Israel's leaders, says Debra DeLee, president of Americans for Peace Now, increasingly characterize dissent as terrorism. "We hear terms like 'economic terrorism' used to describe a Palestinian Authority effort to boycott products made in Israeli settlements, 'popular terror' to describe nonviolent protest and 'cultural terror' to describe pressure on international artists to cancel appearances in Israel."
These opposing perspectives reflect a genuine rift within the American Jewish community -- or, perhaps, between American Jewry's two increasingly distinct communities. On one side are the venerable Jewish organizations unwilling to criticize the Israeli government for its increasing elevation of ethnocentricity over democracy; Orthodox Jews for whom such ethnocentricity is often central to their lives; and the small, hardy band of neoconservatives for whom this fight over Israel's character is just one more front in their ongoing war against fellow Jews whose liberalism drives them batty.
On the other side are a growing number of those Jewish liberals and a clear majority of younger American Jews. Former New Republic editor Peter Beinart published an important essay on this generational rift in the June 10 issue of the New York Review of Books. He begins with an account of focus groups that Republican pollster Frank Luntz held with American Jewish college students in 2003, in which it became quickly apparent that their thoughts, even as they discussed their Jewishness, seldom if ever turned to Israel. The only Zionism that the students could support, writes Beinart, was one "that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs." They held, in short, the abiding beliefs of liberal American Jews in human rights, multiculturalism and skepticism toward military solutions, "and in their innocence," writes Beinart, "they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel."
These college students, however, are not the only young American Jews. A 2006 poll sponsored by the American Jewish Committee showed that while 60 percent of non-Orthodox American Jews under 40 backed a Palestinian state, just 25 percent of their Orthodox counterparts did. "Particularly in the younger generations," Beinart concludes, "fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal."
The roots of American Jewish Zionism, of course, are almost entirely liberal. Consider the career of David Ginsburg, the Washington attorney who died May 23 at age 98 with one of the most stellar liberal résumés of the 20th century. A young New Deal lawyer who clerked for Justice William O. Douglas, Ginsburg helped found Americans for Democratic Action, authored the Kerner Commission report calling for far greater attention to the needs of black America -- and as counsel for the Jewish Agency (which represented the mainstream Jewish organizations in pre-1948 Palestine) played a key role in securing U.S. recognition for the new Israeli state.
The David Ginsburgs of today, however, have feelings toward Israel that are understandably more conflicted. For the past 43 years, Israel has occupied the Palestinian West Bank, building settlements there that reduce the Palestinian sphere to a series of Bantustans. As the settlers, the Orthodox and Russian immigrants have backed policies that have marginalized Palestinians within and outside of Israel, the democratic character of this once democratic socialist nation has diminished. A nation that bans Noam Chomsky at the border, lest he lecture on Palestinian rights, is no longer one that Louis Brandeis -- a leading figure in both American liberalism and American Zionism for the first half of the last century -- would necessarily embrace. And with each passing day, his heirs -- with good reason -- grow ever more estranged.
In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen.
The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didn’t. “Six times we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness and connection to Israel,” he reported. “Six times the topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish youth used the word ‘they‘ rather than ‘us‘ to describe the situation.”
That Luntz encountered indifference was not surprising. In recent years, several studies have revealed, in the words of Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis, that “non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders,” with many professing “a near-total absence of positive feelings.” In 2008, the student senate at Brandeis, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored university in America, rejected a resolution commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Jewish state.
Luntz’s task was to figure out what had gone wrong. When he probed the students’ views of Israel, he hit up against some firm beliefs. First, “they reserve the right to question the Israeli position.” These young Jews, Luntz explained, “resist anything they see as ‘group think.’” They want an “open and frank” discussion of Israel and its flaws. Second, “young Jews desperately want peace.” When Luntz showed them a series of ads, one of the most popular was entitled “Proof that Israel Wants Peace,” and listed offers by various Israeli governments to withdraw from conquered land. Third, “some empathize with the plight of the Palestinians.” When Luntz displayed ads depicting Palestinians as violent and hateful, several focus group participants criticized them as stereotypical and unfair, citing their own Muslim friends.
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Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined. They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs. Luntz did not grasp the irony. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was the kind that the American Jewish establishment has been working against for most of their lives.
Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.
Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral. If the leaders of groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations do not change course, they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist leadership whose naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular American Jews who range from apathetic to appalled. Saving liberal Zionism in the United States—so that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel—is the great American Jewish challenge of our age. And it starts where Luntz’s students wanted it to start: by talking frankly about Israel’s current government, by no longer averting our eyes.
Since the 1990s, journalists and scholars have been describing a bifurcation in Israeli society. In the words of Hebrew University political scientist Yaron Ezrahi, “After decades of what came to be called a national consensus, the Zionist narrative of liberation [has] dissolved into openly contesting versions.” One version, “founded on a long memory of persecution, genocide, and a bitter struggle for survival, is pessimistic, distrustful of non-Jews, and believing only in Jewish power and solidarity.” Another, “nourished by secularized versions of messianism as well as the Enlightenment idea of progress,” articulates “a deep sense of the limits of military force, and a commitment to liberal-democratic values.” Every country manifests some kind of ideological divide. But in contemporary Israel, the gulf is among the widest on earth.
As Ezrahi and others have noted, this latter, liberal-democratic Zionism has grown alongside a new individualism, particularly among secular Israelis, a greater demand for free expression, and a greater skepticism of coercive authority. You can see this spirit in “new historians” like Tom Segev who have fearlessly excavated the darker corners of the Zionist past and in jurists like former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak who have overturned Knesset laws that violate the human rights guarantees in Israel’s “Basic Laws.” You can also see it in former Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s apparent willingness to relinquish much of the West Bank in 2000 and early 2001.
