Published: 11 February 2022
Last updated: 4 March 2024
In the first of a series on faultlines among the Jewish people, CLIVE LAWTON examines the centrality of Israel in the Diaspora: where once it was a non-question, today it is a topic for robust debate
ANYONE UNEASY ABOUT criticism of Israel hasn’t spoken to any Israelis for a while. They are hardly united on anything. Indeed, it is one of the most impressive features of Israel throughout its comparatively short life that dispute remains so robust and so open.
I doubt there is another country so beset by existential challenges through its short life that has retained all the openness and fractiousness of Israel without at least occasionally sinking into military dictatorship.
But – even if we don’t waste swathes of time on Twitter, Tik Toc and friends – we know that disagreement has become far more disagreeable in recent years. Reflecting the strident tone which appears to be de rigueur online, Jews seem hardly able to stomach being in the same room with their policy opponents.
The differences that concern me here, however, are of a more philosophical quality. Put bluntly, how significant should Israel be to Jews of the diaspora? (There’s a parallel issue in Israel as to how significant the diaspora should be to Israel. Certainly, to judge by the behaviour of many Israelis abroad, the answer is “not much”.)
So where should Israel be in the hearts and minds of diaspora Jews? Many who have not looked closely or listened much might think this is a non-question. Surely Jews are committed to Israel. Indeed, to use a common term among passionately Zionist Jews, don’t all accept “the centrality of Israel”?
In the 1990s, when I was helming Jewish Continuity, the initiative of the late chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, Jonathan Sacks, there were many who felt it was obvious the organisation should include a commitment to “the centrality of Israel” as part of its aims.
But I already felt this made assumptions about Jewish positions that would narrow our appeal. Yes to “importance” or “significance” – but “centrality”? ( I should come clean and admit that I was the boy who wrote in 1967 that we should knock down the Western Wall since it would become a site for idolatry – have I been proved wrong? – so my positions are perhaps literally iconoclastic.)
