What if Israel -- the location for the Jewish homeland, rather than the underlying notion -- was a terrible mistake? It's a question which is beginning, for the first time in a hundred years, to nag at the edge of the public consciousness.
Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer-winning author, is at work on a new novel, an alternate history, in which Jewish settlers have established the Yiddish-speaking nation of Yisroel, in Alaska. Ken Layne, the columnist, dreams of an Israel relocated to Baja California, inhabited by happy Jews eating gefilte fish tacos. Rand Simberg jokes that, as a Jewish homeland, even a Zionist lunar colony would be preferable to the arid hostility of the Arab Middle East.
There were indeed proposed locations for a Jewish homeland other than Israel: Uganda, most famously; Canada and Australia; even Iraq, of all places, was once scoped out. And Chabon's Yisroel is based on a plan, mulled by Roosevelt, to resettle Jewish refugees in the Alaska Territory.
All the current daydreams, and the dusty old plans they draw upon, skirt around the central point: there is, already, an alternative Jewish homeland. It's a country in which Jews are numerous, safe and powerful; in which Jewish culture is supreme; and in which there is a rising tide, not of anti-semitism, but of philo-semitism. The promised land is right here, hidden in plain sight, in the United States of America.
Christopher Hitchens, one of the Brits who have cornered the market in provocative journalism in the US, makes the argument: "[T]he secular Jews of Israel should all move here to the United States, shucking off the madness of sacred lands once and for all. Israel will probably always be a beleaguered place, and as far as I can see, a thinking person should forsake it utterly."
Rather than rehearse the arguments of the Arab-Israeli conflict, suffice to say that 5m Jews are surrounded in the Middle East by 280m largely implacable Arabs. Palestinian suicide bombers, who now use dynamite and fertiliser, will presumably one day graduate to chemical weapons or worse.
Let's focus rather on the virtues of the US. Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement, concluded from the Jewish experience in Europe: "We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live, seeking only to preserve the faith of our fathers. It is not permitted us." The United States has proved an exception.
First of all, it ought to be obvious that Jews can rise to any position in business, media and politics. At risk of giving material to conspiracy theorists, here are the figures: a tenth of the Senate; a third of Bill Clinton's cabinet; half of the media moguls; the upper reaches of Premiere's list of Hollywood powerbrokers; and, covering all the political bases, most of the neoconservative intellectuals.
[There are even Jewish geeks, and being, Jewish, they are Midas-rich, of course: Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, Andy Grove, longtime CEO of Intel, and Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. The New Establishment at play in Sun Valley, subject of the annual Vanity Fair photospread, might as well be the group picture from Habonim summer camp.]
Most American Jews fear any accounting of their influence, lest it provoke envy and antipathy. According to the Anti-Defamation League, Hispanic and Muslim immigration has brought into the US a fresh cohort of unreformedanti-semites, with 17% of Americans and 35% of US Hispanics confessing anti-semitic sentiments.
Nevertheless, if there is a wave, it is one of philo-semitism. Take Camille Paglia, the Italian-American lesbian academic, happiest when surrounded by Jews; the feisty libertarian journalists of the web, such as Charles Johnson, who are more fiercely pro-Israeli than most Jews; the millions of Christian-American readers who follow the 'Left Behind' epic, in which Satan contends with Tsion Ben-Judah, a former Israeli statesman. Even Madonna is getting into Jewish mysticism.
Early Zionists worried that, where Jews were not persecuted, they would assimilate. Move the sabbath to Sunday, as Rabbi Elmer Berger proposed in the 1950s. They would be horrified that half of all Jews in the US now marry out of the faith.
But, if anything, it is Jewish culture, Jewish secular culture, which is assimilating the goys. Think of the most popular American sitcoms, such as Friends, Will and Grace, and, in its day, Seinfeld: they are deeply Jewish in tone. The Jewish-American princess is such an established emblem that Jennifer Aniston, a Greek-American, slips easily into the role.
Romance is essential to any national identity, and the romance of the re-establishment of Israel, after 2,000 years of wandering, cannot be matched. But the US has its own Jewish mythology: of immigrants landing at Ellis Island, the strivers of the Lower East Side, Jewish gangsters in Las Vegas, Einstein at Princeton, atomic physicists on the Manhattan Project, Wall Street tycoons in the 1980s, even the bagel-eating yuppies of present-day Upper West Side, in Manhattan.
So why the resistance to the idea of Zion in America? Well, mainly, because it was not on offer when Jews needed a homeland; the US, like other countries, restricted Jewish immigration. And now it is too late. The Jewish state exists in the Middle East, and even private doubts about its viability would play into the hands of Israel's enemies. Even to raise the subject is to risk the charge of anti-semitism or, in my case, self-hatred.
The US is already the Jewish bastion, and Israel is indeed insecure: a million Israelis have made that determination through emigration, mainly to the US. But the power of Jews in the US and the precariousness of Jews in Israel: these are the twin taboos of the Jewish national debate. Jews sometimes wonder what their world would have been like without Hitler. Israel, a salvation arising from the Holocaust, as a mistake: that would be a regret too heart-rending to contemplate.
So the alternatives are left to the novelists, such as Michael Chabon, who writes of his Alaskan Yisroel: "The resulting country is obviously a far different place than Israel. It is a cold, northern land of furs, paprika, samovars and one long, glorious day of summer. The portraits on those postage stamps we buy are of Walter Benjamin, Simon Dubnow, Janusz Korczak, and of a hundred Jews unknown to us, whose greatness was allowed to flower only here, in this world."
