From Generation to Generation

Welp, we're at the point that no Jewish assembly is completely safe. Two in one week... Now we'll have to look over our shoulders in just the way Israelis do. On the High Holidays, you'd better believe there's going to be an attempted attack somewhere, and we're all going to be praying to Hashem it's not our synagogue.

We're not ready for this. We never are. Whenever the evil eye comes to a new country it feels like a rude interruption of history in an era for which history is now over. We thought we 'made it' in country after country, but every country tires of us because we didn't make it anywhere else.

It was not a protest in favor of the war, but a demonstration in solidarity with the hostages. These demonstrations happen in every city in the US with a synagogue nearly as frequently as demonstrations for Gaza happen on college campuses--and by 'nearly as frequently' I mean usually once a week, whereas the college campus demonstrations often happen 24 hours a day in encampments.

On the other hand, we say these are solidarity rallies for the hostages but... come on, of course they're in favor of the war. As much as we want the hostages home, we use the cover of the hostages to demonstrate in favor of Israeli policy as much as the pro-Palestine crowd uses every slogan from Free Palestine to River to Sea to Intifada Revolution as a cover to demonstrate for violently wiping Israel off the map. Both the Netanyahu coalition and Hamas is depending on a certain percentage of protestors disagreeing with their most violent aims, but not realizing that by demonstrating they've endorsed the bloodiest tactics of both Hamas and the IDF. I'm sure there are some idiots at both sets of protests who don't realize what they're protesting for, but over in Israel/Palestine, everybody fighting the war takes your demonstrations as a blank check for the most violent incarnations of their aims.

It would seem that except for the kids, almost everybody at the Boulder protest was between 67 and 88, meaning that some nice Bubbie took her grandchildren. Sadly, that will not happen as often anymore.

These unfortunate Bubbies and Zaydies have lived through an intrusion from the future. The world they know is the world of Israel bonds appeals, Israeli folk dances, Israel advocacy tutorials, and Yom Ha'Atzma'oot programs, and for all intents that world will be dead in thirty years, or at least it will be dead as they understand it. When the last people who remember the Yom Kippur War are gone, the idea that Jews support Israel because it is a beachhead of liberal democracy in a sea of tyranny will go the way of all bassar. In its place will be naked appeals to nationalism, to the idea that our Jewish brothers are stranded in a sea of murderous barbarians, so we must kill and imprison as many of our enemies as we can so we may continue showing the world what civilization looks like.

The liberal Judaism they remember is as declined as they. Israel hasn't been the underdog in fifty years, and as the 'favorite', progressives have changed their allegiance to the other side. But then again, 'liberal goyism' has changed too. 'Liberalism' as it was defined from Franklin Roosevelt to Biden and Hillary is over, everybody's now either a progressive or a socialist, because for American liberalism's descendants, 'liberal' has ugly connotations from 'neoliberalism' to cold war proxy wars. Liberalism to them signifies the compromise of principle, and Israel is the ultimate compromise.

Israel IS the ultimate compromise. Think about it for a literal half second. If the Jews of 100 years ago could realize any of their dreams, do you really think they'd have wanted that tiny strip of land where nothing grows? Where they were isolated from culture and civilization and home? Of all the pre-1948 Jewish settlers of Palestine (what we call the 'Yishuv'), about a third of them found it so hard that they went back to Europe. Like all ideological movements, Zionism was a dream they had to will themselves into believing was their dream. The only pre-Israel Jews who truly wanted Israel were exactly the ultraorthodox communities who at the time believed there should never be another Jewish state before the Messiah arrives--and remember, ours never got there...

Zionism is reality's ultimate practical accommodation. It exists because we were not allowed to exist anywhere else. If we were able to reliably live as Jews in any other country, we would still be there. "Go back to Israel" antisemites used to say in Poland. Now antisemites say "Go back to Poland" in Israel.

Until recently, a number of anti-Zionists would say that the real promised land of the Jews was America, the place where Jews were completely free to worship, assemble, speak, write, and do it all safely. And, of course, at the time, it was probably true. When times are good for Jews in one place, they're usually good in multiple places (obviously not everywhere...). The irony is that at the time we had the most support for Israel among the widespread American public, we didn't need Israel. But now that the position of Israel is getting insecure again, we're beginning to be insecure too. So now that the necessity of Israel's existence is challenged, we may need it sooner than we know.

Don't think the Israeli government doesn't know that. One of the terrible ironies of our predicament with Netanyahu is that the worse his tactics, the more difficult he makes life for Jews abroad, and the more difficult life gets for us in diaspora, the more Jews who eventually feel no choice but to emigrate to Israel, where they bring their financial holdings, their international connections, and their educations. This is already happening in France, where some sources report that 80% of French Jews are considering moving to Israel because of Islamic terrorism, which is a fact of French life and disproportionately affects Jews.

This tactic, and I believe it's uppermost in the mind of the Israeli right, is based on a messianic level of self-belief. Perhaps drunk on tales of Maccabees and Shoftim (Judges), I think a lot of Jews believe that if Jews pool their resources together and work together as Jews to the exclusion of all others, there's no achievement of which the Jewish people are not capable. There are millions of Jews, even atheist Jews, who believe in this triumphant narrative of Jewish history that there is some kind of divine wind on our backs that eventually bends the moral arc of the universe toward victory.

