The right type of friends

By GIL TROY

The Canadian Jewish News, October 26, 2000

>Just after Rosh Hashanah, the world was repelled by the heartbreaking picture of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy dying in a crossfire as his father vainly tried to shield him. Many Jews, too, were justifiably upset - only the coldest of people, the most hawkish of hawks, could fail to be saddened by such a tragedy.

Too many Jews, however, joined the world in turning on the Jewish state itself. Understandably repulsed by the young boy's brutal death, these fair-weather friends broadly condemned the army, the political leadership, and the entire state. Many spoke of being "embarrassed" to be a Jew. Rather than repudiating the action, they repudiated the State of Israel entirely - often without really understanding the complexities of life in the Middle East.

Just after Yom Kippur, the world was repelled by the heartbreaking picture of a Palestinian mob beating and mutilating disarmed Israeli army reservists. Now, many Jews who heretofore had been uncomfortable, or ambivalent about Israel, rallied around their besieged homeland. Federations mobilized. E-mails flew. Protesters rallied. In Israel, and throughout the Diaspora, our often unruly, quarrelsome, cranky people found a unity last experienced when Iraqi Scuds rained down on Tel Aviv nearly 10 years ago.

Right now, and as long as this awful crisis continues, Israel needs all the friends it can get. The first United Nations Security Council Resolution in response to the crisis made this perfectly clear. With most of the countries of the world, including Canada, ganging up on Israel, this is no time to be picky. It is hard to believe that Canada and the other nations did not feel moved to condemn the orchestration of violence in violation of the Oslo peace process, the desecration of a holy site, Joseph's Tomb, the manipulation of world opinion by deploying schoolchildren to fight. Still, under such circumstances, the Jewish people's relative unity is most welcomed - and absolutely necessary.

But given that most of us, luxuriating in the comforts of Canada, are not consumed by the crisis round-the-clock, it is worth assessing the peculiar psychology of our people. Somehow, we do seem to generate more fair-weather friends than most. I do not recall many Canadian Jews, no matter how much they hated Brian Mulroney, rethinking their basic allegiance to Canada at the time. I do not recall many American Jews, no matter how much they hated Ronald Reagan, ever reassessing their love for America. Yet, somehow, many of us, especially our youth, do not feel that Jewish connection, that Israel connection, as deeply. Ahavat Yisrael, a love for Israel, does not come as naturally to your average young Canadian Jew, as does loyalty to Canada.

The tenuousness of that Israel connection partially reflects the voluntary, and expendable nature of Jewish identity in the modern world. Anyone of us can give it up. We are extraordinarily free in 21st-century North America. We are free to change our names, our noses, our nationality. We are free to adopt all kinds of identities, to assume all kinds of poses, in this stunning and eclectic marketplace of personae we are lucky enough to inhabit.

More and more sophisticated studies are indeed showing that Jewish identity in this modern world is not only voluntary but fluid. It waxes and wanes over the course of a lifetime. Jewish involvement intensifies when many become parents, or when many enter their golden years, just as it flags during theincreasingly prolonged adolescence many young North Americans enjoy.

The malleability of Jewish identity, however, is only part of the problem. The other cause of this fair-weather friendship may have to do with the opposite phenomenon, the foul-weather friendship. Our Jewish community is great about rallying around Israel during times of crisis. It is, of course, natural to close ranks when attacked, to rise to the challenge during stressful times. Moreover, conditioned by millennia of anti-Semitism, and with the Holocaust looming ever larger in the contemporary Jewish psyche, we Jews are conditioned to coalesce and mobilize under the gun.

Alas, such "reactionary activism," as one friend calls it, comes at a price. Foul-weather friends beget fair-weather friends by obscuring the real reasons for a friendship. Foul-weather friends and fair-weather friends both make what should be a three-dimensional relationship unidimensional. If the foul-weather friends rally to the cry "My country right or wrong, take it or leave it," the fair-weather friends simply leave it.

Such an all or nothing approach to our Jewish homeland is most unfortunate. Many of Israel's most articulate and cutting critics are Israelis themselves. They understand that criticism can also be an expression of love, that they can fight fiercely for their state's right to exist, even as they fight fiercely against one policy or another, one tactic or another. The fair-weather friend simply walks away; the foul-weather friend, when mobilized, blasts the Israeli internal critic as a traitor too, perpetuating a stereotype of our community as closed and narrow-minded.

Israel's short life has been punctuated by so many crises that too many of us do not know how to love Israel, to appreciate the miracle of our Jewish state, when things are calm. We are blind to the many wonders of this remarkable country. A month ago, federation fund-raisers knew that Israel didn't "sell" with most donors, that things over there were at once too quiet and too complex.

Shockingly, my FEDERATION CJA pledge card lists eight different and worthy areas for the Directed Plus Giving Program. The only one that mentions Israel talks about Rescuing Jews for resettlement in Israel - and my guess is that most of that money would be spent in Russia, Ethiopia, or wherever else. Now, of course, one crisis and too many deaths later, Israel is again serving as a galvanizing force.

We need, when the smoke clears, to reevaluate our relationship to Israel. We need to forge strong and deep ties that last. We need to fall in love with Israel, the success story, as well as Israel the beleaguered, Israel the proud partner not just Israel the poor cousin.

We need to see what we can get from our relationship with the Jewish state - a sense of history, an exposure to all kinds of Jewish expressions, a feeling of belonging - rather than simply seeing what we can give to the Jewish state in trouble.

Let us pray for peace. And let us pray for the opportunity to test out an all-season friendship with the Jewish state, a friendship based on mutuality and equality that can survive the good times as well as the bad.

Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill University