dual identity. I’m a European Israeli. My partner immigrated to Israel from France as a child. Her parents live in Jerusalem and physically live the existential duality. All their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren are Israeli. All their hopes and frustrations are channeled to this place. Their home is the most Israeli place possible, and at the same time an island of European French refinement with all its manners and culture in the heart of a hidden Jerusalem garden. They have a dual identity and culture. French Israelis, simultaneously Jewish and European. Traditional people in their personal life, committed to a public sphere that sanctifies the secularism of the state, the famous French laïcité. I learned from them the essence of the French conception of secularism, freedom of religion and freedom from religion. Religion has no foothold in the institutions of the state, and the state is not involved in what goes on in the religious sphere. At the time of writing, this concept has no Hebrew entry in Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, and I wonder if it is a coincidence that there is one in Turkish and even in Esperanto, but not in Hebrew.
When I left the Knesset in 2004, I knew that I wanted to embark on a journey to my roots, in the internal direction of Europe. I could have gotten a German passport as my father’s son, maintaining his citizenship that had been cut off by the sundering violence of the previous century, and I could have requested French citizenship by virtue of my marriage to a French citizen. I devoted much thought to the subject. Doubling my identity, and the point of entry to that status, preoccupied me. In the end, I realized that there were no gates more symbolic than the French and German ones. I come from Israel, one of the most emphatic nation-states in the world. The old Germany presented the world with a concept of a nation based on a shared blood bond. France, which had its own set of problems, presented the model of a nation based on shared culture and civic values. On the one hand, I’m fascinated by and very much like what is happening today in the new Germany. In every World Cup, I root for the German soccer team. It’s enough for me to see Germany’s national team, composed of so many players of different origins cooperating under the same flag—Poles, Turks, North Africans, all of them German—to remind me that people, collectively and privately, are always open to change. I am a big believer in partnerships of ideas, alliances of values, and I have no commitment to genetic tribalism, not even to the Israeli blood-bonded nation emerging around me. The new Germany today is very far from those blood-based concepts. On the other hand, the symbolism of the past stopped me. From that point, the decision was simple.
I applied for French citizenship in addition to my Israeli citizenship. Like my partner and children. Like many of my friends. Considerable public fury, scathing criticism, and bitter cynicism have been directed at me since. As if people were doubting my patriotic allegiance. Because I’m no longer a public figure, I don’t really care about the criticism, which is superficial and hollow anyway. Few people really take the trouble to listen to the reasons. Most prefer to hurl “your French passport” at me in order to avoid dealing with my Israeli criticism. I don’t really need another passport. I returned my diplomatic passport, for which I have lifetime eligibility as a former Knesset speaker, to the authorities, and I never asked to have it renewed. Both because I was never elected to be a “former” and because I want to have freedom of opinion and expression, including harsh criticism of the country, its behavior, and its leaders. For that reason, I can’t travel the world with a representative passport without representing Israel. I have paid my public dues to society and I don’t want to continue being a representative stuffed animal, as some would like me to be. From the start, I wanted a European passport to get to places I can’t reach with my Israeli passport. I’ve already been to Yemen to help the small Jewish community that remains there, I’ve explored whether I could get to Syria, and Tehran is also a goal on my map. I’ve been in all sorts of places, and I want to reach others, to speak with the local people and build human bridges to places where political ties and the Israeli passport still cannot reach. Along with the storm of controversy, I discovered more layers I hadn’t thought of originally regarding the places I aspire to reach. They are not only physical and political places, but mainly ideological spaces found beyond today’s Israeli conceptual world.
AS ISRAELI JEWS, WE HAVE AN AGGRESSIVE AND INSENSITIVE basic assumption that all Jews in the world are committed to dual allegiance: to their countries of citizenship—the United States, Britain, France, and the rest of the world—and to another country, Israel. At times, we exploit this duality with brutal cynicism, as was the case with Jonathan Pollard and with Ben Zygier, “Prisoner X.” Zygier was an Australian Israeli citizen, a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces, and allegedly also a Mossad agent. He died in custody in 2010, apparently by hanging himself in a suicide-proof maximum-security cell. While he was imprisoned, he was referred to as Prisoner X, Mr. X, or Mister X.
I have nothing but contempt for this cynicism. I adamantly oppose this emotional manipulation and don’t want to be part of it. Pollard is the best-known but definitely not the only person whom various Israeli agencies have used against his or her countries, regardless of the high prices for them personally or even of endangering the well-being of their entire Jewish communities. I want to offer an alternative. For me, being part of the “nation of the world” is to have dual responsibility, which is the complete opposite of the conventional divided and dual allegiance. The meaning of dual responsibility is simple: I do my best on behalf of members of my Israeli community, and at the same time I am committed to a better world according to my values. That is why anywhere and in any way that I can fight those who ruin the world, I am committed to this dual responsibility.
Europe is not just a geographic place; it is also a value system that I am trying to expand so that it envelops our lives and the lives of the Palestinians. I watch with great sadness the pessimism that drives the wheels of our region. Even the greatest believers in peace between us and the Palestinians find it hard to form images of a sustainable future for the State of Israel and the State of Palestine together. It seems that psychologically the terrestrial space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is too small to contain such giant and hurt egos like those of the Israeli and Palestinian collectives. Peoples like ours need wide open spaces after the end of the wars and traumas. And still, I truly believe that our iconic conflict, between Israelis and Palestinians, can become an iconic solution, one that will be an inspiration to peoples in conflict and areas still driven by hatred and distrust.
I know that the reality I’m dreaming about is no more than a utopia at this stage in our history. For every one of us bearing the burden of being Israeli—earning a livelihood, wars, fears, and pressures—it is no more than a vision. “Maybe,” I tell people in the heat of debate, “but it is my north star. It can’t always be reached, but you can always navigate toward it. What’s your star?”
Sometimes I tell them about the once-in-a-lifetime event in which science met the faith of my childhood. On every first Saturday night of the new Hebrew month we would go out to the synagogue courtyard right after services, crane our necks, and try to see the thin crescent of the new moon. We would say the prayer of the new moon as we faced it, dancing a bit and reciting, “Just as I dance before you and cannot touch you, so will my enemies be unable to touch me.” Like other prayers, this was another protective layer of the constantly fearful Jew. When I was fourteen, Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and my father went through a minor theological crisis. “I don’t know,” he wondered aloud at the Sabbath table, “whether now that man has touched the moon, the prayer for the new moon should be changed, or whether our enemies will now be able to harm us.”
That landing on the moon, which seemed impossible, which changed the world and caused my father to ponder a taboo—a tiny religious reform—is for me a source of inspiration. In almost every matter I deal with, I begin with the basic question, who is “the man on the moon” of this issue? What is the most far-fetched vision I can think of, and what are the paths leading to it? I have no doubt that I will live to see the day in which Israeli-Palestinian peace, based on principles of freedom, human dignity, equality, justice, and democracy, will be possible and self-evident. We will touch the moon, and the persecution will stop. I’m convinced that between the Jordan River and the sea every person must have the same rights. Such full equality between Israelis and Palestinians will be a source of peace that will radiate positively across the Mediterranean region, to southern Europe and to Muslim North African lands.
IN MANY RESPECTS, ISRAEL IS A MICROCOSM OF THE WEST. What takes place here frenetically occurs in the West at a more measured pace. War, terrorism, a weakening of liberal values, strange political leaders, xeno- and Islamophobias, and setbacks to democracy as well as hesitant peace, and the dynamics of history. Our world is shrinking into social network ghettos, and a media-driven politics focused on presidential tweets is undermining idea-based discourse. The roots of our contemporary reality, however, are much deeper and older. One of the most significant starting points of our time is World War I; that conflict, a century ago, gave birth to the world order that we now are leaving. The demise of the Ottoman Empire happened then, the new Soviet empire was born, and in the West, the stars and stripes of the United States began to light up the sky as it joined—and increasingly shaped—the new world order. The process was completed by the end of World War II, with the defeated nations, Germany, Italy, and Japan, enthusiastically embracing capitalism.
For Israel, the Six-Day War was somewhat akin to what World War II was for the West: the instant removal of a prolonged siege. The six days of the amazing military victory changed the face of Israel. The war redefined the strong and the weak and changed the face of the Middle East beyond recognition. David became Goliath, the heads of the previous Goliaths of the region were severed, and the Palestinian nation became the sole entity confronting Israel.
It is said that wars are won by the human spirit. But not everything that emanates from the human spirit is necessarily positive. What are the elements in the victory of the West at the end of World War II and that of Israel in 1967 that carried within them the seeds of failure? Why did the tremendous victory of those six days turn into an endless seventh day of nightmares? And why is the West failing in its attempts to reap the fruits of its victory in the complex realities of the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the Far East?
