THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

Without listing what needs repair in Israel’s public life and jurisdiction, I wish to pointout three areas that deserve careful attention: the Law of Return, the Law ofPunishment of the Nazis and their Collaborators and the relationship withGermany.Every state in the world determines its identity and how residents and immigrantsare naturalized. In Israel, the direct path to becoming a citizen, at least for Jews, is theLaw of Return. In Israel’s early history, so says the parliamentary legend, the law wasenacted as a mirror image of Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws, which defined Jewsfor their future persecution. I have never found confirmation of this in the Knessetrecords, but in all parliamentary discussions of the law, everyone, whether a ministeror a house member, who took to the podium claimed that the Law of Return was ouranswer to the discriminating race laws of Nuremberg. Almost everyone who wouldhave been defined by Hitler as a Jew and was sent to his death must be granted aprotective Israeli citizenship. So even if this was not the legislators’ intent at the time,it has become the working assumption of its successors. Until the link between Israelicitizenship and the Nuremberg Laws is severed, Hitler will in effect continue to decidewho is Jewish. A modern definition of citizenship, according to a genetic or religiouscode, is by itself an enormous ethical problem, especially for Jews.The problematic definition of a Jew according to the Law of Return—“A Jew is aperson who is born to a Jewish mother or who converted and is not of a differentreligion”—should be abolished, along with the old-fashioned concept of the nationstate.Israel should become the democratic state of the Jewish people which belongsto all of its citizens, and the majority will decide on its character and essence. I amafraid that if the association between our traumatic past and our schizophrenicpresent continues, our acquired immune deficiency will continue for a few moregenerations. It would be a shame, because I believe that all issues of identity of themodern human in general, and of the Jew in particular, have completely changed, andtherefore there is no choice but to redefine who belongs to the state of the Jews.Israel must disengage from both the Nuremberg definitions—which define a Jew asanyone with a fourth-generation connection with Jewish blood—and from currentpolicies and practice, which recognize only the strictest Orthodox conversion as