Israel Flotilla Attack
Monday, Jun 14, 2010 07:01 ET
For too many, the homeland now means only embarrassment and unease. Here's what it can learn from
American Jews
By Rich Cohen
A hundred years ago, when Zionism was just an idea, its founders believed a Jewish state would liberate not just its citizens but Jews everywhere, the Diaspora dwellers who live, a half-plus century after the Holocaust, mostly in America.
This would happen in two ways: First, with the existence of a Jewish homeland, the presence of the Jew on Orchard Street would seem less an unexplainable whim of history than a matter of preference: I choose America. With this choice, all the old charges of dual loyalty -- the Jew will always honor his people above his state -- would fade. A Jew living in New York would be no more sinister than an Irishman living in Boston, or a Pole living in Chicago. (The fact that the same man coined both the phrase "the melting pot," for the U.S., and "a land without a people for a people without a land," for Palestine, is no accident.)
What's more, in filling out all ranks of a national society, the citizens of Israel would show that the image of the Jew, as bankers and professors and such, that is, as anything but manly men, was a lie. As Golda Meir (or someone just like her) said, "We will know Israel is a success when we have Jewish cops chasing Jewish criminals." A Jewish state would make being a Jew ordinary, in other words, even boring. No longer the object of conspiracy theories and millennial fantasies, the Jews would become regular, beat-walking, ordinary Joes, thus set free.
So I ask you Jews of the new world, at your keyboards, at your espresso makers, at your play-stations: Do you feel that the Jewish state has set you free?
When I was a kid, and this was the day before yesterday, I did indeed feel liberated by Israel. Because I grew up with the regularly repeated lesson of the Holocaust, because my father, whenever faced with a particularly brutal enemy, would say, "It's 1939, and this bastard is killing Jews," because I burned with anger and shame whenever they showed, on PBS or during awareness week in school, footage of the Jews in the camps, striped or stripped, emaciated, hollow, because in my town the Jew was either the victim in need of saving, the nebbish in need of schooling, or the white-collar finagler in need of catching.
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http://www.salon.com/news/israel_flotilla_attack/index.html?story=/mwt/feature/2010/06/14/american_jews_teach_israel
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