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How Jews in America and Israel Look at the World

(Tablet) Einat Wilf and Oren Gross - America is a country where anyone arriving on its shores could become fully and completely American. This idea of the universal America is as inspiring as it is exceptional. The U.S. is the only country that was purposefully built on universal ideals. The rest of the world's countries are not universal nations, and almost none of them aspire or even pretend to be so. Ever since the 20th-century collapse of empires, the Earth is divided between nation-states - almost all based on a single dominant national, ethnic, linguistic, or religious group, often with some other national, ethnic, linguistic, or religious minorities. Israel, as the nation-state of the Jewish people, with an Arab national, ethnic, linguistic minority, is well within the global norm. When Israel is measured by the EU guidelines on how nation-states should treat their national, ethnic, and linguistic minorities - for example, in providing schooling, government services, and road signs in the minority's language and providing the ability to celebrate holidays - Israel emerges with strong marks. This achievement is especially impressive since Israel operates in the rare situation that its minority belongs to the dominant national, ethnic, linguistic majority in the region - most of which is still officially at war with it, and continues to deny the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in any borders. In fact, the status of the Arab minority in Israel during wartime is better than that of minorities in many countries which are at peace. Most Jews in America still believe that Zionism is deeply entwined both with their Jewish and American identities, and that Zionism incorporates both the particular and the universal. Jews in Israel will continue to celebrate the fact that they finally live in the sovereign nation-state of the Jewish people and can therefore walk this Earth knowing that someone has their back. Einat Wilf, a former member of the Israeli Parliament, is co-author of The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream has Obstructed the Path to Peace. Oren Gross is Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School.
2020-08-20 00:00:00
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