JEWS AND THE CHALLENGE OF SOVEREIGNTY

      
   Over the past few years, as the Israeli army has become the world´s
foremost anti-terrorist fighting force, great numbers of American
servicemen and servicewomen have come to Israel to learn from our
experience and to apply it in America´s own war on terror. It has been
my privilege to host many of these officers at my home in Jerusalem... It
is always fascinating to hear their impressions of the area and their
analyses of both the conflicts in the Middle East and the nature of
Middle Eastern societies.

   Invariably they home in on one characteristic-the refusal of many
Arab leaders, whether they be Palestinians, Iraqis, Saudis, or Syrians, to
take responsibility for their own failures and foibles. Whenever
something goes wrong in Arab societies, these Americans observe, it is
never these societies´ fault, but instead the fault of the United States
or the West or, most commonly, of Israel and the Jews. And this refusal
to accept responsibility is the largest single obstacle to America´s
efforts to foster democracy in the Middle East-so these officers tell
me-because the essence of democracy, of sovereignty and freedom, is the
willingness to take responsibility for one´s actions and decisions.

   I listen to them, and I cannot help but agree, but I also cannot help
wondering whether Israelis and Jews don´t face similar difficulties in
shouldering the burdens of statehood. Inevitably, I find myself thinking
back to the eve of Israel´s independence, to May 14, 1948, when one man
had to grapple with the question of whether the Jews, after generations
of powerlessness, could learn to act as sovereigns in their own
state-whether they could live up to the challenges of independence.

   That man was the leader of the Zionist movement, the soon-to-be
prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. On that day, Ben-Gurion sat in his living
room and watched while outside in the street, the Jews of Palestine
were dancing. They were dancing because they were about to realize what was
one of the most remarkable and inspiring achievements in human history:
A people which had been exiled from its homeland two thousand years
before, which had endured countless pogroms, expulsions, and persecutions, but
which had refused to relinquish its identity-which had, on the
contrary, substantially strengthened that identity; a people which only a few
years before had been the victim of mankind´s largest single act of mass
murder, killing a third of the world´s Jews, that people was returning
home as sovereign citizens in their own independent state.

   And so they danced, filling the streets; but Ben-Gurion wasn´t
dancing. Instead he sat alone and wrote in his diary about his fears,
confiding doubts about the Jews´ ability to withstand the onslaught of
the combined Arab armies, and about the world´s willingness to accept a
permanent Jewish state. He wondered whether the Zionist vision of a
normal state, a state like all others, could be reconciled with a Jewish
state that aspired to be a light unto the nations. Most
disconcertingly, he questioned whether a people so long accustomed to being the victims of sovereign power could suddenly turn around and judiciously wield
it-whether they could, in fact, take responsibility for themselves...

    Those problems are already discernible in the Bible-with the
serious reservations regarding kingship raised by the Prophets, and with the
unstable and often violent relationships between monarchs and priests
during the period of the Temples. The problems multiplied a thousand
fold, however, with the destruction of the Second Temple and the
annihilation of the Jewish commonwealth in biblical Israel.

   Shorn of sovereignty, the Jews developed a cult of powerlessness,
which many deemed a form of divine punishment for their sins and which
developed, in time, into an actual repugnance toward power. If the
Bible was clear about whom it considered the hero-Joshua conquering Canaanite
cities, Gideon smiting Midianites, Samson wielding a jawbone like an
axe-the Talmud, written mostly by Jews lacking sovereign political
power, was far less categorical. "Who is the hero?" asks the Mishna. Not King
David dancing as he escorts the ark to liberated Jerusalem, not Judah
Maccabee and the Hasmoneans defeating the Greeks and rededicating the
Temple; no, the hero is "the man who conquers his own passions." Losing
sovereignty, the Jews fled in ward from the fields of politics and
battle-into their communities, into their synagogues, and into
themselves...

     In modernity, however, the ever-inventive Jewish people came up
with another answer to the problem of power: Not turning inward, but-as soon
as the Emancipation and the fall of the ghetto walls allowed it-by
bursting out through assimilation. Thus, beginning in the nineteenth
century, Jews could become powerful-they could become a Benjamin
Disraeli or a Ferdinand Lasalle-but as Englishmen and Germans, not as Jews; in
spite of their Jewishness, and usually at its expense.

