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Ron Lauder is angry with us. He is within his rights. As president of the World Jewish Congress, he represents many of our brothers and sisters who have chosen to remain in the Diaspora and not make aliyah to Israel.
Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, and the nation-state law anchors our responsibility to world Jewry as a whole. In the family of the people of Israel, disputes and debates are an ancient ethos that is as old as the people itself.
A nation whose founding father fiercely argued with his God about the fate of Sodom, whose sons and daughters repeatedly questioned their leader Moses, and whose Talmud and oral tradition are full of heated debates, is not daunted by controversy, no matter how fierce.
But Lauder is wary of controversy. Over the past few decades, as the cultural and political changes in Israel deepened and the "second" and "third Israel" took their place at the helm of the Zionist vessel, we have become accustomed to the veteran elite's doomsday prophecies predicting our glum future, lamenting the loss of Israel's way and vision, its "deterioration" toward theocracy, the alleged adoption of racist and fascist principles, and other evils, all compounded by self-professed experts who are sure they and they alone understand both history and current reality.
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Lauder's feathers have been ruffled by the shelving of the egalitarian prayer framework at the Western Wall, Orthodox conversion, the surrogacy law, and the nation-state law, all of which have offended the sensibilities of non-Orthodox Jews, the LGBTQ community and minorities. "Second Israel" was never rewarded with a supportive opinion piece in The New York Times calling on the Israeli government to spare its feelings. As long as the feelings of liberal American Jews were spared, there was no "rift" between them and Israel.
As a rule, this argument is foreign to the Jewish ethos: Our ancestors taught us to seek the truth even at the cost of offending one's sensibilities, and the politics of emotions is an attempt to castrate a vital public debate.
Contrary to the liberal attempt to turn democracy into a matter of minority rights, it is worth repeating that democracy is the government of the people, who elect representatives to the Knesset and vest in them the authority to reach a majority vote on difficult issues. These are the rules of the game, especially in a people as diverse and opinionated as ours.
The truth is that the various points made at this time to illustrate our "deterioration" have been endlessly rehashed by the Israeli media. Whenever I meet journalists, intellectuals and leaders from around the world, Jews and non-Jews, I urge them not to be fooled by the unilateralism of most of the media, but rather seek additional sources of information by which to understand the complexity and depth of Israeli society.
Not every cry of "gevald" in Israel that is heard in the United States reflects the Israeli public. Many times it reflects the opposition's frustration over its inability to convince the public it is right, or over its desire to exert external pressure on Israel to change the majority's decision.
Most Israelis favor allocating a mixed prayer plaza at the Western Wall and easing the conversion process, but the nature of the Israeli regime, which fosters a partnership between different, opinionated parties, requires compromise. If Lauder and the rest of liberal American Jewry want to effect change, they should immigrate to Israel, where they could easily garner a Knesset majority to promote their ideas.
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Lauder warns that "if the current policy continues, Jews in the Diaspora may grow to dislike Israel" and, in turn, they will cease supporting the Jewish state. This problem is not just ours – it's yours, too. It is not Israel's policy that has caused many American Jewish youths to stray from the fold. It is the lack of Jewish education and the horrifying ignorance of our people's trove of wisdom and texts that causes assimilation.
Of the millions of Jews in the United States, only a few are busy being offended by any political move in Israel, while the majority is not interested in anything Jewish. The greatness of the Jewish state is that even those who are completely cut off from religious tradition can easily preserve their Jewish identity, something that is much harder in the Diaspora, where one must be an active Jew.
Neither the politics of emotions nor cosmetic legal amendments can help deal with this sad problem. And as long as we are dealing with the issue of conversion, we in Israel are also allowed to ask – what is Jewish about mixed marriages with members of another religion?
Lauder speaks of the link between Judaism and enlightenment in the last 200 years. But our link to global enlightenment is over 3,000 years old. We have contributed some of humanity's greatest ideas, such as the fact that all people were created in the image of God (we have not abandoned our God, even if we argue with him and despite the fact that Western enlightenment is ashamed of him); instating a weekly day of rest even for slaves (Shabbat, Mr. Lauder, talks about refraining from commerce, including "convenience stores"); the notion of social justice and a morality that judges people for their actions and not for the sins of their fathers, and the list goes on. We have also given the world the idea of national identity.
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This brings us back to the core issue – the nation-state law. Those who claim that the law violates the principle of equality are both mistaken and misleading others: Misleading, because the civil equality of all Israeli citizens – Jews, Druze, Muslims and Christians – has not been compromised whatsoever; and mistaken, because the very idea of a "Jewish state" is not equal – it is impossible to create national equality in Israel between the majority and the minority.
The terrible meaning of the equality that Lauder supports is a binational or multinational state – a process at the end of which Israel would cease to be the nation-state of the Jewish people and will become "a state of all its citizens", which is in fact "a state of all its nationalities." This, and only this will, heaven forbid, spell the end of the Zionist idea.
One must distinguish between a state and a nation. In the State of Israel, all are equal in civil rights – even if not in obligations. But there is no equality with respect to nationality. Unlike the United States, Israel is a nation-state – the only one the Jewish people have. Mr. Lauder, as the head of the World Jewish Congress, you, of all people, should understand that we are your insurance policy.
The Declaration of Independence speaks only of a Jewish state that offers full equality in "social and political rights", but it does not mention national equality in any way, and we are not ashamed of that. It is our natural right, as a vibrant democracy, to enshrine in law the national character of the state. Thus, the nation-state law simply complements Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty and both together reflect the spirit of the Declaration of Independence.
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The nation-state law's detractors mentioned the "morality of the prophets" in their arguments, but the prophets of Israel spoke not of equality but of justice. They recognized that people were not equal and that some – the foreigner, the orphan, the widow and the poor – sometimes deserve privileges meant to compensate for inequality. This is the difference between the morality of the prophets of Israel and Western morality, especially in the extremely progressive form that seems to have taken over Western liberal discourse.
Equality is not an absolute value but a relative one, and everyone understands it differently. Justice, on the other hand, forces us to demand the truth; to weigh values on the scales of justice and to decide between them; to examine the various demands of society and decide what is right and what is wrong, and then to act in light of that decision.
There is no "single way," which is why it is the people who choose which path to walk. You have the right to think that "this is not the right path," Mr. Lauder, but most Israelis, including myself, disagree. Enacting the nation-state law was a defining moment in our history. We will need historical perspective to know who was right.
