Local News

The state of the State of Israel: Rabbi Daniel Gordis

November 9, 20100
Zion Ozeri

By Eric Nusbaum, Assistant Editor, JTNews

When StandWithUs Northwest booked Daniel Gordis as the keynote speaker for its annual community reception, organizers were making a choice: This would not be a lighthearted evening. Gordis, an author, rabbi, and Ph.D., is not one to shy away from tough issues — he makes it a point to confront them.
In 2009, Gordis’ seventh book, Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End, won the National Jewish Book Award. His “Dispatches from an Agitated State” e-mails, essays on wide-ranging topics, regularly arrive in thousands of inboxes and appear on his Web site DanielGordis.org. Gordis’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Jerusalem Post, and Commentary, among other publications.
Gordis writes a great deal on the dynamics of Israeli life. In a recent dispatch, he bemoaned Israel’s shortcomings in liberal arts education at the expense of science and mathematics. And earlier this year, he wrote a column in the Jerusalem Post chastising Israel’s ultra-Orthodox who “reject the idea of a ‘Jewish and democratic’ state.”
These issues are internal, but his writings also ripple outward, such as into the state of domestic Israeli politics. For instance, the international community might see Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unwillingness to further freeze settlement building as intractable and become frustrated. But Gordis says it’s important to have context to consider domestic concerns — a botched or unreturned gesture would cost Netanyahu his coalition in the Knesset — and the fact that Israel lacks a strong partner in the Palestinian Authority.
While in Washington State, Gordis will talk about Israel’s standing in the international community — in particular the concerted efforts to delegitimize Israel by governments, world leaders, and non-governmental groups.
“The delegitimization issue is the most potent weapon that Israel’s opposition has,” Gordis told JTNews. “It is more powerful than Egyptian tanks and Syrian MiGs — because Egyptian tanks and Syrian MiGs we know how to defend ourselves against.”
Jews and Israel supporters in Washington are likely familiar with one branch of the delegitimization movement known as BDS, which calls for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions on Israel. BDS supporters successfully passed a boycott on Israeli products at the Olympia Food Co-op earlier this year.
Gordis says BDS is not pro-Palestinian, but anti-Israel. It’s up to American Jews to step in on Israel’s behalf, he says, partly because Israelis are almost entirely unaware of these local issues and their far-reaching implications.
“The Israeli press is doing a very minimal job focusing on the international delegitimization movement,” Gordis said. “BDS has gotten virtually no coverage in the Israeli press here at all.”
Gordis was born and educated in the United States, and moved with his family to Israel in 1998. His roots in both major hubs of modern Jewry, America, and Israel, inform his perspective of an important and powerful connection between the two societies.
“I think the American obligation to Israel is very simple.” Gordis said. “It is to understand first and foremost that the American Jewish life that we take for granted — the sense of belonging the sense of pride the sense of a bright future — is because of Israel.”
But simply understanding that American Jews are indebted to Israel is not enough, says Gordis. American Jews have an obligation to stay informed on the delegitimization movement and its potential consequences, and further, stand up for Israel — whatever their particular politics.
“There’s StandWithUs and there’s CAMERA and there’s AIPAC and there’s even J Street,” Gordis said. “And American Jews who want to counter delegitimization should support those movements and get involved.”
Gordis does not believe that the need to defend Israel’s right to exist should stifle conversation about Israel among American Jews, even if the dialogue is critical and weighty.
“Sovereignty is not an end to itself,” Gordis said. “There are certain things you want to accomplish, there are certain things you want to do.”
Those things aren’t up to just Israelis, but Jews everywhere.
“I think that American Jews should be involved in the conversation about what Israel should and should not be,” he said. “Israel casts a certain light on Jews wherever they are. But American Jews have to recognize that if they have this conversation they are having it in a period of time when Israel is being marginalized as a rogue state.”

See the other articles in the state of the State of Israel series: