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May 9, 2008
A bewildering debate
Author provides many criticisms, few answers.
RON FRIEDMAN
Bernard Avishai, the author of The Hebrew Republic (Harcourt, 2007), also writes a blog. Its tagline is: "Responses, mainly to rash opinions about Israel and its conflicts." His book takes the same approach.
One of the most frustrating things about having a conversation about Israel is the feeling that you are never well enough informed. No matter how much you think you know, chances are that the person you're talking to will throw in some little-known historic event, a newfound statistic or a quote an important person once said, which will shake your confidence and leave you with no response. In such cases, people often end up giving up on ever understanding the whole messy business.
Reading Avishai's book is a lot like having such a conversation. His book challenges readers by providing them with loads of facts and figures and inviting them to follow a complex and convoluted discussion that he has with representatives of various camps within Israeli society.
Avishai holds a doctorate in political economy from the University of Toronto, is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harvard Business Review, Harper's and many other publications. He's the author of The Tragedy of Zionism (Allworth Press, 2002) and A New Israel (Ticknor and Fields, 1990). In The Hebrew Republic, Avishai addresses some of Israel's most fundamental issues, but chief among them is the question of how Israel is to remain both Jewish and democratic.
"Perhaps the hardest thing for people not living in Israel to grasp is that for most Israelis, talk of how to deal with the Palestinian militants, Islamists and others is just foreground. In the background is a contest over what kind of a state Israel must be.... What leaks into nearly every conversation these days is uncertainty about Israel's future boundaries. I don't just mean geographic boundaries. I mean legal, institutional and cultural limits. Most people in the country will insist that Israel is and must remain Jewish and democratic. Almost nobody can tell you what this means," writes Avishai in the introduction. But he knows what it surely doesn't mean and, for the first third of the 270-page book, he provides readers with a history lesson, pointing out painful examples of harsh injustices that came about during the settlement, birth and beginnings of the Jewish state. Injustices, he argues, which have not diminished or been addressed over time and which, he claims, threaten the moral identity of the country.
The source of the problems, according to Avishai, flows from a conflict between two possible personal identities – Israeli citizenship and Jewish nationality. For him, the first allows for peace and democracy, while the other, as a basis for statehood, doesn't.
Avishai's "answer" is to transform Israel from a Jewish state into what he calls a Hebrew republic, one in which Israeli identity is based not on a person's religion but rather on a shared sense of Hebrew culture that can be adopted by all members of Israeli society, a form of federalism that relies on continuing integration into the global economy.
"The Hebrew republic is the Jewish state as the most original forces in the Zionist movement conceived it," writes Avishai. "It is a democratic country whose language is Hebrew, much the way the French republic is French. I am not proposing anything terribly original here. I'm just trying to bring Israel up to code."
In the book, Avishai recounts conversations he has had with a wide range of Israelis, from political leaders, including current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and the likely future one, Binyamin Netanyahu, to intellectuals like Meron Benvenisti and Aharon Appelfeld; from industry leaders such Gil Schwed, CEO of Check Point Software, and Intel's Dov Frohman, to writer A.B. Yehoshua. Despite the broad nature of his discussions, he limits his debate to people orientated towards liberalism and secularism and readers don't hear the voices of the groups he spends most of the time talking about: the settlers, the ultra-religious and the Palestinians. The few Arab voices we do hear are those in the liberalist camp.
Overall, The Hebrew Republic is interesting, if somewhat frustrating. Avishai's talent at critiquing Israeli society isn't matched by an ability to find a tangible solution. This is a book more likely to produce head-shaking bewilderment than forward-looking action.
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