But in Israel today, this humane, universalistic Zionism does not wield power. To the contrary, it is gasping for air. To understand how deeply antithetical its values are to those of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, it’s worth considering the case of Effi Eitam. Eitam, a charismatic ex–cabinet minister and war hero, has proposed ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the West Bank. “We’ll have to expel the overwhelming majority of West Bank Arabs from here and remove Israeli Arabs from [the] political system,” he declared in 2006. In 2008, Eitam merged his small Ahi Party into Netanyahu’s Likud. And for the 2009–2010 academic year, he is Netanyahu’s special emissary for overseas “campus engagement.” In that capacity, he visited a dozen American high schools and colleges last fall on the Israeli government’s behalf. The group that organized his tour was called “Caravan for Democracy.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman once shared Eitam’s views. In his youth, he briefly joined Meir Kahane’s now banned Kach Party, which also advocated the expulsion of Arabs from Israeli soil. Now Lieberman’s position might be called “pre-expulsion.” He wants to revoke the citizenship of Israeli Arabs who won’t swear a loyalty oath to the Jewish state. He tried to prevent two Arab parties that opposed Israel’s 2008–2009 Gaza war from running candidates for the Knesset. He said Arab Knesset members who met with representatives of Hamas should be executed. He wants to jail Arabs who publicly mourn on Israeli Independence Day, and he hopes to permanently deny citizenship to Arabs from other countries who marry Arab citizens of Israel.
You don’t have to be paranoid to see the connection between Lieberman’s current views and his former ones. The more you strip Israeli Arabs of legal protection, and the more you accuse them of treason, the more thinkable a policy of expulsion becomes. Lieberman’s American defenders often note that in theory he supports a Palestinian state. What they usually fail to mention is that for him, a two-state solution means redrawing Israel’s border so that a large chunk of Israeli Arabs find themselves exiled to another country, without their consent.
Lieberman served as chief of staff during Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister. And when it comes to the West Bank, Netanyahu’s own record is in its way even more extreme than his protégé’s. In his 1993 book, A Place among the Nations, Netanyahu not only rejects the idea of a Palestinian state, he denies that there is such a thing as a Palestinian. In fact, he repeatedly equates the Palestinian bid for statehood with Nazism. An Israel that withdraws from the West Bank, he has declared, would be a “ghetto-state” with “Auschwitz borders.” And the effort “to gouge Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] out of Israel” resembles Hitler’s bid to wrench the German-speaking “Sudeten district” from Czechoslovakia in 1938. It is unfair, Netanyahu insists, to ask Israel to concede more territory since it has already made vast, gut-wrenching concessions. What kind of concessions? It has abandoned its claim to Jordan, which by rights should be part of the Jewish state.
On the left of Netanyahu’s coalition sits Ehud Barak’s emasculated Labor Party, but whatever moderating potential it may have is counterbalanced by what is, in some ways, the most illiberal coalition partner of all, Shas, the ultra-Orthodox party representing Jews of North African and Middle Eastern descent. At one point, Shas—like some of its Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox counterparts—was open to dismantling settlements. In recent years, however, ultra-Orthodox Israelis, anxious to find housing for their large families, have increasingly moved to the West Bank, where thanks to government subsidies it is far cheaper to live. Not coincidentally, their political parties have swung hard against territorial compromise. And they have done so with a virulence that reflects ultra-Orthodox Judaism’s profound hostility to liberal values. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Shas’s immensely powerful spiritual leader, has called Arabs “vipers,” “snakes,” and “ants.” In 2005, after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon proposed dismantling settlements in the Gaza Strip, Yosef urged that “God strike him down.” The official Shas newspaper recently called President Obama “an Islamic extremist.”
Hebrew University Professor Ze’ev Sternhell is an expert on fascism and a winner of the prestigious Israel Prize. Commenting on Lieberman and the leaders of Shas in a recent Op-Ed in Haaretz, he wrote, “The last time politicians holding views similar to theirs were in power in post–World War II Western Europe was in Franco’s Spain.” With their blessing, “a crude and multifaceted campaign is being waged against the foundations of the democratic and liberal order.” Sternhell should know. In September 2008, he was injured when a settler set off a pipe bomb at his house.
Israeli governments come and go, but the Netanyahu coalition is the product of frightening, long-term trends in Israeli society: an ultra-Orthodox population that is increasing dramatically, a settler movement that is growing more radical and more entrenched in the Israeli bureaucracy and army, and a Russian immigrant community that is particularly prone to anti-Arab racism. In 2009, a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 53 percent of Jewish Israelis (and 77 percent of recent immigrants from the former USSR) support encouraging Arabs to leave the country. Attitudes are worst among Israel’s young. When Israeli high schools held mock elections last year, Lieberman won. This March, a poll found that 56 percent of Jewish Israeli high school students—and more than 80 percent of religious Jewish high school students—would deny Israeli Arabs the right to be elected to the Knesset. An education ministry official called the survey “a huge warning signal in light of the strengthening trends of extremist views among the youth.”
Jim Hollander/epa/Corbis
The writer David Grossman, right, protesting with Palestinians and Israelis against the eviction of Palestinian families from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, April 9, 2010
You might think that such trends, and the sympathy for them expressed by some in Israel’s government, would occasion substantial public concern—even outrage—among the leaders of organized American Jewry. You would be wrong. In Israel itself, voices from the left, and even center, warn in increasingly urgent tones about threats to Israeli democracy. (Former Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak have both said that Israel risks becoming an “apartheid state” if it continues to hold the West Bank. This April, when settlers forced a large Israeli bookstore to stop selling a book critical of the occupation, Shulamit Aloni, former head of the dovish Meretz Party, declared that “Israel has not been democratic for some time now.”) But in the United States, groups like AIPAC and the Presidents’ Conference patrol public discourse, scolding people who contradict their vision of Israel as a state in which all leaders cherish democracy and yearn for peace.
The result is a terrible irony. In theory, mainstream American Jewish organizations still hew to a liberal vision of Zionism. On its website, AIPAC celebrates Israel’s commitment to “free speech and minority rights.” The Conference of Presidents declares that “Israel and the United States share political, moral and intellectual values including democracy, freedom, security and peace.” These groups would never say, as do some in Netanyahu’s coalition, that Israeli Arabs don’t deserve full citizenship and West Bank Palestinians don’t deserve human rights. But in practice, by defending virtually anything any Israeli government does, they make themselves intellectual bodyguards for Israeli leaders who threaten the very liberal values they profess to admire.
After Israel’s elections last February, for instance, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice-chairman of the Presidents’ Conference, explained that Avigdor Lieberman’s agenda was “far more moderate than the media has presented it.” Insisting that Lieberman bears no general animus toward Israeli Arabs, Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that “He’s not saying expel them. He’s not saying punish them.” (Permanently denying citizenship to their Arab spouses or jailing them if they publicly mourn on Israeli Independence Day evidently does not qualify as punishment.) The ADL has criticized anti-Arab bigotry in the past, and the American Jewish Committee, to its credit, warned that Lieberman’s proposed loyalty oath would “chill Israel’s democratic political debate.” But the Forward summed up the overall response of America’s communal Jewish leadership in its headline “Jewish Leaders Largely Silent on Lieberman’s Role in Government.”
