Sieradski’s peculiar fusion of sober realism and incendiary idealism—there is no unified Jewish Left, and yet we need a unified Jewish Left to make the “Jewish civil war” a fair fight—shows how difficult it is for members of the Diaspora to rein in the sense of self-importance that animates their ideological moves. If you see yourself as a soldier in a war that will determine the fate of millions, you’re bound to be at least a little politically and culturally myopic. No matter how pure their motives, those who get caught up in events like l’affaire Judt end up behaving much like those who act out their private lives with role-playing games—eventually the distinction between fantasy and reality starts to blur.
REMEMBER, THEY’RE AMERICANS
Or so I would tell myself during my years as the managing editor of Tikkun magazine, one of the most influential and controversial Jewish publications to come out of the progressive Diaspora. Both my childhood in the Middle East and Europe and conversations with my family helped put the ideological struggles between American Jews over Israel that I encountered while working at the magazine into proper perspective, if only because the Israel of my upbringing seemed so much more tangible than the abstraction I would later encounter. To put it bluntly, they reminded me not to make mountains out of molehills. But that’s hard to remember when your attempts to close an issue of the magazine keep getting delayed by the angry outbursts of individuals who haven’t yet had their worldviews decentered.
Because my position exposed me to a steady flow of vitriol, many of those rants blur together. But a few stand out, whether for their extremity, absurdity, or both. I remember one time when the latest issue of Tikkun had only been on newsstands for two days, and negative reactions from our readers were already starting to roll in.
“How could you engage in such lashon harah (shit-talking)?” yelled one particularly irate reader on my voice mail. “I can tell by your last name that you must be Israeli. If so, even more shame on your self-hating soul.”
Dealing with impassioned responses comes with the territory in the publishing industry. But this particular outburst proved illuminating for me. The beautifully crafted article that inspired such rage—written by former Time Jerusalem bureau chief and erstwhile crime novelist Matt Rees for our September/October 2005 edition—steered well clear of the usual hot-button topics of Israel coverage. Rees’s piece examined the failure of Israel’s public health care system to properly look after the country’s mentally ill Holocaust survivors. It was one of those rare gems that every editor who’s serious about social justice dreams of acquiring. Tikkun published it nearly two years before Prime Minister Ehud Olmert found himself besieged by elderly Israeli survivors in concentration camp uniforms protesting his government’s offer of an estimated twenty-dollar-per-month stipend in exchange for keeping their plight out of circulation in the United States.
Yet the article elicited a reaction that I was familiar with from our coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but had mistakenly believed would be less intense in this case. As I can now see more clearly, the caller was so incensed because he believed that both the British journalist who wrote the damaging exposé and Tikkun itself were questioning Israel’s very right to exist. From his perspective, we were disguising our anti-Zionism by commissioning negative social coverage of Israel.
The editor in me was tempted to chalk up this reading of Rees’s article to the legacy of ill will among conservative Jews that Tikkun had accumulated in the nearly twenty years prior to my hiring. But as an Israeli I recognized that the lessons of this interaction extended much further. My experiences at the magazine up to that point should have clued me in that many of our readers approached our content with suspicion and even hostility. In a sense, they expected to have their buttons pushed, and not just by stories about the West Bank. Incidents like this taught me that a significant portion of American Jewry didn’t want to hear about Israel’s failings, period. Because the article so obviously dealt with the ineptitude—or, as some would argue, the callousness—of the Israeli state in caring for its most vulnerable citizens (indeed, precisely those for whom the state was rhetorically created), it struck the same chord as would have a feature on a “break-their-bones” anti-demonstration policy or artillery strikes on refugee camps in Lebanon.
This was the editorial conundrum I repeatedly confronted throughout my tenure at Tikkun. How could I, as an Israeli citizen, take American Jews seriously if they cared so deeply about Israel’s existence, yet so little about its actual functioning? Had their desire to discredit Arab and Palestinian claims to the country impaired their ability to empathize with other Jews? Or was there a magic narrative formula that would let me capture the plight of Israelis while working around the paranoid stance that any discussion of Israeli social justice issues was anti-Zionist code?
I find myself confronting this problem constantly as I try to balance my present life in the Diaspora with my past as a person who had no choice but to identify with Israel. It seems that I’m being displaced from the Israel I know and, yes, love—the way you love your family despite all the things it has done to mess you up—by the Israel of American imaginings. This is an uncomfortable acknowledgment because I recognize all too well that my sense of “occupation” is a metaphor that’s incommensurable with the deprivations experienced by the Palestinians for whom the meaning of that term is a matter of flesh and blood. But I’ve learned that it’s better to be attentive to my conflicted feelings than to ignore them. I’ve had the privilege of living most of my adult life in the relative freedom of the affluent and liberal city of San Francisco. If I feel bound by American fantasies of Israel, how must those Israelis feel who live elsewhere in places less amenable to a diversity of perspectives?
In a sense, Israel’s punishment for failing to live up to the idealized notions held by American Jews is to be imaginatively conquered by them, suffering a peculiar form of imperialism that overlooks the land’s “natives”— whatever their religion or ethnicity—in much the same way that the original Zionist immigrants to Ottoman Palestine regarded their new home as a wild and empty place. Paradoxically, contemporary political discourse about Israel in the United States—even as it hinges on the opposition between Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians—ends up collapsing the very distinctions it seeks to sustain in its preference for the figure of Israel over the reality of Israel.
ISRAEL IS EVERYWHERE
In theory, a population as worldly and educated as most Jewish Americans should understand the predicament that Israelis find themselves in, since the U.S. itself suffers under the burden of stereotypes. The years since 9/11 have made painfully clear that people in other parts of the world have a difficult time distinguishing between fantasy and reality where Americans are concerned. Given the United States’ imperial ambitions and unquestioned military superiority in recent decades, this misperception can’t easily be transmuted into a feeling of being “occupied.” But Americans who venture abroad commonly experience the sensation of only being seen for what they’re expected to be, rather than for who they are as individuals. Why then is it so hard for even the most sophisticated participants in American political discourse about Israel to see through the figure of the country to the reality concealed beneath it?
The answer lies in the nature of the Diaspora’s complex political identity. Since the founding of the Israeli state in 1948, all Jews have been considered its citizens, no matter where they live or what they believe. The extension of this right has consistently strengthened Israel economically and socially over the years and prevented Jews from being hopelessly outnumbered by the Arab population still living within the nation’s borders. But it has also given Jews who have no intention of ever living in Israel a political stake in the nation’s affairs. As critics of the U.S. government’s support for Israel have stressed for decades, this psychological investment from the Diaspora Jewish community has translated seamlessly into a financial investment. But those critics often fail to see the degree that this support—which initially came with relatively few strings attached—has recently been accompanied by a growing desire for a specific kind of influence. Whether conscious of this desire or not, members of the Diaspora have increasingly shown that they want more for