No More Enemies #2

by Deb Reich I have often wondered if the Jewish Israeli fundamentalists who want to expel all Arabs, foreigners, non-Jews, etc., and create a country with only people like themselves in it have ever truly taken the time to look down the road at the ultimate outcome of what they aspire to do. The same is true, of fundamentalist Palestinian ultra-nationalists. Imagine how the reality would look if these “us and us only” advocates (on either side) were ever to succeed. Their essentially sterile model of a monochromatic country with all its diversity flushed away could never work. To begin with, the Jews of Israel are themselves a hugely diverse population with a vast range of geographic, linguistic, and religious traditions and lifestyles, some considered wildly heretical by other Jews in a way that offers very little ground for compromise. And this is before you even get to the fledgling movement for feminism within Orthodox Judaism. That movement features the courageous deconstruction of Jewish tradition to try to tease out the threads of social conservatism that deny women full partnership in religious life, while leaving the spiritual mosaic of Judaism intact and perhaps stronger for that effort. If the extremist Jewish zealots’ monochromatic paradigm is not rejected once and for all by Israeli society in favor of a much more universal and inclusive vision, then the moment these zealots get their longed-for objective of a country with no “non-Jews” in it, the conflict will simply shift into the “Jewish-only” arena and continue unabated, Jew against Jew. The hard-line Jewish nationalists who want all others evicted can offer only an unsustainable foundation of discrimination against Jews who differ or who are different, or who are deemed “not Jewish enough.” This approach offers thought control disguised as Torah learning, with the strictest interpretations of halakha (Jewish law) becoming the only permitted interpretations, and with rule by force complete with vigilante hit squads to enforce codes of modesty and so on. What a bleak picture! But there is an even more profound basis on which to critique any such plan, and it has to do with the inherent value of diversity in the first place. There may be lots of diversity within the Jewish world in Israel and elsewhere, but designing a country around “us Jews and only us Jews” is nevertheless not a diversity-friendly program. The simplest path to a healthy diversity is to stop labeling those who are different as the enemy, and bring them into the circle as full partners. “Diversity,” as William McDonough and Michael Braungart put it (Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, 2002), “is nature’s design framework.” Instead of trying to minimize, or (how ridiculous it sounds!) even eliminate diversity, we need to be fostering it. Resilience is crucial for sustainability, and diversity is crucial for resilience. No More Enemies. Deb Reich is an American-Israeli Jew who lived for several years in Muslim Arab Palestinian communities in Israel. She trained in cross-cultural mediation and group facilitation at Wahat al Salam-Neve Shalom (Oasis of Peace), the shared Jewish/Arab village near Latrun founded in the 1970s. Deb has freelanced widely for civil society organizations in Israel, and was a staff translator with Haaretz-International Herald Tribune. When her book No More Enemies was published (2011), Deb was living in Jerusalem/Al Quds.