Read Tomer Persico’s article, The Return to Jewish History.

A transcript of this episode is available below.

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In a frenzied media cycle, Identity/Crisis creates better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. Host Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, talks with leading thinkers to unpack current events affecting Jewish communities in North America, Israel, and around the world, revealing the core Jewish values underlying the issues that matter most to you.

The Roots, Values, and Crises of Liberalism Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute, creating better conversations about the essential questions facing contemporary Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording on July 17th, 2024 from Jerusalem.

In 1904, the year following the Kishinev pogrom, the poet Hayim Nachman Bialik traveled to Kishinev, which is a city in present-day Moldova, to interview survivors and to chronicle the massacre. Following the trip, he published perhaps his most famous poem, “Ir Ha-Harega,” he City of Slaughter. The poem is an elegy that, unsurprising for Bialik, evokes tropes and themes from the classical canon of Jewish memorial literature, especially in the sections when Bialik rages against God for God’s silence and inaction in the face of the enemy. The poem also evokes the grotesque consistent for the late 19th and early 20th-century poem, such as when he describes the Jew and his dog both lying headless on the same pile.

But most of all, for our purposes today, the poem is deeply political. The central villainy in Bialik’s poem is not as much about the perpetrators, who Bialik actually couldn’t have seen in Kishinev after the fact, but the powerlessness of the victims. Some of the poem’s harshest lines are reserved for the pious victims, such as when Bialik mocks them for cowering in the corner, even though they are heirs of the Hasmoneans. Worse, when Bialik describes the violence against the women of the town, which took place in the presence of their husbands, who did nothing about it except ask halakhic questions of their rabbis afterwards about whether they can stay with their wives.

Bialik’s poem is a fierce attack on the quietism of faith, but it’s also a clear invitation for Jews to stop accepting the terms of their own victimhood, to stop conceding their fates to fatalism. The poem is said to have inspired many thousands of people to mobilize on behalf of the nascent Zionist cause in Eastern Europe, and it’s definitely remembered here in Israel that way. I’d also suggest that Bialik’s mocking of the pious in his embrace of the Maccabees helps pave the way for the core ideology that characterized Israel’s secular school system for a long time, which skipped straight from the heroic tales of the biblical period to the heroic tales of the modern state of Israel, leaving behind the extended story of rabbinic Judaism and diaspora, spurning it for the bitter taste of powerlessness that it left behind. Who needs it?

I’ve taught The City of Slaughter several times at Hartman this summer in support of an argument I’ve been making, namely that October 7th brought with it a set of major narrative crashes for the Jewish people. Some of these crashes are more political, like the concepciya, as it’s described here in Israel, the theory on the Israeli right that Hamas would never be capable of a serious attack, and that they could be managed through maintaining their stability, shuttling them suitcases full of cash, apparently, and some basic border control.

But there are two much more ideological, bigger crashes that I’ve been thinking most about, and the first is that belief that the liberal order essentially, eventually works to protect Jews, and the belief that Zionism solved the Jewish problem and changed Jewish history.

I think both of those stories are under serious strain. Now, we’ve talked on the show before about the problems with liberalism right now, especially in places like the universities in America, which were, and are supposed to be, bulwarks of the liberal order. In my classes at Hartman this summer, I argued that maybe part of the problem is that for the last three decades, liberals were coasting on the triumph of the West over the totalitarian, communist, and fascist alternatives of the 20th century, and were persuaded that we were at, or near, the quote, end of history, not noticing all of the erosions in the liberal order that were all around us.

Here in Israel, terror chips away at liberal commitments, it attacks liberals and makes them illiberal. Meanwhile, back home in America, the conservative, the Trumpist, and the progressive rising ideologies, all of them take aim at the more centralist liberalism that they see as weak and banal.

And on the Zionist front? That second idea about the end of history? Well, this is why I talked about Bialik at the outset of today. I’m fascinated and alarmed by the fact that in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, so many Jews, myself included, felt drawn to the very language of pogrom, the word pogrom, that Bialik was insisting conveyed a story of powerlessness that Zionism was supposed to replace. I don’t blame us for the epigenetic instinct, one that we painfully learned from our history and literature, that when we experience tragedy and trauma, we connect it to our past and to the stories that we tell.

