Separating the meaning of Jewish identity and learning, distinct from the Israeli state and its underlying doctrine, is worthwhile work.

It's also urgent work, overdue. This is a maniacal, genocidal post from Israel's Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir:

For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!

Repulsion from Israel's actions naturally affects how Jews are seen in the world, how we walk among others in the world—and ironically, for Zionists, validates their conception of the gentile world as forever hostile to Jews.

The existence of the State of Israel, the merger of Judaism with Jewish nationalism, has unavoidably changed what being a Jew is.

Identifying with a state perpetually in conflict, we retreat to the protection of our litany of noble sufferings, protecting from facts, from seeing ourselves as cruel or hurtful. Or—even—silly, annoying, not so significant.

Zionist theoretician Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in 1923 of the way that the Jewish state would have to be constructed, that “it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting ‘Palestine’ from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority.”

Colonization would have to continue “only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population—behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.”

When Jabotinsky wrote this, Jews were immigrating to Palestine under British protection to fulfill the League of Nations Mandate promise of a yet-to-be defined “Jewish homeland” there.

Population "transfer" to create a Jewish majority state was envisioned by Zionist leadership, from founder Theodor Herzl onwards.

The United Nations Palestine partition plan of 1947 and resulting civil conflict provided the opportunity for Jewish militias and then the Israeli army to target and empty communities—to become sites for Jewish settlements with Hebrew names.

Israeli statehood on May 14, 1948 was accomplished by dispossession of most of the Arabs of Palestine—the expulsion of 750,000 Arabs from what would become Israel. This is called the Nakba (catastrophe) in Arabic.

Those Palestinians remain exiled despite a pledge from Israel to the United Nations in 1949 to accept returning refugees, as part of their admission as a member state.

The “restoration” of our sovereignty inflicted a catastrophe on Palestinians which will be part of Jewish history forever.

The creation of the State of Israel is presented as necessary Jewish self-assertion.

In September 1948, Israeli diplomat Abba Eban wrote that in a “just world” consultation and agreement would have been preferred. “But the world is more realistic than just. The doctrine of ‘accomplished fact’ has been entirely vindicated against that of ‘prior consent.’”

That doctrine forces for Jews a necessity of either identifying with Israel, or maintaining the identity of “Jewish-not Zionist,” an awkward thing to maintain while well-provisioned Jewish organizations present Zionism as Judaism.

That doctrine also destroyed Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa, and as far as India. Exercising naked power to force Arabs from their homes to privilege Jews in Palestine poisoned the place of Jews who lived for many centuries as citizens in neighboring societies.

Thinking of the vulnerability and degradation of Jews in the past, I struggle to reconcile those moments with this moment of Jews as a menace—and Jewish nationalism as a personal imprisonment.

The Zionist movement which descended on Palestine to “ingather the exiles” is now a state dedicated to a philosophy of Jewish redemption by violence, “an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority,” as described by Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and others in a 1948 letter to The New York Times, of the faction that is now in control of Israel’s psyche.

Israel operates with a logic in which opponents to the Jewish state intend a Holocaust—mindless, causeless enemies as in the Passover or Purim or Hanukkah stories.

While most Jews in the diaspora live in accommodation and cooperation with gentile co-nationals, Israel has sacralized and militarized the “they always turn on us” belief.

We live in two models of Jewishness—the Jew living in civil cooperation with gentiles, and the militant Jewish supremacist in Palestine.

The contradiction of those two models of Jewishness makes us a problem to ourselves and others, with no clarity.

Complicating this is our belief in the grandeur of our own culture and learning.

As a child, I was buoyed by stories of Jewish learning and achievement—unlikely persistence through the ages—uniqueness.

I felt I was one of a fine, special group.

I also absorbed the other, paired, narrative of Jewish history. In the ritual reading of the Haggadah text each Pesach, I was reminded that we were enslaved in Egypt, and that in every generation They rise up to destroy us. And we survive, achieve, and show our high quality.

The theme of Jewish life is that we were chosen for a great mission, and have been persecuted since.

In these narratives, living a Jewish life is fulfilling the endowment of Torah and generations of scholarship, earnest and humane— targeted by malice, by jealousy from peoples less… fortunate? Not Jewish.

It may be that feelings Jews have about gentiles are as problematic as prejudices gentiles have against Jews. We suffer from not only how gentiles may see us, but limitations on how we see non-Jews.

Mitch Abidor, in the magazine Jewish Currents, describes a passage in Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint about a non-Jewish girl who tosses a flaming baton and catches it, and and its significance to the “nice Jewish boys in the stands." Portnoy observes that:

there was still a certain comic detachment exhibited on our side of the field, grounded in the belief that this was precisely the kind of talent that only a goy would think to develop in the first place.

Legendary Forverts newspaper editor Abraham Cahan wrote in his novel, The Rise of David Levinsky, of Talmudic education (an experience Cahan had shared with his character during his youth in Lithuania). The process of extended reasoning and disputation in religious study seemed the acme of human ratiocination:

"Can you fathom the sea? Neither can you fathom the depths of the Talmud," as we would put it. We were sure that the highest mathematics taught in the Gentile universities were child's play as compared to the Talmud.

This feeling of higher thought as a specifically Jewish achievement is useful to surface in discussion of how we see our not-Jewish fellows.

Torah study may be mostly a treasure of the observant now, but the habits and outlook of study and productive disputation persist. Might the assumption of superlative Jewish quality also?

