The Answer Is Nothing

What would it take for me to stop supporting Israel?

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Question

There’s a question that follows every Jew who defends Israel, whether anyone says it to your face or not: “What would it take for you to stop?”

Not soften, not add the careful qualifier, not go quiet for a while.

Stop.

What would Israel have to do, or what would have to be done to you, before you walked away from it for good?

Let’s assume it’s a fair question.

Here’s my answer: Nothing.

I know how that sounds. It sounds like the guy who says the country I love is right or wrong, the cheapest kind of loyalty, the kind that is really just a refusal to think. But it’s not that, and the difference is the whole point, so let me be clear about what I am actually loyal to.

Governments

I’m not loyal to a government, especially not a particular Israeli government. Governments come and go, and most of them earn some of the grief they get, Israel’s included. I can think a particular Israeli government is wrong. Anyone can, lover or hater. We can vote against it, argue with it, want it gone by Thursday. None of that touches the thing underneath, which is the only thing I’m really defending: Jewish sovereignty. The fact that the Jewish people get to govern themselves, in their own land, without asking anyone’s permission. That’s not a conclusion I reached after weighing the arguments but rather where I start from. The word for it is an axiom, the thing you reason from and not the thing you reason your way to, and you don’t give up an axiom because the headlines are bad.

Think about how strange the demand is once you say it out loud. Nobody tells the French that France should cease to exist when a French government does something terrible. Nobody moves to dissolve Canada over its own long list of sins, and that list is long. They get told to change their leaders. Hold elections. Apologize. They don’t get told to give up their country. Only the Jewish state gets handed the rule that it has to keep earning the right to exist, over and over, on good behaviour, with its life on the line every single time. I don’t accept that rule, and neither should you. And the moment you throw it out, the whole idea of a red line goes with it. Not because we should stop caring about what Israel does. Because what a government does and whether Jews get to have a country of their own, in safe and secure borders, were never the same question, and I won’t let anyone pretend they are.

Once you see that, you start to see what is actually going on around us.

The wear-down

The people who want us to give up on Israel know, deep down, that they can’t argue us out of it - well, most of us. You cannot reason someone off the ground they’re standing on. So most of them stop trying to convince us and start trying to wear us down. They reach for the biggest words they have, “genocide,” “apartheid,” and they don’t bring them as a criticism of this policy or that operation. They bring them as a verdict on whether the country - Israel - should be there at all. And they get there the way you skip the dull part of a story. Accusation, yada yada yada, verdict. The yada yada is where the evidence was supposed to go. And when the words don’t move us (frankly, because they’ve lost all meaning at this point), they go to the other tool. They make it cost us. The invitation that stops coming. The committee seat. The negative Google reviews. The quiet assumption that people like us can’t really be the good ones. They are working to make supporting Israel expensive enough that one day we’ll simply decide it isn’t worth it anymore.

That’s the current move, and we need to acknowledge it because it isn’t an argument, but a price.

Argument vs. price

The two are not the same, even though the whole campaign depends on you mixing them up. An argument goes after what you believe. A price just goes after what you can stand. An argument says you’re wrong. A price says we'll make this hurt until you quit.

And here’s the trap: pay a price long enough and it starts to feel like an argument. You get tired. A tired person goes looking for the exit, and after a while he starts to wonder whether the people making his life hard had a point all along. That’s how it works on good people. That’s how they’re trying to make it happen to our children. You set the burden down and tell yourself you changed your mind, when really you just ran out of the strength to carry it. How dare they.

Look at who actually says the blunt thing out loud. The other night Jerry Seinfeld walked out of a Knicks game, and a streamer stuck a microphone in his face and asked him to say free Palestine. Seinfeld laughed, said “it doesn’t exist!”, and kept walking. I loved it! It was clean, and he didn’t flinch. But look at why he, Jerry Seinfeld, could do it. Seinfeld is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and he is one of the most loved people in North America. There’s nothing that streamer, or that crowd, or that whole movement can take from him. He’s past the reach of the price. He has nothing to lose, so he pays nothing, so he says exactly what he thinks. Good for him.

So is that the cost of admission now, that you have to be untouchable before you can defend Israel without weighing it first? Look at where the Jewish actors and writers and executives with careers still ahead of them are, the ones who can still be uninvited, blacklisted, quietly frozen out. Most of them are silent. Not because they believe less than Seinfeld does, but because for them the price is real, and it is working exactly as designed. Gwyneth Paltrow comes out with an advertisement for an apartment complex in Israel? Boom, calls to blacklist her. That’s the whole point of it. The campaign isn’t built to silence the handful of people it can’t touch. It’s built to silence everyone it can, which is almost all of us. Seinfeld and Paltrow don’t show that this kind of courage is cheap. They show how narrow the ledge has gotten, that you nearly have to be untouchable to stand on it without a second thought.

