Lebanon and the Jewish Conscience

Abstract

An historical aim of the Zionist movement is to secure the Jewish people not only a national homeland, but also a state. Within the national homeland, Jews are to be all that they religiously, intellectually and culturally can be, and by possessing a state they are also finally to become like all other nationalities. This latter goal is wholly secular and different from the biblical directive calling upon the Jewish people to be a light unto the nations, a notion that embodies the Jewish claim to a moral mission and ethical superiority. The tension between modern secular state and ancient moral mission is the source of the present soul searching now being experienced by Jews within and outside Israel. Jews derive their self-image as a special people from a sense of ethical superiority that has helped them weather a notably tragic past. Because of the inherent racial link between Israel and the rest of world Jewry, US Jews' self-image is strongly bound to Israel's status in the world. In late September, when Phalangist forces-acting virtually as surrogates of the Israeli armyentered Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and murdered over 1,000 men, women and children, Israel confirmed itself to be a state brutally like all other states. Simultaneously, it's action called into serious question the claim to ethical superiority held by Jews world-wide, and confronted them with the rudest awakening possible because it was triggered by the worst kind of catalystaiding and abetting a genocidal act. It took a situation that smacked of their own history as victim to force many Jews to suspect they were not all quite the moral people they wished to be. Much of the rest of the world, however, had suspected long ago that Israel was just as aggressively chauvinistic, and therefore capable of being just as ruthlessly unethical, as any other national entity.