Quotes of the Day - June 5, 2012: Notes on Gershom Gorenberg's The Unmaking of Israel

I've been reading The Unmaking of Israel off and on for a few weeks now, but I've decided to sit down and give it a close reading. Since I will spending a gap year in Israel, I have a bit more motivation fully immerse myself in texts about Israel and Zionism. This is also the first book that I'm reading on Kindle and trying to take notes on, so this might be a bit more fragmented than other posts.

Gorenberg notes the chasm between the internal and external perceptions of Zionism. From outside, and increasingly from inside:

The most concise criticism is that Israel is an "ethnocracy," as Israeli political geographer Oren Yiftachel argues in his book 2006 book of that name. (5)

However:

Zionism, understood from within, is the national liberation movement of the Jews. (6)

And yet, does Zionism as a national liberation movement make it any less of an exclusionary and ethnocentric ideology? If Zionism is simply another kind of nationalism, then does it encompass, as many argue it does, all of the unsavory and illiberal facets of nationalism: ideas of ethnic supremacy, nativism, and racism?

But there is another problem with the idea that Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jews: the majority of the world's Jews do not recognize themselves as members of a distinct nation. While many like to look to Israel as evidence of Zionism's success, the presence of a mere six million Jews living in the state of Israel suggests otherwise. More than half of the world's Jewish population lives outside of the Jewish state. They have no desire to be part of the national liberation movement. Israel, then, is worse than just an ethnocracy; it is an ideological failure. The modern state of Israel is not the fulfillment of the Zionist dream but it's failure.

Though the parliamentary anti-capitalist left in Israel is long dead, it's nice to see things kernels of resistance like this:

By then, both of the Communist newspapers had published editorials denouncing Ben-Gurion and Eban of "trafficking in the blood" of young Israelis to satisfy their American masters. (32).

I would love to see an argument like the one above made again. After all, American Jews bear none of the sacrifices Israeli Jews bear in protecting the Zionist dream. American Jews give a few dollars, Israeli Jews give their lives. AIPAC, ZOA, and other American Zionist organizations, by setting policy agendas and taking hawkish positions, are responsible for the deaths of Israeli soldiers in unjust and unnecessary wars. For all their rhetoric about their love for Israel, American Jews seem to equate the lives of Israelis with dollars and cents.

No matter how many books are written and films are made, American Jews have trouble understanding the trauma of the Nakbka for Palestinians. Jews have trouble facing the realities of the war for independence:

In some places, Jewish commanders expelled Arabs from conquered villages. In many ore, panic led to mass flight, especially after Irgun and Lehi fighters perpetrated a massacre in the village of Deir Yassin outside Jerusalem. (48)

Afterward as the fighting continued, cases of the IDF expelling Arabs grew more and more common. The decision to prevent return was the turning point transforming what began in the chaos of war into a choice. (29). 

Quotes of the Day - April 11, 2012: On Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People

I picked up Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People over six months ago in a book store in the Neve Tzedek neighborhood of Tel Aviv, but I finallynsat down today to give it a close reading. I have not read the book in Hebrew, nor could I attempt to do so. But from what I can tell, the English translation is great. The prose is quick and pointed. It manages to maintain its polemical intensity up until the afterword.

The controversy surrounding this book is quite overblown, and most of the book is actually unnecessary. Sand could have easily presented his political platform for the future of Israel, revealed in the last chapter and in the afterword, without the preceding four chapters devoted to debunking the myth of Jewish "peoplehood." That he reveals the idea of the Jewish people to be a complete construction is irrelevant to his policy prescriptions. Nonetheless, the are a number of passages worth noting that I think summarize Sand's argument and point out its flaws.

At the beginning of the book, Sand's argument is based on the following claims; there was a real Judean kingdom, but most Jews are not actually descendants of those Judeans.

"The documents from el-Amarna, dating from the fourteenth century BCE, indicate that already there were two small city-states in the highlands of Canaan - Shechem and Jerusalem - and the Merneptah stela shows that an entity named Israel existed in northern Canaan at the end of the thirteenth century BCE" (121). 

One of the points Sand makes is that the Arab fellahin who inhabited Mandatory Palestine alongside the Jewish settlers are closer ethnically/genealogically to the Judeans than the Jews who claim to be the "children of Israel." Since the expulsion never happened, Sand argues, the "real" Jews are the Palestinians and the Jews in the Diaspora are actually the progenies of proselytized pagans.

