I dream of a time when the State of Israel finally has permanent, stable, defensible borders, recognized by the UN and by the entire world, including the Arab states, the United States, and Europe. Borders that will be negotiated with former enemies out of mutual agreement, rather than drawn unilaterally and coercively—as Israel is doing today with the wall it is building around itself. The meaning of the new borders will be security. It will be identity. It will be home.
The meaning of such borders will also be that the Jewish people can finally resolve the critical dilemma of its entire existence: the question of whether it is a “nation of place” or a “nation of time.” Are the Jewish people a “nation of eternity,” a “nation of the world,” unconnected and uncommitted to any one physical place, able to exist within the universal sphere of religion and culture and spirituality alone? Or is it now ripe to begin a new stage, a stage that will be the true and complete realization of the process begun in 1948, when the State of Israel was established?
In other words, an agreement on the borders of Israel, and a normalization of relations with all its neighbors, will gradually be able to answer the extremely complex and loaded question of whether the Jews are truly willing and able to live in a state with permanent, unambiguous borders, to live with a clear national definition. Or are they instead doomed—because of reasons I will not go into, and which are possibly more emotional than political—to continue their search for a “borderless” existence, in its deepest sense, for a state of constant motion, of intermittent exile and return, assimilation in other identities, and subsequent returns to Jewish identity? Such a condition persistently evades definition, impenetrable to all forces acting around it, forces that sometimes enrich and fertilize it, and sometimes, as has often occurred, try to annihilate it.
One can also hope that a peace agreement resulting in safe and stable borders will heal a deep deficiency in Israelis’ sense of acceptance into the political, international “normalcy” that has eluded them for hundreds of years, even though they have had their own state for much of that time. Because this, perhaps, is the greatest tragedy of the Jewish people: that throughout its history it has always been viewed by other peoples and religions, primarily Christianity and Islam, as a symbol or a metaphor for something else—a parable, a religious moral of retribution for a primordial sin. It has not been seen as “the thing itself,” as a nation among nations, as a person among persons.
For almost two thousand years, the Jew was distanced and exiled from the practical political reality of what is known as “the family of nations.” His humanity was denied through a variety of sophisticated means of dehumanization and, conversely, idealization—and these are two sides of the same coin. He was laden with fears and superstitions, treated as an anomalous, mysterious, metaphysical entity with an internal order that is different from others, and with hidden powers that are above nature—and sometimes beneath it, as the Nazis proclaimed when they defined the Jew as Untermensch.
Judas Iscariot, God killer, Antichrist, the Wandering Jew, the Eternal Jew, well-poisoners, spreaders of plagues, the Elders of Zion seeking world domination, and many other satanic and grotesque characters, Shylocks and Fagins, have trickled into folklore, religion, literature, and even science. Perhaps this is why the Jews found comfort in self-idealization, in viewing themselves as the chosen people, which is also, in and of itself, a problematic and obstructive perception, and one all the more isolating.
I am alluding here to a subtle and extremely delicate sense, a sense of profound foreignness in the world. An existential foreignness of the Jewish people among others. An existential loneliness that perhaps can only be understood by Jews. An aura of riddle and mystery that has encompassed the Jewish nation—and Jewish people—over the generations. A riddle that has spurred other nations to solve it in various ways, to ascribe racial and racist definitions to the Jews, to repeatedly delineate them with fences and ghettos, to restrict their living space, their professions, their rights, all culminating in the most definitive and terrible attempt to “solve” this Jewish riddle: the “final solution.”
If we look back a mere decade, to the days of the early Oslo process, we can recall what an important change occurred at that time in the worldview, and in the self-perception, of Israelis. In those days many Israelis began to taste the intoxicating flavor of a new way of belonging to the modern world, an acceptance of sorts into a progressive, civic, liberal, and essentially secular universalism. It seemed as though some sort of nation-among-nations normalcy was emerging. For a short while, very short, there was a chance to create a relationship that would be more mutual, more equal, less loaded, between Israel and “the rest of the world.” I will even dare to employ a somewhat “literary” or metaphorical description: there was a sense of acceptance into reality.
And then, over the past four years—as a result of the severe threat created by the intifada and the terrorist attacks, the overwhelming hostility around the world to Israel’s acts and at times to its very existence, the swell of anti-Semitism, and the increasing demonization of Israel—these same Israelis found themselves once again sucked into the tragic wound of Judaism, into the scars of its most painful and paralyzing memories. Israeliness itself, which was always directed at the future, comprising constant agitation and promise, seemed to shrink and seep back into the channels of trauma and pain that pervade Jewish history and memory. The result is that among “new” Israelis, the anxieties of the Jewish fate, the experience of persecution and victimhood, the sense of profound loneliness and existential alienation, are once again surfacing powerfully.
