The Jewish Diaspora’s relationship with Israel is an under-theorized but often spoken-about topic. The extensive amount of energy devoted to publicly debating Israel, Zionism, Palestinian rights, and the Jewish Diaspora’s role in all of it betrays how little is actually being said. This noisy silence is partly a consequence of the sensitive nature in theorizing the relationship that exists between Diaspora Jews and Israel, a relationship that is often experienced and understood differently by different Jewish communities. However, there does exist a shared denominator in these experiences, and that is the hierarchical character of the Jewish diaspora’s relationship with Israel. This hierarchical character exists in at least three ways.
First, there is the principle contained especially in political Zionism, and to a lesser extent in cultural Zionism, of the negation of the Diaspora. This hierarchical positioning of Israel for the future of the Jewish people was a major point of contention, and was acutely challenged by the leading Jewish Studies scholar Simon Rawidowicz. A consequence of this negation has been how in some ways Israel matters more for the Diaspora than the Diaspora does for Israel.
Second, there is the moral hierarchy of how Israeli politics is evaluated or judged. The archetypal example is debate about the “Israel-right-or-wrong” position, a debate that is remarkably similar to the one Morgenthau addresses in his argument about how the national interest takes precedence over moral considerations. However, in the Jewish case, this position ends up being paradoxical in that it has been the successful politics of minority rights in the Diaspora in the second half of the 20th Century that were so important for Jewish integration into the West. The paradox is when Diaspora Jews end up supporting the very types of anti-minority rights policies that they were the victims of. Again, this is a point made by Simon Rawidowicz
Third, underlying Jewish unease with too much criticism about Israel, there is the hierarchical question of Israel’s exceptionalism or normalcy. Israel is treated as a state that is both exceptional but simultaneously normal. Said differently: Israel is exceptional for the Jews in its importance, and this exceptionality is expected to be respected, but Israel is also not to be treated differently insofar as it is just another nation-state.
These empirical examples reveal that Israel exists in multiple hierarchies within the Jewish political and moral imagination, but that these hierarchies reveal multiple contradictions. This paper explores theoretically the implications of these hierarchies and the contradictions they reveal. Such an examination is important because it seeks to highlight the shared moral contradictions held by both the political right and left that characterize too much debate about Jews and Israel. The varied ways in which hierarchy characterizes the experience of how Jews understand (or are expected to understand) their relationship with Israel offers a useful and non-ideological lens that sheds light on a problematic, important, and emotional political relationship in international politics.
