Israel must survive for Judaism to have a future

DOES it matter if the Jews as a people or nation continue to exist? Once this was the sort of question I played with at university over cups of bad coffee in the early Sixties. Were the Jews a race, a religion, a culture, a tribe? Whatever we were, we were living a good life in Britain, America and the West in general. In those simple, heady days, the state of Israel was seen as a heroic little country.

Nothing essential about Israel has changed since then but the Zeitgeist has changed and, about 30 years ago, Israel went out of fashion. This has created an irony that the early founders of Zionism never foresaw. Israel was established to spare Jews physical danger and anti-Semitism. The irony is that nowhere in the world does being a Jew carry a higher price-tag than in Israel.

The question that now begins to force itself upon some of us is one we have tried to avoid: is this grim scenario of killings and bombings and endless warfare worth it - to the world and, on a personal level, to our children? I think the answer is yes, but there are persuasive arguments to be confronted.

The reaction of much of the media and many commentators to the election of Ariel Sharon has been a lightning rod for this hostility to Israel. "Is Ariel Sharon Israel's Milosevic?" asked the LA Times. The Independent's Review section led with a front that described Sharon in oversize type as a man whose "name is synonymous with butchery; with bloated corpses and disembowelled women and dead babies, with rape and pillage and murder"

The Guardian's special report on the Middle East contained a piece by journalist David Hirst. Hirst, a regular contributor to the online English language Lebanese Daily Star, made his position on the Middle East quite clear in a January 25 article for the Star. For him, the state of Israel is a "colonialist enterprise" and any solution to the conflict begins with the assumption that every inch of Israel is "usurped land" and the entire entity is illegitimate. Yesterday's Observer ran a poem by the highly regarded Arts Council recipient Tom Paulin that described "the Zionist SS".

One can take the view, legitimately, that Israel is a disputed land with two peoples each believing it is theirs, and that it is difficult to say who is right or wrong. What is immoral and illogical is to talk about international law, rights and wrongs, and then blithely disregard every rule, whether it is the UN resolution establishing Israel, the Oslo Accords, or laws against targeting civilians in terrorist attacks or using civilians as shields for military attacks. This is like umpiring a boxing match and letting your favourite contestant take a submachine gun into the ring while shrilly pointing out any rules broken by his opponent.

The Israelis are exhausted by it all. The country has been in a state of war that started five hours after it came into being in 1948. This low-level war of 52 years has been interspersed with armed truces, but it has never ceased and it is predicated on one simple fact: the rejection by the Arab world of the UN vote to partition Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state in the Middle East. You can argue whether or not this rejection is justified, and I have some sympathy for the arguments of the Arabs, who had nothing to do with the Holocaust in Europe that gave impetus to the establishment of the state of Israel in their midst. But the fact of their non-acceptance is undeniable. Even Egypt, signer of the first peace treaty with Israel, has never established anything more than a cold-war accommodation with its Jewish neighbour.

Indeed, of late, the anti-Israeli rhetoric has been heating up in Egypt. Last December, in the government-sponsored weekly October magazine, a two-part article by General Hassan Sweilem, "The Jewish personality and Israeli actions", concluded: "Historians, race-studies professors and sociologists agree that humanity throughout its long history has never known a race such as the Jewish race in which so many bad qualities, base and loathsome, have been gathered." The series included anti-Semitic remarks attributed to George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, first used in a vicious forgery that appeared in 1935 in Germany in the Nazis' Handbook on the Jewish Question.

Once you face the fact that what exists in the Middle East is a war, albeit a low-level one, the futility of trying to judge individual acts is obvious. The world judges the warring parties anyway, according to the spirit of the times. There was a time when, perhaps wrongly, every Palestinian act was considered one of terrorism and similar Israeli acts were never condemned. That lasted until the end of the 1960s. Now the climate is such that only Israelis are judged.

Arab rejectionism is more obdurate than ever because it is closer than ever to succeeding. Morale in Israel is low. Emigration is an option when the computer age makes it feasible for labour to be mobile. You can as easily do your job in Cincinnati as Ramat Gan and not worry about a bomb going off on a bus. The Arabs are many, the Israelis few. As the Muslim world has said, we can outwait you and we will prevail.