Cost

I’m not doing that, and I can tell you exactly why. My conscience has plenty to say about what Israel does, and I let it say all of it. I argued with the last government and I’ll probably argue with the next one. But my conscience works on the conduct, not on the existence. It can tell me a policy is wrong. It can’t tell me that Jews shouldn’t have a country, any more than it can tell me that two plus two is five. I’ll fight about what Israel does for the rest of my life, and I’ll never put the existence of Israel on trial. Those are two different things, and I won’t let anyone glue them together.

I’ve been thinking about all of this since Bondi Beach.

On the first night of Hanukkah, two men opened fire on a Chabad celebration on a beach in Sydney and killed fifteen people. A twelve-year-old. A Holocaust survivor. A rabbi who had given that community eighteen years. The killers didn’t ask anyone their opinion on the war in Gaza and certainly didn’t sort the crowd by who held the right views. They weren’t there about a policy. The price they came to collect was simply Jews being proudly Jewish, living as if it were a right and not a favour someone grants you.

I’ll be careful here: The professor who signs the boycott letter is not the gunman. The curator who quietly stops returning a Zionist artist’s calls is not the gunman. They’re not the same, but I’d argue they’re on the same road, and the road runs one direction. It runs from the slogan to the shunning to the smashed window to the firebomb to the beach. Australia’s Jews watched it travel that whole distance in about two years. And every respectable person who spent those years making it normal to treat a Zionist - which is, the majority of Jews - as someone who had forfeited his place in decent company helped pave a stretch of it. The polite end of the road builds the permission the violent end uses. You don’t get to act shocked at where it led when you spent years pointing the way.

The deal

And here’s the thing the whole campaign can’t see about itself.

The deal on offer is simple. Give up Israel and you can have your place back. Go quiet, disavow, and the cost disappears. Be a court Jew, an “As-a-Jew,” an “embarrassed-of-your-own-people-Jew.” But Israel exists for exactly one reason, so that a Jew never has to buy his safety with his silence. That’s the entire point of the place.

So when you tell me I can keep my standing as long as I give up the one country built so that my standing never depends on anyone’s goodwill, you haven’t made an argument against Israel, but rather the argument for it. You can’t price a person out of where he starts from. You can only make him pay more to keep it, and every payment reminds him why he will. The pressure doesn’t loosen my grip, but simply tightens it.

So no, the cost is not too high. I have done the math and decided to keep paying. It means I am raising children who will be handed the bill, and some nights that sits heavy on my chest, because they’re going to have a harder time than I’ve had. We light the candles in the window where the whole street can see them. We’ve given our children “Jewish” names. They’re too young to know there may be a price on that. One day they will. And when they ask me whether it was worth it, I’m not going to tell them the cost was nothing. I am going to tell them it was real, that I counted every bit of it, and that I paid it gladly. That the country they inherit in Israel - and the story in which they are a part - looks different than the one I knew, the way judges once gave way to kings and kings to a parliament, and that this is fine, this is how it has always gone. But that the one thing underneath, the plain fact that we govern ourselves and ask no one’s permission to exist, I was never willing to put back on the table. Not for any reason or any price.

Here’s the Catch

What would it take for me to stop supporting Israel? Nothing. I’ll never. I’m not loyal to any government in Jerusalem, and my conscience has plenty to say about what they do. I’m loyal to the one thing underneath, that the Jewish people get to govern themselves and ask no one’s permission to exist. That is where I start from, not a conclusion anyone can argue me out of. The form can change, the way it has for three thousand years. The country itself is not up for review. Nobody asks France or Canada to keep earning the right to exist every time a government sins, and I won’t accept that rule for the one Jewish state. That is why the people pressing me do not really argue. You cannot reason someone off where he starts from, so they raise the price instead, and the biggest words they own, genocide and apartheid, are aimed at the existence and not at any policy. Bondi is where that pressure ends up, and the respectable people who spent almost three years making Zionists unwelcome helped build the road there. The whole thing defeats itself, because you can’t price a person out of what he starts from. You can only make him pay to keep it, and the paying shows him why he will. The cost is real. But never too high.