Israel At War 5785: Shemot – What Makes an Authentic People?
Jews are frequently referred to as a people. But it wasn’t always so. We began as a family, its fortunes documented in Breishit, the first book of our Torah. The book of Shemot describes how this family became a people.
In this week’s Torah portion, also called Shemot, we are for the first time called an am, a people. But we did not define ourselves thus; rather, it was Pharaoh who did so:
Vayomer el-amo hineh am b’nei yisrael rav b’atzum mimenu (And he said to his people, “here, a people, children of Israel, are more numerous and stronger than we.”) (Ex. 1:9)
Pharaoh named the children of Israel a people to contrast them to his own people.
Perhaps that is initially how any people is defined: as separate from another group. But this is not enough. Ultimately, a people must unify around something organic: kinship ties, a shared history, a set of values, a mission. In a future Torah portion we will read that, right after receiving the commandments at Sinai, kol ha’am kol echad vayomru kol-hadvarim asher-diber Hashem na’aseh, all the people said with one voice, “All the words that Hashem spoke, we will do.” (Ex. 24:3) They were not just non-Egyptians; they were a people in their own right.
This am, this people shared kinship ties, all being descended from the family of seventy that went down to Egypt. They shared a history: the experience of slavery, the miraculous deliverance from Egypt, and the revelation at Sinai. They shared the values given and accepted at Sinai, and the directive to bring those values to all humanity. Their peoplehood was authentic, born out of shared experience and mission.
It would have been easy for these victims of slavery and attempted genocide to define themselves by bitterness and hatred. But they chose to unify around a positive, not a negative.
In the United States and some European countries, various white supremacist/neo-Nazi groups speak of a “white culture” that they want to preserve. But there is no such thing as white culture. Culture is not a function of skin color but of shared experience and history, and white-skinned people come from many tribes and nations, each with individual formative histories. The French are very different from Germans, and both are very different from Russians. White racist groups are reacting, perhaps with envy as well as resentment, to the authentic peoplehood of American blacks, born out of a common history of slavery and Jim Crow.
The Arabs who call themselves Palestinians were not a people distinct from the other Arabs around them when Palestine was a part of a larger empire that included present-day Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, among others. Ironically, the war the larger Arab world declared and carried out against Israel and the subsequent failure of this Arab world to accept and integrate Arab refugees from the British Mandate after 1948 began the formation of a distinct Palestinian identity. Their refusal to accept a Jewish state and the subsequent wars, intifadas, and terrorism, solidified this identity. But it is as much an oppositional identity based on Jew-hatred as it is based on this brief shared history.
When there is no unifying principle but hatred, when identity is formed only in opposition to another identity, a people will not stand the test of time. Even today, both in Gaza and the West Bank, the Palestinians are divided into clans, and clan-based identification competes with national Palestinian identification. The Palestinians will never have their own functioning state unless and until they give up not only clan identification but also defining themselves as a people whose mission is to make the land judenrein. There can be “two states for two peoples” only if there are truly two peoples, each with a mission to build, not to destroy.
Perhaps the initial Palestinian mission could be to build a functioning state and gather in its refugees from other lands, just as Israel did. In parallel, as did Israel, a future Palestinian state could choose to express positive values based in religion. For example, Islam commands that its followers practice charity towards the poor and needy. Israel has a track record of sharing its medical and technological innovation with poorer countries and helping with disaster relief all over the world. A future Palestinian state that focused on building a strong economy for itself could export charity to others in need.
What about Israeli Arabs, many, if not most, of whom define themselves as Palestinians, yet increasingly are integrating into Israeli society? Particularly since October 7th, many say they identify more strongly as Israelis. A good model might be, ironically, American Jews. While identifying as Americans, to varying degrees we retain a distinctive sense of ourselves as a unique people. And just as diaspora Jews feel strongly connected to and identify with Israel, Israeli Arabs may someday experience the same emotional connection and kinship ties with a future Palestinian state. But only if this state can build itself around a positive identity that does not define itself in opposition to its Jewish neighbors.
Right now, with Gaza in ruins and terror cells bursting forth in the West Bank, such a scenario feels like a distant mirage. Yet stranger things, including the rebirth of Israel, have happened. Two proud, self-confident peoples could then see the day when war and bloodshed cease, and peace envelops the land.