But as Yossi Klein Halevi taught this summer, never before in Jewish history did Jews experience something like October 7th and then have the options available to them of October 8th— the capacity to respond and the will to do so. Still, this story tells us that we’re kind of in a slippage back somewhere to a kind of Jewish fatalism about anti-Semitism, a kind of existential loneliness about the fate of the Jews to be a people that dwells alone. So on both fronts, as relates to both liberalism and Zionism, I’m wondering, are we moving backwards in history?

It turns out I’m not the only one thinking about these questions. As I’ve been writing and thinking about these themes, so has my friend and colleague here at Hartman, Dr. Tomer Persico, a senior research fellow here at the Institute, a prolific author and public intellectual about topics as ranging as modern spiritualities, internal dynamics in Israeli society, Zionism, and increasingly on liberalism and its discontents.

Tomer spent several years working with us in North America as a scholar at UC Berkeley, where he became very well acquainted with the complexity of the American university campus. We’ll talk a little bit about that today. But also teaching for the Hartman Institute in the broader Jewish community, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area.

His new book, which I believe is called Liberalism: Its Roots, Values, and Crises, was just published in Hebrew in the past few weeks here in Israel, and he just published the cover essay in the Jewish Journal in Los Angeles about Zionism and the return to history. I think it’s fair to say that we’re in the same conversation.

So Tomer, I’m going to just jump right into the deep end if that’s okay. A couple weeks ago on the podcast, I was talking to Matti Friedman, journalist, about the Lebanon threat. And in the course of that conversation, he described what I think is true for him personally, but also something that characterized the Israeli ethos of a kind of pessimism that has taken root about the future of a liberal order here in the Middle East.

And at one point I was pushing him about what Israel has failed to do to advance alternatives with the Palestinians, and he, in the belief that there could be real reconciliation, and he said, memorably Yehuda, that’s 90s thinking. You’re talking like you’re in the 1990s. The appeal to liberal values gets confronted here by, call it pessimism or realism, that makes it seem that it’s naive. You are insisting that the only real future, or the only moral future, that we have here is a liberal one. So how do you react or respond to that kind of culture of pessimism about the possibility of liberalism taking root here in the Middle East?

Tomer: I think, first of all, Matti Friedman is right, this is 90s thinking, but I think we made a mistake we where we didn’t follow through in that thinking. After the Oslo process began, I think there was a chance there, and I’m not discounting Arafat’s deceptiveness and his inclination for terrorism, obviously, and the Second Intifada, which he also tried to orchestrate. That’s all true. But there was a real possibility for the Oslo process to continue, and Israel could have, I think, ended the occupation, or at least progressed a lot on that path.

For many reasons, some, of course, the Palestinians have the blame for, some us, this didn’t happen. And now we find ourselves in a situation which begets such pessimism. It’s not by coincidence. It’s because we, again, it’s not wholly our fault, but we did choose not to progress along the Oslo process, and things just got worse. I mean, really, Israel has a history. We have this, we like saying about the Palestinians that they don’t miss a chance to miss a chance. Well, we’ve missed some chances also, and the chances that we’ve missed make the price that we have to pay now for something like a two-state solution that much higher.

During the peace process with Egypt, Israel was committed, I mean, it’s in the agreement to give the Palestinians autonomy. That never happened. Were that to happen in the 80s, right, because the peace process was signed, the peace agreement was signed in ’79, perhaps that could have been the beginning of a path, even, perhaps even not towards a fully independent Palestinian state, but some sort of autonomy that would give Palestinians hope and dignity, etc.

What we did was the opposite. We continued the settlements inside Judea and Samaria, and we continued pushing Palestinians towards a future in which they are eternally subjugated by Israel. I think we need to understand that the situation we find ourselves now in isn’t here by chance. I mean, we have arrived at where we were walking towards.

