Some considerations about how to (re)think our relationship with the State of Israel

If Steve M. Cohen and Ari Y. Kelman´s study took place in Argentina, I am sure the result would not have been very different. The new generations do not feel the same attachment that the last generations felt for Israel. But perhaps the central point at the time of evaluating this change lays not in assesing the intensity of this feeling, but understanding what this generation thinks, what´s their precise feeling towards Israel. Or perhaps, more importantly, to ask how they define their place within Judaism and Jewish peoplehood, and then yes, the place Israel holds.
To focus on the degree of affective proximity or distance towards Israel, is to lose the idea that Israel has sense in relational terms. Jewish identity, Jewish peopledhood, diaspora, Zionism and Israel, are terms which are structurally related one to another. The change in one of them pushes a reconsideration of the rest. And each one of these notions is deeply rooted in the experience of each Jew.
If we accept this, we must face questions such as: whether or not the situation of Jews in the western countries today is equal to that which they experienced at the end of the XIX century, or during the 1930's and 1940's?, in what terms are the ways the new generations live and feel the experience of the Shoah similar to the previous one, when the contact with survivors is more and more difficult?, is it possible to think, perhaps, that the social and economic situation of Israel today is the same today as it was in the 1960´s, or 1970´s?, that its internal political problems and external challenges are the same? All the references of the Jewish world have changed, and a lot, even for those who cling to a past they pretend has not moved since ancient times. If the diaspora has seized to be the place of pure negativity in the terms zionism used to indicate; if the contact with some Jewish languages, the Shoah and the migratory experience, now must be transmitted through education and no longer by a direct enconunter with the carriers of those worlds; if the borders of the State of Israel, in spite of the multiple challenges, are safer than in 1948 or 1973; if the civilized world has accepted to recognize and to defend its existence; then, we must ask ourselves whether the feeling of a young person –third generation of Jews born in Argentina-, towards the State of Israel ,can, or, better still, must, be the same as that of his or her parents or grandparents?
To expect the same linkage, just because the young person is Jewish, is to ignore the dynamics of history and politics. But to recognize this means to give up to the logic of change and to wait for a new transformation that may take place in one or more of the terms than conform the Jewish universe so that our relationship with Israel gains sense once again? No way, to aknoweldge these historical transformations is no more than the basis for taking an active role in Jewish life, for recreating it, and, within this frame, for reinterpreting our relationship with Israel. The Jewish past is filled with chapters of men and women who, understanding the pulse of their time, decided to act in a deliberate form to alter in a radical way the course of history: how not to see, for example, in the renaissance of the Hebrew as daily language, national language, political language, one of the most fantastic conscious actions of the modern Jewish world.
Claiming the knowledge of the answer to such a challenge would not only be pretentious, but, basically, erroneous. I am convinced, on the contrary, that we must return to a state of constant debate, of discussion in the best Talmudic style, that we have lost. There are Jewish thinkers that wait to be reappropriated. The world in which Pinsker, Ajad Haam, Moses Hess or Martin Buber wrote has disappeared, but not thus their ideas. We must go for them, interrogate them, review them, discuss them. And behind these thinkers, are many others that still have fundamental things to say to us about what it is to be a modern, or, why not, a posmodern Jew, about how the existence of a Jewish State can be thought.__Although the political defense of Israel must be made heard in each local or international forum that demands it, the political action cannot and must not become pure praxis. In an action that doesn´t interrogate itself, that doesn´t reflect about the values and the spirit that guide it. The always urgent circumstances that force us to be alert and to act with pressure and celerity, can, at the same time, make us lose our north and even weaken the convictions of many. This is what must not happen. Politics cannot give off nor deny the vitality of the ideas. Let us recover the sources, let us recover the debate.

Alejandro Dujovne, Buenos Aires