Israel, the Capital of the Wild East

Israel is no longer part of the West

We were once told that Israel was a Western country, a villa in the jungle, the only democracy in the Middle East, and a few more unproven clichés. Later the boast became more modest, and we were called the eastern border of the West, a forward outpost of enlightenment. The time has come to say it in a clear voice and without stammering: Israel has seceded from the West. It did so of its own free will, by government decisions, legislation, incitement from its most official platforms, and in the end with a great deal of blood. Israel is not the long arm of the moderate West. It is the capital of the wild East.

The West is first of all an idea. Its geography is secondary. That is why Japan and Australia belong to it and Russia does not. To belong to the West is to accept a moral commitment, not to carry a commercial brand, join a military alliance or hold a ticket to the Eurovision. The West was forged through struggles, revolutions, religious wars, and long, bloody processes of self correction. The gap between its declarations and its deeds was often enormous. Colonialism, slavery and the Holocaust were born within it, and out of their ruins a clear moral core crystallized and became the foundation of liberal democracy and of the idea of human rights: the individual comes before the collective, the power of government is limited, and every person possesses natural rights that do not depend on the grace of the majority.

At the center of that core stands the individual human being. A person’s worth flows from humanity itself, from birth to death. It precedes status, origin, faith and national belonging. From this principle derive human dignity, freedom of thought, expression, religion and conscience, and the right to choose your own path of life. Equality before the law is therefore a binding foundation, and everyone, truly everyone, is equal in front of it: the minister and the citizen, majority or the minority, the person of wealth and the one who has nothing. Democracy gives all of these a political framework, and it is first and foremost a method for limiting power, not a license for unlimited force or for the tyranny of the majority. The separation of powers, independent courts, a free press, an active opposition and a vibrant civil society are its true guarantees, far more than election day itself. To these are joined pluralism, which allows human beings to live together amid profound disagreement, and critical reason, which subjects every authority, political, religious or military, to examination and challenge. And above them all hovers the principle of universality: human dignity, liberty and equality belong to every human being. All of them. Including the one who is not me, not “one of us”, and who does not carry the right ID card.

These are the tests by which the West is judged most severely, and this is precisely the test that Israel fails every day, every hour, deliberately. The failure is all the more painful because the idea was born among us. The Judaism to which I belong preceded Europe by thousands of years. Burned into it is a deep resistance to every tyranny and to the racist generalizations that lead to the enslavement of entire collectives. Unlike the kingdoms of antiquity, our faith rests on the preciousness of every human being created in the divine image. That is the foundation of the slaves’ revolt against Egypt and against the very idea of Egypt-ism. From it flowed the principle that no person may be punished for the sin of another. “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers; every man shall be put to death for his own sin.” This is the teaching of the Hebrew prophets, a revolutionary idea in a world that saw the tribe, not the person, as the binding unit. From that faith arose, in time, the entire legal structure we now call Western. The presumption of innocence, the burden of proof and the independence of judges express a profound moral dread of punishing a person for a deed he did not commit, and the courts of the West were built to make conviction difficult, because the moral horror of punishing a single innocent person weighed more heavily in their eyes than the hope of punishing all the guilty. From the same root grew the idea of human rights, which recognizes no hierarchy of blood and no hierarchy of nations. And from it flows the greatest virtue of the West: the capacity to criticize itself by the standards of its own values, to acknowledge its failures and to repair them. The West at its best claims no moral perfection. Its strength lies in its power of criticism and correction.