Not only does the organized American Jewish community mostly avoid public criticism of the Israeli government, it tries to prevent others from leveling such criticism as well. In recent years, American Jewish organizations have waged a campaign to discredit the world’s most respected international human rights groups. In 2006, Foxman called an Amnesty International report on Israeli killing of Lebanese civilians “bigoted, biased, and borderline anti-Semitic.” The Conference of Presidents has announced that “biased NGOs include Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Christian Aid, [and] Save the Children.” Last summer, an AIPAC spokesman declared that Human Rights Watch “has repeatedly demonstrated its anti-Israel bias.” When the Obama administration awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mary Robinson, former UN high commissioner for human rights, the ADL and AIPAC both protested, citing the fact that she had presided over the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. (Early drafts of the conference report implicitly accused Israel of racism. Robinson helped expunge that defamatory charge, angering Syria and Iran.)
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are not infallible. But when groups like AIPAC and the Presidents’ Conference avoid virtually all public criticism of Israeli actions—directing their outrage solely at Israel’s neighbors—they leave themselves in a poor position to charge bias. Moreover, while American Jewish groups claim that they are simply defending Israel from its foes, they are actually taking sides in a struggle within Israel between radically different Zionist visions. At the very moment the Anti-Defamation League claimed that Robinson harbored an “animus toward Israel,” an alliance of seven Israeli human rights groups publicly congratulated her on her award. Many of those groups, like B’Tselem, which monitors Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories, and the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights, have been at least as critical of Israel’s actions in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank as have Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
All of which raises an uncomfortable question. If American Jewish groups claim that Israel’s overseas human rights critics are motivated by anti- Israeli, if not anti-Semitic, bias, what does that say about Israel’s domestic human rights critics? The implication is clear: they must be guilty of self-hatred, if not treason. American Jewish leaders don’t generally say that, of course, but their allies in the Netanyahu government do. Last summer, Israel’s vice prime minister, Moshe Ya’alon, called the anti-occupation group Peace Now a “virus.” This January, a right-wing group called Im Tirtzu accused Israeli human rights organizations of having fed information to the Goldstone Commission that investigated Israel’s Gaza war. A Knesset member from Netanyahu’s Likud promptly charged Naomi Chazan, head of the New Israel Fund, which supports some of those human rights groups, with treason, and a member of Lieberman’s party launched an investigation aimed at curbing foreign funding of Israeli NGOs.
To their credit, Foxman and other American Jewish leaders opposed the move, which might have impaired their own work. But they are reaping what they sowed. If you suggest that mainstream human rights criticism of Israel’s government is motivated by animus toward the state, or toward Jews in general, you give aid and comfort to those in Israel who make the same charges against the human rights critics in their midst.
In the American Jewish establishment today, the language of liberal Zionism—with its idioms of human rights, equal citizenship, and territorial compromise—has been drained of meaning. It remains the lingua franca in part for generational reasons, because many older American Zionists still see themselves as liberals of a sort. They vote Democratic; they are unmoved by biblical claims to the West Bank; they see average Palestinians as decent people betrayed by bad leaders; and they are secular. They don’t want Jewish organizations to criticize Israel from the left, but neither do they want them to be agents of the Israeli right.
These American Zionists are largely the product of a particular era. Many were shaped by the terrifying days leading up to the Six-Day War, when it appeared that Israel might be overrun, and by the bitter aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, when much of the world seemed to turn against the Jewish state. In that crucible, Israel became their Jewish identity, often in conjunction with the Holocaust, which the 1967 and 1973 wars helped make central to American Jewish life. These Jews embraced Zionism before the settler movement became a major force in Israeli politics, before the 1982 Lebanon war, before the first intifada. They fell in love with an Israel that was more secular, less divided, and less shaped by the culture, politics, and theology of occupation. And by downplaying the significance of Avigdor Lieberman, the settlers, and Shas, American Jewish groups allow these older Zionists to continue to identify with that more internally cohesive, more innocent Israel of their youth, an Israel that now only exists in their memories.
But these secular Zionists aren’t reproducing themselves. Their children have no memory of Arab armies massed on Israel’s border and of Israel surviving in part thanks to urgent military assistance from the United States. Instead, they have grown up viewing Israel as a regional hegemon and an occupying power. As a result, they are more conscious than their parents of the degree to which Israeli behavior violates liberal ideals, and less willing to grant Israel an exemption because its survival seems in peril. Because they have inherited their parents’ liberalism, they cannot embrace their uncritical Zionism. Because their liberalism is real, they can see that the liberalism of the American Jewish establishment is fake.
To sustain their uncritical brand of Zionism, therefore, America’s Jewish organizations will need to look elsewhere to replenish their ranks. They will need to find young American Jews who have come of age during the West Bank occupation but are not troubled by it. And those young American Jews will come disproportionately from the Orthodox world.
Because they marry earlier, intermarry less, and have more children, Orthodox Jews are growing rapidly as a share of the American Jewish population. According to a 2006 American Jewish Committee (AJC) survey, while Orthodox Jews make up only 12 percent of American Jewry over the age of sixty, they constitute 34 percent between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. For America’s Zionist organizations, these Orthodox youngsters are a potential bonanza. In their yeshivas they learn devotion to Israel from an early age; they generally spend a year of religious study there after high school, and often know friends or relatives who have immigrated to Israel. The same AJC study found that while only 16 percent of non-Orthodox adult Jews under the age of forty feel “very close to Israel,” among the Orthodox the figure is 79 percent. As secular Jews drift away from America’s Zionist institutions, their Orthodox counterparts will likely step into the breach. The Orthodox “are still interested in parochial Jewish concerns,” explains Samuel Heilman, a sociologist at the City University of New York. “They are among the last ones who stayed in the Jewish house, so they now control the lights.”
