A new book details how the Left chose to surrender to the Arab enemy

In recent weeks the mostly left-leaning news media have published articles about the turbulence of this year’s elections in Israel with such handwringing titles as “Is the Israeli left doomed to marginalization?” “The Decline of the Israeli Left,” and “Whatever Happened to the Israeli Left?” But if one really wants to educate oneself deeply and broadly about this shift in the tiny democracy’s political landscape, one can hardly do better than to read Mordechai Nisan’s new book, The Crack-Up of the Israeli Left, published by Mantua Books. In it, Dr. Nisan brilliantly dissects the rise of the Right and the decline of the Left in the Jewish state. To quote from the book cover’s description, it details how “the Left detached its moorings from reality and principle, raised its voice against the Zionist enterprise, and chose surrender to the Arab enemy.”

If anyone is qualified to expound upon Israel’s political and cultural battlegrounds, it’s Mordechai Nisan. Dr. Nisan (with a doctorate in Political Studies from McGill University) has been a teacher and consultant for a number of academic and public institutions in Israel, including Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he taught Middle East Studies for 35 years. Among his many books are Toward a New Israel: The Jewish State and the Arab Question (1992), Only Israel West of the River: The Jewish State and the Palestinian Question (2011), and Politics and War in Lebanon (2015). He has written articles for The Jerusalem Post, Israel National News, Global Affairs, Middle East Journal, and many other publications. He has also been an activist for Jewish settlement in the territories of Judea and Samaria.

Dr. Nisan was kind enough to take time to answer some questions for FrontPage Mag.

Mark Tapson: You begin your book by describing Israel as “a fable and a myth, but also a Great Truth.” What do you mean by that?

Mordechai Nisan: Myth as an expression of inner thoughts and memories mobilizes people to action. Fables arouse children’s imagination, as myths do for adults. Israel was born from a great myth rooted in the Biblical story of liberation and conquest, awakening the Jewish people to relive their past through the medium of Zionism and reconstituting their freedom and sovereignty in modern times. This is a revitalized myth actualizing an ancient truth of God and Jewish peoplehood in history.

Thus, the distinction between reality and imagination, truth and fable, collapses in the dynamic Jewish Return to the Land of Israel. This is the secret of the founding or re-founding of the state of Israel in 1948. A culture that has lost myth, wrote Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, “has lost its natural healthy creativity.” Israel’s myth lives on, and so does Israel.

MT: What IS “the crackup of the Israeli left”?

MN: The Israeli Left is stuck in a deep moral and political crisis. Its cyclical downturn has degenerated into ideological rigidity (against the Land of Israel) and political arrogance (against the citizens of Israel). Rootless leftist elites, who are entrenched in the media, academia, the arts, and the judiciary, parade secularism against tradition, vaunting a pro-Palestinian political narrative and having abandoned a pro-Israel one. The more radical elements in the Labor and Meretz parties severed their spiritual ties to the vision of a proud Jewish state, as when they opposed the 2018 Basic Law recognizing “Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.”

This Leftist “crack-up” includes a long list of political pathologies: siding with the BDS travesty, charging Israel with fascism and Nazi-like policies, refusing to sing the national anthem, employing blood libel terminology to denigrate Jewish settlers, praising Palestinian enemies as peace-loving, and trivializing the dangerous consequences of territorial withdrawal. Leftist incoherence and despair have cost them votes, with the nationalist-rightist Likud Party dominating Israeli politics for decades, since 1977.

MT: To confront the Palestinian “war is peace” mindset toward Israel, you state that “Israel is in need of a culture of war to secure its future.” Can you elaborate on that?

MN: The Israel Defense Forces, with an array of intelligence and cyber capacities, are on 24/7 alert since the day Israel arose in 1948; and poised to defend the country from threat, attack, and terrorism by Iran and Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah. For its part, Islam is a religion of war – as Ayatollah Khomeini said; but this does not prevent the Palestinian war donning the mask of peace as a strategy of deception.

Israel enlists and trains its youth for military service and instills love for the homeland, to fight and sacrifice to protect its citizens. This is not a sign of militarism, rather a call for realism and vigilance. When I say that Israel must cultivate a culture of war, despite Judaism in its biblical, prophetic, and rabbinic sources teaching that the highest human value is peace, I am speaking about a patriotic spirit for the defense and survival of Israel.

MT: You refer to the 1993 Oslo Accords as a “swindle,” “plotted in darkness” and “abundant in Israeli hubris.” What did the Accords lead to instead of peace and democracy?