(In this context, it is interesting to note that Israel is still known, even among its citizens, as “the Promised Land.” Not “the land that was promised” or “the land of promise,” but, ostensibly, the land that is still in a permanent state of being “promised.” Even after the “return of Zion” and the establishment of a sovereign state, Israel is still perceived by its residents as not entirely realized, and certainly not having fulfilled all its potential. In a state of “eternal promise” there is of course the hope for momentum and the potential for great liberty—liberty of thought and creation, and a flexibility of viewpoints on things that have become set in their definitions. But this state is also afflicted by a curse of “eternal unfulfillment” that engenders a latent sense of inability to ever achieve full realization and full contact with all aspects of reality, and therefore an incapacity to normalize the fundamental questions of identity, of place, of clear borders, and of neighborly relations.)
Could real peace begin the Israeli-Jewish process of healing from those distresses and anomalies? Moreover, will “the world”—namely, the Christian and Muslim worlds, as well as regions dominated by other faiths and religions, and states where anti-Semitism prevails, whether openly or as an undercurrent—be able to heal itself of its distorted approach to Israel and to Judaism? Will it ever be able to let go of its racism toward Jews? With your permission, I will leave these momentous questions open. I do not have the answers.
There is one more unanswered question: What will really happen to Israeli society, now polarized and conflict-ridden, if the external threat is removed—the threat that currently protects it from internal strife and “helps” it avoid confronting the contentious issues? To an outside observer this may seem an unfounded and even fantastical question, but it has been hovering in Israeli public space for decades, so much so that one can sometimes hear statements along the lines of “The war with the Arabs saves us from civil war.”
I have no doubt that removing the external threat from Israel will clear a large space for it to cope with its profound domestic troubles. Although the crux of the central argument between “right” and “left,” on the question of the Occupation, will be dulled, other issues will jump to the forefront: the vast social and economic gaps, the tense relations between secular and religious Jews, between Jews and Arabs, and between different immigrant groups who are un
able and unwilling to understand one another. Such circumstances may expose the fragility of the diverse and diffuse immigrant society that has emerged in Israel. They may also reveal the weakness of the democratic worldview, which does not seem to have been truly internalized by most citizens, both because they came to Israel from countries that never knew democracy and because it is impossible for a state to maintain true democracy while simultaneously upholding a regime of occupation and oppression.
Still, only a madman or a complete cynic would prefer Israel’s century-old state of war to a state of peace, bad as it may be. Even if internal conflicts do erupt, even if genies are let out of their bottles, they will be our genies, the internal, authentic identity materials of the State of Israel and Israeli society. In some sense, the developments that occur then, though they may be painful, will be far more relevant to the construction of Israeli identity than the processes in which Israel has found itself due to the conflict with the Arabs. The fact that such hesitations are openly voiced and contemplated by many Israelis attests to the powerful destruction and degeneration that can result from prolonged exposure to the cancerous rays of war.
“Here in the land our ancestors cherished, all our hopes will come true,” our pioneering forefathers sang when they came to Eretz Yisrael roughly a century ago. Today it is clear that many years will pass before even a fraction of “all our hopes” comes true. It will be very difficult to relinquish the distortions of violence and anxiety, as it is sometimes difficult for a slave to lose his shackles or for someone to let go of a defect around which his entire personality has been constructed.
Because the situation we live in, in Israel, in Palestine, in the Middle East, has become a sort of national and personal defect. Many of us have become so used to the deformation that we find it difficult to even believe in any other existence. Others create entire ideologies, political and religious, to ensure the continuation of the present situation.
Hegel said that history is made by evil people. In the Middle East, I think we know that the opposite is also true: we have seen how a certain history can make people evil. We know that prolonged existence in a state of hostility, which leads us to act more stringently, more suspiciously, in a crueler and more “military” manner, slowly kills something within our souls and finally hardens like an internal mask of death over our consciousness, our volition, our language, and our simple, natural happiness.
These are the real dangers that Israel must act quickly to avoid. Israel needs to experience a life of peace, not only because peace is essential for its security and economy, but so that it can, in a sense, get to know itself. So that it can discover everything that is still present, though dormant, in its being: the parts of its identity and personality, and the possibilities of existence, that have been suspended until the anger dies down, until the war ends, until it can be allowed to live life to the fullest in all its dimensions, not only the narrow dimension of survival at any cost.
Elias Canetti writes in one of his essays that survival is in fact a repeated experience of death. A sort of practice of death and of the fear of death. At times I feel that a nation of sworn survivors like the Jewish people is a nation that somehow addresses death at least as insistently as it addresses life, a nation whose intimate and permanent interlocutor is death, no less than life itself. And I do not mean to imply a romanticization or idealization of death, or even the idea of being in love with death (akin to the prevailing notions in late-nineteenth-century Germany, for example). Rather, I am speaking of something more profound. Of some firsthand knowledge, a bitter knowledge that is passed through the umbilical cord, a knowledge of the concreteness and the actuality and the daily availability of death. A knowledge of the “unbearable lightness of death,” whose saddest expression I ever heard was in an interview with an Israeli couple on the eve of their marriage. They were asked how many children they would like to have, and the sweet young bride immediately answered that they wanted three children, “so that if one is killed, we will still have two.”
