In a series of panel discussions and debates while on a recent tour of Jewish communities in North America, Daniel Gordis encountered quite a few who claimed to be “pro-Israel” and “profoundly committed to Israel’s security” but who immediately went on to voice a list of complaints about the Jewish state, mostly focused on Benjamin Netanyahu, settlements, and the status of the West Bank. Many, including writers and some of American Jewry’s “most significant thought leaders in their 30s and 40s,” pointed out that their positions on these issues are shared by a significant portion of Israelis. Suspecting an element of insincerity in their protestations of love, Gordis proposes a litmus test that can be applied to critics of the Jewish state:
If a young American Jewish person were to read everything you’ve written about Israel, what would they encounter? How much is about the occupation or checkpoints, and how much is about Israel’s extraordinary accomplishments, its hardy democracy, and its history of pressing for peace? What portion of your corpus addresses the undeniably anti-modern and even anti-Zionist chief rabbinate, while how much is devoted to new Israeli explorations of Jewish meaning and belonging? To what degree does your written record alert your readers to the richness—but also the soul-searching—that is key to much of contemporary Israeli literature?
This matters because [Diaspora Jews] cannot move the policy needle. [Their] collective writing and speaking in North America is not going to affect Israel’s policy one iota. The needle that we can move is the “devotion needle”—we have the capacity to get young people either to embrace the extraordinary phenomenon that is Israel, or to walk away in anger. . . .
Yet many [writers who claim to be loving critics of Israel] produce work that is almost exclusively about bashing Israel, never reflecting on the much that is good about the Jewish state.
Read more on Jerusalem Post: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/A-Dose-of-Nuance-Time-to-take-the-Twitter-test-468432