Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

THE DISTINCTION 311
ground level has continued to mix Jews with those who live beside them, who
attend the same universities and who share the same workplace. The impact
of everyday cultures, local and global, is stronger than the synagogue and
the Zionist Sabbath folklore. Consequently the demographic power base of
the Jewish establishment is steadily eroding. Comfortable Jewish life in the
"diaspora," the irresistible power of young love, and the welcome decline in
anti-Semitism are all taking their toll. Surveys indicate that not only is mixed
marriage on the rise, but support for Israel among Jewish families under
thirty-five is declining. Only among the over-sixties is solidarity with Israel
stable and popular. These data suggest that the inflow of power from Israel's
"transnational diaspora" may not last forever. 88
Nor should Israel assume that the support of the mighty West will never
falter. The neocolonialism of the early twenty-first century—exemplified in,
for instance, the conquest of Iraq and Afghanistan—has intoxicated the power
elites in Israel, but for all the rising globalization, the West is still far away
while Israel is situated in the Near East. The violent reaction to the humiliation
of the East will fall not on the remote metropolis but on its forward outpost.
The fate of the self-segregating ethnos state in a corner of the Arab and Muslim
world is uncertain. In the present historical stage, as is usually the case, we
cannot see the future, but there are good reasons to fear it.
For example, the peace camp must consider that a compromise accord
with a Palestinian state, if achieved, may not only end a long and painful
process, but start a new one, no less complex, inside Israel itself. The morning
after may be no less painful than the long nightmare preceding it. Should a
Kosovo erupt in the Galilee, neither Israel's conventional military might, nor
its nuclear arsenal, nor even the great concrete wall with which it has girdled
itself will be of much use. To save Israel from the black hole that is opening
inside it, and to improve the fragile tolerance toward it in the surrounding
Arab world, Jewish identity politics would have to change completely, as would
the fabric of relations in the Palestino-Israeli sphere.
The ideal project for solving the century-long conflict and sustaining the
closely woven existence of Jews and Arabs would be the creation of a democratic
binational state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. To
ask the Jewish Israeli people, after such a long and bloody conflict, and in view
of the tragedy experienced by many of its immigrant founders in the twentieth
century, to become overnight a minority in its own state may not be the smartest
88 See the article by Shmuel Rozner, "Mixed Marriages Create Two Jewish Peoples,"
Haaretz, December 29, 2006; and also the reports in Yediot Ahronot, August 31, 2007.