Siege Mentality

Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Reform Rabbi and Professor of Jewish Theology at Lampeter University who is a prolific writer on Jewish and Palestinian issues, has recently published a new work, The Paradox of Anti-Semitism. His thesis will shock many people, Jew and non-Jew alike because he argues that anti-Semitism has had positive effects which have ‘led to the enrichment of the Jewish heritage’. Anti-Semitism, which he clearly deplores, has caused Judaism to become introspective and this in turn has had the positive consequence of prompting Jews to value and reaffirm their traditions. The paradox he refers to is that without anti-Semitism, Jews may be unable to survive the conditions of the modern world. “Jews need enemies in order to survive”, he says and “in the absence of Jew-hatred, Judaism is undergoing a slow death”. Indeed he asserts that without anti-Semitism Jews may be doomed to extinction.

In an interview published in The Independent on Sunday, Cohn-Sherbok elaborated on this argument. The interviewer records the Professor’s views in the following way. “Historically it was the barriers imposed by anti-Semitism that helped Judaism survive. In the ghetto, Jews studied the Talmud, kept kosher and observed the commandments of the Torah. In earlier times, when the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, it was the institutions that were created because the Jews had no homeland that bound them together”. The problems he identifies are those forms of assimilation in which Jews are accepted and valued, and in taking on the trappings of the host culture, lose contact with those essential observances and beliefs which make a person Jewish. He posits no solutions for this dilemma and indeed suggests there may be no ultimate answer. “If we’re hated we’ll probably continue as we did in previous centuries, and if we’re loved, we may be loved to death”.

Is the fact that many Jews now possess a homeland and are no longer forced to live in the Diaspora one of the causes of the erosion of traditional beliefs and practices? For one of my Israeli friends this was certainly the case. He was fond of saying that when living in his native New York he had constantly to be seen as being Jewish, whereas in Haifa there was no expectation that he be an observant Jew. But leaving the homeland question to one side, is it the case that in order to maintain their cultural, religious and political identity, Israeli Jews need to be hated by the world at large? If this is indeed so, it would go some way to explaining why the Israeli political establishment rejects international criticism of its human rights abuses in its treatment of Palestinians, and its employment of tactics which, while they cannot be described as ‘holocaust’, are certainly ‘ethnic cleansing’.

Friday’s Guardian carried two articles about the Israeli situation. One was news of a poll of attitudes amongst Israeli Jews which has exposed widespread racism. The poll reveals that two-thirds of Jews would refuse to live in the same building as an Arab; half would not allow an Arab into their home; 41% want entertainment facilities to be segregated; 40% say that the state should encourage Arab emigration; 63% consider Arab Israelis as a security and demographic threat; 34% believe Arab culture to be inferior to Jewish culture; and 18% said they experience hatred when hearing Arabic spoken. Commenting on these results Bacha Ouda, director of an academic centre opposed to racism said that in Israel “racism is becoming mainstream” and Taleb-el-Sana, an Arab member of Israel’s parliament said that while anti-Semitism overseas is greeted with a frenzy of Israeli denunciations, there is no will to address home-grown racism. Another Arab politician claimed that racism has moved from the streets into parliament where it is now an acceptable stance. If this endemic racism becomes as is likely, translated into even more separatist and repressive social, economic and political ‘solutions’ we will be confronted with an Israeli variation of apartheid. And perversely, the storm of overseas criticism that this would provoke would, if Cohn-Sherbok’s thesis is true, have the positive outcome of consolidating Jewish cultural and religious identity.

In the political comment section of the same paper, the writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft, commenting on last week’s bizarre Israeli raid on a Palestinian prison in Jericho, says that Israeli indifference to outside opinion reflects the ‘endlessly popular’ Israeli song The Whole World is Against Us. His view is that the liberal establishments of the West had a romantic view of the humanitarian and democratic socialist principles upon which the State of Israel was founded, and that this romanticism obscured the fact that the new State was necessarily predicated upon a form of ethnic cleansing which saw in Moshe Dayan’s famous words Jewish villages built in place of Arab villages so that “there is not one single place that did not have a former Arab population”. In other words, we of the West have through our false perceptions and lack of critical awareness have allowed the development of the Israel contra mundum mentality.

Of course the sad side of all this is the disastrous effects in terms of the health of the community, of the souls and of the minds of Israeli citizens. In another recently published book, The People on the Streets: A Writer’s View of Israel, Linda Grant describes a ‘bubble society’ in which life seems normal as long as one continues to live within the bubble. But beyond the bubble lies something else. Israel, she writes is “a society floating on boiling anger, fear, anxiety, post-traumatic shock, aversion, brutality. You saw it in the road rage, in the domestic violence, in the rape, the desire to build walls not just against suicide bombers but your own neighbours . . . Suspicion, fear, exploding psycho-dramas detonating whole families. I would be woken in the night by terrible screams, the raised voices of husbands and wives, the sound of objects smashing against walls, the police sirens. Or on the street, screeching tyres, sickening metal collisions, tirades of fury between drivers”.

She describes a society under siege, a society which is not coping, a society which cannot imagine an accommodation with its Arab citizens, a society which, as Cohn-Sherbok suggests, cannot afford to be accepted and loved without losing both its identity and its life. And that is a tragedy for all humanity.