   It has often been remarked that perhaps the one thing ultra-Orthodox
and assimilated Jews agreed upon early in the last century was a
staunch opposition to Zionism: The Orthodox because it claimed that Zionism
aspired to play God and redeem the Jewish nation; the highly
assimilated Jews because they denied that the Jews were a nation at all.
Ultra-Orthodox and assimilated Jews would reunite tragically on the
train to Auschwitz, the final destination on the 2,000-year-long path of
Jewish powerlessness. The Nazis sent them there claiming, paradoxically, that
Jews wielded too much power.

   Though American Jewry would later explain the Holocaust as the
product of an absence of toleration and universal values, the Zionist
interpretation of the Holocaust has always been that six million Jews
died because they lacked an army, a state power.

   But for the 600,000 Jews in Israel in 1948, facing six Arab armies
preparing to invade the nascent state, the question of whether Jewish
power was necessary was moot. Without power, the citizens of the new
state would die-not only spiritually, but physically.  Yet, as Ben-Gurion
realized, knowing this and acting on it were not synonymous. He
understood that the transformation from a people recoiling from power
to a people capable of embracing it would be the single greatest challenge
facing Israel. "We must adopt a new approach, new habits of mind," he
told listeners shortly before the state´s founding. "We must learn to
think like a state."

   He even coined a Hebrew word for that challenge, mamlachtiyut, a
neologism which eludes English equivalents but which roughly translates
as "acting in a sovereign-like manner." By mamlachtiyut, Ben-Gurion
meant the Jews´ ability to handle power-military power as well as democratic
and political power-effectively, justly, responsibly. The Jews of Israel,
Ben-Gurion knew, might succeed in repelling Arab armies, in absorbing
many times their number of new immigrants, and in creating world-class
governmental and cultural institutions, but without mamlachtiyut,
without the ability to deal with power and take responsibility for its
ramifications, they could not ultimately survive...

     Israel...established its independence, but some of the greatest
challenges to its sovereignty lay ahead. In 1956, Ben-Gurion
demonstrated what he meant by mamlachtiyut by going to war against Egyptian
President Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Soviet-supplied army. The decision was
roundly condemned by most of the world, including by the United States, but
Ben-Gurion´s position was that no state, and certainly not the Jewish
state, was obliged to sit idly while an army sworn to its destruction
massed on its borders. Ben-Gurion also exercised mamlachtiyut by
building what became the greatest physical manifestation of Jewish power ever,
the Dimona nuclear facility. Just over a decade after Jews were herded by
the millions into Nazi death camps, an independent Jewish state possessed
the power enjoyed by only a handful of nations.

   Yet, for all its successful displays of mamlachtiyut, Israel
sometimes displayed a frightening inability to understand the rudiments of
sovereignty. In May 1967, for example, while Nasser´s troops again
gathered on Israel´s border, Israel´s leadership was torn between the
generals who wanted to go to war immediately, and the ministers, who
insisted on first proving-to the United States, especially-that Israel
had done everything possible to avoid bloodshed. The ministers won out,
and in June 1967 Israel defeated at least three major Arab armies,
almost quadrupling its territorial size.

   But the Six Day victory precipitated a different kind of power complex
in Israel-an over reliance on tanks and planes and paratroopers, a
fetishizing of the Israel Defense Forces, and the near apotheosis of
its generals. The edifice would come crashing down, suddenly, at 2 p.m. on
October 6, 1973, when the armies of Egypt and Syria simultaneously
attacked Israel, catching it off guard and killing 2,600 of its soldiers.
Though the IDF managed to turn the tide and to achieve a stunning
victory which would in time pacify Israel´s two most threatening borders, the
shock of that initial attack would remain a national nightmare. Come
Yom Kippur time every year-and this year was no exception-much of the
country engages in a paroxysm of pain and an all-out assault on the very notion
of power. Since 1973, virtually every Israeli resort to armed force-the
1976 Entebbe raid and the 1981 attack on the Osirak nuclear reactor in
Iraq are notable exceptions-has been the focus of profound controversy
not only in the world, but more keenly, within Israel itself.

