• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

To say that I accord the state no messianic status does not mean, however, that I refuse to find meaning in the fact of its existence. Perhaps here I should say a more general word about my attitude toward history. I am not, as should be clear by now, a believer in traditional views of providence, meaning that God consciously rules over the historic process and causes certain events to come about. Once confrontation with the Holocaust caused me to lose that faith, I was not able to resurrect it for the sake of Israel or its rather astounding victories in 1948 and 1967. I mostly found the attempts of others to do so rather shallow and jingoistic. But my disbelief in a God who causes these events to happen does not free me from seeking God in them when they do occur. If God is present in each place and moment, as the Ba'al Shem Tov teaches, God is present too in the events of history. It is our task to find these events meaningful, to find challenge within them as to how to better direct our lives in the face of them, which is to find God — or the Presence, or the divine spark— within them. If we ask where God is to be found in the Holocaust, we usually think of the shekhinah compassionately identifying with the suffering, present also in the small acts of kindness, even in the ghettos and camps, that defied the horrors and kept a glimmer of humanity alive.

The return to Zion and the creation of a Jewish state in the aftermath of the Holocaust and at the very moment of the breakup of the colonial era in world history surely calls upon us to think about the meaning of those events, all the more so as we hear in them undeniable echoes of ancient prophecies. The coincidence of the birth of the Jewish state and the end of the colonial age tells us that a society created by Jews in what we believe to be a holy place needs to be built on the universal values of Judaism discussed above. Our faith and the legacy of our history will not permit a Jewish society to act as a colonial society, one in which a self-defined “superior” population imposes itself upon, and appropriates the resources, including the land, of a “native” human group, whom it then deprives of freedom. If it sounds to our ears as though Israel's founding might be too close for comfort to that description, it is our job, as Israel, to make sure that is not the whole story, to participate as best we can (from within or without) in the emergence of a noncolonialist Israel.

Any discussion of this subject has to be marked by compassion for all the sufferers and by awareness of the historical context. A third of our people were destroyed in a series of horrific events that came to define the term “genocide” for the entire human community. Those European Jews who were left after 1945 wanted more than anything else to leave that blood-stained continent and to go to the Land of Israel, to build a state or community of their own, free from Gentile domination. Who could oppose such a morally justified will? As Elie Wiesel used to say, Europe was glad to get rid of the survivors, so as not to have to look them in the eye and be reminded of its own guilt.

History put us in an untenable situation. How could anyone expect the Jewish refugees from Hitler, soon to be joined by a mass flight of Jews from Arab lands, to stop and consider that their new homeland was being built at someone else's expense? The myth that the Holy Land was “a land without a people,” waiting to receive these “people without a land,” fitted the needs of the moment too well. Unfortunately, it was not true, as the Jews already living in the land knew quite well. There has indeed been significant suffering on the other side as well. We Jews, of all people, need to be big and openhearted about acknowledging that.

For more than four decades now I have stood on the critical left flank of Israel's supporters, urging peace with the Palestinians, a negotiated return of territories, and a viable two-state solution