Two powerful forces faced each other in World War II. In the end, the allies, with their greater resources and more advanced technology, triumphed. Germany was left isolated. Its reservoir of human resources had dwindled and it could not sustain its efficient fighting machine. Japan suffered defeat through cataclysmic nuclear technology dropped from the sky. Looking back after many years, it seems to me that their victories frightened the victors. The vanquished nations were forced to dismantle the totalitarian regimes with which they had threatened the world. Today Germany has no military ambitions and little desire to be involved in international conflicts. It would seem that Italy, pleasant, aesthetic, and tolerant, had never really belonged in the Nazi-Fascist valley of death. On the other hand, the victors sank into an orgy of soul searching, including a reckoning with the ability of humanity to wipe itself out.
The Soviet Union reached the conclusion that military superiority was the supreme national goal whose attainment would defend it from outside threats. The Russians vowed that no one would lay siege to Moscow and Leningrad again. No one would be able to destroy the collective soul in favor of material pleasures resulting from exploitation, discrimination, and inequality. Violence and deterrence became the defenders of human values in the new revolutionary society. The Soviet Union invested heavily in conflict, and in the end drowned under the burden of preserving a wall of isolation between itself and the surrounding world. Soviet citizens became weary of sacrificing their well-being for the good of the state’s values, which offered nothing in terms of personal freedom.
The United States of America, by contrast, saw the allied victory as that of humanity triumphing over madness. In the euphoria of victory, America took the human spirit to absurd ends. Competitiveness at any cost. Individualism was the medicine that would ward off any symptoms of national collectivism, Nazism, fascism, or communism. The spirit of individualism and competitiveness brought America to a terrible indifference toward the perceived losers. Winner takes all. The arrogance of the lone wolf, concerned only with its prey, hiding under a generous smile and deep pockets of foreign aid. Today’s presidents Putin and Trump are the quintessence of both civilizations; the Russian one, brutal and heartless, and the American one, aggressive and merciless.
Professor Eliezer Schweid, one of the most important and influential Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, sadly summarized:
Only the achievements whose effectiveness was proven in the cruelest wars have stood the test: science, technology, the efficient administrator. The natural conclusion was then to develop them at an accelerated pace in order to make the most of what they had to offer to satisfy universal human needs. The principle of free market competition between the individuals in every group and between groups in every nation was seen as the most efficient principle of economic success: It suits the selfish traits of human beings.… Liberal selfish-individualism took the place of an awareness of overall responsibility for a fair distribution of resources.†
From a distance, American society, especially Trump’s America, seems to zealously sanctify these values, which conceal the seeds of its destruction. His America First policy, and a selective concern for world peace, are based on the dark legacy of Charles Lindbergh’s America First. This America came to the conclusion that tough, rigid competitiveness in every arena is a worthy goal. Sophisticated technology can bestow personal and economic well-being, not just military superiority. However, the World War II victory exposed the weakness of American society: the widening economic gap between the nation’s haves and its have-nots.
And this, exactly, is what the Six-Day War did to Israel. The overwhelming victory mercilessly revealed deep scars on the nation’s soul. The first and foremost—the gathering around the tribal campfire and erecting an iron curtain of military might between us and the surrounding Arab environment, a curtain that prevented us from even noticing the rare times when an Arab hand was held out to us in peace. Power became the god harnessed to the great redemptive plan. A frightening synthesis was created between national militancy and zealous messianism to produce an extreme image of modern Israel. The distances between various strata of the population widened, so much so that the cohesiveness of Israeli society was threatened. The contention that the investment in the settlements robbed Israel of precious resources is misleading. The settlers coalesced quickly, with military efficiency, and managed to place themselves at the center of politics, ideology, and the economy. Jewish national fundamentalism moved from the periphery to the political mainstream around the same time that the Tea Party and Christian fundamentalists became more and more prominent and successful in North America.
All of a sudden, for me and for those like me, the situation no longer is an open, pluralistic United States on one side and a diminishing liberal Israel on the other. Today’s partition lines are between those of us who are devoted to liberal values and those who embrace authoritarianism. Some of us on both sides of the ocean versus some of them, also on both sides of the same ocean. Equality and rights in Israel, the US, Europe, and elsewhere against those who fear openness, abhor equality for all, and believe in any form of racial, religious, cultural, or political superiority.
The future of liberal democracy is not local, here or there, but global. Democracy is ill and urgently requires demo-therapy. Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Erdoğan, and their like are inspiring and empowering each other. And so should we. We must move from indigenous politics to global democracy, to a worldwide front of liberal values as a sand wall against the ocean of conservative hostility and intimidation.
* See Zygmunt Bauman, Culture in a Liquid Modern World [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2013). Originally published in English (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011).
† Translation mine; compare with Eliezer Schweid, The Philosophy of the Bible as Foundation of Jewish Culture, trans. Leonard Levin (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2008), 23.