Selling our Soul

Yehezkel Dror is the founding president of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, a professor emeritus of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a recipient of the Israel Prize and a member of the Winograd commission of inquiry into Israel’s war with Hezbollah in 2006. He’s also the man who ruined my day a week ago. That latter is the least of his sins.

In a Forward column of May 23 he opines that “when the survival of the Jewish people conflicts with the morals of the Jewish people, is existence worthwhile or even possible?” And then he answers his own question: “Physical existence…must come first. No matter how moral a society aspires to be, physical existence must take precedent…realpolitik should be given priority [over morality]…Regrettably, human history refutes the idealistic claim that in order to exist for long, a state, society or people has to be moral…The calculus of realpolitik gives primacy to existence, leaving limited room for ethical considerations.”

Realpolitik is a term coined by Otto von Bismarck. It is best exemplified in a speech he made to the Prussian Landtag (parliament) in September 1862, shortly after his appointment as Chancellor. The king wanted to make Prussia a military state; the Landtag objected. Bismarck, soon to be known as the Iron Chancellor (he spoke metaphorically of his iron fist inside a velvet glove) told a parliamentary committee that “The position of Prussia in Germany will not be determined by its liberalism but by its power … Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided…but by blood and iron.” And Bismarck was true to his word. He fabricated a war against Denmark, and another against Austria and a third against France and the blood flowed and the iron ripped into bellies and Germany was united under Prussian militarism. And then it brought about the First World War and then the Second World War. The Germans have finally learned that when you abandon morality for realpolitik you get neither.

Dror continues: “Let us leave aside reliance on transcendental arguments, biblical commands and sayings of the sages…” To which I ask, “And still be Jews?” Is such possible? Without morality, we, the weakest people on the planet would be doomed to wander, eking our way through history without contributing anything to world culture. Israel surviving without morality as its life’s blood would be a Jewish Golem, an artificial body without a soul; it would be as a hollow tree, surviving until the axe-man comes for firewood. This is what we want?

Dror continues by offering what philosophers call a reduction ad absurdum; a false choice that we must chose morality or survival. I don’t know if the Jewish people are unique in this, but one thing that’s maintained our status as a lamp unto the nations is that historically (maybe because there’s been so little choice) Jews have opted for the moral high ground that Dror so facilely would have us surrender.

One more point: “But at the end of the day,” Dror tells us, “there is no way around the tough and painful practical implications of prioritizing existence as an overriding moral norm over being moral in other respects. When important for existence, violating the rights of others should be accepted, with regret but with determination.” I imagine that these very words are the ones muttered by Ahmed as he straps the plastique onto the torso of Abdul whose assignment is to go to the local pizzeria in Tel Aviv.

Enough of Dror. The same issue of the Forward has an article by Gideon Levy of Haaretz. He wants Americans to stay out of Israel’s politics. He especially wants rich Americans such as Morris Talansky not to bribe Israeli politicians such as Ehud Olmert. “Leave us alone. Take your hands off Israel. Stop using your money to buy influence in Israel. Stop contributing to advance your interests and views, some of which are at times delusionary and extremely dangerous to the future of the country you’re supposedly trying to protect.” In other words, Israel is capable of taking the high ground; the realpolitik of the politician who contaminates the morality of the State and his foreign investor is, or will be, the ruin of the nation. Good for Levy.

Is there a local angle here? You bet there is. Our Jewish Federation, the organization that publishes this newspaper, has made a grievous error. We have squandered the high moral ground for $30,000. We have taken the advice of Dror and rejected the wisdom of Levy. I refer, of course, to our recent participation with the Reverend John Hagee, the selfsame who declared that the Holocaust was God’s way of removing the Jews from Europe and resettling the survivors in Palestine. The same Reverend John Hagee who calls the Catholic Church the Great Whore which has thirsted for Jewish blood throughout history. The same Reverend Hagee who announced that he knew that Katrina struck New Orleans when it did with such devastating force because there was a scheduled gay pride march which the hurricane prevented. When John McCain learned of the God works through Hitler blasphemy he renounced Hagee’s endorsement and in the process stood to lose 2,000,000 potential votes, for thus is the impact of Mr. Hagee. We went to an event in Seekonk where at an Evangelical church (I know nothing of the politics of this church or its minister) we received a check for $30,000 made out to a hospital in Jerusalem which we immediately gave to Rabbi Jonathan Hausman of Stoughton, Massachusetts who will forward it to Alyn Hospital. What were we doing there? Didn’t we know the money was tainted by Hagee’s presence? For $30,000 we gave the man credibility at the cost of our own? As Gideon Levy would say, “Leave us alone. Take your hands off Israel. Stop using your money to buy influence in Israel. Stop contributing to advance your interests and views, some of which are at times delusionary and extremely dangerous to the future of the country you’re supposedly trying to protect.” To which I say, Amen.