Islam is on an upswing throughout the world. I come from a British Jewish family that was all but assimilated. I barely understand a word of Hebrew or Yiddish, yet my personal pride comes from my Jewish identity. Given this, how can I fail to understand how strong the tribal sense of belonging must be to those among the Arab and Islamic world, many of whom are devout, highly religious and brought up with a narrow perspective on the world compared with Western notions of liberalism?

The problem with nationalism - or tribalism and deism - is that the people who are immersed in it generally oppose everyone else's version, while those who are distanced from it don't understand the power of such notions and blithely bash on, trying to build happy multicultural constructs. At the same time, Jews themselves lack some essential character traits for survival. We can be excellent soldiers and commandos. We may even have the odd sadist or death squad. But we don't revel in it. We cannot contemplate mass population transfers and the extermination of a people or nascent state as the price for the survival of Judaism. It is not in the Jewish temperament.

What many sentimental or Left-wing Jews, both inside and outside Israel, do dream of is a multicultural Israel in which Jew and Arab live together in harmony in one land under a flag flying both the red crescent and the Star of David. Nice stuff if you could get it. If, deep down, some of these Jews understand that within one hour of the crescent going up on the Jewish flag, Israel as a Jewish state would end, they either don't care or are in denial. An Islamic state is not an inclusive state and has no room for full citizenship for practising Jews.

Would it really matter if Israel ceased to exist? For the extraordinary achievements of its 52 years alone, it deserves to exist. But, in the past 50 years since the end of the Second World War, the actual necessity of a Jewish homeland seems to have progressively diminished. Overt anti-Semitism has been all but vanquished. Certainly, Jews appear to have given the Western world disproportionate gifts in the arts, literature and sciences.

But one of the great unknowables is whether an unassimilated group makes more or less of a contribution than assimilated peoples. We don't know what the Samaritans or Babylonians, never mind the Visigoths, have given to the world since they disappeared into the greater population pool. Myself, I'd be sympathetic to the view that the unusual contribution Jews have made to the world may have been due to the peculiar position that we have never been fully assimilated, or become masters of our own culture, and this has been a spur to Jewish achievement. This is purely speculation and has no scientific basis at all.

While organised anti-Semitism has been eliminated in the world today, the situation of the Jews hasn't fundamentally changed. Notwithstanding the moderating forces of liberalism and the fact that we can live peacefully anywhere, the same forces that turned Germany into Nazi Germany still exist in the world. Any people such as the Jews who do not have a country of their own may forever be at the mercy of any virus that takes hold. We might live peacefully for the next five generations without Israel. After all, about five generations of Jews managed quite well from the time of the Habsburgs' Joseph II until the end of the Weimar Republic, suffering only those restrictions that were totally normal in any place at that time that had a Leitkultur or dominant culture.

Only the Israelis can make the decision on whether to keep up the fight for their country. All they really want is to be accepted by their neighbours as a nation like any other. If that were genuine, all the squabbling about holy places, settlers and borders could easily be resolved. Israelis want to be able to travel from A to B without fear of ambushes. They want to stop worrying whether or not their children will survive military service - a requirement that is not simply a year or two of some discomfort and disruptions, as it may be in other countries that have an active military service, but a lottery in which their sons and daughters may not come out alive.

Without Israel, it is hard to see how all Jews in the diaspora could avoid assimilation. Jews have survived more than 2,000 years in the single, unshakeable belief that one day their dislocation would end with their return to the Promised Land. This is the central underpinning of Judaism. "Next year in Jerusalem" is the single phrase every Jew hears and remembers from the moment he can speak. If, this time, Israel is destroyed and the Jews leave, whether through progressive absorption into an Islamic state or bloody warfare, there seems little chance of a Third Temple and a return. Without the possibility of Israel, Judaism becomes pointless.

In the diaspora, the remaining practising Jews may well face unbearable burdens. We have put to rest the curse that we were responsible for the death of Christ. But if a Jewish state is eliminated from the Middle East, our children may inherit such canards, for example, as our supposed role as persecutors of the brave victorious Palestinian people. Losers do not get a hearing. The Israelis will make their decision whether to carry on the draining struggle for a Jewish state, but all Jews, even the anti-Israel Jewish journalists in the West, may yet bear the consequences of that decision.