Melanie Phillips: Jewish conservatism is the key to our survival
The American philanthropic foundation, the Tikvah Fund, has decided to challenge the dominance of liberal universalism among Jews and promote instead a Jewish conservative movement. After two well-attended conferences in the US suggesting pent-up sympathy for such ideas, it held a third last week in Jerusalem.Howard Jacobson: Free Palestine
Some 850 people packed into the city’s International Conference Centre to listen to Yoram Hazony, author of The Virtue of Nationalism, Douglas Murray, author of The Strange Death of Europe, and various luminaries of the Israeli conservative scene (yes, there is one).
Both Hazony and Murray pointed out that conservatism resonates in Israel far more than in Britain or Europe. Murray said that, while nationalism and patriotism are not understood in Europe, most Israelis realise these are a force for good.
Israelis recognise strong borders are a prerequisite for survival; in Europe they’re seen as a cause of war. And even most secular Israelis, he said, recognise they are at least “in dialogue with the religion of their forbears”; in Europe, religion and philosophy are viewed as accessories to the cultural crime of merely being the west.
For his part, Hazony observed that Israel’s traditionalism – the Bible being taught in all schools, the orthodox religious marriage ceremony, the nation- state law which is so controversial among Israeli leftists and diaspora Jews – conserves and strengthens the nation.
In 1896, he said, Theodore Herzl wrote that the Jews in Israel should be traditional and conservative. Yet the left, both within and outside Israel, has a problem with the traditional family, the idea of distinct men and women, property rights, immigration controls and so on. “The enlightened liberal world”, he said, “hates not Israel but Israeli conservatism and tradition. It hates the people sitting in this room.” And unfortunately many diaspora Jews sign up to this too.
I’ve been trying to work out why her words offend me retrospectively. Does it go back to her original decision to embrace ideologies and symbols positively inimical to the faith in which she was born? There must be an exhilaration in apostasy. Only imagine the first time the daughter of Jewish parents wraps herself in a keffiyeh. That this is a thrill a number of Jews have chosen to experience in our time should give us pause. Is not sympathy for others enjoined upon us? “Love the stranger,” Deuteronomy commands, and it is a fair point that Palestinians are hardly even strangers in the Land of Israel. Leave the unholy frisson of apostatizing out of it and it is hard to take exception with what E.G. gave as her motive for calling to me in the street—“I just want everyone to have a chance at life.” Who doesn’t?Alan M. Dershowitz:It is Not Surprising to See an Increase in Jew-hatred in Western Europe
Ask her why she thinks I don’t, however; ask why she feels confident in asserting that I often speak out against justice for Palestinians—when I never have—and we quickly run into the rigid dualism of the activist, where whatever isn’t wholly good in their eyes must be wholly evil. According to this febrile logic, those who don’t support the cause must of necessity oppose it. Thus, while she is right that I am unlikely to be a friend of Palestine Live, she is wrong to suppose that a hostility to Palestinians is the reason.
This assumption of heartlessness whenever Israel is defended or Zionism embraced bedevils relations between the factions contesting the rights and wrongs of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To speak up even lukewarmly for Israel outside a Jew-friendly environment is to invite obloquy. To declare oneself a Zionist of any kind is to present an incontestable thumbprint of exceptionalism and cruelty.
There is a vicious circularity to this essentialist logic. In the very act of arguing that one or other aspect of the “occupation” is not as it is frequently presented—that one wall does not apartheid make nor one war a genocide—one merely confirms the original charge of inhumanity. Not to grant Palestinians everything is to grant them nothing.
Thus, the Jew remains forever trapped in being Jew. Simply to invoke anti-Semitism is to prove his bad faith. The more he struggles in the birdlime, the faster stuck he becomes.
"But Israel is doing bad things to the Palestinians," the European apologists insist, "and we are sensitive to the plight of the underdog."
No, you're not! Where are your demonstrations on behalf of the oppressed Tibetans, Georgians, Syrians, Armenians, Kurds, or even Ukrainians? Where are your BDS movements against the Chinese, the Russians, the Cubans, the Turks, or the Assad regime?
None of this is to deny Israel's imperfections or the criticism it justly deserves for some of its policies. But these imperfections and deserved criticism cannot even begin to explain, must less justify, the disproportionate hatred directed against the only nation-state of the Jewish people and the disproportionate silence regarding the far greater imperfections and deserved criticism of other nations and groups including the Palestinians.