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By Root 407 0

to the problems of the Middle East. I am fully convinced that there is no long-term future for Israel without a two-state solution.43 Above all, we need to recognize the full humanity and dignity of the Arabs with whom we are fated to share a land. I also firmly believe that this is the “message” we need to find in our current difficult situation. At a time of terrible interethnic conflicts throughout humanity, in an age when the nuclear threat means that we can no longer afford to take such hostilities lightly, the Jewish people, this “kingdom of priests and holy nation,” reclaims and returns to its ancient homeland, becoming a party to the seemingly most intractable of all these conflicts. What is the message in this situation? We have the opportunity here to teach our truth — that of Ben Azzai's principle — in the most powerful way ever. We can do so by generosity, by seeing the humanity, including the pain, of the other, and by concluding that the only way to live in a Holy Land is to share it with its other inhabitants. If we cannot find it in our hearts to do that, even in the face of real obstacles and sometimes atrocious behavior by the other side, we and our tradition will have failed a vital test.

So far we are not doing too well. Arab intransigence and the horrors of the intifada years have weakened the vision of a humanitarian Zionism. We who believe in it, both in Israel and in the diaspora, have been too ready to allow it to fade. Most of all, we have reason to be concerned that Israel (and here too this name refers to all the Jewish people) not be overwhelmed by a Holocaust-dominated view of the world.44 Ever conscious that we did not take the Nazi threat seriously enough, we now tend to put all our enemies in the same category as Hitler. We take seriously anyone who talks about destroying the Jews, pushing us into the sea, or wiping Israel off the map. How could we do otherwise? But we cannot allow this needed vigilance to paralyze us, to render us unable to trust. Sometimes one has to take risks for the sake of peace, for the possibility of coexistence, especially when the alternative, living forever within the bunker and behind barbed wire, is unacceptable. “The Arabs are not Hitler,” we of the Left have insisted. Despite the worst of some of their preachers’ rhetoric, most Palestinians are waiting for accommodation to reality and are as frightened as we are of the threatened apocalypse. A two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict must be possible, and we (a “we” that includes Israel, the United States government, and world Jewry) need to be doing much more to make it happen. Israel will not be able long to survive as only a garrison state, both because garrison states do not have a good track record of survival and because such an existence is ultimately a betrayal of the best of Jewish values.

I write these words as a Jew who has chosen to live outside the Holy Land. I fully realize that their moral power would be infinitely greater had I chosen otherwise, and if my own life and that of my family were on the line each day, as are the lives of my fellow Jews in Israel. Some would say that my choice not to become an Israeli makes it illegitimate for me to express these views, which are vacuous when offered by one who lives abroad. But I cannot keep silent. All of us Jews, wherever we live, inherit the same name of Israel and the same tradition. We have the same prophets’ words thundering in our ears. As our long history has shown, we also share a common fate. A threatened Israel threatens us all. I deeply hope not to live in an era in which there is no state of Israel. I thus find myself affirming Israel and challenging it, longing for it to be more the Israel of my dreams (which it has not been since 1967), while sympathizing with its sense of constant struggle for existence. I grow especially uncomfortable when I see Israel and its political leaders, for or against whom I have no chance to vote, speaking as the leadership of my Israel, the entire Jewish people, or seen as such by the world.