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  • Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End
  • Joel Streicker
Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End, by Daniel Gordis. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009. 272 pp. $25.95.

Passionately argued, at times discomfiting, and deeply flawed, Saving Israel is the latest book to prescribe a remedy for Israel's problems. Its author, Daniel [End Page 156] Gordis, an American-born Conservative rabbi and senior fellow at Jerusalem's Shalem Center, could not disagree more with those like Avraham Burg and Bernard Avishai, who lay much of the blame for Israel's current malaise on the state's own mistaken actions, encouraged by Israelis' excessive turn inward toward Jewish concerns at the expense of universal values. Instead, Gordis contends that, despite Israel's best efforts, achieving peace is probably impossible: the Arab states and the Palestinians are bent on destroying Israel.

Gordis portrays the Palestinians' and Arabs' hostility as monolithic and unchangeable. He fails to consider the internal politics or foreign policies of any of Israel's enemies and how these might change their stance toward Israel. Nor does he examine how Israeli policies, as opposed to its mere existence, have shaped its enemies' actions. Without attention to these matters, and the grasp of history this requires, it is impossible to explain such major shifts as the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan.

Clearly, Gordis is not interested in understanding international politics or the political nuances of Israel's enemies. His project is to bolster Israelis' and American Jews' belief in the legitimacy of Israel's Jewish character. He finds Israelis and American Jews distressingly unable to articulate why Israel matters, which undermines Israelis' determination to defend the state militarily, and American Jews' will to support Israel's self-defense. To the question of why anyone would embrace a life of hardship and perpetual war if he had any other option (say, emigration), Gordis responds: "Israel has to work to recreate that awareness of how dramatically Jewish sovereignty has altered the Jewish condition, and it must find ways to restore to its citizens the hope and the passion that it once evoked, leading them to defend their state and to see to its thriving."

According to Gordis, inadequate self-knowledge makes Israeli and American Jews susceptible to arguments questioning Israel's legitimacy. In the international arena, Gordis catalogues a list of recent left-wing outrages, including the infamous U.N. racism conference in Durban, portrayals of the security barrier as an apartheid wall, and Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's book The Israel Lobby.

Gordis also lambastes Israeli Arabs for overreaching. He states that it is one thing to petition for social equality, which he accepts as overdue; it is quite another to demand an end to the state's Jewish character. For Gordis, demanding Israel be a secular, rather than a Jewish, democracy delegitimizes the state because its Jewish character is its reason for being.

Make no mistake: Gordis sees the Israeli Arabs as the enemy within. What is to be done with such a people, especially as their high birth rate will ultimately destroy the state's Jewish character? He considers massive aliyah [End Page 157] unlikely. Shifting Israel's borders so that a chunk of present-day Israel inhabited mainly by Arabs will lie within a future Palestinian state is also possible, but raises thorny issues: residents of such an area would, under international law, still be Israeli citizens, never mind that most do not want to be citizens of a Palestinian state. Besides, given the Israeli Arab birth rate, this would only provide temporary respite.

Gordis entertains the idea of forced "population transfer." He is keenly aware of the practical objections to this option, yet does not explore its moral dimensions. In a book that argues for the reassertion Jewish values in the public square, the failure to bring these values to bear in this discussion suggests the author's uneasiness with the idea. Does Gordis believe that there are particularly Jewish justifications for expelling Israel's Arabs? What would the cost be, and would it be higher than the...

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