When I hear Israelis, even very young ones, talk about themselves and about their fears, about not daring to hope for a better future, when I am exposed—in those close to me, and in myself—to the powerful existential anxiety and the influence of the tragic historical Jewish memory, I can often feel, chillingly, the failing left in us by history, the terrible tendency to view life as latent death.
In a life of stable and continued peace, this failing and these anxieties may find some cure. If Israel can live in peace with its neighbors, it will have the opportunity to express all of its abilities and all of its uniqueness. To examine, under normal conditions, what it is capable of as a nation and as a society. To discover whether it is able to forge a spiritual and material reality full of life, creation, inspiration, and humanity. To examine whether its Jewish citizens can extricate themselves from the destructive fatal metaphor framed for them by other nations, who have viewed them as eternal strangers, as borderless nomads among nations—to step out of these definitions and become a nation “of flesh and blood.” Not just a symbol or an abstract concept, not a parable or a stereotype, not an ideal or a demon. A nation in its country, a nation whose state is surrounded by internationally recognized and defensible borders. A nation that enjoys not only a sense of security and continuity but also a rare experience of actuality, of being, finally, “part of life” and not “larger than life.” Perhaps then Israelis will be able to taste what even after fifty-six years of independence they do not truly know—a deep internal sense of security, of “solid existence,” like the one expressed so simply and movingly in the musaf prayer recited on the Sabbath: “And plant us in our borders.”
I conclude with one more wish, which I once expressed in my novel See Under: Love. This wish is uttered at the very end of the book, when a group of persecuted Jews in the Warsaw ghetto finds an abandoned baby boy and decides to raise him. These elderly Jews, broken and tortured, stand around the child and dream about what they would like his life to be, and into what sort of a world they would like him to grow up. Behind them, the real world is going up in smoke, with blood and fire everywhere, and they say a prayer together. This is their prayer: “All of us prayed for one thing: that he might end his life knowing nothing of war … We asked so little: for a man to live in this world from birth to death and know nothing of war.”
Lecture at the Levinas Circle meeting in Paris, December 5, 2004
Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Rally
The annual memorial ceremony for Yitzhak Rabin is the moment when we pause to remember Rabin the man and Rabin the leader. We also look at ourselves, at Israeli society, at its leadership, the national mood, the status of the peace process, and at our own place as private individuals within the national developments. It is not easy to look at ourselves this year.
There was a war. Israel flexed its huge military muscle, revealing nothing but its powerlessness and fragility. We discovered that, ultimately, our military might alone cannot ensure our existence. Moreover, we discovered that Israel is in a profound crisis, far more profound than we had imagined, in almost every aspect of its being.
I am speaking to you this evening as someone whose love for this country is difficult and complicated, but nonetheless unequivocal. And as someone whose long-standing covenant with the country has become, tragically, a covenant of blood. I am a wholly secular man, yet to me the establishment and the very existence of the State of Israel are a sort of miracle that we as a people have experienced—a political, national, human miracle. I do not forget this even for a moment. Even when many things in the reality of our lives outrage and depress me, even as the miracle is broken down into tiny units of routine and misery, of corruption and cynicism, even when reality seems like a bad parody of the miracle, I always remember. And it is from this feeling that I speak to you tonight.
“Behold, earth, for we have been very wasteful,” wrote the poet Shaul Tchernichovsky in 1938. He was lamenting the fact t
hat in the earth of Israel, time after time, we bury young people in the prime of their lives.
The death of a young person is a terrible, shattering waste. But no less terrible is the sense that for many years the State of Israel has been criminally wasting not only the lives of its children, but also the miracle it experienced—the great and rare chance bestowed upon it by history, the chance to create an enlightened, decent, democratic state that would conduct itself according to Jewish and universal values. A state that would be a national home and a refuge, but not only a refuge: rather, a place that would also give new meaning to Jewish existence. An essential part of the Jewish identity of this state, of its Jewish ethos, was to be a thoroughly egalitarian and respectful attitude toward its non-Jewish citizens.
And look what has happened.
Look what has happened to the young, daring, enthusiastic, and soulful country that used to be here. See how, through some accelerated aging process, Israel has leaped from infancy, through childhood and adolescence, to a permanent state of discontent, weakness, and missed opportunities. How did this happen? When did we lose even the hope that we could ever live a different life, a better life? Moreover, how can we continue to stand by and watch, as if hypnotized, as our home is taken over by madness and coarseness, violence and racism?
And how, I ask you, is it possible that a nation with our powers of creativity and renewal, a nation that has managed to resurrect itself from the ashes time after time, finds itself today—precisely when it has such huge military power—flaccid and helpless? A victim once again—but this time, a victim of itself, of its own anxieties and despair, of its own nearsightedness?