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July/August 2008-Opinion

We Are Not One
Eric Alterman

Jews are perhaps the world’s most famously disputatious people. How is it possible, then, that on what is perhaps the most contentious issue of all—the shape and solution to the endless wound that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict —we are “as one”?

When I was growing up in the 1970s in a heavily but not predominantly Jewish New York suburb, it was verboten to criticize Israel in polite company. The underlying argument went something as follows:

“Jewish history is one long story of the goyim trying to wipe us out. In the Holocaust, they came pretty close. That's why God gave us Israel. If we let them criticize it, next thing you know, they'll try to wipe it out. And anyway, there's nothing to criticize. Israel is the most moral nation in the history of the world. Everything they do there that doesn't look so good, they have to do. It's actually the Arabs' fault for making them do it. But really, don't ask too many questions. You, who live in safety and comfort here in America, could never understand….”

I received this lesson pretty consistently in every Jewish forum I attended, including Hebrew school, social events, seders and teen tours to Israel. I took these lessons seriously. At rock concerts, I used to yell at the Jews for Jesus who passed out literature next to the Hare Krishnas that they should be ashamed of themselves “because of Hitler.” During my senior year of high school, however, I was sent on a “Presidential Classroom” trip to Washington, DC, and for some reason, sandwiched between the senators, representatives and various luminaries, we visited a local synagogue. There, one of my fellow Presidential students asked the rabbi: “Why do the Jews think they should have a country but they won't let the Palestinians have one, too?”

A fury welled up inside me. The audacity! The ignorance! The chutzpah! Didn't this guy understand that… Well, come to think of it, it was actually a pretty good question, one that, as I thought about it, had nothing to do with pogroms, Hitler or the Spanish Inquisition. Looking back, I'm struck by the un-Jewishness of the lessons I'd been taught. Since when do Jews instruct other Jews—or anyone for that matter—not to ask questions?

Much has changed about this discourse during the past 30 years, but too much has not. Although today most Jewish organizations accept—albeit only rhetorically—the need for the creation of a Palestinian state, much about the conflict remains unsayable and, for many, unaskable. Indeed, the unanimity on key questions among official Jewry is as impressive as it is depressing. Try to find a spokesperson in good standing from a Jewish organization who would be willing to say that the West Bank settlements are the primary obstacles to peace, or that Israel ought to negotiate with Hamas, or that the Palestinians who lost their homes in 1948 deserve a“right of return” (however unworkable that may be in practice), or perhaps Israel would benefit from a little “tough love” from the United States when it comes to moving forward, or that Walt and Mearsheimer made some useful points (even though they way overshot their mark), or even that Munich was a pretty good movie. Perhaps all of the above notions are indeed morally, intellectually and politically mistaken. But unspeakable? Needless to say, this is not only intellectually indefensible, it's also impractical, given that most people—including most Jews, according to survey after survey—don’t buy it.

Now add to this enforced silence the pretense of unchallenged consensus. Sit through the endless exhortations, speeches and solicitations at an annual dinner for a Jewish organization; you are likely to be bombarded by variation after variation of a single slogan: “We Are One.” American Jews, Israelis, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, “just Jews,” Sephardic, Ashkenazi, converts, whatever: On [Name your issue] they [Name your opponent] will say, but we warn you: Do not try and separate us: We will stand together as Jews in support of—or in opposition to—whatever and whomever.

This, too, is nonsense. Jews are perhaps the world’s most famously disputatious people. Two Jews, three opinions, remember? We don't even agree on what a Jew is, much less what a Jew believes. How is it possible, then, that on what is perhaps the most contentious issue of all—the shape and solution to the endless wound that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—we are “as one”? What these groups are really saying is much the same as what my bubbe used to say to me when I complained too loudly about something in public: "Shhh, not in front of the goyim..."

All this is a long way of getting to my real point, which is to welcome the formation of the new voice of a significant segment of the Jewish community on Israel called “J-Street”—a sort of anti-AIPAC— whose point, according to its founder, Jeremy Ben-Ami, is to make “clear the diversity of views among American Jews and their friends who care about Israel.” Agree or disagree with J-Street, and I happen to agree, which is why I gave it my name for its Board of Advisors. I’m not going to try to argue the merits of its cause here, except to note that in this respect, its goals are considerably more authentically Jewish than those of AIPAC. But nothing is more basic to Talmudic principles than to embrace the reality of multiple voices in any significant conversation, and even were that not the case, it would still be reality: We are not one. We are many. And thank God for that.

Eric Alterman is a professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College and of journalism at City University of New York’s graduate school. His latest book is Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook to Post-Bush America (2008).