This finding is largely irrelevant to the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The political significance of Sand's book is the claim that Israel is an ethnocracy, as it protects rights for an ethnos rather than a demos. That the ethnos is a historical/political construction, he argues, makes things even worse. In reality, the historical legitimacy of the ethnos served by the Israeli government does not matter. An ethnocracy, whether founded on fact or fabricated pseudohistory, is still fundamentally illiberal. The political solution to such an illiberal state- universalism, egalitarianism, and multiculturalism - does not change.

"The central myths about the primeval origin of a marvelous nation that emerged from the desert, conquered a spacious land and bult a glorious kingdom were a boon for rising Jewish nationalism and Zionist colonization. For a century they provided textual fuel of canonical quality that energized a complex politics of identity and territorial expansion demanding self-justification and considerable sacrifice" (122).

My first blog post ever stressed the importance of semantics in framing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is sloppy scholarship to call the Jewish settlers colonists, as they were not acting on the behalf of a colonial power. There was no greater Jewish motherland that benefited economically from early Jewish settlement in Mandatory Palestine; early Jewish settlers were not establishing a colony on behalf of another, already existing entity. Waves of settlement should be viewed as migrations - a natural part of human history - or as refugee crises - caused by pogroms in Eastern Europe and later the Holocaust.

To challenge the idea of a Jewish ethnos, Sand makes the point that there was no forced expulsion of the Jews from Judea. But, he does not deny that there was some kind of dispersal. To back up his claims, he references Simon Dubnow (known for his support of Jewish Autonomism as opposed to Zionism).

"Simon Dubnow also makes no mention of deportation. Moreover, unlike Graetz, the Russian-Jewish historian avoids associating the destruction of Jerusalem with a forced exile. He follows the literary examples of Josephus and Graetz in describing the fall in shocking and dramatic terms. Thousands of captives are carried away to the ends of the empire, leaving Judea thinly populated. A similar description follows the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt: a great number of captives are sold into slavery, and an equal number of rebels become fugitives. But Dubnow does not create a meta-image of the Jewish people going into exile after the destruction of the Temple, and it is clear to readers that the people was not forcibly uprooted from its country" (138).

This strikes me as a somewhat silly distinction. "The people was not forcibly removed from its country," but instead it left after its capital city was destroyed. Leaving a destroyed homeland as a refugee, slave, or fugitive may not technically fall under the category of expulsion, but it certainly is a tragic national event. Moreover, recognition of this dispersal casts doubt onto Sand's hypothesis that the expulsion never happened and that the real Jews never left and became Palestinians.

"Emperor Hadrian's decrees had, of course, expropriated lands in the second century, but the arrival of the Muslims greatly accelerated the process and eventually led to the emigration of the Jews and "the creation of a new national majority in the country. Until that time, the Jews had constituted the majority of the population, and Hebrew was still the dominant language. The arrival of the new settler-conquerors altered the country's cultural morphology and put an end to the presence of the Jewish people in its land" (141).

Land has traded hands throughout history. Populations have migrated and morphed into new groups. While generally history is important to a nation, this back and forth about the true inhabitants of what is now Israel/Palestine adds nothing to our understanding contemporary politics in the region.

"It is true that there was no deliberate policy of expulsion, but that does not mean that exile was undertaken voluntarily - God forbid. Dinur was worried that if it were accepted that the Jews left their country of their own volition, it would undermined their renewed claim to it in modern times" (141). 

Sand's real gripe is with Zionist historiography, not historical reality. While most nations attempt to portray their primeval founders as bold, strong, and heroic, Zionists are obsessed with victimhood. Eternal Jewish victimhood, not historical conquests or ethnic supremacy (or at least until recently) entitles the Jews to a state. Sand rightfully points out that the Zionist preoccupation with victimhood has warped the depiction of the Jews as a collective. The dispersal may have been volitional. It may have been motivated by the desire to proselytize. Admitting this, though, does not necessarily undermine the idea of a unique Jewish collectivity.

Sand is at his most insightful when discussing historiographical methods. One of the challenges of reading ancient documents, he notes, is that religion, tribe, and people were until recently inexact and often fluid terms.