Now, I do still believe that it is possible to progress towards reconciliation with the Palestinians. Of course, this will demand today a price that is higher, it will demand risks that we will have to take, which are again higher than something that we could have achieved or taken, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, but I just don’t see any option. Right? Again, I mean, what is the alternative? To eternally occupy millions of people? Can we as Jews and as Israelis really conceive of the possibility for us to engage in that kind of life? I mean, simply with no horizon of something else? I don’t think so.

Yehuda: I’ll come back to the risk issue later on, because I think that’s, to me, is, risk and trust are, to me, the biggest obstacles for liberal societies to get over. You actually need everybody to trust that the liberal order will serve them, which has a certain kind of generosity of spirit. And the minute some people start distrusting that the liberal order will protect them, the whole thing falls apart. I want to come back to that.

But, you know, in 1989, when Francis Fukuyama published his End of History article, which he has since then continually revised, but stuck with that thesis, which basically argues that the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century have failed. And what he means by the end of history is there’s no other serious ideological claim other than liberal democracy that has emerged on the scene.

However, near the end of the essay, he says, there’s two possible ideas that might threaten the 20th century. And he dismisses them. He says, religion is one and nationalism is the other. And he says, I’m sure he basically says some version of, I think we’ll be fine. I read that again this summer. I was like, oh, you know exactly what the threats are to the system, but you actually don’t take them seriously.

It seems to me that the basic problem in this society is that both religion and nationalism have come together to kind of team up against the liberal order here. And, what’s worse, is that they’ve taken over the most threatening regimes to Israel’s existence, that’s liberalism looks feeble in response to religion and nationalism. So, how does, how does a commitment to liberalism both take seriously the claims of religion and nationalism, but actually defeat it?

Tomer: I think, first of all, I would say, I think Fukuyama was right. I think there’s no grand idea, there’s no grand framework that is actually vying to replace the liberal order. We had those in communism, we had those in fascism, real serious ideological frameworks that said the right way to conduct a just society is for ABC, right, a strong leader or a nationalizing capital, whatever. We don’t have that now.

What we have are three different challenges to the liberal order. One, indeed, from religion, and I will specifically say from fundamentalist religion. Of course, we have many benign forms of religion that have no problem with liberalism. And the two others are, from the right, at this time, populism. So it’s not exactly nationalism, I would say. It’s populism, and we can go into what that means exactly. And from the left, we have the radical left, anti-liberal, I would say identitarian frameworks. It’s not identity politics as such, because identity politics can be just and simply demand a just piece of the pie for some group or other. These are identitarian, anti-liberal groups that demand to chuck the whole pie away. The whole pie is colonialist or white or capitalist, which needs to be simply chucked away.

So these are the three challenges and apart from fundamentalist religion that really has a whole, you know, canopy of idea encompassing society, which really wants a different kind of life, right? Sharia rule, Halakha rule, etc. We don’t really have an alternative, right? As Fukuyama says. Now we do, we Israelis do live in a neighborhood that is full of religious fundamentalists. Most of them Muslim, and we have some Jewish ones as well, right? So they do pose a real threat and a real problem. But I would say again, I don’t think it’s nationalism as such, at least inside Israel. And of course, the US also has the same problem. What we have as a challenge to liberalism is mostly populism.

The Likud in Israel has become from a liberal party, the National Liberal Party, which is its own motto right, has become a populist party under Netanya. And we saw in the judicial overhaul how it wants to dismantle. Israel’s liberal framework, checks and balances, et cetera.

Yehuda: Why do you understand the structures of liberalism to seem so feeble in response to these ideological trends?

Tomer: I think the feebleness is really a feature, right? It’s a bug when liberalism is on its own, but as such, liberalism has to be such a feeble framework because it wants to be, to provide the citizen with as full as an autonomy as it can, right? Liberal order says, look, individuals are equal, each have dimensions to their being, which must be protected, those are our rights. The free exercise of which constitutes an individual’s liberty, right? For me to be free, I need to be free to say what I want, to believe in what I want, to organize, to move, to have property which cannot be taken away, etc. These are my rights, right?

