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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Cramer has enormous admiration, empathy and sympathy for ordinary Jews and Arabs and their cultures, both of whom he sees as victims of their evil and corrupt leaderships and establishments. He argues that Israeli Jews, mainly the secular ones -- many of them descendants of the socialist founding fathers of the Jewish state and of the early pioneers -- are oppressed both by the old-boy junta generals and by zealous rabbis who have transformed secular Israel into a semi-theocratic state.
The author of this review is an atheist Israeli Jew who has fought an uncompromising struggle over the past 40 years or so for the separation of state and synagogue. Having said this, however, I find Cramer's description of the Israeli Orthodox and national religious rabbis (today it is difficult to find any differences between them) to be highly stereotypical and repugnant. Cramer portrays Orthodox rabbis as greedy and ridiculous, as in a story about a hotel restaurant which goes to absurd degrees to get around its violation of a kosher dietary law. Even if this portrait has some roots in Israeli daily life, it is so exaggerated it resembles an anti-Semitic screed -- surely not Cramer's intention.
In fact, religion plays a more profound role in Israeli civic life and Israeli self-definition than Cramer realizes. It's true that Israel was envisioned and created by secular socialists and liberals. At the same time, the Zionist movement was essentially a religious-messianic one. This is why it aroused the antagonism of European Jewish Orthodoxy prior to the Holocaust and World War II. It was not incidental that the founders of the state chose the Holy Land, nor is it by chance that the major symbols of the state were selectively borrowed from the Jewish religion. The Bible was always perceived by both Jews -- even the atheist ones -- and many non-Jews as the "Charter" of the Jewish people, justifying their claims over a land which was already populated by a native people.
The roots of Israeli submissiveness to religion and toward the "representatives of the god on the earth" -- rabbis and religious clerks -- should thus be seen as reflecting the quest for legitimacy of a settler-immigrant society in a region where they were not welcomed by the local population. Herein also lies a partial answer to the mystery of the extraordinary influence of the settler minority, which far exceeds their actual numbers.
"How Israel Lost: The Four Questions"
By Richard Ben Cramer
Simon & Schuster
320 pages
Nonfiction
As for the question of how to end the occupation, according to Cramer the solution is simple. He argues that "any Jew who isn't an Israeli and not on psychotropic drugs, could solve this Peace-for-Israel thing in about ten minutes of focused thought. Give back the land to the Palestinians. All of it [the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem]. And since Palestinians are already living in their own country, they should have equal rights, a fact so laughably obvious -- the only nation that can't see this is Israel."
Cramer is right about the solution, but wrong to say that Israelis don't recognize it. In fact, opinion polls indicate that approximately 35 percent of Jewish Israelis support the so-called "Geneva Accord" issued recently and built on the same principles as suggested by Cramer. This level of support for such a "radical" peace plan was almost unthinkable several years ago. Today, even every child in Israel knows that if ever it will be possible to reach an agreement, these would be its contours.
What is the cause of this dramatic trend as well as of the surprising "disengagement" suggestion of Prime Minister Sharon, including the uprooting of all the settlements in the Gaza Strip and some isolated settlements in the northern West Bank? No doubt it is the so-called "demographic threat": the fact that Palestinians will eventually outnumber Jews, forcing the Jewish state to choose between democracy and its Jewish identity. Some calculate that by 2020, a total of 15 million people will live on the land of historic Palestine, with Jews comprising a minority of 6.5 million. Moreover, even in Israel itself, within 20 years, the Jewish population will be reduced from its current 80 percent majority to a projected majority of barely 65 percent. Israeli fear of this has led to proposals that Israeli areas densely populated with Arabs be transferred to the Palestinian state in exchange for Jewish settlement blocs.
Two deep-rooted existential anxieties exist within Jewish Israeli political culture. The first is the physical annihilation of the state, an issue that is frequently used, abused and emotionally manipulated by many Israeli politicians and intellectuals. The second is the loss of the fragile Jewish demographic majority on which the supremacy and identity of the state rest. In fact, the loss of that demographic majority could be a prelude to the physical elimination of the Jewish state. Thus, the annexationist camp has found itself in an impossible situation: The patriotic imperative of holding onto the sacred land is contradicted by the patriotic imperative of ensuring a massive Jewish majority on the land.
