Time for Jews To Abandon the Old Foundation Myth of Israel?

By Ira Chernus, Religion Dispatches. Posted July 6, 2009.

Meet the New Myth, Not the Same as the Old Myth

Diane Balzer is president of Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, the largest -- and among the most moderate -- of American Jewry's several pro-Israel, pro-peace groups. She gave Netanyahu qualified praise, welcoming his two-state approach but noting that his "statements on continued settlement expansion, the status of refugees and Jerusalem, and the future Palestinian state's control over its own borders complicate efforts to renew substantive negotiations by attempting to prejudge their outcome."

Behind those measured words hides a potentially explosive message: It is time for Jews to abandon the old foundation myth in favor of a new one. That's clear just by considering what it means to enter "substantive" negotiations without attempting to prejudge their outcome.

The goal must be an actual settlement of the conflict, one that improves the situation for one's own side; in this case, for Israel, which is exactly what Brit Tzedek and all the other Jewish peace groups want.

But the settlement has to be mutually beneficial; the opponents won't agree unless it improves the situation for their side, too. So there are at least three necessary conditions if you want "substantive" negotiations:

• You cannot assume that your opponents are out to destroy your very existence simply because they are trying to drive a hard bargain;
• You cannot assume that all the fault and blame for the problem lies with your opponents;
• You cannot let your self-esteem rest on showing your strength by being intransigent, prejudging outcomes and inflicting defeats on your opponent.

Breaking any of these rules, and certainly all three of them, dooms the negotiation to be fruitless from the outset.

Thus, the call for "substantive" negotiations sows the seed of a new Jewish myth whose basic elements are just the opposite of the old one:

• Jews and Gentiles have to live together; they are inextricably woven together in a single web of relationship, what Martin Luther King Jr. called a "single garment of destiny."
• Within that web, there will inevitably be both conflict and cooperation; cooperation is perfectly possible, so it pays to make serious efforts to promote it, which means being responsive to the changing concerns of everyone else in the web.
• There are rights and wrongs done on every side; it makes no sense to measure how much blame accrues to any one side, because finger-pointing blocks the way to cooperation.
• Self-esteem comes from promoting cooperation; if self-esteem must depend on showing one's strength (an open question), the way to show strength is to show understanding of others, respond to their concerns and find paths of mutual benefit.

Many Jewish peace advocates are not yet aware of the new myth they are implicitly telling, nor of the magnitude of change in Jewish life it can create. But new myths rarely arise by conscious effort. They simply grow organically as people pursue the goals they value most and talk to others about their efforts.

Then one day, someone wearing the mantle of authority (perhaps even a future prime minister of Israel) looks back and says of the new myth just what people once said about the old one: "This is what we've always believed. These are our eternal values."

How long that will take no one can predict. But considering the suffering the old myth has produced for Israelis and -- much more so -- for Palestinians, even one more day is too long.

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Ira Chernus is professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Read more of his writing on Israel, Palestine and American Jews on his blog.

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