And the liberal order wants to protect these and wants to leave everything else for the individual to decide. Do you, what is your conception of the decent life, the right way to live, the good life? Is it to study in a yeshiva all the day? Is it to work for fame and fortune? Is it to find a new cure for cancer? Whatever it is. And you do your thing. You do you, right?

So liberalism is an arrangement. It doesn’t tell a story. The problem is that people don’t want to be part of an arrangement. They want to be part of a story. We want to have a, to be in some sort of context. We want to be part of something bigger than us. We want to have a goal that we strive for. We don’t want to be simply individual monads expressing our autonomy. That’s great as far as rights go. It’s not great as far as people need meaning in their lives. So the feebleness of liberalism is simply liberalism. That’s what it is. It’s a framework. It doesn’t tell a story.

And here it connects to what I said before that I don’t think the problem is nationalism, right? The nation-state in itself, first of all, is a prerequisite for liberalism. You can’t have protection of rights without the nation-state. The nation-state enforces the protection of our rights. By the way, I love the next sentence in the famous second passage of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. “We hold these rights to be self-evident, all man… life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The next sentence is “To preserve these rights, governments are instituted among men.”

Okay? Why are we doing what we’re doing? Why are we fighting the British, wanting to divest from the British crown? Why are we doing it? To preserve these rights. This is liberalism. Liberalism wants a nation-state to preserve these rights. So the nation-state in itself is important. And even nationalism, in its benign form, patriotism, I don’t know how should we call it, is important in the fact that it gives people a collective identity that is important for them. I am an Israeli and I strive for the betterment of the Israeli Republic and I contribute to it. Sometimes I’m even asked to sacrifice for it. Sometimes even my life, right? All that.

And we want to create a society that is just, perhaps even a model society. Chevrat mofet, as the Zionists used to call it. All that is very important, and when it’s done properly, complements liberalism, in that it gives us a collective identity and a story that we are a part of. The problem, I think, is over the last 30 years, that we have slided into a post-national era in which nationalism, again, the benign form, has been forgotten. We just, we don’t even understand why we need states. Perhaps we just need open borders and everybody, et cetera, right? And that has made liberalism accentuate itself and reveal its weaknesses. Again, the fact that it does not tell a story.

Yehuda: So, you’ve essentially diagnosed two problems with the liberal order. One is it’s politics. It needs a particular infrastructure of government and politics to sustain itself. And the other is what Martha Nussbaum calls poetry, the poetry of liberalism. You know, she basically describes in the American context it’s, both Walt Whitman and Martin Luther King understood the power of liberal poetry. And she argues until liberals start speaking the language of poetry again, the pragmatism around our politics is gonna look even weaker than it did before.

I guess this is a dumb question, but which comes first? The politics or the poetry? Because actually, on the populous side, you don’t actually need a vision for a political future. You just need a slogan. Make America great again. I see American liberals. struggling under the weight of the fact that the political institutions that upheld liberalism are no longer doing that anymore. Bipartisan government, the universities, a free and fair media. If they’re not doing it, it makes a good slogan sound incredibly dumb. And I guess I’ll put it like this: When liberalism is the accepted norm, the bipartisan era in America, you just need to kind of feed it. What happens when it’s actually on the defensive? What do you need to invest in first to rebuild liberal culture in a society that is skeptical of it?

Tomer: I mean, I think the real problem is that we have been simply feeding liberalism and forgetting the poetry, as you said. And we have done that because we took liberalism for granted. And that happened because the greatest threats to liberalism were over, right? The fall of the communist bloc, et cetera. Liberalism, in its inception, in the 17th, 18th, certainly 19th century, had poetry, had poets, had activists and fighters, and people who, as Martin Luther King did in the 20th century, of course, for the cause that he was fighting for. It had poetry when it indeed needed to struggle in order to assert itself, in order to have a place in the public sphere, conquer the public sphere even right.

