Kai Bird: The Hebrew Republic
My father was a Foreign Service officer, a diplomat and an Arabist who spent virtually all his career in the Near East, as it was called in the State Department. So I spent most of my childhood among the Israelis and the Arabs of Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In the spring of 1956, when I was 4, Father was appointed vice consul at the American consulate in the Jordanian-controlled part of Jerusalem. Mother arrived a few weeks later, bringing my little sister and me. We soon settled into a rented house, newly built of the city's famous gleaming white limestone, on a hill overlooking the stretch of "no man's land" that bordered Israeli-controlled Mount Scopus.
Jerusalem was very much a divided city. A jarring series of ad hoc fences, walls and bales of barbed wire, running like an angry, jagged scar from north to south, separated East Jerusalem from West. Our house was a stone's throw from the 1949 armistice line, and Mount Scopus was but an island of Jewish property in a sea of Arab territory. On some nights I could hear the random, not-so-distant tapping of machine-gun fire. "War and rumors of war seem to be the habit around here," my father wrote, "and waking up in the night to hear rifle fire is almost an every night occurrence."
To get to West Jerusalem one had to cross no man's land, passing through the heavily guarded passageway known as Mandelbaum Gate. The gate took its name from a house that once stood on the spot, built by a family of Jewish immigrants from Byelorussia. I crossed through the gate nearly every day, past the barbed wire and the cone-shaped anti-tank barriers. Men with guns stood guard. The skeletal remains of armored personnel carriers and rusting tanks lay about as constant reminders of lost lives and past conflicts.
I know the dangers and the seductions of the Middle East. It is part of my identity. I grew up among a people who routinely referred to the creation of the State of Israel as the Nakba--the catastrophe. And yet I fell in love with and married a Jewish American woman, the only daughter of two Holocaust survivors, both Jewish Austrians. Gradually, over many years of marriage, I came to understand what this meant. One can't live with a child of Holocaust survivors without absorbing some of the same sensibilities that her parents transmitted to her as a young girl. It is an unspoken dread, a sense of fragility, an anxious anticipation of unseen horrors. So the Holocaust--or, to use the more accurately descriptive Hebrew term, the Shoah--well, it too has become a part of my identity. The Nakba and the Shoah: the bookends of my life....
About 76 percent of Israel's population--or 5.4 million people--define themselves as Jewish. But while most Israelis are still culturally secular, some 1.5 million others are divided into two main streams: the nationalist religious and the ultra-Orthodox, or haredim. And because of their high birthrates, the Orthodox community as a whole is growing rapidly. By definition, the Orthodox are antisecular, and over the years they have succeeded in imposing many of their archaic rules on the secular majority. They determine who is a Jew and who is not, and sometimes what is culturally forbidden. They have the political muscle to persuade the state to fund their religious schools. The ultra-Orthodox, primarily concerned with pursuing religious studies, get their young men and women exempted from military service. The national religious, for their part, form the backbone of the settlers' movement to colonize the occupied territories, and they have moved in great numbers into the army, transforming that formerly overwhelmingly secular institution. Both the nationalist religious and the ultra-Orthodox ardently believe in their right to live in an exclusively Jewish state--which helps to explain why in some polls a near-majority of Israelis say they would like to see their government "support the emigration of Arab citizens." A small majority openly opposes equal rights for Israeli Palestinians.
This is, to say the least, a highly undemocratic sentiment. But it has become quite clear that the Orthodox cherish "state Judaism" over democracy. Even the Hebrew spoken by the Orthodox, saturated as it is with archaic religious concepts and overtones, seems to reinforce tribalism. For the Orthodox, all politics comes down to one question: is it good for the Jews? As Avishai observes in his deeply incisive book The Hebrew Republic: "You cannot live in Hebrew and expect no repercussions from its archaic power. You cannot live in a state with an official Judaism, in addition to this Hebrew, and expect no erosion of citizenship. You can, as most Israelis do, speak the language, ignore the archaism, and tolerate the Judaism. But then you should not expect your children to understand what democracy is."...