There Is No “Jewish” State

by Rabbi Arthur Waskow

Dear companions in the struggle to transform our world toward Truth, Justice, and Shalom —

Sure, there is a State that is ruled by Jews; but they have done their best to rid themselves of most of what were for the last three thousand years the compassionate parts of Jewish identity.

Let me be precise: When I say “State,” I mean the official machinery: The military, foreign policy, “intelligence,” the economic budget of State taxes and expenditures.

“Beneath“ and affected by these State decisions are thousands of small Jewish communities — often attached to the traditions of celebration through ancient festivals, compassion through ancient practices of tzedakah, eating through ancient practices of kashrut, etc. For some of them, modern democracy has become identified as an outgrowth of such ancient Jewish institutions as prophetic challenge to kings and the wealthy by the Prophets in their imaginative world of peace and economic justice and protection for a sliver of Earth, an independent set of judges, ancient provisions for asylum and refuge, and equal treatment of the law toward “resident foreigners.”

There are also about one-fifth of the population that are Muslim or Christian Palestinians. Though tolerated, they are effectively prevented from exercising any citizenly power on State policy.

Let me add one important caution:  Just because the machinery of the “Jewish State” is a caricature of Jewish values and identity, that does not make its seeming opponent a vessel of authentic Islam. Far, far from it, for the military wing of Hamas is an anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-foreigner, anti-democratic, ultra-violence-addicted apparatus. Spooky, how like each other the two regimes are that make atrocity-laden war on the grass-roots communities of their neighbor!

For many of us, the war we see as “proper,” even noble, was the democratic USA versus Nazi Germany or democratic Ukraine versus despotic Russia. So — stuck in those memories — some of us seek to name one regime bad, the other good. Unfortunately, both regimes are bad for their own people as well as the neighboring people. One of our most important jobs is to convince each victimized people of that truth. 

For eight or ten months till October 7, a huge proportion of the Israeli Jewish communities — the real grass-roots Jews, the self-defined people of Israel — were in struggle against the government — the State — they had elected. The struggle was over whether Israel would continue to be a flawed internal democracy with an active and independent judiciary or become an autocracy as the State wanted.

The public was insisting that there must be an independent judiciary capable of over-ruling an arrogant State. The public was insisting that no convicted felon could be Prime Minister. These demands posed a serious personal threat to the current Prime Minister.

Even this fight over whether the state was to be democratic assumed it could be internally democratic and still militarily rule over several million people living very close to, often working within its own boundaries.

Not, I would say, a Jewish version of democracy. Perhaps not even a biblical version of democracy — which defined people who were non-Israelite residents of the ancient states of Israel and Judah not simply as foreigners but for many purposes with all the rights of full citizens.

That was not the case when the modern State of Israel was born, despite a Declaration of Independence that claimed equality to all religious communities, sexes, and other residents. For at the beginning, the “Arab” or “Palestinian” communities of the state were governed by military law. And after a war in which the state of Israel occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank of the Jordan River, Gaza, and a few strips of the Golan in the north — almost all populated by Palestinians — there were various degrees of military control imposed sometimes by annexation, mostly by occupation.

Hardly a Jewish value — for even in those lands of Europe where Jews made up great majorities of local populations they did not attempt to rule over their neighbors.

I first visited Israel and the occupied territories in 1969, shortly after the success of the Freedom Seder and just two years after the beginning of the occupation of those Palestinian lands. Very few people at that time expected or even imagined the occupation would last into the 2020s. The official Israeli expectation was that the lands would be returned to Jordan or Egypt or Syria in exchange for peace treaties, but even though there were peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, the occupied territories were not returned.

Some of them — a huge acreage that the Israelis called East Jerusalem as well as parts of the heart of the city — were actually annexed by Israeli law. But Israeli rights were not extended to the populations thus “annexed.” They were subjected to Israeli military rule and increasingly to unofficial attacks by Israeli settlers in the occupied territories.

There were reasons that not only Israeli governments and most of the political parties, even those not in the government, cited to justify this continuing arrangement. The reasons included protection against terrorism and protection against another war of allied Arab powers against Israel. But alternative responses to both non-violent and violent resistance were smashed, not taken as the occasion for new negotiations.

So what I have described is rooted in my assumption that Jewish values and Jewish identity have been deeply inflected by the Torah and its protections for the actual Land or Earth and for “resident aliens,” by the Prophets; and by two thousand years of rabbinic rulings for justice and compassion. My assumption includes the evidence that democracy has been deeply wished-for by most of the world’s Jewish communities and by the world that voted in the United Nations to sponsor a state made mostly of Jews.

So the Declaration of Independence had to affirm democracy not only for Jews but for all its inhabitants. But most of the Jewish communities of the State of Israel have had very little commitment to the idea that everyone who was governed by those Jews who sit in government offices and comprise “the State” is entitled to an equal voice in shaping that government and its policies.

That is why I say there is no Jewish State. The founding document of the Zionist movement calls for the creation of “Die Judenstaat.” That means the state of the Jews, but it does not mean a Jewish state, embodying the values and the long-shaped identity seeking democracy and expressing compassion.

In the many-valued conglomeration that is the world nation-state system, many of the states have no commitment to democracy and still are legitimate states in that worldwide system. Israel is one of those states. My saying that it is not really a “Jewish state” does not deprive it of its functioning reality as one of those states, not influenced by Jewish values, that exist on every continent.

There are many aspects of the life of the Jewish communities that live under the State of Israel — celebration of holy days, including Shabbat, even by Jews who would say they are not religious; the use of Hebrew as a national language, even though it was originally perhaps far more “Jewish” to recognize the language of a large minority of the citizenry by making and keeping Arabic also a national language. But “The State” is in many ways not acting Jewishly or democratically to those it governs.

What to do? Other Jewish communities, especially in the Americas, could publicly affirm that of course Israel is a legitimate state in the world of legitimate states — bound by all the rules that govern legitimate states — but that we cannot recognize Jewish values or a Jewish mindset in the actions of the government of that state. Jewish Federations or other centers of American Jewish money could redirect their money to grassroots organizations in Israel, South Africa, the European Union, and the United States that are creating a new Judaism. The million Israelis who went with civil disobedience into the streets during most of 2023 could become an element in such a revival of the Jewish people.

If “Exile” is a necessity for a deep Jewish spiritual life (as Shaul Magid has argued) then exile is not defined by geography. It is defined by what we ourselves called Godwrestling, wrestling to transform even a world that looks as if God must have made it because it’s there in all its clunky injustice.

Long before Pirkei Avot (a section of Talmud) said so —. And long after Pirkei Avot said so —. The Jewish commitment has been that the three pillars that uphold the world are Truth, Justice, and Shalom. This commitment swims above water in many of the Jewish communities within the State of Israel but not in the State itself. When “The State” undertakes to kill 30,000 of Abraham’s “other” people, most of them noncombatant women and children, it is time to divest it of its claim to Jewishness.

With blessings of shalom in your own lives for all those who struggle for shalom in the world,

Arthur


TWO peoples, safe and free
From the River to the Sea