In a scathing commentary on the indulgence of the Obama Administration relying on Dennis Rossto resuscitate Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar notes that Ross has been at the essence of only about every failed initiative on that front over the preceding two decades - and that now, as ever, he is running interference for the Israelis, sustaining what he says is an illusion of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's willingness to create major concessions while restraining the U.
. from putting any significant force on him.
There's nothing new about those hoping for a game-changing U.S. intervention groaning at the word of Ross - the incarnation of two decades of "action" without end - being put in charge.But one paragraph stood out in the exasperated Israeli's column:
"Now Ross, the late president of the Jewish People Policy Institute, is stressful to convert the Palestinians to make up on bringing Palestinian independence for a ballot in the United Nations in September and know the State of Israel as the province of the Jewish people - in other words, as his country, though he was natural in San Francisco, more than that of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who was natural in Safed."
The plant to which Eldar refers is a Jerusalem-based think-tank established by the Jewish Agency, a government-backed institution promoting Jewish immigration to Israel. Ross headed it up for a point between his help to the Clinton and Obama Administrations.Now, Eldar accuses him of using the great pulpit of American ability to coax the Palestinians into heeding Netanyahu's demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a "Jewish nation" and as "the subject house of the Jewish people."
Skeptics regard this need as only the latest red herring tossed out by an Israeli prime minister who has built his political career on opposing the Oslo peace process.It has been introduced very deep in the game, and its' use is mostly to preempt any negotiation over the good of restitution for Palestinian refugees who missed their homes and realm to the nascent State of Israel in 1948. After all, it's not realization of a Jewish theocracy that Netanyahu is demanding; rather, he insists that the state's ethnic composition will remain predominantly Jewish.
Because of the refugees - and likewise because of the implications for the position of the 1 million Muslim and Christian Palestinians who are Israeli citizens - Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas demurs. The PLO has long ago recognized Israel in keeping with all the requirements of international law, he counters, and Israel's definition of itself is a subject for its citizens to decide.
It's difficult to recognize how far Ross and the Obama Administration are pressing Abbas to go in accommodating this new Israeli demand, but Eldar's observation is worth unpacking: Should the Palestinians be needed to recognize Israel as Dennis Ross' "national home"?
Of the world's 13.5 million Jews, only 5.6 million are Israeli - the majority, free to "return" (and encouraged to do so by the Israeli government) have chosen to persist in what Israel once disparaged as the "Galut" ("Exile"). Not but that; it appears that as many as 1 million Israelis have united them.
The mind of Israel as "the subject house of the Jewish people" was at the heart of modern Zionism, which emerged in the later nineteenth century in reply to centuries of often virulent anti-Semitism and rising nationalism in key and eastern Europe. Jews would never make a good position in the nation states of the West and East, the line went, because anti-Semitism was immutable and inevitable whenever Jews lived among non-Jews. Thus the motivation to make an ethnic-Jewish nation state in Palestine, into which Jews could be "ingathered" from their "exile" in the Diaspora.
But then, as now, the bulk of the world's Jews did not think themselves in "exile" from an ancestral homeland. Most chose to be elsewhere and to - naively in the minds of the Zionists - integrate themselves into other nationalities. Only a pair of 100 thousand moved to Palestine to help establish a Jewish homeland.
The Holocaust changed the equation, of course, with the refugees from Nazism and survivors of the death camps more than double the Jewish population to about half a million at the time of Israel's creation. It continued to swell through immigration in the intervening years, particularly with the comer of more than half a million Jews from Arab countries driven out by nationalist regimes in the aftermath of Israel's founding.
The flow of immigrants from Western countries was slower, however, and the following major boost to Israel's Jewish population came with the founder of the Soviet Union, when around 1 million Jews and mass of Jewish origin fled the economic collapse of a notoriously anti-Semitic society.
But the early Soviet Jews may have been the final great roll of immigration to Israel. Today's demographic trends point increasingly to a compressed or even negative net balance of migration, as immigration has slowed and emigration has increased.
Today, Joseph Chamie and Barry Mirkin point out, approximately 1 million Jewish Israelislive abroad, almost two thirds of them in North America and a further quarter in Europe. That's close to one in five Jewish Israelis. (The project includes some 200,000 of the million that emigrated from the old Soviet Union during the '90s. And it may be a growth trend.
Almost half of Israeli teenagers told researchers in a recent opinion study that they would be abroad if given the opportunity.Chamie and Mirkin also notice that an estimated half million Israelis hold U.S. passports, with a further quarter million applications pending, while an estimated 100,000 hold German passports. It has become commonplace, anecdotally, among more secular cosmopolitan Israelis to use for or have a foreign passport.
The prime problem facing efforts to carry the mass of Jews to go to Israel may be the fall of anti-Semitism in the Western world: It seems increasingly far-fetched to suggest to third-generation Jewish Americans or Canadians, Britons or Frenchmen that theirs is a temporary, twilight existence in the countries of their parentage and citizenship, a way station en route "home" to Israel.
Then-head of the Jewish Agency Sallai Meridor castigated Germany in 2004 for permissive immigration rules that, as he put it, "enticed" Jews from other Soviet territories to locate there - and, indeed, at the time, more were settling in Germany than in Israel. But the ironic moment of an Israeli leader complaining that Germany was being too kind to Jews seemed to get a new reality: Absent a mass outbreak of anti-Semitism in some land with a substantial Jewish population, migration is unbelievable to change the rest of the world's Jewish population from the Diaspora to Israel. Allowed to select freely, the bulk of Jews - and level a growing amount of Israelis - have made their homes elsewhere.
Demanding that Israel be recognised as the "subject house" of a Jewish American, Canadian, South African or Argentine becomes problematic for many more free and secular Jews.Many Jewish Americans who've grown up with the melting-pot values of consolidation are not completely comfortable with the thought that their religion assigns them a "national home" elsewhere - a 2007 survey of American Jewish attitudes to Israel found that only 54% of those below the age of 35 were "comfortable with the mind of a Jewish state."
Of course there's still overwhelming support among American Jews, and Americans more generally, for the protection and well-being of Israel, which of course defines itself as a Jewish state. But while Netanyahu would assert that Zion is their "national home", it's far from light that the bulk of the world's Jews see themselves as sojourning citizens of Israel, or believe that Netanyahu somehow acts on their collective behalf.
Not that any of this is probable to see in the Obama Administration's efforts to get Netanyahu and Abbas back about a table. There are enough of understanding why those will probably fail - or, at best, produce a short-lived imprint of progress - long before the motion of Israel's kinship with the Jewish majority that lives outside of its borders comes into play.
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