Once we were like that. No longer. The Israel of our day is a loud and coarse abandonment of the Jewish tradition and an ugly divorce from the Western foundations on which it was built. The Neo-Judaism of Israel is a new religion, tribal and brutal, violent and disfigured, neither Jewish nor democratic nor Western. A neo Judaism rules and rampages in Israel, and it is nothing but the doctrine of race in its most accursed and degraded form. I do not belong to it or to them. They are my enemies in the full sense of the word. For these self styled National Jews, the collective comes before the individual, no one bears personal responsibility, and every Palestinian is judged by his national belonging before his deeds are ever examined. Collective punishment has ceased to be an aberration and become official policy. Houses are demolished for the deeds of another member of the family; food, water, medicine and electricity serve as instruments of punishment; hundreds of thousands are uprooted from place to place; and children pay for the deeds of adults they never knew. Ministers in the government of Israel incite to murder, for their equation of death, a thousand of theirs for one of ours, has no other meaning. This religion is the complete inversion of the teaching that every person shall die for his own sin. It is a theology of tribal vengeance against which our prophets rebelled thousands of years ago, and here it returns to us now, wrapped in a prayer shawl and a military uniform, kissing mezuzahs and voting for one of Israel’s parties of crime.

The regime in the occupied territories is the decisive proof. In the very same space two systems of law operate side by side: settler and Palestinian, meters apart, are subject to different courts, different rules and a different hierarchy of rights. One is a citizen whose state is bound to protect him; the other is a subject of an abusive military rule and has no part in shaping the laws that govern his life. This supposedly temporary arrangement has already lasted three generations, and it has therefore become the permanent regime. It is a regime the Western world cast off at the cost of much blood, some of it ours. The erosion long ago crossed the Green Line as well: Arab citizens of Israel are required to prove their loyalty again and again, Arab protest meets a heavy hand that Jewish protest has never known, and the assault on the judiciary completes the picture. Its deepest purpose is to free the political majority of every restraint and to make elections the sole source of power, that is, to move openly from constitutional democracy to centralized majority rule.

And the deepest betrayal of all is the betrayal of memory. The State of Israel arose as a state of refuge for persecuted Jews in order to turn the memory of persecution into moral responsibility: the founding generation hoped that those who had known powerlessness would be doubly careful with any power entrusted to their hands. In a covenant of thousands of years we swore that we would never do to others what we hated having done to us. Over the years, memory was turned on its head, and Jewish suffering was transformed from a moral obligation to refrain from bloodshed into a political license to kill without distinction. That is a betrayal of memory itself, which has ceased to warn against injustice and is now summoned to justify it.

One can be shocked until tomorrow morning, one can murmur “not in our name” and feel good about oneself. The truth is far harder: taking part in the democratic game and accepting its results means granting the government the authority to do all these things “in our name.” A crime elected by a majority of votes is still a crime, and a policy of separation and discrimination remains discrimination. Democracy cannot launder disgrace, and it places full responsibility also on those who accept the inciters as a legitimate outcome, sit with them in one government and grow accustomed to them.

The time for half measures is over. We must go all the way and draw every conclusion. First, the time has come to hear a clear electoral commitment: ministers who incite to murder and to collective punishment must stand trial, in the courts of Israel if anyone dares, or in the international tribunals if no one does. Second, the Western world must stop granting Israel its celebrity exemption. We must be judged by the same standards by which every other regime that tramples human rights is measured. A country that abandons the values cannot continue to enjoy the privileges. It is intolerable that Washington and Brussels accept a reality in which human rights are a language binding on rivals and suspended for friends. Justice and law must be universal and apply to all. The West will be judged by its treatment of Israel, and Israel will be judged by its treatment of the Palestinian human being.

And third, and this is the essence: upon us, the Israelis who remain faithful both to the covenant of the prophets and to the covenant of enlightenment, falls the duty to build the alternative. Another Israel, in which the individual comes before the tribe, in which the law is equal for every soul, and every human being, Jew, Arab, Palestinian and stranger, is created in the divine image.

The true test of every culture is the life of the human being subject to its power, and in that test we have failed. The door of the West is still open, though no longer wide open. After these elections we will know where we are headed: deep into the Neo Jewish ghetto, a people dwelling alone, with its fears, racist ministers of crimes and our sword forever drawn, or back to the Western family of liberty and rights.