RAEL JEAN ISAAC

In Jews and Power (Schocken, NY 2007) Ruth Wisse zeroes in on an issue of crucial importance to Israel’s prospects for continued existence—the development over centuries in the diaspora of what she calls Jewish “moral solipsism,” a concentration on moral improvement to the detriment of political survival.

Wisse takes exception to the common notion that Jewish political history experienced a hiatus between the destruction of the Second Temple and the emergence of modern Zionism. Not so, says Wisse, there was an active Jewish politics in the Diaspora as worthy of study as Jewish religion, philosophy and culture. It is concerning the nature of that political tradition that Wisse demonstrates ambivalence. Wisse explains that part of the problem stemmed from Jewish religious beliefs. The prophets taught that the political fate of Jews depended upon their ability to convince God of their uprightness. While this situated politics in a transcendent scheme of judgment so that Jews did not have to accept the verdict of the battlefield, it also laid the responsibility for defeat on Jewish behavior. Thus, for example, the rabbis no less than Josephus (a traitor to the Judean state) attached the blame for their defeat on the Jews, not Roman imperialism.

The penchant for self-blame coupled with pride in sheer survival, Wisse argues, over time sometimes led the toleration for political weakness (a fact of life for diaspora communities) to cross the moral line into veneration for political weakness, making of this a Jewish ideal. This notion was particularly prominent in European liberal Judaism whose proponents saw Judaism as becoming more ethically and spiritually advanced as it became freed of a national and state apparatus.

On the other hand Wisse finds much that was positive in Jews’ political adaptation to the diaspora – even in the syndrome for self-blame. By accepting responsibility for their political failure, Jews could maintain a political narrative in which they retained control of their national destiny despite their dependency in other peoples lands. Jewish self-governance in the diaspora (especially well-developed in Poland) was modeled on self-rule in the land of Israel except that the power of protection was handed over to local rulers. Moreover, Wisse maintains, Jewish diaspora communities were skilful in adaptation—elastic, flexible, pliable, subtle and worked to master skills that would make them indispensable.

With the failure of the Jewish political experiment in Europe—already apparent by the end of the nineteenth century as anti-Semitism burgeoned—Jews applied their adaptive skills to building a home in the Land of Israel. Wisse notes that Jews fell into the traditional pattern of appealing to the good faith of stronger nations. Notably absent from Jewish planning (Jabotinsky, and his Jewish Legion, was the exception) was the military force every other nation assumes it needs to gain its land.

Wisse writes that as a state, despite the constant threats to its survival Israel has continued to be grudging in its use of military force, repeatedly falling back on the preferred diaspora strategy of accommodation. Like the rest of the world it has refused to acknowledge that Arab-Islamic hostility is directed against the very idea of a Jewish state, rendering useless the endless attempts to deal with the conflict as if it were a matter of borders, susceptible to political accommodation. With the Oslo accords, says Wisse, Israel wound up doing what no people in human history had ever done, arm its enemy in the (ludicrous) expectation that this would bring the state security.

Another Jewish political tradition, that of self-blame, has persisted to haunt the state: rather than blame the pan-Arab war against the Jews, a sizable portion of Israelis (and an even larger section of its media and other elites) have turned inward and focus on supposed Israeli wrongdoing, blaming “settlers” and religious Jews for the conflict, assuming, contrary to all evidence, that there would be peace were it not for the post 1967 “occupation.” Wisse concludes: “Their capacity for accommodation dooms them if they fail to repel their assailants when necessary.”

This is a brief book, seeking to focus on the broadest issues in the historical relationship of Jews and power. Even so, there are curious omissions. Although the book is published in 2007, Wisse essentially ends the narrative with Oslo. She quotes at length Norman Podhoretz as the “strongest” of several American critics of Oslo who rightly predicted that it was merely destined to provoke great Palestinian Arab violence. But she makes no mention of the more important, and more forceful, attacks on Oslo by many on the Israeli right, including future Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, who warned repeatedly that the Palestinian state envisaged by Oslo would spell the end of the Jewish state. If Wisse had mentioned this she would have been forced to address the about-face of both of these leaders once they headed the government. Why did Netanyahu continue the Oslo process with the Wye agreement? Why did Sharon back a Palestinian state and uproot the Jewish communities of Gaza, with results even more predictable than Oslo?

No doubt there were a variety of reasons (external pressures, in the case of Sharon personal political considerations) but their actions would not have been possible were it not for aspects of the Jewish national character that cannot be fully subsumed under the rubric of “accommodation” or “self-blame.” After all, polls showed their policies had the support of a majority of the public, the very public that had presumably voted against precisely those policies in selecting these leaders. (This was especially striking in the case of the Gaza communities, whose importance to Israel Sharon had stoutly defended up until the moment he decided to eliminate them.)