There are two problems with this: one is that it fits the world's stereotype of Jews to an absolute taf: that we look out only for ourselves, that we're disloyal to our home countries, that we are greedy for prosperity, overachievement, and superiority over all other peoples; that even if we don't want to rule the world, we want to beat it, run it, avenge it, hold the world at our mercy. If that ever happened, it would prove antisemites correct.

The other, much larger, problem is that it neglects hundreds of years of history between Solomon and the Babylonian exile when we had exactly these circumstances.

The Story of the Book of Kings is literally a lost text of the Bible that should be canonical, but the similarly named Book of Kings mentions that this book which gives all the details of Judean court of exactly these years was 'lost.' Don't think it wasn't lost by accident. There are a couple hundred years which the Judeans wanted very much to forget, probably because there were literal hundreds of years when Jewish kings were as incompetent and murderous as any pagan king. Many of them probably even worshipped pagan gods. This is not stuff any redactor wants in a text commemorating the deeds of a peoplehood for all time. And that's only in the centuries before the multiple instances we were conquered and re-enslaved, most of us assimilated into an empire's larger population.

Ergo, the problem with this tactic is that if life gets too difficult for Jews abroad, far far more difficult than it is now, Jews will be divested of our holdings, our connections will want nothing to do with us, and educational institutions will not let us in. Obviously, we're still quite far from all that, but that was what happened in Germany during the early years of Hitler, it also happened in Russia's pre-Communist years and to a certain extent continued for the duration of the Soviet Union. Arguably it happened all around medieval Europe and famously in post-medieval Spain, it happened in Renaissance Poland, it happened in the Judea of the Roman era and the Greece of the classical era, it happened around the Middle East in the years surrounding Israel's founding. It all happened then, and sooner than we know, it can happen again.

A large part of Israel, like every country at the zenith of its prosperity, believes itself invulnerable even as they believe themselves all too vulnerable. Just as we had the years after 9/11 when we simultaneously thought ourselves vulnerable to a nuclear attack yet able to remake the world into democracies on a shoestring budget overnight, Israel has these years when they think themselves simultaneously on the verge of its existence ending yet able to exile millions of people to a faraway land without five times as many countries working in concert to affect their destruction.

It's probably going to be a steady decline for Israel from now on just as it will be for American Jews. It may not seem like a decline for a while. There might be a while when we may seem more prosperous than ever. No matter what temporary ego-clashes go on between the micro-schmecklach of Netanyahu and Trump, the Jews of both Israel and America are now positioned in the oldest, most familiar position in history. Writ large, we are all what used to be called 'dhimmi' in the Arab lands, and 'Schutzjuden' in the German ones. At the highest levels, the very most privileged among this type of Jew was called the 'Court Jew.'

Our privileges will now exist at the protection and pleasure of undemocratic rulers, who decide which minorities get protection according to a mixture of self-interest and whim. As Schutzjuden, we do the ruler's bidding, and his bidding is for us to do all his most unpleasant tasks: the administration, the taxes, the moneylending and loan collection, the real estate management. Our protected status exists to absorb all the shocks of hatred that should be absorbed by the rulers, and when the leader's position is threatened, he throws the dhimmi to the masses. We are blamed for everything, and we are killed. The process may take 50 years, it may take 100 or multiple hundreds of years, but we have always found the Jewish future in its past.

From generation to generation, this is the basic story of Jewish history we pass down. We pass it down by commemorating the exceptions to the rule: the few times when Hashem in his infinite mercy granted us a reprieve from the same basic stories. Why do we celebrate so many Jewish figures who advised kings from Joseph to Mordechai and Esther, from Daniel to Ezra and Nehamia, even Abraham and Moses, and so many post-Biblical examples? We celebrate them because they used their privileged position to thwart those who would murder us. Many Jewish advisors to kings thought they had that level of influence, only to be shown that all their privileges were folly and their connections were dust, because no amount of power spared them, those they love, or their people.

The oldest demonstrator was 88 and a holocaust survivor. At the end of World War II, she was eight. The Shoah is almost out of living memory for anyone old enough to understand what was happening. For a whole lifetime, we have lived in the afterglow of the sympathy the Shoah engendered and the founding of the state meant to be a reprieve from that.

The true test of Israel is in its future. Can Israel be a reliable haven: not only for endangered Jews, but can Israel break the horrible cycle of Jewish history? Can Israel stop us from being Schutzjuden?

Israel may have been able to until recently, but now? It seems incredibly unlikely. Israel is itself the Schutzjudenstaat. Jews can go on deluding themselves about Israel's capabilities and independence, but the reason Israel exists as it currently does is the protection of the United States. Israel cannot survive alone, and Netanyahu not only made Israel more dependent on America, but dependent on America staying on its current authoritarian course. If America course corrects without Israel correcting similarly, it will be the end of the America-Israel alliance. The Democratic party will absolutely not tolerate any sort of alliance with Israel as it's currently constituted, and even my faith that they should is shaken.

If Israel's leadership wants to stop the dhimmi-cycle, they can't savor acting the villain part with such relish. The world's beginning to look at us again as though we're Shylock or Caiaphas. It may be inevitable, it may be the Crown's plan for the Kingdom, but if this is Hashem's plan, do we really have to make it so easy for Him?