The Hidden Question

According to the Mishnah, today’s arrival of the Hebrew month of Nisan signals the ascension of the Kings of Israel. While it may be a bit misplaced to announce a coronation, the resounding victory of Binyamin Netanyahu in last week’s elections would, at the very least, appear to be consistent with the spirit of the season. With his Likud party having won thirty seats, the formation of a ruling coalition with Netanyahu as Prime Minister appears to be all but certain.

In my mind, the most interesting thing about the election was not who won or lost, but the emergence of a different kind of dark horse, a topic that did not come to the fore until the eleventh hour: the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Think about it. Over the past few months, throughout the entire election season, our collective attention has been focused almost entirely on one subject: Iran. How close is Iran to a bomb? Which candidate is best able to stand up to the threat? How much enriched uranium is too much? And of course, was the Prime Minister right or wrong to bring his case before the US Congress? Some attention, no question, was paid to ISIS and a host of Israeli domestic issues, but if memory serves, our attention has decidedly not been focused on comparing the relative merits of each candidate’s recommendations towards resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

And then, in the final run-up to the election, the question burst forth. Netanyahu stated that a Palestinian state would never be formed on his watch, a pronouncement seemingly at odds with his 2009 Bar Ilan speech affirming a two-state solution. The location of Netanyahu’s speech, as much as the speech itself, was altogether telling: Har Homa, which, you may recall, has been ground zero on the question of settlements. So too, Netanyahu’s pre-election warning that Arab voters are “streaming in huge quantities to the polling stations,” was also understood as an attempt to leverage fears within the Israeli electorate that the Israeli-Arab community may displace the Jewish interests of Israel. In the days since the election, Netanyahu walked back his pre-election statements, reaffirming his support for a two-state solution. It is a fascinating turn of events. The one thing that nobody has been talking about, ultimately revealed to be the elephant in the room: the Arab population within Israel and the West Bank, the peace process, and the viability of a two-state solution. Not unlike a breakthrough in therapy, it is almost as if the election functioned to bring out the question buried deep inside Israel’s psyche, the question that anyone who knows their history knows sits at the very core of Israel’s soul.

As far back as 1907, the Hebrew writer Yitzhak Epstein penned an essay entitled “Sh’eilah Ne’elamah” – the hidden question. A pioneering Zionist, Epstein opens his essay: “Among the difficult issues regarding the rebirth of our people in its homeland, one issue outweighs them all: our relations with the Arabs.” Epstein understood that alongside the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of political Zionism there existed another historic current with which to contend: the Arab nationalist movement. In bringing the “hidden question” into the open, Epstein’s intention was to bolster, not undercut, the Zionist cause. In his own words, “If we don’t want to ruin our work, we must consider every step we take in our homeland, and we must urgently solve the question of our relations with the Arabs before it becomes a ‘Jewish question.’ We must not rest content with the current situation!” (Jew in the Modern World, pp. 631-635) For Epstein, the viability of the Jewish national project went hand-in-hand with Arab national aspirations. Not to openly contend with the “hidden question” – namely, how do we figure out all these competing claims for a single piece of land – would put the sustainability of the Zionist project itself at risk.

Epstein was not the first and certainly not the last to ask the “hidden question.” A review of the last hundred-plus years of Zionist literature is peppered with examples of our greatest minds grappling with the question of this “land of two peoples.” In 1891, Ahad Ha’am, the revered founder of cultural Zionism, returned from a visit to Palestine to pen an essay entitled “Truth from the Land of Israel” filled with reflections on the Arab population. Or, if you like, David Ben Gurion, who in a 1930 address to the World Congress for Labor Palestine in Berlin implored his comrades to pay attention to the Arab question, even “with all the discomfort that it entails for us.” (Mendes-Flohr in Buber, A Land of Two Peoples, p. 6) It wasn’t just the political left, like the 1925 founders of Brith Shalom, who asked the question openly. As early as 1921, Zev Jabotinsky, the ideological forefather of Netanyahu’s Likud party, openly acknowledged the Arab national movement. To be sure, in Jabotinsky’s mind, “Jewish needs” would always trump “Arab claims” (especially in the shadow of Hitler’s Germany), but even Jabotinsky would acknowledge the claims of others, at the same time as he fought on behalf of his people.