But it is this very parochialism—a deep commitment to Jewish concerns, which often outweighs more universal ones—that gives Orthodox Jewish Zionism a distinctly illiberal cast. The 2006 AJC poll found that while 60 percent of non-Orthodox American Jews under the age of forty support a Palestinian state, that figure drops to 25 percent among the Orthodox. In 2009, when Brandeis University’s Theodore Sasson asked American Jewish focus groups about Israel, he found Orthodox participants much less supportive of dismantling settlements as part of a peace deal. Even more tellingly, Reform, Conservative, and unaffiliated Jews tended to believe that average Palestinians wanted peace, but had been ill-served by their leaders. Orthodox Jews, by contrast, were more likely to see the Palestinian people as the enemy, and to deny that ordinary Palestinians shared any common interests or values with ordinary Israelis or Jews.
Orthodox Judaism has great virtues, including a communal warmth and a commitment to Jewish learning unmatched in the American Jewish world. (I’m biased, since my family attends an Orthodox synagogue.) But if current trends continue, the growing influence of Orthodox Jews in America’s Jewish communal institutions will erode even the liberal-democratic veneer that today covers American Zionism. In 2002, America’s major Jewish organizations sponsored a large Israel solidarity rally on the Washington Mall. Up and down the east coast, yeshivas shut down for the day, swelling the estimated Orthodox share of the crowd to close to 70 percent. When the then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told the rally that “innocent Palestinians are suffering and dying as well,” he was booed.
Mohammed Saber/epa/Corbis
Palestinian boys standing on the rubble of buildings demolished by the Israeli army near the Israeli settlement of Netzarim, Gaza Strip, July 2004. The settlement was the last to be emptied as part of Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan in August 2005.
America’s Jewish leaders should think hard about that rally. Unless they change course, it portends the future: an American Zionist movement that does not even feign concern for Palestinian dignity and a broader American Jewish population that does not even feign concern for Israel. My own children, given their upbringing, could as easily end up among the booers as among Luntz’s focus group. Either prospect fills me with dread.
In 2004, in an effort to prevent weapons smuggling from Egypt, Israeli tanks and bulldozers demolished hundreds of houses in the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip. Watching television, a veteran Israeli commentator and politician named Tommy Lapid saw an elderly Palestinian woman crouched on all fours looking for her medicines amid the ruins of her home. He said she reminded him of his grandmother.
In that moment, Lapid captured the spirit that is suffocating within organized American Jewish life. To begin with, he watched. In my experience, there is an epidemic of not watching among American Zionists today. A Red Cross study on malnutrition in the Gaza Strip, a bill in the Knesset to allow Jewish neighborhoods to bar entry to Israeli Arabs, an Israeli human rights report on settlers burning Palestinian olive groves, three more Palestinian teenagers shot—it’s unpleasant. Rationalizing and minimizing Palestinian suffering has become a kind of game. In a more recent report on how to foster Zionism among America’s young, Luntz urges American Jewish groups to use the word “Arabs, not Palestinians,” since “the term ‘Palestinians’ evokes images of refugee camps, victims and oppression,” while “‘Arab’ says wealth, oil and Islam.”
Of course, Israel—like the United States—must sometimes take morally difficult actions in its own defense. But they are morally difficult only if you allow yourself some human connection to the other side. Otherwise, security justifies everything. The heads of AIPAC and the Presidents’ Conference should ask themselves what Israel’s leaders would have to do or say to make them scream “no.” After all, Lieberman is foreign minister; Effi Eitam is touring American universities; settlements are growing at triple the rate of the Israeli population; half of Israeli Jewish high school students want Arabs barred from the Knesset. If the line has not yet been crossed, where is the line?
What infuriated critics about Lapid’s comment was that his grandmother died at Auschwitz. How dare he defile the memory of the Holocaust? Of course, the Holocaust is immeasurably worse than anything Israel has done or ever will do. But at least Lapid used Jewish suffering to connect to the suffering of others. In the world of AIPAC, the Holocaust analogies never stop, and their message is always the same: Jews are licensed by their victimhood to worry only about themselves. Many of Israel’s founders believed that with statehood, Jews would rightly be judged on the way they treated the non-Jews living under their dominion. “For the first time we shall be the majority living with a minority,” Knesset member Pinchas Lavon declared in 1948, “and we shall be called upon to provide an example and prove how Jews live with a minority.”
But the message of the American Jewish establishment and its allies in the Netanyahu government is exactly the opposite: since Jews are history’s permanent victims, always on the knife-edge of extinction, moral responsibility is a luxury Israel does not have. Its only responsibility is to survive. As former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg writes in his remarkable 2008 book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes, “Victimhood sets you free.”
This obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among America’s secular Jewish young. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israel’s. Yes, Israel faces threats from Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, Israelis understandably worry about a nuclear Iran. But the dilemmas you face when you possess dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, and your adversary, however despicable, may acquire one, are not the dilemmas of the Warsaw Ghetto. The year 2010 is not, as Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed, 1938. The drama of Jewish victimhood—a drama that feels natural to many Jews who lived through 1938, 1948, or even 1967—strikes most of today’s young American Jews as farce.
But there is a different Zionist calling, which has never been more desperately relevant. It has its roots in Israel’s Independence Proclamation, which promised that the Jewish state “will be based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew prophets,” and in the December 1948 letter from Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and others to The New York Times, protesting right-wing Zionist leader Menachem Begin’s visit to the United States after his party’s militias massacred Arab civilians in the village of Deir Yassin. It is a call to recognize that in a world in which Jewish fortunes have radically changed, the best way to memorialize the history of Jewish suffering is through the ethical use of Jewish power.
For several months now, a group of Israeli students has been traveling every Friday to the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where a Palestinian family named the Ghawis lives on the street outside their home of fifty-three years, from which they were evicted to make room for Jewish settlers. Although repeatedly arrested for protesting without a permit, and called traitors and self-haters by the Israeli right, the students keep coming, their numbers now swelling into the thousands. What if American Jewish organizations brought these young people to speak at Hillel? What if this was the face of Zionism shown to America’s Jewish young? What if the students in Luntz’s focus group had been told that their generation faces a challenge as momentous as any in Jewish history: to save liberal democracy in the only Jewish state on earth?
“Too many years I lived in the warm embrace of institutionalized elusiveness and was a part of it,” writes Avraham Burg. “I was very comfortable there.” I know; I was comfortable there too. But comfortable Zionism has become a moral abdication. Let’s hope that Luntz’s students, in solidarity with their counterparts at Sheikh Jarrah, can foster an uncomfortable Zionism, a Zionism angry at what Israel risks becoming, and in love with what it still could be. Let’s hope they care enough to try.
