Peoplehood, Thin and Strong: Rethinking Israel-Diaspora Relations for a New Century (original) (raw)
Related papers
The State of Israel and the Jewish Diaspora
2004
This Report examines in depth the complex relationship that exists between the State of Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. The Report comprises five main parts and several appendices which present some important documents of interest for the Israel-Diaspora relationship. The first part on The State of Israel and the Jewish Diaspora after a review of some general unique and shared patterns of Diasporas, presents an overview of the Jewish People and Israel in historical perspective, followed by a discussion of the peculiar double role of the State of Israel as the State of the Jewish people and the State of its citizens. An overview is also provided of the main legal provisions in the State of Israel concerning the relationship with the Diaspora, namely in the area of citizenship. The second part presents a detailed overview of the Demography of World Jewish Population. Attention is given to the determinants of Jewish population change as is the case of other sub-populations in a broader context, and to the ensuing peculiar conceptual and technical Issues. After a discussion of Jews in the global system, detailed data are given on World Jewish population size and geographical distribution in 2004, and an overall picture and prospects for the future are provided. The third part provides a detailed examination of the Institutional and Organizational SetUp of Jewish communities in Israel and in the Diaspora. It briefly raises some general principles of governance now observable among the Jewish people, and follows describing the main global and international Jewish organizations, the major organizations based in the United States, Jewish organizations in other countries. Some overall analysis and conclusions are presented in the end. The fourth part discusses Strategic Challenges that stand in front of the Jewish people, beginning with an overall balance and followed by a detailed analysis of the impact of external environment on the Jewish people and Judaism, and major internal trends within the Jewish people with special attention to the interactions between Israel and Diaspora. The fifth part deals with Future Prospects with special attention to future common decision-making mechanisms such as the Presidential suggestion to create a Second House devoted to the discussion of common issues between the State of Israel and the Diaspora. The final remarks reconsider the challenges of peoplehood survival and interaction in the current era of globalization.
Journal of International Political Theory, 2017
This article explores a question that is often assumed but rarely addressed: What does Israel provide ideationally for Diaspora Jews that serves as the basis for Diaspora/Israel relations and justifies the importance of Israel for Jewish identity? Whereas past literature on this topic has either assumed an answer to this question or debated survey results and demographics, this article takes a different approach by not assuming an answer to this question. The article argues that Diaspora Jews’ relationship with Israel is best understood phenomenologically. The significance of Israel for Diaspora Jews is found in a type of obligation that is political but is not based in sovereignty or law but instead in meaning that serves as a form of authority and functions as part of the phenomenological structure characterizing Jewish being-in-the-world in the age of Israel. Using a combination of personal reflection, empirical research, and theoretical investigation, the article concludes by su...
There are two main opposing narratives employed by Israel's elite in its interaction with the Diaspora: one depicts the Jewish state as ‘strong, protective and salvaging’ and the other portrays it as a weak nation that ‘dwells alone’. This article argues that it is not only the two opposing narratives but also the same imagination agent that is an essential element of both Israel's political goals for the Diaspora and the Diaspora's transnational characteristics. It will also present a model for analysing the relationship between historical trauma and threat from future traumas as imagination agents, the Homeland political goals and trauma as the main diasporic characteristic.
The Jewish Diaspora and the State of Israel
Since the biblical times, the Land of Israel has been the centre of focus, both spiritually and theologically. The historical roots, culture and the religious identity of the Jewish people – within Israel – can be traced back many centuries, even before Judaism was formally unified and centralised (Safran, 2005). Moreover, the existence of Judaism and its adherents within Israel can be seen perpetually throughout history. This further implies the spiritual and theological importance and role of the Holy Land from a Jewish perspective. However, over time, the perception and interpretation of Judaism and its teachings have changed dramatically: from Orthodox, to Conservation and then Reform. Therefore, this essay will briefly assess the relationship between the Jewish Diaspora and the state of Israel throughout history. In addition, the findings will be supplemented with an examination and overview of the Orthodox and Reform perspectives on the modern state of Israel.