But again, once it did conquer the public sphere, to the extent that it was simply the obvious way we live. I mean, everybody has rights and I can do whatever I want. This is America, right? I mean, you know, that sort of talk, I think it forgot the poetry side of it. It was taken for granted by all of us. And it left the space of poetry, right, in a broad sense, for the other forces. I mean, and really, if you look at populism, if you look at fundamentalist religion, if you look at identitarianism on the left side, they have poetry, they have pathos, they know how to move hearts and not only minds, because they tell a story, because they promise identity, which I think is a very important word here, which liberalism, again, does not give.

And ironically, it is only now that the liberal order is threatened and perhaps will even, I won’t say fall, but will be severely damaged, that I think we will find liberal poets again. Because there will be something to defend and there will be a charge to take and a flag will have to be hoisted up, and slogans will have to be written on it, right? That’s what’s going to happen.

Yehuda: Yeah, I mean, Berlin writes about this in his message to the 21st century, the commencement address he gave in 1994 in Toronto, Isaiah Berlin, where he says, we must weigh and bargain, measure and compromise, right, to resist the kind of totalitarianism of the 20th century. And he acknowledges, I know that this is not the kind of flag under which idealistic young men and women will wish to march. It sounds too tame to a bourgeois.

Tomer: By the way, liberalism always was the bourgeois, tame, middle path, at least certainly in the 19th century, in the 20th century, the radicals were always much more, you know, much more fiery and juicy, right? They were the revolutionaries, the communists, the nationalists sometimes, right? Yeah. I mean, that’s really, again, it’s both a bug and a feature in the liberal makeup.

Yehuda: Is there a human nature read that you have on this? Because the demand of liberalism is also a culture of compromise, which runs against an instinct of winning. And partly what happens is, people are willing to compromise if they don’t think they can win. Or, if it is such a dominant ethos in a society that everybody knows that their collective good is brought about by a culture of compromise. The minute that you start to perceive weakness on the other side, or the belief that you might actually win, the desire to compromise goes away and gets replaced by something else.

So I worry a little bit that we’re advocating for an approach towards, of the good that needs everybody to buy into it at the same time. And now you see that there’s blood in the water.

Tomer: I mean, if, to turn to sociology, I understand the whole liberal order as a manifestation of our conception of the human being, first of all, right? We are individuals that cherish our autonomy, usually also understand autonomy as freedom. It’s one conception of liberty or freedom, but there are other conceptions that don’t have anything to do with autonomy, but we do. And I think the liberal order is the political translation of a society that is made up of individuals who cherish their autonomy. What they do is they construct a system in which the government takes care and is responsible for protecting their autonomy. So that’s the liberal order.

But again, the liberal order never gave us a horizon to look up to and to progress towards, that’s not its job. And as long as we did have such a horizon, let’s say Israelis, Zionism was such a horizon, etc., of course, Israel at first was a socialist state also, that filled things with meaning and,and a conceivable future that we strive for. But as long as we did have that I think our wish to win was tempered by our collective wish to achieve some sort of project, some sort of collective vision.

When we don’t have that, I think we fall into this mutual bickering and, and trying to beat the other side. And I mean, look, I mean, at politics in this time, a lot of it is just trying to press a finger into the other side’s eye. It’s not even about principles. It’s not even about assets, or about power. A lot of the time it’s just to crush the other side for your own joy at seeing them weep, right? And I think that is also a symptom of the fact that we just don’t have a collective vision to strive for. You just fall to that sort of political childishness, I would say.

Yehuda: Bloodsport. So let me go to a place, at least in the American context, where there is, I would say, an ideological north star, a vision of the future, but one that is eroding commitments to liberalism on the left, which is kind of progressive ideologies that have taken hold, especially in the humanities and social scientists at American universities, which have, we could trace the whole history of the way that they are, they have been wedded for a long time to cultures of activism, but they also have taken place within the context of an institution that by its very nature, succeeded, at least in the 20th century, of promoting pluralism, civic-mindedness. You know, the kind of upward mobility that’s essential to the American project, and now seems to be at war with those ideas and ideals.

