Incidentally, the only border that Israelis find instinctively clear and concrete is their western one — the sea. If I were to say this in Israel, everyone would nod understandingly, although the notion may not be very politically correct. (It is interesting that the sea, the most unstable, fluid, and deceptive natural element, is the one that in our perception is the only stable border.)
The citizens of Israel have no clear concept of a border. Living this way means living in a home where all the walls are constantly moving and open to invasion. A person whose home has no solid walls finds it very difficult to know where it “ends” and where the next home “begins.” The result of this ambiguity is that such a person’s identity is always on the defense, always “contra” to those who threaten him. This condition provokes in his neighbors a constant temptation to invade, and his own behavior is characterized by a tendency to be overly defensive — meaning aggressive. The choices he makes in moments of distress or doubt are virtually doomed to be hasty and belligerent. The lessons he is capable of learning from his own history are bound to be the most extreme, and therefore often the most simplistic, the least nuanced — lessons that often damage his perception of reality.
In a certain sense, the State of Israel is replaying one of the most problematic anomalies of the Jewish people in the Diaspora, and the root of its tragic existence over the past two thousand years: it is a nation living among other nations, most of whom are hostile, with no clearly defined borders. This means that every contact may be experienced, by both parties, as a dangerous infiltration into sensitive, loaded identity regions.
I dream of a time when the State of Israel finally has permanent, stable, defensible borders, recognized by the UN and by the entire world, including the Arab states, the United States, and Europe. Borders that will be negotiated with former enemies out of mutual agreement, rather than drawn unilaterally and coercively — as Israel is doing today with the wall it is building around itself. The meaning of the new borders will be security. It will be identity. It will be home.
The meaning of such borders will also be that the Jewish people can finally resolve the critical dilemma of its entire existence: the question of whether it is a “nation of place” or a “nation of time.” Are the Jewish people a “nation of eternity,” a “nation of the world,” unconnected and uncommitted to any one physical place, able to exist within the universal sphere of religion and culture and spirituality alone? Or is it now ripe to begin a new stage, a stage that will be the true and complete realization of the process begun in 1948, when the State of Israel was established?
In other words, an agreement on the borders of Israel, and a normalization of relations with all its neighbors, will gradually be able to answer the extremely complex and loaded question of whether the Jews are truly willing and able to live in a state with permanent, unambiguous borders, to live with a clear national definition. Or are they instead doomed — because of reasons I will not go into, and which are possibly more emotional than political — to continue their search for a “borderless” existence, in its deepest sense, for a state of constant motion, of intermittent exile and return, assimilation in other identities, and subsequent returns to Jewish identity? Such a condition persistently evades definition, impenetrable to all forces acting around it, forces that sometimes enrich and fertilize it, and sometimes, as has often occurred, try to annihilate it.
One can also hope that a peace agreement resulting in safe and stable borders will heal a deep deficiency in Israelis’ sense of acceptance into the political, international “normalcy” that has eluded them for hundreds of years, even though they have had their own state for much of that time. Because this, perhaps, is the greatest tragedy of the Jewish people: that throughout its history it has always been viewed by other peoples and religions, primarily Christianity and Islam, as a symbol or a metaphor for something else — a parable, a religious moral of retribution for a primordial sin. It has not been seen as “the thing itself,” as a nation among nations, as a person among persons.
For almost two thousand years, the Jew was distanced and exiled from the practical political reality of what is known as “the family of nations.” His humanity was denied through a variety of sophisticated means of dehumanization and, conversely, idealization — and these are two sides of the same coin. He was laden with fears and superstitions, treated as an anomalous, mysterious, metaphysical entity with an internal order that is different from others, and with hidden powers that are above nature — and sometimes beneath it, as the Nazis proclaimed when they defined the Jew as Untermensch.
Judas Iscariot, God killer, Antichrist, the Wandering Jew, the Eternal Jew, well-poisoners, spreaders of plagues, the Elders of Zion seeking world domination, and many other satanic and grotesque characters, Shylocks and Fagins, have trickled into folklore, religion, literature, and even science. Perhaps this is why the Jews found comfort in self-idealization, in viewing themselves as the chosen people, which is also, in and of itself, a problematic and obstructive perception, and one all the more isolating.
I am alluding here to a subtle and extremely delicate sense, a sense of profound foreignness in the world. An existential foreignness of the Jewish people among others. An existential loneliness that perhaps can only be understood by Jews. An aura of riddle and mystery that has encompassed the Jewish nation — and Jewish people — over the generations. A riddle that has spurred other nations to solve it in various ways, to ascribe racial and racist definitions to the Jews, to repeatedly delineate them with fences and ghettos, to restrict their living space, their professions, their rights, all culminating in the most definitive and terrible attempt to “solve” this Jewish riddle: the “final solution.”
If we look back a mere decade, to the days of the early Oslo process, we can recall what an important change occurred at that time in the worldview, and in the self-perception, of Israelis. In those days many Israelis began to taste the intoxicating flavor of a new way of belonging to the modern world, an acceptance of sorts into a progressive, civic, liberal, and essentially secular universalism. It seemed as though some sort of nation-among-nations normalcy was emerging. For a short while, very short, there was a chance to create a relationship that would be more mutual, more equal, less loaded, between Israel and “the rest of the world.” I will even dare to employ a somewhat “literary” or metaphorical description: there was a sense of acceptance into reality.
And then, over the past four years — as a result of the severe threat created by the intifada and the terrorist attacks, the overwhelming hostility around the world to Israel’s acts and at times to its very existence, the swell of anti-Semitism, and the increasing demonization of Israel — these same Israelis found themselves once again sucked into the tragic wound of Judaism, into the scars of its most painful and paralyzing memories. Israeliness itself, which was always directed at the future, comprising constant agitation and promise, seemed to shrink and seep back into the channels of trauma and pain that pervade Jewish history and memory. The result is that among “new” Israelis, the anxieties of the Jewish fate, the experience of persecution and victimhood, the sense of profound loneliness and existential alienation, are once again surfacing powerfully.