   The Yom Kippur trauma would give rise to two new, mutually
incompatible movements: First, Shalom Achshav (Peace Now), a leftist
organization, recoiled from an over reliance on power and instead
sought a mediated solution in which Israeli sovereignty would dissolve into a
borderless New Middle East-essentially the old assimilationist vision
revisited. Second, Gush Emunim (the Bloc of the Faithful), championed
by parts of the Right and many religious settlers of Judea, Samaria, and
Gaza, revered power as the panacea for Israel´s security problems.
These are the poles between which Israel has been torn for the last thirty
years, and the dividing issue is not race or economics, but power.

   It goes without saying that this struggle does not occur in a
vacuum.  Israel is situated in the midst of the Arab world, in the historic
Islamic heartland, a region that also has a problem with power, but one
that is diametrically opposed to Israel´s. Unlike normative Judaism, a
product of powerlessness, Islam developed during a period when Muslims
ruled most of the civilized world. Power is integral to Islam. There is
no medieval manual on how to run a Jewish state, but thousands of such
texts exist on how to run an Islamic state. Islam, therefore, harbors
no misgivings regarding power. It is the tool by which God fulfills his
will for the world, and, as such, the attainment of power is incumbent on
every individual Muslim.

   Arab Muslims thus have a problem with a palpably powerful Jewish
state, and in recent years they hit upon the ideal solution. Terrorism
not only requires little by way of technical sophistication or capital
outlays, but by forcing Israel to fight back in densely populated
areas, imposing roadblocks and curfews. By drawing international wrath toward
Israeli policies, it thrusts to the fore the deepest Jewish ambivalence
toward power. Though it patently failed in its goal of destroying
Israel´s economy and unraveling its civil society, terror did succeed
in exacerbating the Jewish confusion over sovereignty, over mamlachtiyut.

   Part of the Israeli population, for example, reacted by building
unauthorized settlements in the territories-essentially subverting the
democratic process-while another part tried to negotiate a
European-funded peace treaty with Palestinian officials behind the
Israeli government´s back. Some Israelis wanted to drive the
Palestinians out entirely-an extreme abuse of power-while others advocated the
creation of a binational state-the final abdication of power. Both are
classic examples of what Ben-Gurion would call a breakdown of
mamlachtiyut.

   Mamlachtiyut, in fact, was what drew me to Israel in the first
place.  I grew up just about the only Jewish kid on the block, and the almost
daily trouncing I took from the neighborhood gang taught me a great
deal about power and the hazards of lacking it. But what really convinced me
was a coin... [A] distant cousin of mine from Israel gave me a coin
that was an exact replica of a Second Temple coin, only it wasn´t ancient.
It was shiny and clean and the letters emblazoned on it were identical to
those I was just then learning in Hebrew school. Though not a
particularly precocious nine-year-old, I knew that modern coins came
from existing countries and Hebrew from Jews and quickly completed the
syllogism: There was a Jewish state. From that epiphanous moment on, I
was hooked.

   There followed the Six Day War-the only event in history in which
Jews have been powerful and appreciated for it. I was fascinated by the
notion of Jews taking responsibility for themselves as Jews-for their taxes
and their sewers and their lampposts...  So I moved to Israel, became a
citizen, and joined the army. I put on those red paratrooper boots the
first time and was overwhelmed by the realization that I was a member
of the first Jewish fighting force in 2,000 years, a Jew from New Jersey
lucky enough to live at a time when I could serve a sovereign Jewish
state...

   Today, as an Israeli, I must confront questions that derive from
having power. I had to decide, for instance, whether to support the
construction of a fence which may provide greater security against
terrorist attacks, but which evokes the very ghetto walls that Zionism
aspired to topple. During the last two years, when two of my children
were serving in the IDF-one of whom was wounded in action fighting
against Hamas in Hebron-I had to decide whether to favor a pullout of
Israeli forces from Palestinian cities and perhaps give a jump-start to
peace, or whether, by doing so, I´d be giving encouragement to terror,
jeopardizing my third child, who took a bus to and from school every
day in Jerusalem. Last August, when I, together with a group of Israeli
officers, broke into a synagogue in a Jewish settlement in Gaza and
confronted a hundred men, women, and children lying on the floor,
wailing and screaming out to God, I had to decide whether evicting these people
from that synagogue and from their homes would strengthen the Israeli
state or shatter the Israeli people. There was no escaping that
decision; the responsibility was mine.

