A few days ago, a friend drew my attention to a letter published in British daily "The Guardian" entitled "We’re Not Celebrating Israel's Anniversary" (April 30th, 2008). The roughly one hundred people signing this letter informed readers that while many Jewish organizations would celebrate in May the 60-th anniversary of the State of Israel - an event of understandable importance in the context of centuries of persecutions that culminated in the Holocaust - they, as Jews and British subjects would not join in the celebration. Some of them - highly recognizable personalities in science, culture and academia (among them, Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize winner for literature) - seemed keen on expressing their dissent by bringing up exclusively the Palestinian narrative of the Middle East conflict. The tragedy of 750000 Palestinian refugees - presented tendentiously and one-sidedly (a quote from Edward Said, for instance, compares the Holocaust with the Palestinian Naqba) is used with no mention or even a hint to the history, dynamics and causes of the belligerent situation in that part of the world.

The right to free opinion

We live in a democratic world where anyone has the right, of course, to express an opinion in the media. "The Guardian’s” decision to publish such a viewpoint comes therefore as no surprise, since the newspaper has been often critical of Israel. I’m not surprised even by statements expressed in the letter, such as: the anniversary of Israel’s Independence is founded on terrorism and massacre; Israel violates international laws, inflicts collective and monstrous punishments against the civilian population of Gaza; Israel deprives Palestinians of their land, houses, human rights and national aspirations, etc. We can find all these statements in many publications around the world, as well as in Israel.

To their credit, some authors do not avoid presenting the political circumstances and the history of Israel, unrecognized by neighboring Arab countries for decades (and by some of them, not to this day), a country whose existence is permanently threatened. When the writing is in good faith, even when some statements are exaggerated, or partial (and may hurt), they are still legitimate - as part of the price we pay for democracy and the free world we live in.

But that is not the reason why these hundred English Jews signed the letter - in fact more of an appeal that ends with this very forceful statement: "We’ll celebrate when Arab and Jew live as equals in a peaceful Middle-East." If these signatories wished to petition the world, or criticize the policy of the Olmert government, or even deny Israel’s right to exist as a state for the Jews, they could have added to their list signatures with no ethnic differentiation. But, alas, the list has only Jewish names, the writers underlining their Jewish-ness and using it as core addition to the argument, considering such dissociation with Israel as their duty to the world, as Jews.

When such a letter is published in the Guardian, in a country threatened by fundamentalism Islamic terrorism and where anti-Semitic events are not rare, a suspicion arises that the signatories are really trying to preempt the imagined accusation that “You, Jews, you dodged the issue!”; that they suffer from a minority complex forcing them apriori to exonerate themselves from any kind of identification with Israel; and that they fear their silence would embolden anti-Semitism that, in truth, has never needed encouragement to show its ugly head.

History repeats itself

Israel, of course, as democratic state and a potential refuge for all the Jews wishing to settle here, will keep open doors to each and every Jew, even those afflicted by self-hate or those who rabidly judge the Israeli government policy. Nothing can or should prevent the signatories of this letter to sing a hymn honoring Her Majesty the Queen. But, if by a tragic turn of history their lives were in danger, this letter would neither serve them as an alibi on British soil nor give them a free pass against problems, despite their public stature. They don’t seem to realize that the mere existence of Israel confers them dignity. They can go on ignoring that Egypt and Jordan agreed to sign a peace treaty with Israel because they wanted to, while the rest of the Arab world remained hostile and chose to cultivate and thereby perpetuate the deplorable situation of the Palestinian refugees, instead of helping them. As far as I am concerned, these Jews, members of a minority loudly dismissing any kinship with Israel, should better stay in England. History, however, has this annoying habit of repeating itself while people don't seem capable to learn from it.

