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among other nations without the three bases of national existence--without land, without central political authority and without means of self-defense. Jews suspended their return to sovereignty not until such time as they would be ready to recover it, but until such time as God would declare them ready to recover it, making God the guarantor of their political power. Jews developed a Politics of Accommodation which has been mistaken by many historians as a form of spirituality, or a "non-political" existence. In fact, the Politics of Accommodation worked in complementarity with other forms of power.The Politics of Accommodation had many advantages. Jews tried to compensate through economic ingenuity for political dependency. Seeking shelter under the wings of power, they tried to provide whatever was lacking, excelling in intellectual property, portable professions and assets, risk-management. They often became visibly wealthy and prominent, reaping the rewards of their success. But the absence of their own central political authority with their own means of self-defense meant the Jews could never protect what they amassed. This made them the ideal target, a no-fail enemy, for any aggressor, whether the mob or authority, foreign invader or native insurgent.
One of these days, I hope to describe the Politics of Accommodation in all its genius and fatality. For now, let me note that the Jews and Gentiles drew different conclusions from the same pattern of evidence. Convinced that they were protected by God's sovereign power (which trumped mere human power), Jews rebounded from every successive expulsion, massacre and pogrom, pointing to the miracle of their survival. But the Gentiles inferred that the Jews could be destroyed, their assets seized, their properties confiscated, wth absolute impunity. The Jews had invented a strategy of postponed political autonomy to avoid another great destruction such as that of the Second Commonwealth. But in our century, the Politics of Accommodation reached its apotheosis in the destruction of European Jewry.
Zionism's diagnosis of the Jewish danger in Europe preceded the Holocaust. Ever larger factions within the Zionist movement tried to recover Jewish territorial sovereignty, to establish central Jewish political authority and to ensure means of national self-defense. When the State of Israel was established, the Law of Return became the foundation of a revitalized autonomous nation. But the Arabs know the Jews through their history of exile, and they remain convinced that Jews lack the political experience, resolve and organization to maintain their national sovereignty in the centuries ahead. The example of the Holocaust inspires Arab elites to insist that "time is on their side." They know us Jews as the idiot savant of politics.
We Jews stand between two catastrophic po-litical alternatives, lacking any models of political endurance. The odds against us are overwhelming--as our enemies know better than we. The greatest single error in the short history of modern Israel--greater, because more essential, than the Oslo accords--was Ben-Gurion's accommodation to Jewishness when he exempted yeshiva students from national service. Allowing an exception to citizenship, as well as of Judaism, since it pretended that Torah study would exceed military study as a religious value in Israel. The Jewish people's "right" to sovereignty can only be seized, not granted, and it depends on a process of self-emancipation that has barely begun. A sovereign Jewish people will have to reevaluate all considerations of "Jewishness" according to the priorities of Jewish statecraft, unless we are to fail yet again, and again, and again.
Ruth R. Wisse is Professor of Yiddish and Comparative Literature at Harvard University.
Dogmatism is a condition of mind in which essential practical concepts are perceived with such clarity that only one possible interpretation of reality exists. In such a case, all evidence suggesting contrary interpretations-and therefore alternate courses of action-simply disappears from sight, indeed is inconceivable. But there also exists an opposite condition, one of conceptual decadence, in which a central concept is perceived so dimly, with such feebleness, that even its adherents can no longer grasp it amid the din of competing facts and concepts springing out of the fabric of reality. It is well known that the dogmatist--regardless of his particular faith or persuasion--is capable of sustaining protracted, consistent, and even fanatical activity on behalf of his idea--precisely because he can see it so well; precisely because, to his mind, the idea never falters, or changes form, or disappears from sight. But the decadent, even when he professes loyalty to the very same idea as the dogmatist, sees his concept so poorly that it is never clear to him what it entails, either in terms of thought or action; thus he is forever confusing it and superseding it with other concepts, never quite aware when he has accidentally eroded some peripheral aspect, nor even when he has succeeded in inadvertently demolishing its essence. It goes without saying that the decadent is incapable of protracted and consistent efforts on behalf of his idea; the concept in his head is in such a state of dissolution that when he tries to apply it, half the time he ends up shooting at his own forces.
The concept of the Jewish state, once a matter of dogma among Jews and their friends, has now reached a condition of decadence. For Theodor Herzl,
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Outpost - 4 - February 1999