"Henceforth, the Edomite people would be seen as an integral part of the Jewish people. At that time, joining the religion of another group was regarded as joining its people - its cult community. But it was only the progress of monotheism that made the attachment to faith as important as the traditional association with origin. This was the begininning of the slide from what we might call Judeanity - a cultural-linguistic-geographic entity - toward Judaism, a term denoting a broader kind of religion-civilization" (158).

In a book filled with ridiculous phrases, the above passage is one of the most absurd. The mingling of religious, ethnic, and cultural groups was not a phenomenon unique to the Jews. The Gauls, Goths, Teutons, and so on cannot be considered to be any more ethnically homogenous than the Jews. Furthermore, the idea of Judaism as a "religion-civilization" is not controversial, nor does it undermine the idea of Jews as a people. In fact, Mordecai Kaplan, father of the Reconstructionist movement, wrote a book called Judaism as a Civilization.

Throughout the book, Sand routinely refers to instances when Jews married members of other "tribes", or when entire tribes adopted Judaism and began to marry other Jews. This, he argues, suggests that there is no Jewish ethnos.

"The converted Jews of Edomite origin intermarried with the Judeans and gave Hebrew names to their children, some of whom would play important roles in the history of the Judean kingdom. Not only Herod came from among them; some of the disciples of the strict Rabbi Shammai and he most extreme Zealots in the great revolt were also of Edomite descent" (158).

Contrary to what Sand suggests, this intermarriage does not imply the notion of Jewish peoplehood is entirely factitious. Indeed, by noting intermarriage, rather than conversion and continued ethnic distinction, Sand inadvertently furthers the idea that there exists a common Jewish DNA. Even if descended from an Edomite mother and a Jewish father, a person still possesses Jewish heritage.

In the chapter entitled "Realms of Silence" Sand claims to reveal aspects of Jewish history that have been intentionally shrouded or forgotten by Zionist historiography. But in doing so, he frequently contradicts himself.

"Proselytizing Jews were driven from the arena of rival monotheisms, Christianity or Islam to the lands of paganism" (220).

Presumably, the "arena" is modern day Israel/Palestine. The contradiction lies in the statement that the proselytizing Jews were driven out. "Driven" implies a forced or non-volitional movement. Yet "proselytizing" is an intensely volitional action. It appears that Sand cannot choose the narrative he wants to present. Is world Jewry the result of active proselytization? Or, as, Sand seems to suggest, does a somewhat non-volitional "dispersal" explain the scatterings of the Jews?

"The uncomfortable explanation was that Jewish men had come from the Near East unattached and were forced to take local wives, whom they undoubtedly converted to Judaism in the proper manner" (277).

Uncomfortable? If the wives are converted "in the proper manner," this is a non-issue. Sand argues that this contradicts the Halakhic definition of a Jew based on matrilineal descent, because the mothers are not ethnically Jewish. Yet, again, Sand's purportedly earth-shattering claims are rather mundane. The above passage proves Jewish ethnic continuity. It may not have been done in a way that satisfies contemporary Jewry or Halakhic definitions, but even Sand, I think, would be hard pressed to deny that his above statement actually supports the notion of an ethnically-based Jewish people.

The real value of Sand's work is the final chapter, "Distinction," and the afterword. In these two sections, Sand offers an astute critique of contemporary Zionism.

"A national consciousness is primarily the wish to live in an independent political entity. It wants its subjects to live and be educated by a homogeneous national culture. That was the essence of Zionism at its inception, and so it remained for most of its history until recent times" (303).

The crisis of Zionism has nothing to do with disaffected liberal Jews or even the settlements. Instead, the crisis of Zionism, and perhaps the failure of Zionism, is the fact that the majority of Jews continue to reside outside the Jewish state. A country that was created to offer a collective national culture for Jews has been turned down by the vast majority of American Jewry; most American Jews continue to call themselves Zionists despite their conscious refusal to take part in the Jewish national consciousness. To assuage their guilt, they visit Israel as if it were an ethno-religious amusement park. They throw checks and change at various organizations like the JNF of AIPAC. These Jews believe they should have a say in Israeli policy. They agitate for sanctions and war with Iran, knowing that their children will not be endangered at all by a conflagration in the Middle East. The real crisis of Zionism is that American Jews are comfortable parting with merely their money while forcing Israelis to part with their sons and daughters.

