The politics of self-flagellation

Jews and Power by Ruth R. Wisse, Schocken/Nextbook, 256 pages, $20

Ruth R. Wisse has a curious intellectual profile. A professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard University, she is the author of acclaimed works like "The Modern Jewish Canon" and "The Schlemiel as Modern Hero."

But Wisse is known to a much wider audience as a long-time contributor to the pages of Commentary magazine, where her articles span an impressive range, from deeply informed reflections on the legacy of the novelist Saul Bellow to poison-tipped polemics aimed at her ideological foes. It is the latter Wisse - the intemperate conservative agitator with a genius for provocation - who in 1992 published the very well-written and very wrong-headed book "If I Am Not For Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews," which reads like an egregious exercise in unsubstantiated alarmism. Such excess is not absent from the pages of her latest book, "Jews and Power," though Wisse does manage to strike a far more successful balance between her scholarly sensibility and her hard-nosed critical stridency.

"Jews and Power," the eighth title in the impressive "Jewish Encounters" series published jointly by Nextbook.org and Schocken, is a tightly argued and elegant meditation on the Jews' vexing relationship with power and how their unique history continues to shape the Jewish political psyche.

For our purposes, that unique history begins with the suppression of Shimon Bar-Kochba's revolt against the Romans in 135 CE, which ushered in 18 centuries of dispersion for the Jewish people. Judaism became, as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin once put it, a "tradition on wheels." Jews struggled to refashion a system of self-rule developed in Israel, for life in the Diaspora. This feat demanded balancing the external demands of Gentile authorities with the internal desire to maintain a cohesive system of cultural and political autonomy. In a fascinating section, Wisse stresses how the study of law was integral to sustaining Jewish solidarity. Rabbinical authorities acted like an international court, trading opinions across countries and continents.

The circumstances of exile demanded a politics of creative accommodation. Jewish communities had to curry favor with Gentile rulers, on whom they depended for physical protection. "Look up the synonyms for adaptation and you discover Jewish communities at work: elastic, flexible, pliable, and supple, Jews tried to master the skills that would make them indispensable." Where Jews were tolerated they often flourished, a fact Wisse attributes to Judaism's emphasis on education and individual ambition: "Jewish self-government encouraged the development of a supremely competitive people, competitive because everywhere they had to prove their worth and could never take their existence for granted."

Magnets for violence

The situation, though, was impossibly precarious. Irreducibly alien to the Muslim and Christian societies in which they dwelled, Jews were magnets for violence. "Jews had visible power and goods to tempt their assailants, but no means of defending that power and those goods once their political shield was withdrawn," Wisse writes. Such powerlessness was provocative; Jews were "the no-fail target."

It is in this sense that Jewish history is commonly interpreted as a series of tragedies miraculously endured. "In every generation they stand up against us to destroy us," reads the Passover Haggadah, "and the Holy One saves us from their hand."

Wisse convincingly argues that it is precisely this faith in the Holy One that spawned a destructive politics of self-flagellation. Instead of railing against Roman imperialism or the capricious temperament of Polish noblemen who suddenly decided to expel Jews from their towns, rabbis ascribed their political misfortunes to the Jews' spiritual and moral shortcomings. They began to equate victimhood with Godliness.

"The hostility of their antagonists sometimes trapped them in a political situation so dire that they could testify to God's presence only by how much indignity they could bear," Wisse writes.

This perverse logic took a particularly insidious turn when some Jews embraced the moral purity of weakness as a Jewish ideal. "A nationality which lacks a defensive protection of state or territory develops, instead, forces of inner defense and employs its national energy to strengthen the social and spiritual factors for unity," wrote the Russian-Jewish historian Simon Dubnow. The tragic absurdity of Dubnow's sentiment is hauntingly exemplified by an anonymous Jew in the Warsaw Ghetto, quoted by Wisse, who said, "God forbid that the war should last as long as we are able to endure it."

Zionism offered a remedy for this condition. Lashing their fate to the rising tide of modern nationalism, Jews would normalize their condition by reclaiming political autonomy. Though the Zionist impulse is widely considered to be a radical break with Jewish history, Wisse argues that the movement's principal ideologues were not immune to the fantastical Diaspora politics of accommodation. Reviewing the work of Theodor Herzl and Ahad Ha'am, Wisse notes the remarkable feebleness of their political vision. Herzl "replicates in the Land of Israel the political posture of the stateless European Jews whom he is trying to rescue," while Ahad Ha'am irresponsibly gives no thought to who might protect "cultural Judaism" from the Jews' inevitable rivals.

