Jewish Commentators Are Asking: " Was It a Mistake Establishing Israel as a Jewish State ?"

Read HERE Essay by Eliahu Salpeter in The Haaretz (Israel) November 7, 2003 "Israel is bad for the Jews"

Excerpts from Eliahu Salpeter's article:

Recently, several articles appearing in the West (most of them written by Jewish commentators) questioned whether it was a mistake to establish the State of Israel along ethnic lines - as a Jewish state.

The settlements have ended any possibility of geographic separation between Jews and Palestinians, and therefore the remaining solution, in practice, is to establish a binational state.

In the October issue of the influential New York Review of Books in an article, (Jewish) commentator Tony Judt wrote:

"The behavior of a self-described Jewish state affects the way everyone else looks at Jews.

..... but the depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for the Jews ...to convert Israel from a Jewish state to a binational one would cause far less disruption to most Jews and Arabs than its religious and nationalist foes will claim.

.... A binational state in the Middle East would require a brave and relentlessly engaged American leadership.

The security of Jews and Arabs alike would need to be guaranteed by international force ... but the alternatives are far, far worse."

Similar ideas are appearing in other journals, also reflecting the disappointment over Israel's policy in the territories.

The veteran Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen recently wrote:

"In the perpetual war against Israel - its enemies are winning, but history admonishes Israel..."

And in The Nation, Daniel Lazar concluded in the article "The One-State Solution":

"Hounded by rabbis, terrorized by suicide bombers, hemmed in by nationalism, Israelis see no alternative but to throw in their lot with a strongman like Sharon.

The logic is irresistible, but suicidal - unless somebody can figure a way out of the ideological cage."

The Jewish Week, printed in New York, featured a column by its editor and publisher, Gary Rosenblatt, in which he wrote:

"Israel's military approach to the Palestinian conflict - respond to attacks and defeat the enemy - does NOT work when applied to U.S. campus ideological clashes over the Middle East.

And the more strident the pro-Israel position, the less likely tens of thousands of American Jewish college students are to be sympathetic to the Jewish state.

A Hillel director on the West Coast, who asks not to be named, stressed that `strident pro-Israel advocates who are unwilling to concede that Israel has a problem with settlements, occupation, and other controversial stands, only end up making more Jewish students skeptical. If you insist you are always right, you lose credibility'."

Large Jewish organizations in the United States continue to stand behind Israel, but many rank and file members feel increasingly displeased with the aggressive policy of the government of Israel and the growing strength of religious-nationalist influences in Israel.

Anti-Semitic entities in Europe and the U.S. are using Israel's policy in the territories. It backs up their propaganda, but it is highly doubtful that this is indeed evidence of a corresponding rise in the scale of anti-Semitism. .

Anti-Semitism is NOT the main reason behind the increased criticism of Israel among liberal circles in Europe.

Indeed, there are today more incidents of anti-Semitism in Europe, and clearly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict contributes to that.

Support for Jews (and Israel) in the 1950s and 1960s has dropped considerably in a generation that no longer remembers the Holocaust.

Constant emphasis on the "perpetual presence" of anti-Semitism achieves the opposite results. It is both despairing and may also weaken the hand of those combating anti-Semitism.

The fact that Islam (even non-fundamentalist Islam, as evidenced by outgoing Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad's remarks) disseminates images borrowed from Christian-European anti-Semitism does NOT contradict the vast differences that still exist between the two forms of anti-Semitism.

Christian anti-Semitism grew out of religious grounds and later adopted political and racist attributes and objectives.

The other anti-Semitism, contemporary Muslim, was born out of political reasons and is now taking on racist attributes.

Associating contemporary Muslim anti-Semitism with classic Western anti-Semitism is very convenient for extremists, both European and Israeli.

It is true that there is a lot of hypocrisy in the demands of anti-Semites that Israel and the Jews act with more tolerance and morality than other nations.

But they are not the ones who determined that Israel should be a light unto the nations; that is a demand made throughout the generations by Jewish ethics and that is the bond we asked the nations of the world to redeem in 1948.

We should therefore not complain if the world now demands that we redeem that bond. It is recognition, for or better or worse, of the status of the "chosen people."

In this context it is fitting to quote Tomas Masaryk, who established independent Czechoslovakia (and a friend of Zionism) who cautioned his people:

"Nations fall with the fall of ideas with which they were established."

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