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.

Quotes of the Day - March 4, 2012

The next book on my reading list is Power and the Idealists, by Paul Berman. I decided to read it after a debate with an uncle of mine about humanitarian interventionism. I argued that while well-intentioned, humanitarian intervention has tended to exacerbate conflicts rather than end them and that, more often than not, humanitarian intervention is used a pretext for the expansion of military power. My uncle framed the debate in purely ethical terms; if you have the ability to stop a massacre you are morally obligated to do so. So, I had a general idea of what the book was going to be about. That said, now that I'm halfway through the book, Berman covers a lot of material that I did not expect to see. With a fast-paced, journalistic tone and occasional humorous flourishes, Berman deftly describes the transformation of the radicals of '68 and the New Left into the champions of liberal intervention on the world stage. And, over the course of the first two chapters, he provides a stinging critique of left-wing anti-Zionism and a humorous take on contemporary American conservatism among other noteworthy points that I have highlighted below.

Berman characterizes well the conservative fear of the moral bankrupting of America by spooky academic liberal elites. For the Right, and probably for for David Brooks, too,

 "The American public seemed to have sunk into a swamp of moral indifference, even depravity. Right and wrong had disappeared into a marshy haze. And the conservatives grew wide-eyed in astonishment and horror."

Berman's description of the non-terrorist New Left is harsh. It paints the activists of '68 as silent accomplices in the wave of left-wing terror that gripped Europe in the 1970's. His description also verges on a criticism of lifestylism.

"They were not entirely resistant to the terrorist argument. So they dithered....they labored at building their communes, kindergartens, food co-ops, new gender relations, and other elements of the new Left utopia in its countercultural version. Or else they followed the retro-Marxist example and colonized the factories in search of proletarian followers. They mooned nostalgically over the anarchosyndicalist vision of a revolutionary general strike" (pg. 52).

The last line jumped out at me. As May 1st grows nearer and talk about a general strike seeps into the mainstream media (See this Salon article). Berman's mocking tone frustrates me. A general strike, however unrealistic it is to hope for a complete halt to all business on a single day, could have intense localized effects. Even if only one factory is taken over, or one business shut down, that is a small victory that can propel the movement forward.


As much as I try to avoid Israel nowadays, it always seems to find me. I've argued for years now, with friends and family, about the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Yet, in describing the Left's post-1967 backlash against Israel, Berman shows that there is, regrettably, an often blurry line between the two.

"The 1967 war, in which the Israelis seized a lot of land, seemed to confirm Israel's imperialist nature. The Soviets became fierce enemies of Zionism. Palestinian Marxists stepped forward. Soviet resources poured in. And, under those circumstances, the New Left came up with one more interpretation of the Middle Easter conflict, in which the New Left's vision of a lingering Nazism of modern life was suddenly reconfigured, with Israel in a leading role. Israel became the crypto-Nazi state par excellence, the purest of all examples of how Nazism had never been defeated but had instead lingered into the present in ever more cagey forms. What better disguise could Nazism assume than a Jewish state" (pg. 54).

Of course, to describe Israel as a Nazi state is utterly preposterous. It is not possible to compare the actions of the Nazis to the occupation of the West Bank. Israel may be an oppressive, even apartheid state, but it is certainly not a reincarnation of Hitler's Germany. The great irony of left-wing sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and thus opposition to Israel, is that by opposing Israel for being Nazi-like, the Left puts itself quite literally in the same camp as people who themselves are Nazi-like - Islamic fundamentalists (or Islamofascists) and even Neo-Nazis themselves.

"He found himself in a military training ground where, in one part of the camp, European leftists singing left-wing songs received their anti-Zionist military training, and, in another part, European fascists singing fascist songs received their own anti-Zionist military training" (pg. 55).

I have no love for the French New Philosophers, but Glucksmann's attempts to create a new and coherent set of political ideas out of the antiquated Marxism of both the old and New Left is certainly something admirable.

"[H]e set about trying to construct a new set of political ideas. That was his project. He did this in three big steps between 1975 and the early nineteen eighties. His first step, in the mid-seventies, was to give up on his old-fashioned anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, the fundamentals of the left, in favor of what he began to call antitotalitarianism" (pg. 67).

Today, the Left is in need of revitalization more than ever. The resonance of Occupy Wall Street has provided a certain spark to segments of the political left, but it remains as disparate and factionalized as ever. Every ideological subgroup, from the insurrectionary anarchists to the social democrats, compete for scraps of political power. As much as I loath to admit it, a strong and well organized party, well-grounded in theory, might be the antidote to the Left's chronic disorganization.

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.