Ben-Gurion frets

The glaring absence of clear thinking about power, especially military power, was not lost however on David Ben-Gurion, who fretted about the Jews' knack for political naivete.

"We did not disappear from the face of the earth as other nations did, but we failed to remain independent in our homeland; we failed to save our state," Ben-Gurion confided to a friend. "This time our task is not to maintain a state but to build it; this constitutes a much more difficult political skill, and I do not see that we know it." Ben-Gurion understood that statecraft demands grappling with the corruptions and vagaries of political power and, most perilously of all, the use of military force.

Purists are troubled by this reality. For those Jews who venerate Jewish suffering as evidence of Jewish purity, it is dispiriting to see Israeli troops engaged in the morally fraught work of defending the Jewish state. This current of disillusionment is evident among a growing number of Jewish intellectuals in recent years.

Consider Avraham Burg, who has emerged as the latest high-profile apostle of this phenomenon. In his much-discussed Haaretz Magazine interview of a few months ago, Burg shamelessly fetishized the post-national aspirations of the European Union, declaring it a "biblical utopia," "amazing" and "completely Jewish." Burg's critique echoes that of other ardent and intelligent thinkers who have in recent years made the case that it is well past time that Jews discard the outdated particularities of Jewish nationalism in favor of a more universal creed.

But their grandiose notions of Jewish exceptionalism and superior moral refinement have no basis in reality. As Hillel Halkin recently argued, the founding of Israel has been a painful (and necessary) reality-check for Jews after centuries of life in the Diaspora. "Israel forces Jews to surrender fantasies and illusions about themselves that have long been part of their character," Halkin observed in the June issue of Commentary.

Power resides with those who have guns, and the Jews must be willing to use them. But for Wisse, power is Israel's essence. She cannot fathom a reason for its existence save for the fact that she seems to believe the world wants to destroy the Jews. This siege mentality prevents Wisse from acknowledging how the whole constellation of international politics has assumed a far more auspicious shape for Jews since the last victim perished at Auschwitz. The Jewish people have acquired raw, temporal strength - a state, an army and an air force. I share in Wisse's enthusiasm for these developments. But with strength come obligations. As a result, moral and political deliberations necessitate a great deal more intricacy and thoughtfulness than they did before 1948. Wisse's analysis fails to take the proper measure of these complexities.

Despised for who they are

Here are the stakes according to Wisse: "Most of the Arab world remains formally in a state of war against Israel. An estimated 13 million Jews worldwide, about 4.5 million fewer than in 1939, try to win tolerance from more than 250 million Arabs, who have ties to more than 1 billion Muslims. Advances in Arab missile technology bring Israel ever more dangerously into enemy sights, while Israel's power remains hugely constrained by international pressure and by its own disinclination to fight those from whom it seeks acceptance."

Wisse repeatedly stresses that none of the hostility directed at the Jewish state is related to Israeli actions. Rather, as it has been throughout history, "the animus against [Jews] was not directed to any correctable attribute or rectifiable lapses." In short, Jews - and by extension Israel - are despised because of who they are, not what they do. That's true enough: Anti-Semitism has shown itself so malleable in part because it has proven itself to be of great political utility. In a similar fashion, anti-Zionism became the glue of pan-Arabism and, to some degree, Islamism.

Nonetheless, Wisse's diagnosis is only correct to a limited extent. We should be able to acknowledge that Jews have very real, very implacable foes without having to delegitimize all criticism of Israeli actions. Wisse seems incapable of such an acknowledgment. And she fails to make essential distinctions between political opponents and existential threats. Indicative of her style is a brief and rather venomous attack on Peace Now, which Wisse charges with hypocrisy: "Obeying their instinct for survival, most members of Peace Now and the Israeli elites did not interrupt their military service while they lobbied Washington for a Palestinian state and otherwise promoted their enemies' cause over their own." She presents this as evidence that "they were not prepared to sacrifice their children, their parents, or their country to their imaginary 'partners for peace'."

But Wisse has it backwards: It is precisely because the leaders of Peace Now are committed Zionists that they serve in the military and advocate the establishment of a Palestinian state, which need not be created because there is any expectation of peace in return. That explains why Peace Now's leadership is devoted to military service; they know there are some enemies that need to be fought. But they also know that the West Bank should be relinquished because it is a matter of moral and strategic necessity. That Wisse considers a Palestinian state her "enemies' cause" is breathtakingly short-sighted.

Jews should be proud of the political and military power they have acquired. But it is well past time that Israel's super-strident friends recognize that it is not enough to merely possess it. The real challenge is learning how to wield it wisely.

Evan R. Goldstein is a writer in Washington, D.C., and a contributing editor at Moment magazine.