A Brief Foray Into Religion - Ritual Without Belief: What is it Good For?

A teacher once told me that my refusal to pray was childish. My insistence on believing in the literal meanings of the word I said when I prayed, he argued, was immature. The ability to say the prayers and recognize their inherent contradictions, but still say them was, for him, the mark of maturity. A child cannot live with contradiction; he or she demands complete logical and moral consistency. Yet an adult - a mature and reasonable person - can live with contradiction and cognitive dissonance. Yes, a contradiction arises when one observes ritual without believing in god. However, a truly mature person has the capacity to deal with that contradiction, and thus practices ritual anyway.

At the time, this sounded reasonable. It made the case for practicing ritual without belief fairly well. But I soon wanted something more certain, something more purposeful. If I wasn't going to engage in ritual observance for a deity, I wanted to do it for a reason. Ritual observance, I decided, would only be worth practicing if it was responsible for the genius of the "non-Jewish Jew." To this end, I found counsel in an article by an old socialist writer and historian.

In Isaac Deutscher's "Message of the Non-Jewish Jew", he defines the "non-Jewish Jew" as someone who transcends Jewry, and in many instances rejects it, while still belonging to a Jewish tradition. Deutscher argues that major thinkers of Jewish descent - Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Luxembourg, and Trotsky - were able to revolutionize the fields of philosophy, sociology, economics, and politics because of their special positions on the margins of society.

"They were a priori exceptional in that as Jews they dwelt on the borderlines of various civilizations, religions and national cultures. They were born and brought up on the borderlines of various epochs...They lived on the margins or in the nooks and crannies of their respsecive nations. They were each in society and yet not in it, of it and yet not of it. It was this that enabled them to rise in thoguht above their societies, above their nations, above their times and generations, and to strike out mentally into wide new horizons far into the future."

This unique place of the Jew in society that Deutscher describes is attained through ritual observance. Jewish ritual observance in the diaspora is a kind of self-ghettoization - a form of separation from surrounding society. The Jew is part of society, as he participates economically and socially in the country and community in which he lives. Yet, at the same time, the Jew is recognized as different and separate from the dominant religious group or even nationality. He is set apart by the laws of kashrut and by the obligation to keep the Sabbath, among many other things.  This allows Jews to be "each in society and yet not in it, of it and yet not of it." By virtue of this in-and-out dualism, the aforementioned "non-Jewish Jews"  had all this in common, "that the very conditions in which they lived did not allow them to reconcile themselves to ideas which were nationally or religiously limited." Ritual observance is what places the Jew on the borderlines of civilizations- part of one society, but at the same time not truly part of that society.

The separateness of the Jew from society allows him to critique and challenge, and perhaps even alter society and its institutions."Those who are shut in within one society, one nation, or one religion tend to imagine that their way of life and their way of thought have absolute and unchangeable validity and that all that contradicts their standards is somehow 'unnatural,' inferior or evil. Those on the other hand, who live on the borderlines of various civilizations comprehend more clearly the great movement and the great contradictoriness of society." The Jew who transcends his Judaism is thus perfectly equipped to comprehend and reorder society.

The rationale for ritual practice without belief and continued Jewish text study is that it is necessary for the creation of future social critics and figures who are willing to challenge and eventually alter the status quo. I now have reason to observe religious tradition without believing in a word I say when I daven. But more curiously, I now have reason to be concerned about Jewish continuity. If knowledge of tradition, texts, and ritual is eroded, from where will the next great "non-Jewish Jewish" thinkers come?

Quotes of the Day - February 29, 2012

I just finished To the Finland Station, and there are a number of great lines I want to highlight and review.

The following is noteworthy, considering much of the world is still embroiled in some form of crisis:

"Marx believed that a new rebellion on the part of the petty bourgeoisie would upset the big bourgeoisie in France...and they announced in the last number of the Revue that "a revolution can hope for success only when the modern factors of production and the bourgeois tecnhique are at varience. A new revolution is possible only after a new crisis" (pg. 201).