So you spent a few years at Berkeley, I’d love for you to reflect a little bit on what you learned from kind of soaking in that intellectual community during this time.

Tomer: Yeah. I mean, first, I think it’s important to say that, of course, not all of the university academics, and we are talking about certain departments and, or certain internal centers within the university that have started to concentrate on subjects that morality plays more than intellectual sojourns into fields of knowledge, right? I mean, they teach morality, and they teach a certain sort of morality, a morality in which we need to protect the weak and fight for equality for all and fight for freedom of the oppressed, etc. So, again, these are, as such, you can even say they are liberal values, right?

But I think many times, what has happened is that these values are taken Into a framework that is anti-liberal in its very conception. And, you know, this isn’t, I don’t need to interpret it as such. These people are saying, we don’t think the liberal order is good. We don’t think it should be cherished. We want to critique it and we actually want to undermine it because the liberal order is white, colonialist, capitalist, you know, you name it, right?

At the very bottom, I think there is a sentiment that is antagonistic towards the West. There is a sort of Western self-hatred here, taking the West as the epitome of evil, because the West has succeeded, right? Because the West has come to dominate the world, to such measure that it’s almost embarrassing, and I think for many of these people, it’s something to feel guilty about. And this then also we can connect it to antagonism towards Israel, etc. But I think this is the main thing here. There is, there is this deep-seated critique of the West as such, of Western values as such, because of the unbelievable success of the West, both in terms of prosperity, material prosperity, and in terms of the war of ideas. Again, simply the liberal order has, has become the, the obvious water we swim in. Right?

About Berkeley, I have to say I was in Berkeley for three years, a year and a half before COVID, and then a year and a half into COVID. COVID, of course, made campus impossible. But before, I myself did not experience any, you know, any sort of negative phenomenon or event. I took care to go into campus with my kippah on, on purpose, right? And it was always okay. But my students did. My students sometimes did get blamed for Israel’s actions. At a certain student government, Zionists were asked to leave and which meant really Jews because nobody asked a certain Jew if they were Zionists or not. So that did happen, right? And I used to talk to students about it. I think that the campus in general, though, was much quieter then, and I’m afraid to think about what’s happening now.

Yehuda: Yeah, I mean, meanwhile, the other pressure that’s coming to bear on the universities is not coming from inside the house, progressive intellectual trends, but is actually coming from conservative government. In America, in red states in America, the crackdowns on academic freedom are quite significant, the crackdowns on tenure, the imposing of certain ideological restrictions is pretty severe, and, it’s even more pronounced here, during the war, I read multiple news stories about ways in which, you know, Palestinian professors at Israeli universities were experienced culture of surveillance and suppression.

I guess I’m curious your read on that instinct. What is it about conservatives that in theory claim to want a kind of freedom of speech, a kind of essential autonomy, what’s the ideological value that is driving the conservative critique on the universities?

Tomer: Well, I think first of all, there’s a difference between the U.S. and here. In the U.S., I think it’s the whole populist game, really, and it’s mostly about winning the adoration of your electorate of your constituency. I mean, you know, take Florida governor DeSantis. I mean, he’s playing a game in order to satisfy his voters, et cetera.

Here, the war has infused all this with a nationalistic and intolerant strand in which not, by the way, not only Palestinian professors, but also Jewish professors who are too left-wing for the government to bear are getting threats and, you know, there’s even a law proposed that the government could order a university to fire a professor for condoning terrorism, right? You know, without a trial, really.

