Presenting a nuanced view

BASYA LAYE

Daniel Gordis is the rare observer of Israel’s social and political landscape who attempts to remain above the partisan fray. He has made it his priority to present a more nuanced view, trying to cut through the noise that threatens to overtake most of today’s Israel conversations.

The senior vice-president of Jerusalem’s Shalem Centre and the author of several books, most recently The Promise of Israel: Why its Seemingly Greatest Weakness is Actually its Greatest Strength, Gordis will be in town Nov. 18 to keynote Vancouver Hillel Foundation’s Annual Gala Celebration dinner.

In an interview with the Independent, Gordis discussed the thesis of his latest book: that Israel is an “example of ethnic democracy gone right.” Israel, Gordis writes, flies in the face of a conventional wisdom that says that a country cannot be overtly committed to the future of one people and remain democratic. Concerns over Israel’s growing particularism, however, are not out of place, he warns. Both realities are true, he explained to the JI.

The purpose of ethnic democracy “is to allow a particular community and a people with a certain narrative and a certain history and a certain tie to a place and so on and so forth to build a place,” he said. “As somebody who grew up in the States, it’s everything from the [fact that the] holidays are your holidays and not Christmas ... it’s about the national stories that are told. I don’t know what the Canadian parallels are, but in the United States, like Plymouth Rock and crossing the Delaware and the Alamo and Fort McHenry and the Mayflower, those are all very formative American stories. And Jews have done extremely well in America and have been given great gifts by America, but those are not fundamentally Jewish stories. Jewish stories are shemesh b’Givon dom [when the sun shone longer than natural as Joshua circled] Yericho seven times and crossing the Red Sea and crossing the desert and crossing the Jordan. Ethnic nationalism at its best is an opportunity for a people to create a community of citizens, communal leaders, memories, places, where they tell their story to the rest of the world.”

The Promise of Israel argues that particularism can successfully exist within democracy, but also that it’s important to reaffirm the Jewish state’s founding democratic principles.

“I point to some of the ways that Israel’s been notably successful [as an example] of ethnic nationalism, but ... there’s a major but here ... has Israel not turned its back on some of its commitments in doing that? I think the answer is yes – it has turned its back. In some ways ... it’s done a remarkable job. Israeli Arabs populate all the Israeli universities and there are some on the Supreme Court and there are Arabs in the Knesset and, and, and, and.” At the same time, “part of the challenge of being an ethnic democracy is to see the minorities in your midst not as a problem but as a reminder of the value of a plurality of views. So, whether it’s Israeli Arabs, or whether it’s Israeli Jews who are not Orthodox but not secular either ... Reform Jews, Conservative Jews, Reconstructionist, whatever kind of Jews, I see that we have not done nearly as good a job as we need to.”

Gordis was concerned with the growing African refugee crisis that came to a head this past summer, a prime example of Israel’s difficulties in this regard. “I think there are ways, in terms of the treatment of Israeli Arabs, in terms of Israeli Jews who are not Orthodox, in terms of Eritreans and other Sudanese, we’re stumbling a little bit and that’s a very sad thing,” he said.

“One of the ways in which you address this is by calling attention to it,” he added. For Israel to tack closer to the ideals of the state’s founders, changes need to be made, he argued, but improvements in policy will likely only happen through the combined efforts of the political leadership and a sustained grassroots movement.

“If you look at the social protest movement in Tel Aviv, mostly two summers ago and a little bit this past summer, the social protests were an example of wanting to lead from the bottom up, they were really calling for change,” he explained. However, “the problem with the movement was that it was wholly inarticulate.” While the movement had noble intentions, it “grew to be so inclusive that it was kind of nonsensical,” Gordis lamented.

“The other thing that was disturbing and distressing about it was that it was distinctly devoid of any Jewish content.... Daphni Leef, who was one of the women who was running it ... she did not say one thing that could not have been said in Swedish in Sweden at a protest or in French in France in a protest, etcetera.... So the answer is, yes, people do want to ... rise up ... but, I think, to the extent that it’s going to come from the bottom up, it’s going to have to be people who are actually equipped to make a conversation that’s distinctly Jewish or a distinctly Israeli conversation.... On the other hand, I think people really are looking for new leadership.”

With the Israeli election on the horizon, Gordis sees “currents of change” afoot. “I think Israelis know that we’re at a sort of bad place,” he said. “We’re in a bad place because of our enemies – but not in the way that most people think. We’re in a bad place because we have all these enemies and they cause problems for us. I think that, because they cause problems for us, we focus on those problems and we never focus on the internal issues.... But I think that Israel is slowly coming to terms with that.”

Change will take time, however. “There will be more frustrations,” he predicted. “The good thing about the Charedi issue, for example, Tania Rosenblatt, the woman who rode on the bus, which is a disgusting, ugly scene, the good thing about it is it created a crisis in Israel. People are asking themselves, you know, are we going to let these guys take over the country? I think Israel needs a few more social crises. It needs a social protest movement, it needs some other Charedi kind of thing, it needs a national budget crisis, it needs a series of little things to nudge people to begin to realize that you have to have a serious conversation. And, at that moment, then you need the right leader to be present to ride the wave. When those two things happen, it’s kind of a perfect storm.”