Thoughout the book, Wilson makes numerous references to Marx's Jewish background. Perhaps I like these passages because I can relate to them, or perhaps it's because they flatter my sense of Jewish tribalism.

"If Marx is contemptuous of his race, it is primarily perhaps with the anger of Moses at finding the children of Israel dancing before the Golden Calf" (pg. 207).

"It was here that Karl Marx as a Jew had his great value for the thought of his age. The characterisic genuis of the Jew has been especially a moral genius. The sacred books of the people of Israel have served as a basis for the religions of three continents; and even in the case of the great men among the jes who do not occupy themselves with religion proper, it is usually a grasp of moral ideas which has given them their peculiar force" (pg. 301).

At certain points, passages like the one above make me uncomfortable with Wilson's philo-semitism.

In the chapter "Karl Marx: Poet of Commodities", Wilson provides a fantastic explanation and simplification of Marxist economic thought:

"The capitalist system was based on private property andso was inevitably competitive. The aim of every manufaturer was always to undersell the rest, sothat there would be a contunyal stimulus to more efficient methods of production. But the more efficient an industry became - the fast the machiens were able to do the work and the fewer people were needed to tend them - the more people would be thrown out of jobs and the more would wages be reduced. That is, the more the commodities produced, the fewer the people who would be able to buy them. In order to get rid of his goods under these continually tightening conditions, the manufacturer would have to undercut his competitors, and that would mean further reduction of wages and still more efficient machinery, consequently again in the long run, fewer people able to buy what he was making. This situation had already produced a jam and a depression about every ten years; and the only way for the manufacturer to get a reprieve from the vicious cycle was to find new foreign markets for his prodcuts - an escape which would not save him in the long run" (pg. 313).

Back to the topic of the Jews. Wilson's comparison between the marginlization of the Jews in Europe and the marginalization of the proletariat is instructive.

"...proletarian children, as Engels had said, were not aware that they were unfortunate or unhappy because they had never known anything else; whereas the Jews, though their outlook had been narrow, had been accustomed to intellectual traning" (pg. 314).

This may actually explain the attractiveness of socialism to European Jewry and the presence of Jews, like Trotsky and Zinoviev, at the forefront of the Marxist struggle. For, of the proletarian Wilson writes:

"The men who employed him had an interest in keeping him ignortant. By vertue of his very position, he was deprived of the things that would enable him to rise to a higher status. The mediaeval dissabilities of the Jew were in the nature of a mere national accident; the disabilities of the proletarian were disabilities indissoluble from his class" (pg. 314).

My favorite part of the book is Wilson's discussion of Lenin. While Wilson certainly glosses over the negative aspects of Lenin's personal life and philosophy, his comments on Lenin's Marxism are definitely worth highlighting.

Lenin's political philsophy, Wilson writes,

"grew out of his intellecutual enmity toward the striving for petty ends, toward out-and-out pragmatism, and toward all that is ideologically without form and theoretically ungeneralized" (pg. 430).

There is also an honest critique of Lenin's authoritarianism.

"[H]e is quite clear about the intellectual inequalities between the intelligentsia and the masses. He quotes in What Is to Be Done? as 'profoundly true and important' a statement by karl Katusky to the effect that the proletariat, left to itself, can never arrive at socialism; socialism must be brought them from above: 'the vehicles of science are not the proletariat but the bourgeois intelligentsia.' And 'our very first and most pressing duty...is to help turn out worker -  revolutionists on the same level in regard to party activity as intellectual revolutionists" (pg. 387).

" 'All power to the Soviets' had never really meant what it said and that it had soon been exchanged by lenin for 'All power to the Bolshevik Party'"(pg. 431).

Though written over seventy years ago, the following phrase shows Lenin to be more relevant to American politics than ever before:

"In What Is to Be Done?, Lenin characterizes Russia as 'a politically enslaved state, in which nine hundred and ninety-nine of the inhabitants have been corrupted to the marrow of their bones by political subservience and by a complete incomprehsension of party honor and party ties'" (pg. 388).

Just switch out Russia for America, and you definitely have a voice that might add something to contemporary political discourse!

These aren't all the passages I want to highlight, but unfortunately I neglected to note every passage of interest in my copy of the book.

There is No Such Thing as Diaspora!

