Some of you may have been following the recent noise surrounding Avrum Burg's new book..."Defeating Hitler (only in Hebrew for now)." Avrum last hit the papers when he was arguing to keep his car and driver from his service in the Jewish Agency...so some of us take Burg's ethics arguments with several grains of salt, but not only does he ask all the right questions, but I believe most of his answers are correct as well.
Do not rely on the Haaretz condensed version of his book or the "interview" published last week, instead see piece in the Forward by JJ Goldberg, here and below.
JJ titles his peice "Burg's New Zionism," but for me its the same Zionism I always knew, perhaps because I was born in 1969, two years after the cataclysmic events of 1967, and grew up with a different relationship to Israel and Jewish history than many of my friends from one generation back (and more).
Burg's most important line below is one I repeat all the time (and makes many of my native born Israeli friends quite uncomfortable...), " The Jewish people after 60 years of statehood cannot allow
itself to take its holiness for granted. It has to question itself
every day."
Thank God there are people like Burg asking the questions. May all of us join in!
Shabbat Shalom from Jerusalem.
Avraham Burg’s New Zionism
Editor’s Notebook
J.J. Goldberg | Wed. Jun 13, 2007
Zionism
has meant many things to many people over the past century. To Theodor
Herzl and the founders of the Zionist movement, it meant creating a
national home to gather in the Jewish people — to some minds, as a
refuge from antisemitism; for others, as a fulfillment of an ancient
promise. To Herzl’s great critic, the essayist Asher Ginsberg, better
known as Ahad Ha’am, Zionism meant building a cultural and spiritual
center in Israel to enrich the lives of Jews wherever they live.
To
David Ben-Gurion and generations of Israelis after him, it meant the
act of settling in Israel and building it, brick by brick. To millions
of Jews around the world, it meant providing material and moral backing
for that effort. To Palestinians and other Arabs, it meant assault and
dispossession. To much of the outside world, it has come to mean the
seed of seemingly endless conflict.
To Avraham
Burg, former Knesset speaker, former chairman of the World Zionist
Organization and son of one of Israel’s founding fathers, it is all of
those things and more. In a new book, “Defeating Hitler,” and in a
much-discussed interview in Ha’aretz last week, Burg argues that the
time for Herzl’s Zionism is past. Now it is time for Ahad Ha’am’s
Zionism, for Israel as a spiritual beacon.
Israel
has lived long enough in the shadow of trauma and fear, he argues. Now
is the time for trust — trust in Israel’s place in the world, in the
possibility of coexistence, in the moral legacy of Judaism.
That,
at least, is how Burg describes his message. You’d hardly know it,
though, from the Ha’aretz interview and the response it’s gotten in
Israel and the broader Jewish world. The interviewer, Ari Shavit, read
the book and admits he detested it.
As Shavit
reads it, Burg’s book rejects the very notion of a Jewish state, claims
that Israel has no moral core and has become a brutal Sparta fast
sliding toward Nazism. In the interview, Burg tries gamely to answer
Shavit’s objections, to explain what he meant, but Shavit won’t have
it.
Burg is talking spiritual philosophy, and Shavit is tasting red meat.
They
go at each other for 4,500 words (2,800 in the abridged English
translation), but the casual reader needn’t wade through it all. Shavit
and his editors sum up the main points — abandoning Zionism, rejecting
Israel — in the headlines and bold print.
“He
did something I’ve never experienced before in journalism,” Burg told
the Forward in a telephone interview this week. “He read my book and
got angry, and then sat with me for what was supposed to be an
interview and argued with me.”
Reading the
interview, after hearing it discussed endlessly online and in
synagogues over the weekend, is an almost psychedelic experience.
Shavit starts out by telling Burg that he saw the book as a “farewell
to Zionism” and asks, “Are you still a Zionist?” Burg explains his
belief that it’s time to move from Herzl to Ahad Ha’am.
Shavit
promptly informs Burg that Zionism “means belief in a Jewish national
state,” and that he, Burg, no longer believes in that.
Burg:
“Not in its current definition. A state in my eyes is a tool,” not a
spiritual or religious value. “To define Israel as a Jewish state and
then to add the words ‘the first dawning of our redemption’” — a quote
from the chief rabbis’ Prayer for the State of Israel, and the core
principle of settler messianism — “is explosive. And to add to that the
attempt to embrace democracy, it’s just impossible.”
Shavit:
“Then you no longer accept the notion of a Jewish state?” Burg: “It
can’t work.” (The English version, by the way, skips over Burg’s
warning about messianism and the state as a tool, and cuts straight to
“explosive” and “can’t work.”)
