Robert Alter is a Zionist - Israel at Age 76 - Yom HaAtzmaut - Ways to Love Israel

[MS: Robert Alter published essays and reviews of all kinds about Israel, Zionism, Bible and Hebrew literature for decades, many on Commentary - even as Commentary morphed politically over the years - along with a lifetime of scholarship and over 25 books.

See references and overviews of his works on the Robert Alter MS Sefaria Sheet Collection here. (Below, edits and formatting are supplied, as indicated.) One quick search of Commentary articles by Alter has over 100 essays and reviews on the major issues in Jewish life over decades.]

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Some of this criticism clearly represents a return of the various traditions of opposition to Zionism that in the pre-state period enjoyed such a lively existence. With the founding of the state forty years ago, these traditions went into temporary eclipse, but lately, and especially since the Lebanon war, they have come back again, couched in updated forms and espoused by people who may or may not be aware of their provenance.

They include the old (Orthodox) charge that a secular state in the Holy Land runs counter to Jewish religious teachings; the old (Reform/humanist) idea that statehood represents a betrayal of the supposedly universalist mission of the Jews; the old (socialist) notion that Zionism is a regressive expression of bourgeois nationalism; even the old (assimilationist) claim that by raising the specter of dual loyalty a Jewish state compromises or actually endangers the position of Jewish communities in the Diaspora.

In addition to all this, there has been a marked change even among American Jews whose commitment to Israel has long been unambiguous and steady. Not only have such Jews become increasingly willing to criticize Israel’s policies and even Israel itself, they have also been more and more disposed to do so in public. Conversely, it is hard to remember a time when favorable comment about Israel has been so muted and so scanty within the American Jewish community.

This, then, is the paradoxical situation as Israel approaches its fortieth birthday. In trying to determine what justification, if any, there may be for such a state of affairs, COMMENTARY addressed the following questions to a diverse group of American Jewish intellectuals:

The responses—forty-nine in all—follow in alphabetical order."

"The most fundamental fact about the state of Israel is that it constitutes a radical turning point in Jewish history.

We have not had such an opportunity as a people in 2,000 years—and, indeed, the last instance of national independence, under the Hasmoneans, represented less real autonomy and exhibited far less political decency than Israel does today. We are not likely to have such an opportunity again, and so I find it hard to imagine how one can choose to be a Jew at this point in time without a staunch commitment to the urgency of Israel’s survival.

I have felt this way ever since I began to think about such questions, and nothing that has occurred in recent years has altered this conviction, including policies and actions of the Israeli government that I view as misguided or self-defeating.

Israel, whatever its imperfections, has certainly fulfilled the hopes vested in it. The most essential of these are the establishment of political autonomy, so that Jews need no longer be passive victims in the historical realm, and the creation through that autonomy of a new secular Jewish culture in the Hebrew language. These are, it seems to me, the reasonable hopes to have been vested in Israel.

But the moment one’s hopes for the Jewish state are pitched in a messianic key—something that has been done not only by the occasional unreconstructed messianist but more conspicuously by many people who are “attracted” to the messianic idea though they stand at a great distance from both Zionism and the Jewish people—then of course the state of Israel must be a bitter disappointment.

Mismanagement, obtuseness, cynicism, and corruption are variously perceptible in all governments of which I am aware, past and present, and so all governments are vulnerable to criticism. This does not mean, however, that one cannot make sharp qualitative distinctions between, say, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and Margaret Thatcher’s England, or more specifically to our point, between Syria’s massacre of over 20,000 of its own citizens at Hama and Israel’s intermittent violation of the civil rights of Arabs on the West Bank. I do not believe in moratoriums on criticism of Israel, and I have from time to time publicly expressed such criticism myself, including in the pages of this magazine. But a great deal depends on the tone of the criticism, the assumptions on which it is predicated, and the contexts in which it is pronounced.

Saul Bellow makes the tart observation in To Jerusalem and Back that what the Alps are to skiers, Israel has become to the moral critics of the world. In part, he means simply that Israel is judged by a more exacting standard. What is more ominous—and I suspect Bellow also has this in mind—is that the criticism of Israel often has a querulous undertone, implying if not actually stating that unless the Israelis can demonstrate unfalteringly that their behavior is beyond moral reproach, the state is a “tragic error,” and has no right to exist.

As Americans, we may view the continuing spectacle of deception, blundering, and borderline criminality in our own government with varying degrees of unease, distress, or anger, but nobody outside the bomber Left construes any of this as calling into question the legitimacy of our national existence. I cannot see why the case should be different for Israel, a country which, like America, exercises various democratic checks on the abuse or inept exercise of power.

In regard to the context for criticizing Israel in this country, let me offer one experience as a kind of illustrative parable. When the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982, I had some misgivings from the start about the wisdom of the action—misgivings that became much more pronounced during the year following the incursion, which I spent with my family in Jerusalem. Nobody asked me for my opinion, and when the widespread vilification of Israel in the American press became evident, I would in any case have said nothing that might seem to amplify that chorus of hostility.