So too, as the national aspirations of the Jewish people took shape, the world at large would ever seek to manage the competing claims made by these two peoples for this one land. The same 1917 Balfour declaration in which “… his Majesty’s Government view[ed] with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” also asserted that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” The November 29, 1947 partition plan, likewise, sought to establish independent Arab and Jewish states side-by-side. From her very founding Israel has had to fight for her right to exist, all the while contending both internally and externally with the national narratives running parallel to her own.

These questions only became pricklier as the state of Israel went from abstraction to reality. When forced into war in 1967, Israel asserted her right to self-defense, a territorial expansion into Sinai, Gaza and the West Bank, which, whether intended, accidental, or otherwise, raised a far less hidden question: How should or shouldn’t Israel engage the millions of Arab non-citizens of this territory, which to this day is neither annexed nor returned? The “hidden question” is no longer merely the question of Jews and Arabs in pre-State Palestine, not just the question of how best to integrate Israeli-Arabs into the Jewish State, but ever since 1967, the question of how Israel can remain, with its present boundaries, both a Jewish and democratic state.

To be sure, neither in 1947 nor in 1967, nor really ever, did Israel’s Arab neighbors ask the question of co-existence with the same conscientiousness as did Israel. Arab and Palestinian rejection of the Jewish state has not afforded Israel the luxury of dropping her guard long enough to do more than theorize as to what peace would look like. From rejecting the partition plan, to attacking the new nation in 1948, to the three “nos” of the post-1967 Khartoum Resolution (no peace, no recognition, and no negotiations with Israel), to the Yom Kippur War, to the hundreds of rockets hurled into Israel from Gaza last summer, one cannot really blame Israel for her reticence to facilitate the creation of yet another unstable neighboring Arab country hostile to Israel’s existence. Certainly, the history of Israel’s withdrawals from Southern Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2006, which were both followed not by peace but by rockets, should give pause to any Israeli government thinking of doing the same in the West Bank. When Israel’s so-called partners are not even prepared to acknowledge her right to exist, even the most left-leaning supporters of Israel are at a loss to identify who it is exactly with whom Israel should be making peace.

There is no crisp answer to the “Hidden Question.” If there were, we wouldn’t still be asking it over one hundred years later. But even without an answer we need to keep asking the question, we need to do so publicly, and we need to expect our leaders to do the same. Of all the sacrificial offerings described in today’s Torah reading, the most interesting by far is the one offered by the Israelite chieftain who, upon being informed of a misdeed, publicly acknowledges it with a sin offering. Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai praises the good fortune of a people with such a leader. Why? Because in taking on personal agency to meet the exigencies of the hour, that leader inspires a generation to do the same. A true leader does not duck, dodge, or deny; a true leader does not sweep things under the rug or kick the can down the road. Neither our concerns regarding Iran and ISIS nor the painful shortcomings of the Palestinian leadership gives us a pass to avoid addressing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The Israeli electorate has spoken, and it is incumbent upon the next Israeli government to nurture the conditions by which coexistence for these two people with one land can one day emerge. The test of Netanyahu’s leadership is not whether he does or doesn’t solve the conflict, nor for that matter, whether I, you, or President Obama agrees with how he chooses to do so. The test for Netanyahu will be found, no differently than for the Israelite chieftain of old, in his ability to publicly name the challenge of the hour, articulate a vision moving forward, summon the political courage to act on it, and sustain that effort through thick and thin. It is not just for the Palestinian future that we work towards a solution, but rather for the future of a secure, Jewish, and democratic State of Israel. If, as it seems at the moment, the election has served to turn our attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then no matter what your personal politics may be, that is something we can all be pleased and hopeful about.

At the conclusion of every Jewish wedding ceremony, the seventh and final wedding blessing asks God to speedily restore to the cities of Judah and the outskirts of Jerusalem, the voices of bridegroom and bride, of joy and gladness, of young people feasting and singing – a hope that has been, time and again, shattered like the broken glass itself. Neither joy and gladness nor peace and security have yet arrived in the cities of Judah and outskirts of Jerusalem. Despite the failures of past generations, we must, nevertheless, try, try again. The alternative is just too awful to consider. We must look for every opportunity to draw this conflict to an end, and we must do so before any further windows of opportunity close. As Rabbi Tarfon taught: “It is not incumbent upon us to complete the work, but neither are we at liberty to desist from it.” (Pirkei Avot 2:1) May the democratically elected leadership of Israel find the courage to ask all the uncomfortable and hidden questions, may our would-be partners do the same, and may we all press forward pursuing peace, building a future filled with Hebrew and Arabic shouts of joy and gladness, a future that we all so desperately want and need.