So, again, here, it’s really because of the war, and in a way you can understand the feeling of pressure and anxiety that the Israeli society is in right now and it produces a lot of things among these very negative phenomena. And I would say here we need to wait for this wave to pass and perhaps the next government will, uh,

Yehuda: I don’t think, I fear that it won’t. And I feel that this is basically a one way slide. I mean, when you look at like the Patriot Act in America, you look at the logic behind the Patriot Act, which was, I’m not saying he endorsed it, but when Aharon Barak writes in 2001 about the confrontation that he writes in the Yale Law Review about the way that terror erodes liberal democracy because what happens inevitably is that terrorists not only attacks citizens, but they make citizens more willing to relinquish their own civil liberties as a means of preventing it. I just don’t know how you combat that downward slide. I don’t know, what’s a horizon by which Israelis start saying we are willing to take risks again because we want, we value our own civil liberties more than, I don’t know, how does that happen?

Tomer: That happens when violence secedes, at least in a certain measure, and people feel a little bit more safe and are willing to risk relaxing the measures that have they have taken during a war. The problem really is, is that even if this war ends, of course, Israel will still be in a dire position security-wise, and we will have to see if if it’s possible.

I think really, I really do think that the Israeli public has shown tremendous resilience. And I’m not talking about this war, but for the past 75 years or even before that. I mean, Israel was established as a democracy from within an independence war that killed 1 percent of the whole population. Israel was threatened from its inception by powers much more numerous than it. And yet, Israel was a democracy, even a thriving democracy, almost from the very start. Of course, you know, many mistakes were made and many things were corrected during, along the path. But I actually marvel at the insistence and the resilience of Israeli citizens and politicians to create a democracy here. Now, I do fear for the future. I don’t know. We are in a recession now.

Yehuda: 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Palestinians. In years before the war, there was a growing recognition, even on the Israeli right, that the health and safety and socioeconomic status of Palestinian citizens of Israel was actually in Israeli national interest. So Bibi had even pledged enormous sums of money, I don’t know if they’ve been paid out, to build out and support the Palestinian Israeli sector. And there’s been really kind of erratic data since the war began about the Palestinian Israeli sector.

On one hand, there was one study which showed that Palestinian Israeli citizens report greater attachment and loyalty to the state of Israel than they’ve ever experienced before. On the other hand, a tremendous amount of data around persecution and repression and surveillance that was coming towards the Palestinian citizens of Israel. It feels to me like one of these opportunities, like an opportunity moment to actually address this piece of the Israeli democratic problem. What do you see on the horizon for that?

Tomer: I mean, first of all, I would say, both things are true. I think, yes, Israeli Palestinians, Israeli Arabs have shown there was a wave of more identification with the state of Israel. And I think this is not only because of, you know, a small measure of patriotism, but also because of fear. These people fear the Hamas not less than us. And when Hamas, during the 7th of October attack, met Israeli Arabs on its murderous path, it killed them. Hamas sees them as collaborators with the Zionist regime, so to speak, right? So, first of all, these people, you know, don’t care too much for the Hamas.

And then again, I want to add to what you said. There is also great sorrow and anger about what Israel is doing in Gaza, right? They don’t care about the Hamas, but they care about their brethren in Gaza. And, you know, we are approaching the 40,000 dead Palestinians in Gaza. And obviously, there’s a lot of aggravation, sadness, and even anger within Israeli Palestinian society.

Now, the chance you’re talking about, of course, is true, but you can’t expect anything from the current government to do about it. I, perhaps, what will happen with the next government is that the, I mean, we have a whole polemic about how to get the Haredi population to join the army or army-like frameworks, you know, to give their share of contribution to the protection of Israel, et cetera. I think when that happens, in parallel to that, and with that, there will have to be some sort of thinking solution about what to do with 18-year-old Palestinian Israeli citizens, and something also will have to be done with them. They probably will not join the IDF, but they probably will, I hope at least, have different civic structures and avenues to commit two or three years too, and to contribute that way. So that will also be a way to engage them with Israeli life and also to give them the very minimal pride and justification in saying, yes, I did my service. I didn’t serve in the IDF, for obvious reasons, but you know, I contribute to the state and this is my state, not less than yours.

Yehuda: Yeah, it goes back to your comment about what it means to be part of a collective enterprise and see yourself as part of a collective mission. It might be, we will look back in retrospect and realize that the moment that this was going downhill for Israel was when, a few years ago, the number of 18-year-olds In Israeli society who served in the military had it dropped below 50%. So once you factor in the ultra-Orthodox, the Arabs, and people who get exemptions, it’s now below 50%. And that’s a kind of metaphorical indicator.