I phoned Burg because the interview looked fishy to me. I hadn’t read his new book, but I know Burg.
Is it true, I asked, that he believes Israel can no longer be a Jewish state?
“I
think Israel should be defined not as a Jewish state, but as a state of
the Jewish people,” Burg said. “What I mean is that the significance of
the state’s content, its culture and ethos and so on, should be placed
on the shoulders of every one of us. We shouldn’t be on automatic
pilot.”
“I see Israel as a state that was created by the Jewish people, as the
expression of thousands of years of yearning,” he said. “Its governing
structures should be democratic. Its content should be created by its
people. When you create something called a Jewish state and then leave
it on automatic pilot, the individual bears no responsibility for its
content and character.”
Burg
has harsh words for Israel’s current character. He believes that years
of confrontation and fear have spawned a militaristic spirit and a
widespread contempt for universal norms like human rights. In one of
his most controversial assertions, he compares Israel today to Germany
in the years before the Nazi takeover. Shavit hammers him on that one.
Is
Shavit exaggerating the point? “Yes and no,” Burg said. “Not every
comparison to Germany means gas chambers. There is a long history to
the rise of German nationalism, beginning with Bismarck.”
It’s
also true, Burg said, that important elements of Israeli society and
culture are drawn from German culture. “From the beginning, Max Nordau
and Theodor Herzl were deeply influenced by the awakening of German
nationalism.”
Still, he said, “It’s important
to recognize that there are some difficult processes underway in
Israel. What I’m saying is that we’re living in a society that is
becoming more militaristic, and it’s important to pay attention to the
process. That means looking at similarities elsewhere.”
Burg,
52, is used to raising eyebrows and stirring outrage, and he seems to
get a kick out of it. The son of Yosef Burg, the longtime leader of
Israel’s National Religious Party, he gained almost instant notoriety
in 1982, when he helped lead a soldiers’ protest against the first
Lebanon War. He quickly entered politics, serving as an aide to Labor
Party leader Shimon Peres, while also hosting an improbably popular
weekly biblical-portion show on television.
Elected
to the Knesset in 1988, he resigned in 1995 to run for chairman of the
World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency for Israel, a post
traditionally reserved for washed-up ex-politicians. In 1999, he
returned to politics. Riding that year’s Labor Party election victory,
he became speaker of the Knesset.
In the fall
of 2003, a few months after leaving the speaker’s post, Burg gained
international notoriety for an article that was published in Yediot
Aharonot, translated by the Forward and then reprinted worldwide, in
which he claimed that Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank and
Gaza was undermining the moral foundations of Zionism. That was taken,
by Israel’s friends and enemies alike, to mean that Zionism had lost
all moral justification — something he never said. Soon afterward, he
left politics entirely and entered business.
His
latest outing in Ha’aretz seems like a rerun of his 2003 misadventure —
especially the part where his provocative thesis is circulated in a
slightly garbled version and makes him a bete noire. He claims to be
annoyed, but he seems at least a bit amused at the same time.
During
the interview with Shavit, he recalled with a chuckle, “I got him angry
when I said, ‘You have abandoned Judaism. You have an Israeli identity
without Jewish content. You identify Judaism with narrow particularism
and settlements. I suggest you go to see places where Judaism is a
universalistic ideal. Go and learn the meaning of Reform and
Conservative and Reconstructionist Judaism.’”
“What
I want to do is to expand the borders of Israel beyond land and
location to include universalism and spiritual search,” Burg told me.
“We were raised on the Zionism of Ben-Gurion, that there is only one
place for Jews and that’s Israel. I say no, there have always been
multiple centers of Jewish life.”
And what about Shavit’s claim — repeated in a headline — that Burg favors abolishing Israel’s Law of Return?
“I
never said ‘abolish’,” Burg replied. “I said ‘rethink.’ Look, in the
parliamentary mythology of Israel, the Law of Return is an answer to
the Nuremberg Laws. That’s not its actual origin, but that’s how it has
come to be seen. Whomever Hitler would have killed, we will accept as a
Jew. And I say Hitler will not define me and who I am.” Hence the
book’s title, “Defeating Hitler.”
“If a state
is Jewish,” Burg said, “it is founded on a certain measure of holiness.
Moses himself defined holiness as an ongoing process of actions, of
behavior toward others and toward God. I am very afraid of automatic
holiness. It can lead to chauvinism, to exclusivism, to all kinds of
negative ramifications in relations between individuals and between
nations. The Jewish people after 60 years of statehood cannot allow
itself to take its holiness for granted. It has to question itself
every day.”
Wed. Jun 13, 2007