—May 12, 2010
Peter Beinart is Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York, a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, and Senior Political Writer for The Daily Beast. His new book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, will be published in June.
For decades, prosecutors in Brooklyn routinely pursued child molesters from every major ethnic and religious segment of the borough’s diverse population. Except one.
Of some 700 child sexual abuse cases brought in an average year, few involved members of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community — about 180,000 followers of Hasidic and other sects who make up the largest such cluster outside Israel. Some years, there were one or two arrests, or none.
But in the past year, there have been 26. District Attorney Charles J. Hynes has brought charges against a variety of men — yeshiva teachers, rabbis, camp counselors, merchants and relatives of children. Eight have been convicted; 18 await trial.
If the sudden spike in prosecutions is startling, even more surprising is the apparent reason: ultra-Orthodox Jews, long forbidden to inform on one another without permission from the rabbis who lead them, are going to the police and prosecutors on their own.
Members of this close-knit community, who refer to themselves as the “haredim,” meaning those who fear God, reject modern secular culture and keep strict control over what they consider internal affairs. For centuries, disputes involving children, marriage and business have been decided by rabbinical courts called beth dins, which do not report their findings to the secular authorities, even when they judge someone guilty. Taboos codified long ago during times of persecution discourage community members from informing on other Jews; violations can result in ostracism.
Now, a growing number of haredi Jews in Brooklyn say they do not think they can get justice from the rabbinical courts, which in several high-profile cases have exonerated people who were later criminally convicted of child abuse. And although some advocates for victims contend that the district attorney has been too accommodating of the rabbinical hierarchy — a charge that Mr. Hynes denies — more families are turning to his office for help.
Prosecutors say that since last year 40 minors have agreed to testify about abuse in court, if necessary. And Mr. Hynes’s office has been asked for advice by prosecutors with jurisdictions that include other large haredi enclaves in the Northeast.
“What we have witnessed in the past year is completely unprecedented,” said Rhonnie Jaus, chief of the Brooklyn district attorney’s sex crimes bureau. “This would be inconceivable just a few years ago.”
Children in haredi families are no more or less likely to suffer sexual abuse than others, according to several recent studies. But Ben Hirsch, founder of Survivors for Justice, a New York group whose members include haredi Jews molested as children in communities nationwide, said the clandestine handling of molestation cases had kept leaders from dealing with the problem and made it easier for predators.
Mr. Hirsch credits the Jewish press, therapists and rabbis in the haredi population itself, and organizations like his, with bringing the issue to light. Jewish blogs like FailedMessiah.com and theunorthodoxjew.blogspot.com, he said, have also been “a major catalyst,” giving abuse victims their first opportunity to vent and connect without fear of being identified.
“People are rising up,” he said.
The father of a Brooklyn 10-year-old said in an interview that the mishandling, as he viewed it, of sexual abuse cases by rabbinical courts had persuaded him to contact the police immediately when his son told him last year that a neighbor had abused him.
“I’m not one who believes rabbis are capable to handle this,” the father said.
The rabbis themselves voice a wide spectrum of reactions. Many say change is needed. Many more defend their internal courts. But almost all concur with what one Orthodox rabbi, Yosef Blau of Yeshiva University, recently called a dawning revelation about child molestation, which was once dismissed by the hierarchy as inconceivable among a people who embrace an all-consuming religious devotion:
Hailed by many as an innovative approach, the program has been criticized by some victims’ advocates for its links to a haredi social service agency, Ohel Children’s Home and Family Services, to which beth dins have referred men accused of sexual abuse. Critics say that the treatment provided by Ohel has been inadequate and poorly supervised, a charge that the agency has vigorously denied.
Mr. Hynes walks a fine line. He has cultivated ties with Orthodox leaders since he was first elected in 1989. In an interview, he said he did so partly because they represent a major constituency, and partly to address jurisdictional tensions between his authority and theirs. In an editorial last year, The Jewish Week said those relationships had hampered abuse prosecutions, describing the district attorney’s approach until recently as “ranging from passive to weak-willed.”
Yet no prosecutor in the country has as many sexual abuse investigations and pending cases against haredi suspects. “We were able to break through because we have worked to establish credibility in the community,” Mr. Hynes said. Some haredi leaders said they had no quarrel with Mr. Hynes’s project. Yet one rabbi mentioned frequently on blogs cites ancient doctrine that justifies killing someone who informs on a fellow Jew.
David Zwiebel, executive vice president of Agudath Israel of America, a group representing many haredi factions, offered the moderate view. “A broad consensus has emerged in the last few years,” he said, “that many of these issues are beyond the ability of the community to handle internally.”
But he added that prosecutors should recognize “religious sensitivities” by seeking alternatives to prison, to avoid depriving a family of its breadwinner, or by finding appropriate Orthodox homes for children removed from abusive families.
“The district attorney should be careful not to be seen as making a power grab from rabbinic authority,” Mr. Zwiebel said.
Rabbi Meir Fund, who leads a synagogue known as the Flatbush Minyan, said that child molesters should be prosecuted, but that victims should consult with a rabbi before going to the police. Connections among the haredim are too entangled to discount the damaging ripple effects of accusations on the accused person’s family, Rabbi Fund said.
Advocates for victims say similar views have informed some of the Brooklyn rabbinical leadership’s worst judgments, allowing prominent rabbis who were repeatedly accused of abuse to keep their jobs and reputations.
In 2000, Rabbi Baruch Lanner, a charismatic youth leader and yeshiva principal who was the focus of students’ abuse claims for more than 20 years — and was exonerated by a beth din — became the subject of an exposé in The Jewish Week, which found more than 60 accusers. The article led to a criminal investigation and a seven-year prison term for Rabbi Lanner.
Another rabbi, Yehuda Kolko, a grade school teacher at a Flatbush yeshiva, was accused of sexually abusive behavior by parents and former students numerous times over 30 years. The complaints were dismissed by rabbinical authorities, however, until New York magazine wrote about them in 2006.
Shortly afterward, the district attorney’s office filed sexual abuse charges against Rabbi Kolko. But Mr. Hynes’s decision last year to recommend probation in exchange for the rabbi’s guilty plea to lesser charges of child endangerment incensed many haredim.
Partly because of that disappointment, some Orthodox leaders began taking steps they admit they would not have earlier.
Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who represents a predominantly Orthodox section of Brooklyn, began devoting his Saturday night radio shows on WMCA (570) to what he called “the epidemic” of unreported sex abuse. For six months, starting in July 2008, he invited victims to call him. Hundreds did, he said, adding that 10 of the criminal cases originated with those calls.
