Adaptation to gentile rule enabled Jews to preserve their nationhood without a land for a long while. But with the advent of populist democracies, politically powerless Jews became so tempting a target that disaster was inevitable. Although Zionism “tried to develop a ‘new Jew’,”Harvard Prof. Ruth Weiss argued last week (in the second annual Bernstein Memorial Lecture), there were still left in Israel vestiges of the ‘old Jew’ ” who was habitually politically accommodating ”. It prevents Israel, she believes, from trying “to convince its neighbors and the world that it expects their accommodation to the needs of the Jews.”

Prof. Weiss also warned that “the politics of adaptation and accommodation are the cause of the unique kind of hostility that is leveled against the Jews”. Therefore, Israeli alacrity to accommodate Palestinians and Syrians demands (whipped to fever pitch by top Israeli negotiators, such as General Saguy, and by the media; they reiterate Assad’s bargaining demands as if they were holy writ that must to be obeyed or else) will not result in a coveted peace now, but in growing Moslem hostility and demands for further capitulation.

Even if Prof. Weiss is right about the disastrous consequences that Israel’s weak negotiating positions may have, her thesis that they reflect an exilic habit of accommodation raises as many questions as it answers. Prof. Weiss judiciously rejects the senseless notion that “exilic Judaism stood outside politics”, as if it were possible to live on earth without the pull of gravity. She mentions the rich variety of political strategies Jews adopted in order to survive, especially, as Prof. Salo Baron noted, their effort “to compensate by economic strength for political weakness”; more accurately their mostly successful parleying of economic gain into political protection. For make no mistake, despite the excruciatingly high price Jewish survival exacted, considering the extremely murderous environments Jews inhabited, their opting for economic advantage and their avoidance (on the whole) of the temptation of messianic longings for temporal power was sane, creative and essentially successful. Few minor outcast nations, as the Jews were, indeed few nations that were their contemporaries in the first millennium have survived at all, or in their original culture as the Jews did.

Unfortunately, economic forces are like a powerful winds that can also go against you. The economic disasters of post World War 1 inflation and the Great Depression caused populist antisemitic democracy to have such devastating consequences, in Germany, Poland and other countries too. The Jews’ luck simply ran out.

It is also debatable whether the strategy of diaspora adaptation became an innate need “to win protection by supplying local needs”, a cowering passivity, as Prof. Weiss suggests. A sweeping generalization, it cannot account for the immense activism Jews have always exhibited, the huge risks they were taking when constantly migrating to unknown lands and engaging in far flung trade.

A cowering people could not have produced an Amon Mi’magenza or Shmuel Ha’nagid, a Shabtai Zvi or a Trotsky, financial geniuses such as the Rothschilds or the many other towering man of action, resolve and intellect. Accommodation could not spawn the hutzpah to try and reach the top, to stir the pot, no matter how difficult or impossible the task seemed. As Prof. Weiss remarks, Jews did exhibit (she thinks paradoxically) a “political dynamism” that created Zionism and Israel; or made many more participate in socialist agitation and in violent communist revolutions.

People, being complex, respond differently to different circumstances and incentives. Even tenacious people become weary or change their minds under the influence of certain ideologies. Consider the anti-Zionist ultra -orthodox “Neturei Karta” who are so extremely “accommodating” that they implore Arafat for protection. They do so because they believe in God’s absolute power over history and consider historical activism as a revolt against Him, and Zionism a false messianism.

Perhaps Israeli accomodationists expresses modern ideological convictions rather than atavistic diaspora attitudes. Theirs’ is a diametrically opposite wish to what Prof. Weiss postulates, a desire to deny any connection with the miserable exilic past identified with traditional Judaism, and embrace instead an optimistic universal dispensation, secular Socialism, which has been holding sway in Israel for over seventy years. Israelis on the left may have become accomodationists (and hate Haredim and nationalists) because they seek “normalcy”, a “state of all its citizens”, free of the yoke of Jewish tradition. Normalcy, they seem to believe, requires that they make peace now, and pay almost any price to get it.

If this is so, the dangerous policy consequences may still be the same, but the way to tackle the problem may be quite different from what Prof. Weiss implies.

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