Divided We Stand
American Jews, Israel, and the Peace Process
by Ofira Seliktar; Praeger, 2002
The Meaning of Israel: The Myth and Reality of the Jewish State
The voluminous literature on the meaning of Israel for American Jews
attests to the complexity of the issue. There is little doubt that, in its
essence, the relationship has been construed around the tribal or
peoplehood component of identity. For most American Jews the establishment
of the state after the trauma of the Holocaust was a manifestation of the
continuity of the Jewish people across time and space. As Urofsky put it,
it was a partial recompose for the Holocaust, a meaning
giving event to what was an utterly cosmological catastrophe. Israelis
birth amidst what was seen as a valiant war of independence was also
significant. It was perceived as an answer to the historical lack of power
and passivity epitomized by the yellow star and the horror of the
extermination camps. The new Jew, the Israeli born and raised in freedom.
. .would be the hero to whom American Jews could proudly point out,
restoring their dignity and self-assurance. The new Israeli Jew was far
removed from the ghetto-victim stereotype of the past. This imagery
indicated that support for Israel and preoccupation with the Holocaust
stemmed from the common root of the beleaguered nature of Jewish
existence.
Closely related to the symbolic aspects of peoplehood was the very real fact
that the new state provided a haven for Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe,
the Middle East, and elsewhere. Well before 1948, American Jews, secure in
their adopted homeland, demonstrated a philanthropic interest in creating a
refuge in Palestine. After the Holocaust, this sentiment was enhanced greatly
by the realization that all Jews could face a harsh contingency someday,
somewhere. Betraying this self-interest, the new reasoning was that there must
be a Jewish homeland, at least for everybody else and, God forbid, us too. The
concept of Israel-as-refuge was strongly manifested in American Jewish distaste
for Israeli immigrants to the United States. One study found that the latter
were treated with a mixture of suspicion, coolness, and even condemnations
since they seemed to detract from the almost sacred status of Israel as a
refuge.
Even without the legacy of the Holocaust, a Jewish state would have appealed to
the ethnic-national part of the Jewish identity. It normalized the status of
Jews in America and put them on an equal footing with Irish, Italian, or Polish
immigrants. Cardin wrote that Israel gave us stature and status and Dershowitz
commented that since 1948 Jews were treated as truly first class citizens in a
non-Jewish state. This normalization went beyond the nostalgia for a home, a
heim, or an ancestral place to visit in lieu of czarist Russia or anti-Semitic
Poland, as some sociologists have claimed. Ontologically, it transformed the
Jewish condition and gave meaning to what the philosopher Emil Fackenheim
called the unauthentic position of the Jews.
Continued:
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