Jabotinsky referred to a flaw in Jewish national character that he called “political diabetes.” Jews were afflicted with a spiritual pathology in which the body did not adjust to bitter things but changed everything to sugar. This meant that those who knew how to purvey pleasant news, no matter how transitory and immaterial in the broader framework, were able to produce in the public an unjustified optimism that paralyzed rational political thought. In other words political diabetes made the public vulnerable to manipulation by leaders who dangled a hoped-for change for the better in Israel-Arab relations, confident that the wish-to-believe would overcome the lessons of experience and simple rationality.

There is something else Wisse ignores: the inability Jews seem to have in comprehending the basics of what having a state entails. Long before Oslo this failure was pinpointed by Moshe Ben Yosef (Hagar) in his 1968 Hebrew book (never translated) Ha’Ayarah (The Shtetl). Hagar argued that Jews in Israel continued to live politically and spiritually as if they were in the confines of the European shtetl. Indeed one could go further and argue that in many respects Israel behaves more like a family than a state. Take the absurdly disproportionate prisoner “exchanges,” with hundreds of terrorists freed to ransom a single soldier. A family may appropriately make a huge sacrifice for the return of a family member, but a state cannot operate in this way; it cannot ignore the effects of its actions upon the larger community, including (only one of the many terrible results of these crazy mass releases) the inevitability that many more will in future die at the hands of those thus set free. Or take the major policy changes undertaken because of the agitation of a small group of family members, e.g. the flight from Lebanon (and betrayal of Lebanese allies in southern Lebanon) as the result of agitation by, literally, a handful of mothers of slain soldiers.

Wisse writes of the moral solipsism that puts moral purity over survival, and ennobles powerlessness. But this is to give more credit than is due to Israel’s critics from within. Theirs is moral posturing, not morality; treasonous identification with the enemy, not a spirit of compromise; self-hatred, not devotion to high ethical standards. What possible moral justification can one find, for example, for the assortment of Israeli academics who instigate boycotts of Israel abroad and work closely with the European anti-Semites who implement them? The pretense of moral concerns only underlines the moral corruption of these Jews.

In her broad brush strokes, Wisse occasionally makes errors. She writes that two opposite movements arose in Israel in response to the political impasse following the Six Day War—Gush Emunim, which wanted to annex the conquered territories up to the Jordan and Peace Now which wanted to return most of the territories. But Gush Emunim arose in response to the Yom Kippur War of 1973, not the Six Day War, and Peace Now was formed in 1978 to put pressure on Prime Minister Begin to accede to all Sadat’s demands. (Begin initially held out to keep the Jewish communities in northern Sinai, including the town of Yamit, within Israel.)

There were indeed opposing movements that arose following the Six Day War. Arguing that all the conquered territories should be incorporated into Israel was the Land of Israel Movement, which dramatically brought together intellectuals from left and right, some of whom earlier would not have remained in a room with one another. On the opposite side were a series of small peace movements with competing proposals. They differed on how much of the territories to give up, to whom they should be surrendered (whether to the former rulers or to a new separate Palestinian state) and what, if anything, Israel should demand in return, by way of recognition or peace.

Moreover Wisse is mistaken (understandably since she has the movements wrong) when she says that neither of the opposing movements “articulated the unique political dilemma facing their country or developed a strategic plan of national defense.” The Land of Israel Movement articulated both dilemma and strategic plan. It emphasized that the return of territories would merely restore the state to the old vulnerability and increase Arab hopes of success in a renewed conflict with Israel. If Israel did not assert her will upon the region, the region would assert its will upon Israel by destroying her. Israel would be a regional power or it would not exist. The problem was not that Israelis were unable to articulate alternative strategies but that the alternatives had such little resonance. In spirit, successive governments were far closer to the peace movement, seeing no alternative to accommodation, to using the territories as bargaining counters (“territories for peace”). It was the supposedly “far right” Menachem Begin, pressured by massive public demonstrations by a public calling for “peace now,” who engaged in the first wholesale retreat, as soon as the first peace partner announced himself. (Wisse correctly points out how empty the peace with Egypt would turn out to be and how obvious this should have been at the time.)

Wisse concludes that the West at its peril believes Israel—and Jews -- can conveniently be sacrificed: “far from choking on the Jewish bone, aggressors against a democratic system are more often invigorated by their anti-Semitism….Why stop at the Jews? Thugs who get away with harassing Jewish citizens go on to torch the rest of the citizenry.”

Fair enough. But Wisse never makes the point that the Jews of the world, so ready to criticize Israel, so eager to approve Israel’s self destructive spirit of accommodation (when the Arab/Islamic world has no intention of accommodating Israel), depend on Israel’s power for their own well-being. Nor does she talk of the counterproductive way Jews have used their own power in the United States when it comes to domestic issues as well as foreign policy—but that should be the subject of another book.

In sum, Jews and Power is not the last word, but a must-read introduction to a crucially important topic.