Israel: it was not about the hostages. (What does this mean for us now?)

Israel has just announced (admitted) that the war is not about the hostages. They were an excuse, a propaganda tool (of great value to the Israeli government and its supporters) that was useful in starting the war. Now Israel admits that even if the hostages are all returned, it will continue the war, whose obvious purpose is to eliminate a Palestinian presence in its neighborhood. Of course this too can be justified in terms of the need to prevent any possible future acts of terrorism, for even if Hamas were destroyed, Palestinian resistance will continue or re-emerge as long as Israel is determined to keep out the Palestinians, which it doesn't want. And also too of course, the Israelis don't want them, whether or not any of them resist, violently or otherwise, especially since what they would be resisting is precisely the exclusion that Israel as a Jewish state is based upon.

The problem will only be solved when, perhaps many years from now, enough Jews in Israel and in America, its principle protector, say, we want to live in this place as Jews among other Jews, but not only among them, and not in a state that is essentially Jewish. This may well mean appropriating two other institutions of the European and American Enlightenment along with those it readily did: separation of church and state, and separation of national identity (as ethnic, linguistic, religious, etc.) from state, as a set of institutions that govern the population of a territory by representing its residents as equal citizens, and not by basing the territorial government on the national identity of a particular social group. Can Israel (or whatever it will become, and then be called) do that? Yes, because Jews can live in such a society, and want to, being just as fulfilled in their private lives and particular communities (defined by the quasi-familial, tribal shared group identity) while more at peace than up to now, when the apparent necessity of Apartheid destined the society to permanent war and a police state. The price of that may become too high. The change will take work, and will involve some mixture of compromise and a recognition of changed needs and wants. Among Americans, not only but especially American Jews, this work will surely take place, and has indeed begun. It will take time, but the matter is pressing. Let's attend to this work.

It also is the best way to save whatever is left of Judaism. Nationalism is leading it into an ugly abyss of naked self-interest and its resulting cruelty, which has been quite revealed in this instance, to be horrifying in what it can lead to. Jews fear that in a general way, understandably mostly thinking of themselves, yet today many people do, and they share this fear in fact with the Palestinians and many of the world's poor; by definition, oppression tends to most impact the more vulnerable, by virtue of poverty or character and concerns, and of course Jews in Europe until recently were remarkable for dissidence and pariah-hood, a quality that in modern social life largely passed to secular classes of artists and intellectuals, whose situation is more remarkable when ethnic and national identities are weaker. Current trends reversed the Enlightenment one further towards romantic communitarian/identitarian nationalism, whose quality as destiny is now fiercely debated, its necessity less certain than it is affirmed, everywhere now though essentially only on the resurgent political right, as left and liberal factions remains resolutely cosmopolitan. It is liberating, not threateningly insulting, to be able to recognize that what Jews can most fear today is something that does not so much separate them from the rest of the world's people as it seemed to in the medieval and early modern period (when they shared it mainly with witches and ideological heretics; in the 20th century it did not so separate them from other pariah groups, though they were certainly unique as objects of the exclusion in the intensity of the will to effectuate it; the forgotten Gypsies, annihilated as they were and in much the same way, were more in the way than targeted as enemies, and in some ways today’s Palestinians have more in common with them, as far as the exclusionary state is concerned). It could very well once again place many of them in the vanguard, as indeed it still does, though for a long time now that has been only accomplished on terms that are secular, individual, and accidental to the associated particular identities, a reality of modern life that probably will not and should not change, and that necessarily leaves Jewish identity murkier and, apart from the nationalist project, which literally emerged in reaction, impossible to define in any terms, a situation that might well be embraced as felicitous in a world where identities and so much else are subject to flexibility and openness, in what might be conceptualized as actually a further reach of dispersion, in a world where various heritages are available in common, a possibility, almost unique until recently, of American culture and society that can be enhanced in public life or diminished in ghettoes. No closed community, as much as it can become a walled camp and fortress, can be a vanguard. The future of the world is not private but common.