I.
I returned from Israel in early August, and after getting off the plane my dad took me to a kosher diner; he knew I was still in culture shock. But, not even a warm bagel with cream cheese could prepare for next night's dinner - a trip to the local pizzeria.

As I opened the door to the restaurant, a former hockey teammate strode past.  I hadn't spoken to him for years, and he didn't notice me. I walked up to the counter, my hands shoved nervously into the pockets of my jeans. This was my first time ordering food in English in weeks, and I half expected the cashier to open his mouth and start speaking in that deep, throaty Hebrew to which I had grown accustomed.

"Excuse me, sir," chimed a high-pitched voice. "How can I help you?"

Looking up I saw, not the dark, heavy eye-browed man at the falafel stand in the Agnon strip mall, but a fair-haired girl who graduated from the same middle school as I.

"Emmmm......" I stuttered, unable to shake that acquired Levantine affectation from my speech. "I'm here to pick up an order for Leifer."

My former classmate did not recognize me.

"Hold on a second," she mumbled. 

I felt around in my pockets for the proper combination of bills and change with which to pay for my meal.

"That comes to ten dollars and twenty cents. Will that be all?"

Nodding, I stretched out my hand to pay, but pulled it back suddenly to remove a shekel from the pile of change. Short a dollar or two, I reached hurriedly into my back pocket to supplement my available legal tender. The multicolored bills in my wallet glared at me as I passed them over in search of the green ones.

"Here you are," I said shyly, looking down at my feet again.

She handed me the pizza box from behind the counter and I left without a recept, anxious to get back home.

In less than forty-eight hours, my home had gone from Shai Agnon Street to Lydia Lane.  Home was now just where I happened to be. Where I wanted to be did not really matter.  I've grown up in the same town my whole life, but it still does not really feel like my hometown. I have little in common with people in the neighborhood, and even our limited shared experience seems to have not endured a few years' time. I don't know very much about the people here, and they know next to nothing about me. They don't know that I read from left to right when I pray - something I do only rarely now. They don't know that I used to avoid the pepperoni even before I was a vegetarian.  They don't know that my day of rest is not Sunday, and that for me December 25th is just a day with shorter lines at the airport. All they know is that I have never been part of their community.  They haven't seen me at their churches, or at their youth-group run town carnivals.  They just know I miss school some days, for reasons undisclosed.


II. 
Halfway through my summer in Israel, now accompanied by my Israeli counterparts, I had a conversation about imagined communities. The discussion was part of a debriefing session after a lecture by A.B. Yehoshua at Haifa University. His speech had reminded me of what I read in a book I picked up in the Tel Aviv neighborhood of Neve Tzedek a few days earlier. In The Invention of the Jewish People (the book is worthless as a history of Jews or Judaism, but it is a pretty good introduction to the works of important scholars like Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, and Eric Hobsbawn), the author, Shlomo Sand references the work of Marxist historian Benedict Anderson on nationalism: "the nation...is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign."  Sand goes on to write, "indeed, every community that is bigger than a tribe or a village is imagined, because members do not know one another; such were the great religious communities before modern times.  But the nation has new tools for people's imaginary belonging to it that were unavailable to old societies." I had gotten into an argument with several of the Israelis over the law of return in Israel and the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Sitting on the ground cross-legged, in a circle with my fellow students, I leaned forward and began to speak.

"Not a single person in my family has every lived here, in Haifa. No one. Not ever. As far as I can reasonably trace my lineage, my family was never in Israel. Of course, if you assume the expulsion is factually true, then perhaps, over a thousand years ago, someone related to me was here."

I  paused briefly to wipe my brow as the biblical sun beat down on our creased foreheads.

"But none of that matters," I continued, increasingly animated. "Because, under Israeli law, I have the right to come back here and become a citizen and live. Automatically. At the same time, an Arab, whose family lived in or around Haifa before the war, and was displaced for whatever reason in 1948, does not have the right to come back and reclaim his family's home. But, I can occupy his family's home."

What had begun as a narrow, almost policy-oriented dispute had expanded to include the most fundamental questions of identity.

"Israel," I tried to argue, "is simply a political entity populated by many Jews. it is just another country, one that American Jews are not part of and should not be entitled to."

I was informed that my worldview left me with very little to offer to the program, as it was reductionist and ultimately empty. And I informed my Israeli peers that I wanted no part in their unjust state.