“The good news is that 100 people showed up,” Mr. Lipner said. “The bad news is that we had to keep the meeting secret. We could not advertise it, and we had to agree that no one would discuss the fact that the meeting ever took place.”
As sensibilities evolve, one father seems to have found a middle ground between traditional and secular systems of justice.
When his 6-year-old son told him one day that Rabbi Kolko had sexually abused him, the father said he resolved to go to the police because he knew that the Brooklyn hierarchy had protected the rabbi in the past.
But first he made a detour. “I booked a flight to Jerusalem,” he said. “I made an appointment to speak with a very prominent rabbi” who had written sympathetically about abuse victims.
“He told me it would be O.K. to report this teacher to the police,” the father said. “He told me that if I reported him I would not be committing a sin.”
The American Jewish filmmaker told me he was doing a documentary on possible answers to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- one state or two -- and human-rights issues. When he showed up at my Jerusalem apartment on a recent afternoon to interview me, he was wearing a beret. His wife and producer wore a maxi skirt; a scarf covered her hair. Their attire showed they were Orthodox Jews. Hers, in particular, fit the stereotyped look of the Israeli religious right, of settlers and their supporters, including some Jews abroad. I was surprised. Maybe, I thought, I was the token leftist interviewee in a project by settlement backers aimed at showing that there is no exit from the conflict and that Israel must hold the West Bank forever.
I was also painfully aware of an irony: My own skullcap identifies me, correctly, as an Orthodox Jew. Countless times, my appearance has also caused people to assume, incorrectly, that I belong to the religious right. One look has been enough for them to assign me to the camp that regards Israel's establishment and its conquests in 1967 as part of a divine plan for final redemption and has made settlement and Israeli control of the West Bank into principles of faith. I'm weary of being prejudged and could feel the reflex was to prejudge my visitor. I gently asked him about the purpose of his project. His concern, he said, was to "see a just and equitable solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." Once the cameras were running, he asked if I thought the theological right was distorting Judaism. Yes, I said, realizing he'd come to record me saying what he felt himself. Afterward, I told him of my initial concern, and we laughed.
It was another reminder that being an Orthodox dove in Israel is a complicated business. The tension, I should stress, is not between my religious and political commitments. I have no doubt that the pursuit of peace is the most basic of Jewish obligations, that the first lessons of Judaism's sacred texts is that all human beings are created in the divine image and deserve freedom. The first religious figure who inspired me was Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the European-born American theologian who returned from marching at Selma with Martin Luther King Jr. and declared, "Our legs were praying." That is, seeking social justice was not only a religious requirement, it was an act of worship. Heschel protested the war in Vietnam though it meant challenging the polices of the country that gave him refuge during the Holocaust. His kind of faith did not allow him to stay silent. I can’t know for sure what Heschel would be doing were he alive today, but I believe strongly that he would be working for peace in Israel.
The tension of being an Orthodox dove is partly sociological. Most Israeli Jews with whom I could pray don't share my political views. Most Israelis who share my politics do not understand why I enter a synagogue. More basically, the presumption of the society in which I live is that one cannot be an Orthodox critic of the occupation. That matching up of the political divide and the secular-religious one is a mistake. For a religious dove, however, there is an additional dimension to the argument about territories, settlements, and peace: The stakes are not only the future of one's country but also of one's religion.
One of the most accepted historical narratives in Israeli society is that since the conquest of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights in 1967, the driving force for keeping the "Whole Land of Israel" has come from the country's religious minority, while opposition has come from secularists. That's part of the real story, but not all of it. The victory of '67 did create a wave of messianic excitement among those known as religious Zionists -- the segment of the Orthodox community that is integrated into general society, unlike the ultra-Orthodox. The victory was seen as part of a divine plan to bring final redemption.
Since the mid-1970s, the most vocal proponents of settlement in occupied territory have been Orthodox. Religious Zionists dominated the protests against the Oslo process and the Gaza withdrawal. The most shocking event in Israeli political history was the assassination of secular Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a religious extremist. Today the settlements deepest in the West Bank -- the ones most certain to be evacuated in any two-state solution -- are almost all small religious communities. On the other hand, settlements wouldn't exist without the support of every Israeli government since 1967. Nor would the two-tier legal system of the West Bank, in which settlers enjoy the rights of Israeli citizens and Palestinians do not. Ariel Sharon, architect of settlement under successive Likud governments was not Orthodox. Nor were Likud prime ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, nor is Benjamin Netanyahu.
Going further back, the original decisions to settle Israelis in the West Bank after 1967 came under Labor governments, which followed the secular Zionist left's gradualist strategy from pre-independence days: settling land to establish a Jewish claim to it. In reality, the religious right has created a dangerous synthesis: It has adopted Labor's settlement ethos and the secular right's intransigence and transformed them into theological principles.
Part of what obscures the secular role is that the secular-Orthodox fissure dates back to the beginning of the Zionist movement and still runs deep among Israeli Jews. It shapes debate not only on social issues but on the meaning of Jewish identity, as an ethnic or a religious category. It's convenient to adopt a unified field theory of politics, to map all other divisions onto this one. Besides that, the range of views among secular Israelis is easier to ignore because opinion appears one-sided among religious ones. "It is completely and unequivocally obvious that the majority of religious Zionists position themselves on the right," Bar-Ilan University political scientist Asher Cohen has written – though he stressed that many are "pragmatic hawks" rather than radical rightists.
And yet, there has always been a dovish religious minority. One of the earliest and most outspoken critics of the occupation was Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a scientist and theologian who began warning almost immediately after the 1967 conquest that ruling over the Palestinians would lead to the "corruption characteristic of every colonial regime" and eventually erode the ties between Israel and Diaspora Jews. The religious right's view of the Land of Israel and the state of Israel as inherently sacred was a form of idolatry, Leibowitz argued. Holiness, he said, could not be imputed to soil or to human institutions. Members of the dovish religious minority today include – just as one example – the leader of Breaking the Silence, the organization that recently published soldiers' testimony challenging the official version of last winter's war in Gaza.
Leibowitz, who died in 1994 at the age of 91, is remembered as a strident, raging man -- a rationalist philosopher with the impatient fury of a prophet. Going back to his early writing against the occupation, it seems clear that he feared not only the corruption of the state but also the corruption of Judaism.