Israel: A Diaspora of Memories. Introduction
Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, 2019
Since the late nineteenth century and the emergence of the Zionist idea, the Land of Israel – after 1948, the State of Israel – has been presented as a shelter where Jews would build a state of their own and put aside their past life and experience in the diaspora. The return of the Jews to the Land of Israel would bring about the emergence of a new “Hebrew” man and woman, of a unified and rejuvenated people, speaking a common language and sharing one ethno-national identity. In fact, Zionism viewed the diaspora (think of the idea of shlilat ha-galut) as a set of negative parentheses in Jewish history, something to be forgotten and substituted with other (national) memories. So the ideology and policies built on that basis before and especially after the founding of the State of Israel intended to erase the diasporic origin of the (Israeli) Jew and support this Jew’s feeling of having grown up in a void and of originating as a tabula rasa of sorts in Israel. Socialist Zionism and an originally European (Ashkenazi) identity became the hegemonic models to which Jewish migrants would need to conform. However, despite efforts to gather all the Jews from the diaspora in Israel and fuse them as part of the so-called mizug galuyiot (“ingathering of exiles”), since its beginnings and especially in the last few decades the country has paradoxically experienced the emergence of new, Israeli, diasporas.
The evolution of home-state positions towards diaspora formation: Israel and its two diasporas
Global Networks, 2024
How do home-state elites react to emigrants who form diaspora communities abroad, and how do these attitudes change over time? The article explores these questions through an analysis of the discourse and policies of Israeli elites towards emigrants who created distinct diaspora communities and established ties with local Jewish diaspora communities between 1977 and 2023. The article highlights the important role that ethnic and national identities and the prospects of emigrants’ eventual return play in such attitudinal shifts. The home state may initially see diaspora formation as harmful for precipitating emigration and obstructing repatriation and ethnic immigration. However, when it becomes clear that the return of many emigrants is unlikely, home-state elites may come to support and even promote the formation of new diaspora communities and their ties with older diaspora communities to offset emigrants’ assimilation into their host society and increase their attachment to the home state.
Diaspora, kinship and loyalty: the renewal of Jewish national security
International affairs, 2002
The beginning of a new round of Palestinian-Israeli violence in September 2000 and the complete collapse of the Oslo process brought to an end, at least for the time being, Israeli and diasporic Jewish expectations of peace and a transformation in their relations with the Arab and Muslim worlds. These developments also, by extension, brought about an apparent end to Israeli and Jewish hopes for a permanent release from both a perceived sense of isolation internationally and a persistent preoccupation with existential questions of security and, indeed, survival. The war of attrition that has followed the initial outbreak of riots has also 'resecuritized' the relationship between Israel and the Jewish diaspora, just as the events of 11 September 2001 took the subject of Jewish kinship and security dilemmas one dramatic step further. The Israeli-Jewish diaspora relationship had been evolving in different directions during the Oslo years. For almost a decade, many Israelis and diaspora Jews believed that a comprehensive Middle East peace would alter fundamentally both Israel's Jewish character and relations between the sovereign Jewish state and Jewish existence in the West. Peace would have enabled Israel to achieve a level of normalization that would have loosened the bonds of involvement with and responsibility for the diaspora, while releasing the diaspora from burdensome entanglements with Israeli security issues that had overshadowed their lives in their countries of domicile for over a generation. Until very recently many American observers remarked upon this process of growing detachment, called by one writer the 'waning of the American Jewish love affair with Israel'. 1 This redefinition of relations between the two communities was indeed most noticeable where the link between Israeli security and the diaspora had been the strongest in terms of identity formation and community mobilization: in the United States, whose political system facilitates ethnic involvement in foreign policy. Jewish Americans clearly have the strongest voice among US-based diasporas. In the west European context, Jews
Moses Hess, who has proven a remarkably accurate i prophet of the Jewish renaissance, was surely correct in his conviction that the Jewish people once returned to its homeland would create modes of Judaism and Jewishness not conceivable let alone achievable in the Diaspora. Only forty years into Statehood -and forty years is a very short time indeed in the history of either institutions or cultures -Israelis choose among options for Jewish commitment unavailable outside the borders of their language and their land, have already put in place a distinctive Jewish culture not lacking in either quality or authenticity, and have begun to rethink religiosity in keeping with their renewed presence in the holy land. These are happy developmentsample cause for celebration on this fortieth birthday of our Jewish state. However, the accuracy of Zionist theory in these regards must cause us to question several others of its leading assumptions. Precisely because the Jewish reality that is Israel is so distinctive, because it is unprecedented from the point of view of all past Jewish history, and because it stands "opposite" a diaspora reality which does have precedent but is in its own terms no less successful, the categories in which we view the relation -25 -