MN: The 1993 Oslo Accord was born in the political shadows by Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, who maneuvered Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to take a leap of faith into political oblivion. The Israeli government galvanized parliamentary support by scandalous means, shamelessly recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as a peace partner, and propounded the absurdity of a “New Middle East.” The Jews embraced their murderers, fantasizing that the Palestinians want nothing more than independence and sovereignty when, in fact, their goal was and remains the destruction of Israel and the elimination of the Israelis.

Thus the idiocy of a “two-state” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum. Israel agreed to imprudent territorial withdrawals and, in return, the Palestinians violated obligations and commitments, unleashing the “Oslo War” indiscriminate terrorism against Israelis, in restaurants, hotels, markets, and busses, on the roads and in the forests. This diabolical war/peace political theatre led to the slaughter of many hundreds of Jews. Leftist complacency and naivety brought fear and panic, suffering and death, upon the people of Israel. The loony Left has not confessed its error and continues to promote further capitulation and withdrawal from land. Fools repeat their mistakes and do not learn from them.

MT: You’re critical of the Israeli response to Arab terrorism, which is to treat it too much like a law enforcement issue. What is a more effective approach to deterring terrorism?

MN: The anti-terror agencies have the responsibility to monitor, detect, and prevent, apprehend and punish those elements engaged in terrorism against a country and its citizens. Israel’s security apparatus is exceptional; its performance level is perhaps the best in the world. The Israelis are Middle Easterners expected to understand the cultural code and workings of Arab society. As such, fighting terrorism as a law enforcement task misses the point, because the Palestinian war against the Jews and Zionism is rooted in religious and ideological Islamic and Arab imperatives. When Palestinians arson Jewish fields or throw rocks at an Israeli car, this is not an isolated misdemeanor or youthful prank, but jihad as a deadly campaign.

To apply effective deterrence, the people closest to the terrorist must pay the price of expulsion for the individual terrorist’s lone foray to destroy and murder. Before the sun rises, the terrorist’s family disappears. To act with boldness in applying collective punishment is not to be arbitrarily ruthless toward the enemy, but to show compassion for your people and implement an effective policy to save lives.

MT: You point out that the prescient philosopher Eric Hoffer recognized as far back as 1968 that, “as it goes with Israel, so it will go with all of us.” Why is Israel the canary in the coal mine?

MN: The image of “the canary in the coal mine,” as the bird faces impending death while warning humans of a like fate, ostensibly misconstrues the connection between Israel and the West. Considering the ignoble collapse of Europe facing militant Islam, the European miner is in a more dire condition than the Israeli bird. Eric Hoffer foresaw the link between Israel and the West, the Jewish state being a litmus test for the survival of the West.

However, his prediction did not account for signs of a loss of meaning and political submission that have afflicted western and central Europe, Canada and Australia as well. Like a wounded animal, Europe seems lifeless. While Europe’s loss of will ill-prepares it to withstand the multi-level Muslim challenge, which strikes at the very core of peoples’ historical culture and national pride, Israel – that lone canary – forges ahead with resolve.

Yet, were Israel to go down and the Muslim world triumph against the Jews, the forces of Islam would be emboldened to believe that Christian Europe–Madrid and London, Paris and Rome – later perhaps New York and Washington – would fall into their hands. In that regard, Eric Hoffer grasped the interconnection of things in the historical process. Worth mentioning here is the menacing Arab adage: “after the Saturday people come the Sunday people.” When the West supports the Jews, they are also saving the Christians.

            (Front Page Mag)

When it was published, in 2004, historian Jonathan Sarna’s “American Judaism” quickly became the authoritative textbook on the subject. It won five awards, including the Jewish Book of the Year award from the Jewish Book Council, and was praised as “the single best description of American Judaism during its 350 years on American soil.”

Earlier this year, Yale University Press released the second edition of the book with a new introduction, conclusion, chronology and index.

It brings the story of American Judaism up to the present, analyzing the latest demographic and societal trends and offering new insights concerning present-day and future developments.

“Jews witness two contradictory trends operating in their community: assimilation and revitalization,” Professor Sarna writes in the book’s conclusion. “Which will predominate, and what the future holds, nobody knows. That will be determined day by day, community by community, Jew by Jew.”

We asked Professor Sarna, the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History and University Professor, about the new edition.

Q: You’ve added new material on the Jewish LGBTQ community

A: That whole movement in Jewish life has advanced with astonishing speed, perhaps not fast enough for those who live it, but still astonishing speed from the perspective of a social movement. I barely touched on it in the first edition.