III.
Driving back from the pizzeria, A.B. Yehoshua's voice, from the lecture earlier that day in Haifa, reverberated in my head. As I navigated the darkened suburban streets, his white tufts of hair and claw-like fingers flashed before my eyes.

"Israel is a Jewish totality. Israel identity is total Jewish. Everything is Jewish here, Jews control Jews in Israel, never before in history did this happen!"

I pulled into my driveway, slightly panicked that I could not shake my vision of the aging writer. This must have been some kind of twisted retribution for my seditious comments throughout my trip in Israel.  The voice of the writer pulsated louder in my ears.

"Jew is a term for nationality! The corridors are religious, in and out, but once you are in, you are part of a nationality. Remember, Israel belongs first to its citizens and second to the Jewish people. This is because of identity and citizenship; they are fundamentally different. Identity is totally separate from citizenship."

By now, I had set the pizza down on the kitchen table and had begun to eat. Though surrounded by my family at the table, I was locked in the terrible, hypnotic, Zionistic trance.

"Israeli citizenship, includes seven million people, Arabs and Jews. Israeli identity, total Jewish! You cannot be total with only the religious, devoid of the national."

I took a bite of the pizza, chewing slowly and deliberately as I tried to reason with the thinker who, against my will again laid out his definitions for the terms of Jewish identity.

"Jew - person who declares themselves Jew. Zionism - the idea that Israel belongs to Jewish people. Israeli - identity and citizenship, THE TOTALITY OF JEW!"

My fork clattered against my plate and I jumped up from my seat at the table. I excused myself and slouched to the bathroom, trying to shake the last echoes Yehoshua's voice. At the sink, I splashed some lukewarm water on my face.

According to Yehoshua's reasoning, I am a national minority - a Jew in the United States - and therefore uncontroversially partial. At first glance, this would appear to be accurate. The holidays for school breaks, the national psalms, and even the food (like pizza) are not mine. My history is not included in the national mythology or state-sanctioned culture. When I sing, "My Country, 'Tis of Thee", the words do not refer to me. The land where my fathers died is somewhere in what was the Pale of Settlement, and the land of the pilgrims' pride is Israel - in Jerusalem. Back in the diaspora, I could not stop thinking that perhaps A.B. Yehoshua was right. But that was six months ago, and a lot has changed in those six months.

IV.
I used to think that even if the connection between Jews in the Diaspora and Jews in Israel was imagined - after all, we cannot all know each other - there was still a bond that transcended both the notions of nationality and religion. In Israel, I wanted to think that I had something in common with the cashier at the coffee shop, or the owner of the falafel stand in the Agnon strip mall, even if my conversational Hebrew was broken at best. I thought of Israel as the country that sleeps on my day of rest, where school is closed on my holidays. In Israel, I thought the electrician or the plumber, bus driver or garbage man, could look at me and know what I did on Friday nights, and know how I spent my Saturdays.

But the uniting factor has always been religion and not nationality.  As the saying goes, even when the Jews have not kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews.  And it is precisely because Israel is a theocracy that I, as a traditionally practicing Jew, could feel at home.  Without that unifying religion, everything fractures. Take observance or ritual out of the equation, and what is left is not a nation but rather a collection of nations - Yiddish people, Mizrachi people, Ethiopian people. Together, we can call ourselves no more of a nation than Christians or Catholics can. And as much as I wish it weren't true, the ties between the disparate strains of Judaism disappear without religion.

I am not living in the "Diaspora" and my ancestors were never in the "Diaspora", for what Zionists have derided for nearly a century as the "Diaspora" is the core of my history and my culture. The foundation of my Jewishness owes far more to the Belarussian or Lithuanian shtetls than it does to the modern state of Israel. The language of my grandparents was Yiddish - killed by the Hebrew revivalists - and the language of my dreams is English.  The natural equilibrium, the homeostasis of my culture, is "Diaspora."

Thus, the Diaspora does not exist; the Jew of many nations is the historical constant. It is the advent of a modern theocratic state in what was once British Mandatory Palestine that is unnatural and deviation from the history of the Jews. Jewishness has always existed outside of Israel, and will continue to exist, even after the modern state of Israel is gone.