You know, another place that I know you’re worried about and I’m worried about as well is the bridge between liberal American Jews and liberal Israeli Jews, who, the complexity of which is that the vision for liberalism here is within a Jewish nation-state and the vision for liberalism in America is on an American model.

And the other complexity, the second complexity actually is that we’re fighting different forces on the left and on the right here. Look, the map is different. And I guess the third is that for American Jews, the liberal position is a majority position and Israeli, for Israeli Jews, it’s a minority position. And I’m curious how you see a pathway towards building reconciliation and resilience between these populations because they kind of need each other.

Tomer: This is one of the points I worry the most about. I don’t know about reconciliation, and I even, at this point, I would concede, I would go for, you know, just not breaking up and going each side their own path, because for American Jews, for most American Jews, liberalism is not just something that they practice in the public sphere or they hold dear. It’s part of their Jewish identity, as you must know, right? They express their Judaism through their liberal values. That means the more a person feels Jewish in the United States, of course, this is a generalization, but usually, the more they are liberal and the more they care about liberal values, right? Equality, human rights, justice, etc.

And what I am afraid of is that if Israel veers further and further away from liberal values, These are the people that will have to, in order to stay loyal to their own Jewish identity, will have to shun Israel and reject Israel. And I mean, I’m afraid of that sort of tragedy in which Israel, even for understandable reasons, right? I mean, war and terrorism will turn less and less liberal and there will be a great rift between Israeli Judaism and American Judaism, because the most committed Americans to their own Judaism will be the ones who the most feel the need to reject Israel. That’s the tragedy I’m afraid of.

Yehuda: So one last tragedy, and then I’m going to ask you to bring us up, which is, you wrote in the Jewish Journal piece, and I’ll bring us back to Bialik, you wrote, “We’re in danger of having a one-day pogrom throw us back into the ghetto, not only psychologically, but politically and geopolitically. This type of development will prompt an existential position of insecurity, seclusion, suspicion towards the world, ethnocentricity, and the fragile, defiant pride of ‘the people that dwells alone’ sort.” It’s quite a laundry list of problems. So what’s the version of a Zionism that you want to see take root in this society that solves all those problems, isn’t that, and also becomes one that bridges the gap between Israeli Jews and American Jews?

Tomer: It’s really the Zionism that was decided on in the first Zionist Congress in Basel. It’s a Zionism that wants to hold fast to Jewish history, but to take Jews and Judaism into human history, right? This is, this was one of Zionists core ideas from the inception. We Jews need to return to human history as agents, as people who are sovereign and are in charge of their own faith, and the return to human history is also the return to the family of nations and to international norms. At the end of the Basel Congress, the first Zionist Congress, 1897, the framing of Zionism was, what they said Zionism was was the wish to create a national home for the Jewish people on the land of Israel, they called it Palestine at that time, through or justified by public law. And by public law, they meant international law.

And you know, they could have simply put the period after creating a national home for the Jewish people in the land of Palestine. That’s it, right? No. They continued and they say justified through international law. Why? It was important for them to be a part and to integrate into the Jewish community. what they called the progressive or the enlightened nations, right?

And I think, that’s, again, what we need. We need that sort of Zionism that does not, you know, fold itself into itself, like I wrote, and, you know, make the verse “A nation that dwells alone” into a part of their identity and into a vision, right? Yes, we of course cherish our Jewish identity, etc. But we can’t let go of the human side of the universal side of our vision. And again, that’s one of my fears, is that this return to Jewish history will make us forget that.

Tessa: Thanks for listening to our show, and special thanks to our guest this week, Tomer Persico. Identity/Crisis is produced by me, Tessa Zitter, and our executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was produced with assistance from Annie Beyer Chafets and edited by Gareth Hobbs at Silver Sound NYC, with music provided by Socalled.

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