I tell the story of how AIDS really affected Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, which was New York’s first gay synagogue. In the 1980s, half of the congregation’s males perished. And they wrote a prayer, an amazing prayer in 1984: “Our community is afflicted, and we know not why.”

I also obtained a picture of the first Jewish AIDS quilt, created by Beit Simchat Torah as part of its Names Project. Surrounding the names of those who died is the text of the Mourner’s Kaddish.

Q: You also discuss the growing numbers of Jews of color

A: In one generation, the idea that someone “looks Jewish” essentially disappears. There are a variety of reasons for that — conversion, adoption, intermarriage, the coming of Sephardic and Mizrachi Jews from Israel, and more.

Adoption plays a much larger role than most people realize. It used to be that adoptions most often took place within the Jewish community because the operative principle was that children and parents should “match.”

That idea disappeared in the 1980s and cross-cultural adoptions became more and more normative. One study suggests that 70 percent of all adoptions by Jews are now transracial. Those kids are growing up, so we are now seeing more and more Asian, African and Latin American children within a Jewish setting.

Q: You point out another big trend — the decline of the Conservative movement. Membership has dropped by about 50 percent since 1970.

A: All over the United States, we see the decline of the broad middle in American religion. Mainline Protestantism has also declined. When you have a culture that’s riven between right and left, the hardest place to be is the middle. That is part of the Conservative movement’s problem.

Q: Meanwhile, there’s been huge growth in the Chabad-Lubavitch movement

A: Chabad has risen in part, I think, because they offered an entirely new and disruptive model, welcoming everybody in and not asking for membership dues. In many respects, they have broken with the typical American Jewish pattern. The Chabad rabbi doesn’t move from community to community. He comes and stays for life. “This is your assignment,” he is told. “What can you do with it?” And it’s a top-down model, very different from the independent congregational model that’s long been characteristic of American Judaism.

Q: What can you tell us about American Jews’ changing views of Israel?

A: We have a younger generation that doesn’t remember when Israel became independent in 1948, doesn’t remember the Six Day War of 1967, and doesn’t remember the great fear that accompanied the Yom Kippur War.

Instead, they only know a very strong Israel. They’ve heard story after story of how Israel is a dominant military power while several million Palestinian Arabs live as second-class citizens chafing under Israeli control. And if you’re a member of a Jewish community that has long sympathized with the persecuted and the downtrodden, that new calculus proves unsettling.

Thanks to the internet and a lot of English language periodicals that represent a wide spectrum of views, American Jews are now much better acquainted with internal Israeli politics. Whereas before, they were simply mobilized in support of the Israeli government’s policies, today they mirror the range of opinions found within Israel itself. American Jews, however, are much more liberal politically than their Israeli counterparts. Forty-nine percent of American Jews characterize themselves as liberal but only 8 percent of Israelis do.

Q: Is there a growing rift between Israeli and American Jews?

A: There are three different views on this question.

The first argues that, indeed, there is a growing rift. This “distancing hypothesis” is probably the consensus view among scholars and there’s plenty of evidence to support it. The most worrisome evidence is a recent poll which asked young Jews whether it would be a great tragedy if the State of Israel were destroyed, and only about half of them said yes.

A second view is that nothing has really changed. There have always been opponents of Israel. Meanwhile, more and more Jews have gone on Birthright Israel trips and have a positive view of Israel, whether or not they support its current government. The so-called “distancing hypothesis,” according to this view, has been manufactured for political purposes.

The third argument is that young Jews are indeed more critical of Israel than older ones, but that is nothing new. Remember Mark Twain who once observed that his father was a remarkable man — “The older I get, the smarter he gets.” So it is with Israel, according to this view. The older we get, the smarter Israel gets.

I suspect that all three of these explanations are partially true. They’re not necessarily incompatible.

Q: Of course, what everyone wants to know is will American Judaism survive?

A: I have tended to view American Judaism as cyclical, much like so many other religions in America. We are currently experiencing a national religious recession — many a synagogue and church is in decline — but remember that every past religious recession has been followed by a surprising religious revival, as young people rediscover religion’s power and benefits.

Someday, I expect, journalists will discover a surprising new interest on the part of young people in synagogues and religious life, and then the cycle will begin again.

That, of course, does not mean that the new synagogues will be identical with the old ones. We see lots of fascinating Jewish religious start-ups today — emergent congregations, partnership services, independent minyanim, and the like. Many of these start-ups will not survive, I suspect, but some of them will make it very, very big. They will reshape American Judaism in the decades to come.