Today it's clear that his fear was well-founded. In the public sphere in Israel, Judaism is identified with the worship of land, not with the pursuit of peace. For those of us in a half-visible minority of a minority, that's one more pressing reason to end the occupation.
MODIIN ILLIT, West Bank — Seen from afar, this fast-growing settlement embodies everything that the Obama administration wants to address through its demand for a freeze on settlement building: it sits on land captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war and, with 45,000 residents and 60 births a week, it is the largest and fastest-growing Jewish community in the West Bank.
If, as is widely believed abroad, “natural growth” by Israeli settlers is blocking the creation of a viable Palestinian state, this community should show why.
But appearances are deceiving. Modiin Illit and its sister community, Beitar Illit, are entirely ultra-Orthodox, a world apart, one of strict religious observance and study. They offer surprising potential for compromise.
Unlike settlers who believe they are continuing the historic Zionist mission of reclaiming the Jewish homeland, most ultra-Orthodox do not consider themselves settlers or Zionists and express no commitment to being in the West Bank, so their growth in these settlement towns, situated just inside the pre-1967 boundary, could be redirected westward to within Israel.
Their location also means it may be possible, in negotiations about a future Palestinian state, to redraw the boundary so the settlements are inside Israel, with little land lost to the Palestinians. And the two towns alone account for half of all settler growth, so if removed from the equation, the larger settler challenge takes on more manageable proportions.
“If I thought this was a settlement, I would never have come here,” said Yaakov Guterman, 40, the mayor of Modiin Illit and a grandfather of three, his Orthodox fringes hanging from his belt, his side locks curled behind his ears. Asked about the prospect of a Palestinian state rising one day on his town line, he said: “We will go along with what the world wants. We have gone through the Holocaust and know what it means to have the world against us. The Torah says a man needs to know his place.”
Whether or not Mr. Guterman will be as pliant as he says, Middle East peace negotiators on all sides — Israeli, Palestinian and American — have long viewed small border adjustments and land swaps as key to a deal that would include a solution to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who have settled in the West Bank over the past four decades.
This week, three senior American officials will be in Jerusalem for talks that will include settlements: the Middle East envoy, George J. Mitchell; the White House Middle East adviser, Dennis Ross; and the national security adviser, Gen. James Jones. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates will also be in talks in Jerusalem.
Break With Settler Movement
The ultra-Orthodox inhabitants often express contempt for the settler movement, with its vows never to move. The people here, who shun most aspects of modernity, came for three reasons: they needed affordable housing no longer available in and around Jerusalem or Tel Aviv; they were rejected by other Israeli cities as too cult-like; and officials wanted their presence to broaden Israel’s narrow border.
Yet they are lumped with everyone else. The settler movement and the Israeli government point to ultra-Orthodox settlements, with their large and ever-increasing families, to argue that there is no way to stop “natural growth” without imposing acute human suffering. Those seeking a freeze use the settlements as evidence that growth is so out of control that drastic action must be taken. More broadly, opponents say the settlements violate international law, legitimize force by armed messianic Jews and ruin the chance of establishing a viable Palestinian state.
But even those who strongly favor a complete freeze acknowledge that the annual settler growth rates of 5 and 6 percent owe a great deal to these two towns that have little to do with the broader settler enterprise.
Dror Etkes of Yesh Din, an antisettlement group in Israel, noted that half of all construction in West Bank settlements was taking place in these two ultra-Orthodox communities, adding that given their location next to the boundary, it was highly likely they would be in Israel in a future deal through a redrawn border. “From a purely geographic point of view, construction there is not as destructive as elsewhere,” he said.
But he does not want building to continue in Modiin Illit or Beitar Illit without a deal for a Palestinian state, nor does he mean to imply that these settlements have been a benign force. “Land has been taken from Palestinians, in some cases from private landowners, for the building in these settlements, and there are many other issues like sewage flow into Palestinian villages that must be addressed,” Mr. Etkes said.
Settler leaders reject any distinction. The fact that the ultra-Orthodox came to the West Bank to solve their housing problems is “completely O.K. with me,” said Dani Dayan, chairman of the Yesha Council, the settlers’ political umbrella group. “They are an integral part of our endeavor and our achievement.”
The Palestinian View
But even in Bilin, the Palestinian village that abuts Modiin Illit and has become a symbol of Palestinian resistance against Israel’s West Bank separation barrier, the settlers over the fence are viewed as different from the Jewish nationalists in, say, Hebron.
Abedallah Abu Rahma, a teacher from a farming family and a leading activist in the village, pointed toward the settler high-rise buildings visible across the valley from his living room window and said: “They tell us, ‘We are poor, the apartments here are cheaper and we did not know it was a settlement.’ Many told us, ‘Give us our money back and we will leave.’ ”
The Palestinians, who hold weekly demonstrations against the barrier, have even joined forces with some of the settlers. Two years ago, Bilin won a major Supreme Court case that forced a change in the route of the barrier, and some of the documents the victorious villagers used, Mr. Abu Rahma said, had been secretly passed to them by ultra-Orthodox settlers feuding with their own municipal leaders.
Still, none of that lessens the harm to the villagers caused by the very existence of Modiin Illit and the contest over its land. Mr. Abu Rahma said he would respect any agreement reached between the Palestinian leadership and Israel, including one that had Modiin Illit standing in Israel. But noting the village’s reliance on agriculture, its own housing needs and the settlement’s encroachment on Bilin’s territory, he insisted, “We need our land.”
Moreover, protecting the settlements from attack has meant construction of numerous barriers, checkpoints and bypass roads that impair economic development and disrupt daily life.
Across the West Bank and excluding East Jerusalem, there are nearly 300,000 settlers living on scores of settlements among 2.3 million Palestinians. And while some say they will fight to stay put, a third are the reluctant ultra-Orthodox, known in Israel as Haredim, Hebrew for the fearful ones, or those who tremble in awe of God.
They believe it important to live in the land of Israel, because certain commandments can be performed only here. But some Haredim actively reject the formation of a Jewish state before the arrival of the Messiah, while others are ambivalent. They also say that protecting life trumps holding territory. Very few serve in the military because the ultra-Orthodox say they do more good for the nation by studying the Torah and praying than fighting.