I am reminded here of the words of a Jewish Community leader who believes that "as long as the Jews stay put, there will be no anti-Semitism." In other words, blame the victim! During my trips to different countries I frequently come across the usual anti-Semitic stereotypes, stemming from both public and private people. They ran the whole gamut from "you, Jews", "Jewish, but a nice guy" or other similar transparent generalizations or prejudices, to the acerbic hate based on ethnicity alone. Some of these people were highly respectable personalities in art or medicine - some were even Jewish. They would quickly add they were Jews by chance, or by faith, and would not be identified with Israel for anything in the world; for them, Israel had the same emotional impact as Switzerland or Congo. With no ties to the Jewish ethos, the history of the Jews and the tragic moments in their early or more recent history, they see themselves as citizens of the countries where they live and loyal to those countries, or as citizens of the world and the universe.

The universe, unfortunately, is not always that welcoming, and the "Jew" stamp reappears periodically when one least expects it. I heartily recommend Claude Miller's 2007 movie "A Secret”, which - among other things - captures the drama of a French Jew desperately trying to rid himself of his Judaism and of the image of the "scared Jew" (the hero minimizes the effects of racial laws before the Holocaust, and although he later loses both wife and child at Auschwitz, when he remarries after the war he converts his new son to Catholicism.)

The Minority Jew

The complex of the minority Jew - who feels the need to be understood at any price, justify himself and separate himself from stereotypes - was imported to Israel by the waves of immigrants that flooded this country through the years. Even though we’ve had a homeland of our own for 60 years, many Israeli immigrants from various countries (for instance, Romania, where I was born) still seek recognition and live spiritually in their former countries.

Unaware (or unwilling to see) of how others perceive them, they avoid expressing any idea which might be construed as subjective or patriotic towards Israel. They would rather please others in order to be accepted in their milieu (be it social, literary or scientific), even when the interlocutor doesn't differentiate between a Jew who lives in Romania and an Israeli of Romanian origin who now has a different citizenship and has a new homeland – a country with enormous accomplishments despite the fact that many of its ideals disappeared or that Zionism has become controversial. I think it was Jabotinski who observed it was easier to take the Jews out of the Diaspora than take the Diaspora out of the Jews. Perhaps, as David Grossman said in a May 2008 interview for “The Atlantic Monthly: "... we have a lack of confidence in our own existence. We also don't really believe in our own existence. We have the formal symptoms of a normal state, but we still do not believe we are a state."

Identity and identification

Personally I've never been impressed by ceremonies, festivities, hymns and symbols. I’ve never pounded my chest as an Israel patriot and I do not have any special feeling on Israel’s 60-th anniversary at a time of so many political and social difficulties. I'm not the only one; many others in the media are of the opinion that there’s nothing particularly special about this Independence Day. Quite the contrary, it is overshadowed by a certain sadness in the population – deeply concerned with the second Lebanon war, the rockets from Gaza, the painfully slow progress of the peace process, the growing economic discrepancies, the poverty, the Iranian threat, the danger of Israel losing its Jewish character or even its possible disappearance as a sovereign state.

And yet, despite all that, since January 21st, 1970, the day I set foot in Israel 38 years ago, I have gradually assumed a new identity, a continuous feeling of belonging, definitely cut off from the condition of a minority Jew: one who is condescendingly reminded of "tolerance" and “hospitality”; expected to "stay put"; facing stupid prejudices and xenophobe outbursts; and who, whenever there's an incident implicating some Jew, must take a defensive stance or keep his mouth shut faced with a system of reference condoning "us vs. you."

I don't feel the need to reassure anyone that "not every Jew is like that"; I don't feel obliged to defend the absurd accusation of deicide; I do not concern myself permanently with the image of my ethnicity in the eyes of a majority, or the myth of the wandering Jew. I can be myself, authentic, a citizen of Israel (in good times and in bad times), a country where I’ve fulfilled and I continue to carry out my duties; and which, despite its shortcomings and the commotions it goes through at present, shields me from another, deeper crisis: that of identity. Moreover, it gives me without a doubt the unambiguous feeling of identification, of belonging. And this is exactly what also bestows on me the quality of citizen of the universe.