To accept the World-Against-the-Jew construct, one must accept the idea that there is a unique quality to Jews.

Our religion revolves around identity, descent from tribes in a substantive relationship with the true God. When we pray, we are praying to a god that particularly cares that we are Jews doing the praying.

The central prayer of Judaism is the Shema:

Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.

The Yiddish phrase "pintele yid," Jewish spark or kernel, expresses the belief that there is an irreducible, distinct core of Jewishness that is in a born Jew, observant or secular or ignorant.

The story told about converts is that their nefesh (soul, spirit) was there at Sinai to hear Moses tell God’s covenant with his people..

This resolves Judaism as an embrace of Torah—fudges the membership story, in truth.

Is “Jew” a coherent national category, as we include Indians, Ethiopians, Yemenis, Poles, and Romanians?

When devotion to Torah is the center of this identity, it does not require ruling from imagined supremacy.

The poison brewed when mixed with a colonial enterprise designed at a time Britain could design a plan “natives” had to accept.

The Israeli government recognizes Israeli citizenship for Jews, Arabs, and others, but then records the “nationality” of the citizen separately, so that I, an American citizen, in their system share the same “nationality”—“Jewish”—as an Israeli Jew.

Ultimately the identity is based on magic, superstition, folkways, and spiritual truth. Am I required to believe in the existence of "The Jewish Nation" as the term is meant in the Zionist state?

The Zionist proposition for the world’s relationship with Jews is, “Love us, love our land.” This is articulated in their claim, “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”

In 1906, Jewish educator Solomon Schechter said that he feared assimilation of Jews, loss of identity, “even more than pogroms.” He wrote that in the Jewish “exile,” the Zionist project could form “the great bulwark against assimilation… an opposing force.”

As we Jews "fight for our existence," is it because diminishment of our self-held special place in the world feels like death?

American Jewish organizations promote connection with the State of Israel to nurture Jewish identity of the young.

Identifying with a state perpetually in conflict, we retreat to the protection of our litany of noble sufferings, protecting from facts, from seeing ourselves as cruel or hurtful. Or—even—silly, annoying, not so significant.

A popular 1970s Israeli song had the refrain, "The Whole World is Against Us.” It concluded,

The whole world is against us...This song was taught to usBy our old fathers,And we too shall sing it,And after us—the sons.And great-grandchildren of great-grandchildren will singHere in the Land of Israel,And anyone who is against usCan go to hell!The whole world is against us…

It’s not clear how we wish to be regarded.

At the Enlightenment and revolutionary emancipation of Jews, converting from toleration to equal citizenship, there was a loss of community autonomy, statutory difference—the loss of definition as members of a nation within the nation.

Even stigmatized, community autonomy had its advantages. Jewish communities had their own recognized governance, internal taxation, regulation of their own personal affairs, and laws, courts.

That concept of modern citizenship as individual equality conflicts with Jews residing as their own self-governing polity with representatives to the larger society, as was often the practice. This is sacrificed with equal citizenship, where all live under the same law.

Max Nordau, speaking to the First Zionist Congress in 1897, made interesting comments that when Jews lived isolated in ghettos, they had society of their own. He says that while Emancipation had its intoxication, it left Jews in Western Europe in “misery” because they could not thrive as Jews among Jews.

We are people; people do evil.

Acceptance becomes a stressor; the more we become like our fellow nationals, the more desperate to maintain a difference.

By the logic of Nordau, the most salutary circumstance for Jewish happiness is isolation from the larger society—or living as the majority the Jewish state achieved in 1948.

UK Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in a 2016 address on antisemitism, presents the existence of Israel as a Jewish human right. “Antisemitism means denying the right of Jews to exist collectively as Jews with the same rights as everyone else.” (Emphasis added.)

Now, we've acquired the belief we're only meant to be happy if we rule our own “Jewish” land? Or only be safe if we do? The rationale toggles between the two, that Israel represents Jewish safety or Jewish fulfillment.

Jewish history treasures—curates—narratives of persecution. The meaning of that must be considered. If we have grievance, contempt, or pity for those outside our circle, are we healthy?

For me, there has been not just a feeling of kinship but a higher expectation of Jews, expecting less of gentiles as a rule. Prejudice absorbed growing up is painful to examine.

The origin story of our people—chosen by God to a special mission of glorifying Him and his laws—may instill confidence, a sense of identity, but I think is “worth another think” as a problem when, as Peter Beinart points out, it is empowered as a state.

He writes, “In most of the Jewish world today, rejecting Jewish statehood is a greater heresy than rejecting Judaism itself.”

Beinart's comment suggests that many Jews now have Zionism as their faith—and faiths are based on taking certain premises as fact. It may be a creator of a particular sort, or in this case a belief in the Jewish people as a reconstituted modern nation-state. In any case, faiths can't be debated.

Beinart, religiously observant and well-grounded in Jewish study, called his book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, and gave it the subtitle, A Reckoning. The necessary reckoning he forecasts for Jews I think will be ugly and with false starts and detours, and will necessitate re-evaluations of how we prejudge gentiles.

We number perhaps 16 million worldwide, and we Jews are at the pivot point of the USA’s wars on Iran, Iraq, and all sorts of involvement in bolstering Israel’s impunity in its neighborhood. Things at pivot points can get caught and mangled.

Dr. Michael A. Meyer wrote of American Jews: “For them the state is the flagship of the people to which they belong. Their Jewish identity is as much ethnic as religious, and their religious expression of that identity........

© Common Dreams