Until his death in 2001, Rabbi Eliezer Schach was the religious authority of the Haredim of European origin. He opposed building Jewish settlements that extended over the 1967 line into territory Israel seized in the war, once calling them “a blatant attempt to provoke the international community” and complaining that they endangered Jewish lives. In fact, when first offered housing for his followers in Beitar Illit, he took it as an insult, according to Yitzchak Pindrus, a former mayor of the settlement.
“Our people live around their families and rabbis, and they were terrified of the idea,” Mr. Pindrus recalled. But with thousands of new couples marrying every year, and the traditional ultra-Orthodox communities expensive and crowded, the Haredim needed homes.
Because few ultra-Orthodox men work, because on average their families have eight children and because they do not integrate easily into the larger community, Teddy Kollek, who was mayor of Jerusalem in the late 1980s, wanted to keep down their numbers. Other cities rejected them. Yitzhak Rabin, as both defense minister and then prime minister, championed the creation of large settlements around Jerusalem to fortify Israel’s hold on the capital, in line with his Labor Party’s strategic plan, so he and the Haredim struck a deal for Beitar Illit in the early 1990s.
For those wanting to remain closer to longstanding Haredi communities in the center of the country, Modiin Illit was an alternative. Private Israeli developers bought tracts of Palestinian land as its base, although the legitimacy of those sales has been challenged. Mr. Guterman, the mayor, said Mr. Rabin “gave his blessing to the city,” telling Rabbi Schach’s disciples that its strategic location on the first rise above Israel’s international airport guaranteed that it would not be given back.
There are smaller pockets of Haredi settlement deeper in the West Bank, where the arm’s-length attitude toward Zionist settlement has shifted toward a more distinctly right-wing ideology. Zvi Kastelanitz, of the Immanuel settlement, who produces silver-inlaid Jewish handicrafts, for example, said he had no objection to two states for two peoples, “but not here.” Still, the Haredi settlers even there remain distinct. After Palestinians ambushed two buses on the road to Immanuel, southwest of Nablus, in 2001 and 2002, killing a total of 20 people, the Haredi settlers did not react like their nationalist counterparts, defiantly setting up another settlement outpost. Instead, about a third of Immanuel’s 4,000 residents left.
Shunning Secular World
The Haredi world is all about being together and apart from secular temptations, an intricate patchwork of groups with allegiances to different rabbinic dynasties and courts. In the new cities, Haredi rules apply. At the entrance to Beitar Illit, a sign warns visitors to dress modestly. The streets are all named for rabbis and sages from Poland to Yemen. There is Internet access, officially intended for professional use only. Televisions are allowed, but nobody admits to having one. And there is poverty: about 40 percent of wives support their large families because their husbands do not work. There are few cars, lots of buses and baby strollers.
Dov Fromowitz, a father of nine who moved to Beitar Illit from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn 12 years ago, runs a central charity fund that collects money from better-off residents and distributes it to the poor, while connecting them with other social welfare services outside the settlement. He says he has 1,200 needy families on his books.
Without most Israelis noticing, Modiin Illit and Beitar Illit have turned into the Haredi towns of the future, cleaner and saner versions of their often decrepit and densely packed neighborhoods elsewhere. They contain open space, even some greenery, and apartments with lots of bedrooms. Their young are shielded from secular Israel, and secular Israelis never see them, thereby reducing the tensions found in Jerusalem over driving on the Sabbath and sexy advertising at bus stops.
The Question of Coexistence
Even if the ultra-Orthodox appear to be less ideologically committed to the West Bank, the longer they live here, the more invested some have become.
In Modiin Illit, Mayor Guterman has ambitions to build what he calls “the largest Haredi residential community in Israel.” Over the past three years, he has set up a business center that he considers the wave of the future. Now 1,000 women, mostly mothers in their 20s, sit at work stations providing phone services to Israeli credit card clients and paralegal research for real estate businesses in the United States. It is outsourcing that seeks to take advantage of the educational level and work ethic of Haredi women.
The question of coexistence with Palestinians hovers, however. In Beitar Illit, farmers from the village of Husan enter daily in cars and on donkeys to work their lands in the valleys among the settlements’ built-up hills. The new mayor, Meir Rubinstein, is proud of the city’s cooperation with local Palestinians, whom he calls “the neighbors.”
“We very much want there to be peace here,” he said. “We pray for it three times a day.” But the question of peace at what price remains.
Avraham and Riva Guttman, who arrived in Beitar Illit 15 years ago from Toronto and have seven children, look out from their street at Palestinian villages. They believe strongly in living in the land of Israel, they say, and they are happy for the parks and space lacking in traditional Haredi areas of Israel. But they do not insist that it is there or nothing. “We are not here for political reasons,” Mr. Guttman said. “Ninety percent of the people are here for the affordability, not for ideology. Haredim don’t fight with Arabs.”
Perhaps not, but his wife, Riva, bristled at the idea of moving. “If you told me to move elsewhere because Arabs needed a place to live, it would not sit quietly on my conscience,” she said. “I am a Jew in the Jewish homeland.”
And increasingly, the Haredim have vested interests over the 1967 line. Yaron and Sara Simchovitch arrived in Beitar Illit from Jerusalem 13 years ago with a group led by their rabbi. The couple now have a thriving butcher shop.
Yoseph Shilhav, an expert on the ultra-Orthodox at Bar-Ilan University, said that almost every Haredi family now had a member beyond the 1967 border, subtly shifting their attitudes about settlement and withdrawal. The Haredim make up 10 percent of Israel’s population and are a fast-growing electoral force. The Chabad movement and Sephardic or Middle Eastern-origin Shas party have increasingly adopted the nationalist agenda.
The rocket fire into Israel that resulted after its withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 has also taken its toll on Haredi views. “In general, Haredim are very practical people,” said Mr. Pindrus, the former Beitar Illit mayor. “We are not right or left. If we get up in the morning and see that leaving Gaza means missiles, then no, we’re not leaving another centimeter.” He added, “We want to live, and our children not to blow up.”
Still, a surprising number do not oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state if safety can be guaranteed. Since housing is the No. 1 Haredi concern and they feel no need for it to be in the West Bank, redirecting the building of their new homes inside Israel could go a long way toward a solution.
“If the Americans can convince us there will really be peace and we won’t be living in fear of rockets, we’ll bring a recommendation to our rabbis,” said Mr. Guterman, the mayor of Modiin Illit. “Our rabbis want peace. We are not against withdrawing from territory. But life is above all.”
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