    An American journalist once asked me to react to a charge made by a
settler leader to the effect that the problem with the IDF is that it
is a Western army, and not a biblical army, capable of exacting
eye-for-an-eye revenge. The problem with the IDF, I replied, is that it
is not Western enough. I said that the Palestinians should thank Allah
daily that they are grappling with roadblocks and curfews, and not,
say, with the American or French armies, which would have pulverized their
cities long ago. The problem with the IDF, I said, is that it is too
Jewish.

   I remembered that when Lebanese Christian militiamen, sent by
Defense Minister Ariel Sharon into the refugee camps of Beirut, killed 800
Palestinians, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to
protest Sharon´s action. But in 2002, when President Bush sent the
Northern Alliance into Taliban villages in Afghanistan, killing many
thousands, scarcely an American voice rose in protest. I recalled that
when U.S. forces believed that Saddam Hussein was hiding in a certain
neighborhood in Baghdad, U.S. planes flattened the neighborhood, but
that when the IDF learned that the entire leadership of Hamas was in a
single building in Gaza, it chose a bomb too small to eliminate them for fear
of harming nearby civilians.  Israeli soldiers go into the homes of terror
suspects, risking their own lives and often sacrificing them in order
to reduce civilian casualties... Israel devotes but a single day each year
to acknowledging its army...Yom Hazikaron, Memorial Day, a day
commemorated...with songs and poems about the horrors of war and the
holiness of peace...

   Israel today faces challenges every bit as existential as those
Ben-Gurion confronted in 1948. Terrorists still try to blow themselves
up in public places within Israel, and vast forces, many armed with
long-range missiles and unconventional weapons, assemble around it. As
evidenced recently by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad´s call for
Israel to be "wiped off the map," many of the world´s 1.3 billion
Muslims would not weep over the disappearance of the Jewish state, nor would
they be too selective with respect to the manner in which that elimination
would be implemented. Many Western Europeans, meanwhile, are
indifferent and even hostile to Israel´s fate. And even in America-in its
universities in particular-Israel is increasingly vilified,
delegitimized, and branded an anachronism at best, and a fascist regime
at worst.

   Yet, in spite of the immense forces arrayed against it, Israel has not
only stood up to the test of power. Far more than that, it has
presented to the world a model of balance between the requirements of justice and
morality and the requisites of power. The IDF is generally regarded as
one of the strongest and most sophisticated armies in the world, yet it
does not use even a fraction of its potential strength against the people
who, if they held such power, would hesitate not a moment to direct it
at Israel´s destruction. Israel does not evict a people that threatens its
existence-and the last century is rife with such expulsions, especially
in the West-but rather offers that people an opportunity to live with
it side by side, even offering large parts of its own historical and
spiritual homeland.

   Israel´s soldiers go into battle armed not only with guns and
grenades but with pocket-size, laminated cards containing the IDF code of
ethics, which reminds them that it is their solemn duty to make every effort to
avoid causing civilian casualties and to use their weapons solely for
the purposes of self- and national defense. Israelis fight, asking
themselves at every stage whether in fact they are doing the right thing, the
moral thing, the Jewish thing. Classical Judaism may not provide us with a
detailed model of what a Jewish state should look like, but Israel has
provided the world with a model of how a state threatened with terror
and missiles and the hatred of millions can act justly...

   Our responsibility today is to prove to ourselves, and the world,
that the phrase "Jewish state" is not in fact a contradiction in terms. Let
us remain cognizant not only of our great achievements-the Nobel Prizes
our scientists are awarded or the European championships our basketball
players win-but also of the weighty responsibilities we bear: the
responsibilities of reconciling our heritage with our sovereignty, our
strength with our compassion, and our will to survive with our desire
to inspire others.

(Michael B. Oren, a Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center and a
Contributing
Editor to Azure, is the author of Six Days of War [Oxford, 2003].) This
essay is adapted from a lecture delivered at the Shalem
Center/Birthright
Institute conference in Tarrytown, NY, in December 2003.