On the second day of the war, there was, predictably, an anti-Israel demonstration in Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza, birthplace of the student revolution of the 60’s. Among the placard-bearers I noticed three Israeli graduate students, including one who had taken a number of courses with me. Knowing the vehemence of their political position, I thought remonstration then and there would have been futile, but I would have liked to tell them the following: a protest against Israeli actions in Sproul Plaza means something rather different from a protest on Ben-Yehuda Street in Jerusalem. In this particular American context, whatever the seriousness of the protesters’ objections to the policy at stake, protest becomes a way of saying, We are not that kind of Israeli, not that kind of Jew. And to display slogans like “Israel Out of Lebanon” in the same marching circle with people actively disseminating every distorted propaganda release from the PLO as hard fact, people who are known by past actions to be ideologically committed to the destruction of Israel, is to convey to onlookers another message, “Israel Out of the Middle East.”

All this involves a painful dilemma because it is surely unhealthy to renounce the prerogative of criticism, and I would even argue that there is a kind of immorality in American Jews’ giving any Israeli government an automatic blank check when they care deeply about the future of the Jewish state and see things that seriously disturb them. But remembering Sproul Plaza in 1982, I think considerable vigilance must be exercised to ensure that the time, place, and manner of the criticism do not conspire to make it an instrument that can be turned against Israel’s most vital interests.

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Rabbi Lord Sacks in the Machzor on ways to love Israel and a warning about the spread of NEW antisemitism "one of the most significant events of my lifetime. "

[MS: Fourteen years ago, in 2009, Rabbi Lord Sacks wrote a dire, scary warning against "Anti Zionism"!]

"I tell this story because opposition to Israel is at the epicenter of the new antisemitism, the spread of which is one of the most significant events of my lifetime.

Antisemitism is never harmless; it has always in the past been a prelude to tragedy. The new antisemitism, coming as it does within living memory of the Holocaust, almost defies belief.

That Israel, alone among the 192 members of the United Nations, finds its very right to exist called into question, and that the United Nations itself, which voted in 1947 to bring Israel into existence, should be home to some of the worst assaults on its right to self-defense - are not phenomena that can be passed over in silence.

A narrative is taking shape and a climate of opinion is being formed that are dangerous in the extreme, and they must be challenged. (p.40)

….

And a day will come when the story of Israel in modern times will speak not just to Jews, but to all who believe in the power of the human spirit as it reaches out to God, as an everlasting symbol of the victory of life over death, hope over despair. Israel has taken a barren land and made it bloom again. It has taken an ancient language, the Hebrew of the Bible, and made it speak again. It has taken the West's oldest faith and made it young again. It has taken a shattered nation and made it live again.

More than a century ago a young Jew from Lithuania, my great-grandfather, built a house on land never before cultivated, and the settlers gave it a name from a verse in the Book of Hosea in which God said, "I will turn the valley of trouble into a gateway of hope." That remains the Jewish hope. Israel is the land of hope." (p.53)

[MS: Formatting, edits and notes are added.]

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Robert Alter - A lifelong friend of Israel, Alter was an intimate friend of Israeli's national poet Yehuda Amichai and Israel's famous advocate, critic and spokesperson, the novelist Amos Oz.

Alter's most recent book is penetrating analysis of Amos Oz. It is a masterpiece of biography, more intimate and revealing than the ordinary biography, in particular about how Oz's love of Israel evolved over Oz's long life..

People find many reasons to love Israel and find the strength to defend its existence despite the hatred and the terror and Hamas war and ferocity. Many of these reason are described at length in th essay above by Rabbi Sacks.

Alter says Hebrew, the language and its rich revival by Hebrew speakers and writers, was Oz's special love among many for Israel reborn:

"...Oz assumes that there are vehement, sometimes even violent differences on many essential issues— on religious observance and the role of religion in national life, on economic policy, on the importance of ethnic identity, and, above all, on what to do about the Occupied Territories.

But he would argue that Israelis, as Hebrew speakers, belong to a single people: the vitality of the shared Hebrew language binds them together as a people and could become one enabling condition for setting the nation on a path that would make its endangered future viable.

The celebration of Hebrew was thus not only a cultural affirmation for Amos but also a political act. Just as he believed that it was an eminently sound move for Jews to come home to the Land of Israel where, for all their bickering about the character of the home, they were able to enjoy a collective existence, he saw the Hebrew language as the living embodiment of the reality that they belong together as a people despite the acute differences among them.

This view of national existence is ultimately hopeful, and Amos's political vision had to be sustained by hope under conditions-particularly political conditions - that could often seem hopeless." (p126) [MS: Formatting and edits supplied.]

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One hopes that Alter might write someday about his own feelings and thoughts - verses what the text or the authors or poets say.

Most recently, Alter commented on the Hebrew Bible vs "Trump's Bible":

"What there is is an abiding source of inspiration for millions of people, especially in English-speaking countries. ... One reason the Bible has retained that power, even as times change, is that it provides many different perspectives and moods, from exaltation to desperate hope, and many different viewpoints, from the comforting notions of reward and punishment in Psalms to the sharp questioning of their validity in Job.

It is fine to say that there should be a Bible in every home — but not as a bolster to a sense of self-righteousness and not as an assured blueprint to the virtuous life. ... Instead, the Bible should be, as it was in ancient times, a source for inquiring about reality, for pondering the unfathomable complexities of the human condition."

Alter: The Hebrew Bible is not a "rallying point for a political agenda."

"Seeing the Bible as it is meant to be seen — as a vehicle meant to prompt learning and introspection — makes it clear how shameful Trump’s exploitation of the Bible for monetary and political ends is. To wrap it in a flag — any flag — and turn it into a rallying-point for a political agenda, is what some biblical writers would have called an abomination before the Lord."

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