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Sept 12th 2004
This past summer, another stay in Israel (my fourth in six years). Hamar vehamatok - the bitter and the sweet, as the late Naomi Shemer's song goes. Delicious Torah study with other American rabbis at the Shalom Hartman Institute. And the bitter taste of what I'd call 'center-right triumphalism' - a celebratory national myth that ignores many uncomfortable and dangerous facts.
According to that myth, for one thing, there has been a great and joyful burst of volunteer energy in the past year, to meet the needs of Israel's poor. Missing from the myth is mention that the Sharon/Netanyahu government had cut to shreds the government budget for social needs, partly to pay for the costs of the military and settler presence on the West Bank and Gaza. Missing also is the fact that even Orthodox Rabbis who are "rightwing" on issues of settlements and the occupation have demonstrated against these cuts on religious as well as humanitarian grounds.
According to the triumphalist myth, the West Bank separation barrier is a great victory for Jewish ethics and self-restraint, since the rage most Israelis feel toward Palestinian murderers is being channeled not into genocidal attacks or expulsions, but into separation. Also cited as a great victory of self-restraint is the Israeli Supreme Court decision requiring changes in the barrier's route where it violates Palestinian needs more than Israeli security requires.
But if ethical self-restraint were really prevalent, why did the route not in the first place - as its original proponents suggested - follow the Green Line, protecting Israelis without shattering Palestinian lives? The answer is that fear of the murderous bombings that might come anytime, anywhere is so strong that it leads to support for policies that know no ethical self-re- straint, go far beyond defense against such murders, and indeed may well sow the seeds of more such murders in the future.
The capstone of the center-right myth is rejection of foreign criticism as being inspired by crass politics or by anti-Semitism. The International Court of Justice decision against the separation barrier has met that fate in much of Israeli opinion. But the ICJ did not condemn the entire barrier, only those pieces of it that depart from the Green Line and penetrate Palestinian territory.
As the one dissenter, Judge Thomas Buergenthal, said, the court should have far more carefully balanced Israel's right of self-defense against the illegality of some incursions of the wall into Palestinian territory. Yet even Judge Buergenthal ruled that Israeli settlements on the West Bank, and the use of the barrier to protect them, absolutely violate international law.
The triumphalist myth demonizes the court, praises Buergenthal's dissent, but ignores its critical content.
Most dangerously, triumphalists often try to inhibit or silence those who criticize the myth. At the Hartman Institute, Rabbi Dr. Arthur Green - world-renowned theologian, scholar and teacher -- said that when he sees a Palestinian town surrounded by a wall with two doorways, where Israeli soldiers administer sometimes humiliating personal checks to passers-through, he cannot help but think 'ghetto'. He urged rabbis to engage in independent moral criticism of Israeli policy. But even a liberal institution like Hartman had taught the triumphalist myth - so many rabbis were infuriated by Green's concern.
Myths can give a sense of joyful purpose. But when they are filled with falsity, they are dangerous to the community itself. That is why rabbis must speak out the truth about these myths and about the policies that if understood would puncture them.
Much of Palestinian society is also in the grip of a national myth - this one about its members' own purity as victims. Disagreeable facts are excluded from the myth, which is then used to justify mass murder, corruption and internal tyrannies.
Most depressing of all is to watch those in each people who cannot see that the other's myth is a cloudy mirror of its own. Thus some Israelis spoke passionately of their own hatred for Palestinians who have killed their friends or children. Yet they showed no understanding for Palestinians who harbor the same kind of hatred because their own children have been killed by Israelis. And some Palestinians do the same, in reverse.
On each side there are some who allow this hatred to dictate their myth and their actions, and some who critique the myth. How do critics of each myth connect? Rabbis from Israel and the Diaspora should indeed be among the first Jews - though not the only ones - to exemplify in their own bearing the Talmud's counter-triumphalist teaching, "When truth is spoken, justice is done and peace emerges" (Pirke Avot I:18 ff.).
Having transcended the false myth in their own work, they should lead in connecting with the kinds of Palestinians who, by insisting that protests against the present destructive route of the separation barrier must be nonviolent, have begun to transcend their own false myth.
Such actions will not only advance truth, peace and justice, but heal the bloodstream of Torah from the poison of triumphalism.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director of The Shalom Center, www.shalomctr.org
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