Diaspora Jews walk a fine line when attempting to influence Israel’s policy agenda, and Jews outside of the state should be cognizant of their limited purview, said Gordis. As well, he added, Israelis should be conscious that they must expect more input than just a steady stream of money from their Diaspora brothers and sisters. “You can’t really ask people to be part of a community one way and not want them to be part of a community in another way,” he mused. “I think that the answer is that it’s got to become a much more nuanced kind of a conversation.”

In Gordis’ opinion, one of the biggest challenges for Israel’s future is the Diaspora’s growing alienation from the Jewish state. As an example, Gordis said that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu “does not understand how alienated a lot of the young people are, he does not understand how terrible Israel looks in the press, [and] Americans and Canadian Jews ... care about that and he doesn’t get any of that.... I think that American Jews and Israeli Jews need to start listening to each other much more.... Canadian Jews, United States Jews have a tremendous amount to teach Israeli Jews about religious pluralism and so on and so forth. By the same token, they really do need to remember that their lives are not on the line in exactly the same way.”

The contention that young Jews today are less committed to Israel’s future is “patently obvious,” said Gordis. “I think that young people are feeling much more conflicted.... Their feelings about Israel are much more fraught and complex than the generation, and certainly two generations, ago. I mean ... when the Six Day War broke out, everybody knew the right thing to do was to support Israel. When the ’73 war broke out, everyone knew that the right thing to do was to support Israel. If Israel was to attack Iran now, would there be a universal feeling among young American Jews, if Israel gets clobbered back, that the right thing to do is to support Israel? Well, a lot of people will say, well, Israel brought it on itself. That will be certainly true, in the sense that Israel will have initiated it, but I think it’s gotten much more complicated....”

There is “no question that campuses are a critical spot” for Israel conversations, and those that have “good and active Hillels that are intellectually inspiring” are particularly important venues, said Gordis, who has faced directly the question of who should be permitted to speak at a Jewish venue.

“I was just recently told that sponsors of a talk that I was going to give somewhere in the States pulled out because I signed a letter urging Prime Minister Netanyahu not to pay much attention to the Levy Commission,” explained Gordis. “These people said, you know what, if you’re going to sign that letter, we don’t want to hear from you anymore. What I said to the people was – and the lecture ended up happening – you’re as much a problem as the people you look at with scorn on the quote-unquote left ... because [of] that attitude, that we only want to hear from people with whom we agree completely. You obviously invited me because, by and large, you think I represent the worldview that you believe in. I’ve been doing this writing about Israel for what, about 15 years, and ... I’ve written 500 pieces or whatever, and I signed one thing that you don’t like, and the minute I sign one thing you don’t like, you don’t want to hear from me anymore? I said, that’s perfectly your right not to want to hear from me and it’s perfectly your right not to come to the lecture, but what has the Jewish world become and what has the Zionist conversation become when the only people that we want to hear are the people that validate entirely what we already think?

“So, my personal belief about the ‘Big Tent’ [is that] people who are invited in have to be committed to three things: Israel’s security, Israel’s Jewishness and Israel’s democracy. And, in my take, if you’re not committed to any one of those things, then I think it’s legitimate for the mainstream Jewish community to say, we’d like not so much to hear from you. Having said that, I think that the most important thing is to listen to smart people with whom we disagree entirely. We tend to only want to invite in people who we think are going to say what we already think and that’s just not what a university is about, that’s not what an intellectually engaging community is about, it’s just, I think, a very, very narrow and almost depressing way of thinking about what Jewish life should be.”

At the Vancouver Hillel gala, Gordis will speak on the topic 2048: Will Israel Survive to 100? He briefly shared his perspective on what is the greatest threat to the Jewish state’s survival.

“I think that the question about whether or not Israel will survive to the age of 100 has got very little to do with Palestinians and Arabs and a great deal to do with Jews,” he said. “As long as we allow the Zionist conversation to be focused on what our enemies are doing and so on and so forth, it becomes a rather narrow, mean-spirited, nervous conversation, that I personally think ... will send young people scurrying in the other direction, they want nothing to do about it. I think that Israel will survive for 100 years if people find the conversation on Israel profound, nuanced, vital, speaking to their very soul. If it does, then I think that the Jewish people have shown, time and again, that there are very few challenges that we cannot overcome, and I’m confident that Israel will survive. If we cannot create that kind of conversation, then I’m sure that a lot of young Jews are going to say, does this really matter to me at all, and they’re going to walk away. And that, I think, is a much graver danger than almost anything else we can point to.”

The upcoming gala is the first major event of Michael Silbert’s tenure as Vancouver Hillel’s new executive director, and he is pleased to be hosting such a “passionate ambassador for Israel.”

“We get to come to work every day in order to connect with young Jews and to offer them as many Jewish options as possible so that they may be inspired to make their own Jewish choices,” he told the Independent. “These are people who are often experiencing the world ‘out there’ for the first time, deciding for themselves who they want to be, trying on different identities. To have a role in these individual processes ... is simply thrilling. It’s an absolute privilege for me.”

The Vancouver Hillel Foundation’s Annual Gala Celebration dinner is on Nov. 18, starting with a reception at 5 p.m., at Temple Sholom. Tickets, $180, are available by calling 604-224-4748.

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