JustASC

A perhaps surprisingly nuanced Yom Haatzmaut essay in today’s Wall Street Journal, via University of Richmond law prof (and sabra) Shari Motro. Writing about her plans to return to her native land on sabbatical after many years in America, she writes of Israel:

I come from a place - from streets I remember when they were still unpaved, from the house where I lost my first tooth, from the beachside terrace where my grandmother taught me how to tell time, from the cemetery where we buried her.

I didn’t choose these places, and I didn’t expel anybody. But that doesn’t change the fact that my joy is someone else’s pain. My home is someone else’s home, a home they can’t return to, because of me. I can’t reconcile this, but running from it doesn’t reconcile it either.

I put her essay in the a category of Israel writing I’ll call Zionist Realism. It is both fully supportive of the Jewish state and honest about its challenges, and yes, failings. It chooses neither to mythologize nor demonize Zionism, nor dismiss its vailidity on the basis of its unmet challenges and moral flaws. Other examples include David Remnick’s recent review of Benny Morris’s book, 1948, and Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent cover story for the Atlantic.

Tom Segev uses “Zionist Realism” to refer to a mindset that he says many Israelis abandoned after 1967. Such realism “advocated settlement,” but

it had always done so with one major caveat: capturing more territory would mean serious demographic dangers. Accordingly, the movement had adopted a basic strategy known as “maximum land, minimum Arabs,” and most of its thinkers had favored maintaining a solid Jewish majority in Jewish-controlled land over ruling vast areas populated by Arabs.

Zionist Realists “struggled with the questions of where to draw the line and… how much new land can be settled without endangering Israel’s Jewish and democratic character.”

Zionist Realism describes a place where I find myself, in between the Propagandists, for whom pro-Israel equals an inability to acknowledge Israel’s flaws, and the Furies,  who treat the Jewish presence in Palestine as a regrettable, even criminal, mistake of the 20th century.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 1:33 pm and is filed under JustASC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.