Double Jeopardy
Americans in Israel.
by Harold R. Isaacs.
John Day. 256 pp. $5.95.
Is Israel to be merely a haven for the persecuted and the stateless, settled by those who have no other choice and financed by those who do? Like so much else in Israel, this question has generated conflicting emotions, controversy, bitter self-admonishment, and, as Harold Isaacs says in this richly documented, detached, and unusually well-written book, “a kind of suspended confusion that comes out of a common unwillingness to force such issues, to allow them rather to work out in time.”
For most Israelis, the question of immigration from the free countries of the West—in particular from the United States—has always been a sore point, a cause of endless grumbling, of admonishment and recrimination. Why, they ask, are there so few American settlers in Israel? (Less than two-tenths of 1 per cent of America's 5,500,000 Jews now live in Israel, where they constitute a mere half of one per cent of Israel's two million Jews.) For every American Jew who has come to Israel and stayed, five or more have eventually left. Some catastrophe-oriented Israelis have accused American Jews of living in a fools' paradise of false security; others, while halfheartedly admitting that America is not the same as Europe, have appealed to American Jews on the basis of a common sense of national identity, and a common desire for a Jewish renaissance.
This entire issue was recently reopened as a result of the Six-Day War, when an unprecedented wave of sympathy for Israel swept Jews everywhere, and somewhere between twenty- and twenty-five thousand volunteers registered at Israeli consulates throughout the West. Of this number, some six thousand actually came to Israel. The influx, though partly subsidized by public funds, caught local authorities unprepared, and their improvised methods of employing the volunteers gave rise to much criticism. Almost the only sector capable of absorbing the newcomers proved to be the kibbutzim, with the result that many who had rushed to Israel to save it from extinction found themselves instead picking apples. Absorption of the volunteers was complicated in part by dislocations caused by the war, and in part by the fact that in July and August there was still considerable unemployment in Israel. Authorities, understandably, were reluctant to employ foreign volunteers at the expense of Israeli workers, many of whom had just returned from war service as army reservists. (About twenty-five hundred volunteers are reported to be still in Israel.)
Early in July, a joint session of the Israeli cabinet and the Executive Council of the Jewish Agency issued an impassioned appeal to the Jews of the West, couched in characteristically biblical terms: “Rise ye all, come up and build the country. . . . Whoever is among you of all his people, may the LORD his God be with him. Let him go up and come!” The appeal was answered first by an editorial in the local daily Haaretz, which reproached the government for clouding the issue and evading real problems with empty phraseology. The reasons behind American Jewish reluctance to emigrate to Israel, the paper suggested, were deeper than those allowed for in traditional Zionist rhetoric. “We should address appeals above all to ourselves. What is needed now is change within Israel more than appeals directed abroad. The most successful rhetoric cannot hide the fact that the Jews of the West have not in the past and are not now emigrating to Israel. Those who have come have almost all returned because the makeup of Israeli society and the quality of life here do not fit the taste of young Jews from the West, and at times are even contrary to the image drawn by our own propagandists abroad.”
Reflecting a debate that has dominated Israeli politics in the past few years, the paper continued: “We are a paradox of deep conservatism under a cover of superficial dynamism, and of deadening ideological immobility against the background of frantic muscular activity. As Jews we form a closed island of Eastern European doctrinaire collectivism set in the modern open world of technology in which our brethren in the West live.”
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The debate continues, and Harold Isaacs's Americans in Israel is likely to add more fuel to the fire. This highly readable study is based on a thorough knowledge of conditions in Israel, on much reading, and on a series of intensive interviews with some fifty American settlers. Isaacs describes vividly and authoritatively the material difficulties and other hardships encountered by Americans in Israel: lower wages, inadequate housing or schools, high taxes, the insensitivity, even rudeness of Israeli bureaucrats (“they are like all other bureaucrats, only more so”), and, if the particular American happens to be a religious Jew but non-Orthodox, the unsatisfactory quality of religious life in Israel. “Here you are either Orthodox or nothing,” one interviewee told Isaacs. The rabbi of a Conservative congregation in a small American city who had tried to settle in Israel stated that the only way he could stay was to go into business, and this he could not do. “He shook his head with a rueful kind of sadness. ‘The truth is that I have found that America is more conducive to living religiously than Israel is.’”
Factors such as these are important, and they surely account in part for the steady attrition in the ranks of American Jews who have come to settle in Israel. But the main difficulty of the American in Israel, according to Isaacs, is to be located less in any hardship he may surfer, material or otherwise, than in the unique crisis of national identity which the experience of immigration forces him to undergo. This crisis is what sets Americans in Israel apart from settlers of European or Afro-Asian origin, whose commitment to their new society, Isaacs feels, is stronger and more absolute. Americans who feel alienated from American society come to Israel to be Jews and insiders, and they end up in Israel being identified, and identifying themselves, as Americans and hence again as outsiders. This paradox, says Isaacs, is unique to American immigrants; it explains their relative isolation in Israeli society (Isaacs finds them “orphaned”), and perhaps their small number too. They have simply “opted out,” voluntarily. The reasons, as Isaacs sees them, are rooted in the uniqueness of the historical experience of America as an “open society,” if not yet in deed, at least in theory, a theory now “painfully becoming fact.” This openness, both as goal and as partial reality, he says, has created, more than any other fact, the specialness of the American identity. It marks the difference between American Jews and those of other countries, “and remains stamped hard even on this small number of American Jews who had been driven by some lack in their lives as Americans to emigrate to Israel to try to give priority to living as Jews.”
In Israel, many of these American Jews were found by Isaacs to have held on to their American passports even after one, two, and three decades of living in Israel on extended tourist visas or as “temporary residents”; thus they remain ineligible for military service or voting privileges and are immune from many local taxes, living as strangers in a paradise of their own choosing; possessing a “cake-eating, cake-having status.” Wavering between loyalties, they never really choose one over the other. They waver for a number of complicated reasons, some practical, some not, but as Isaacs points out, the ambivalence is anchored in a primary fidelity to their identity as Americans that transcends or at least runs parallel to their identity as Jews. Another reason, until recently, has been legal: unlike that of Britain or most European countries, the law of the United States has prohibited dual citizenship for Americans, as well as service in foreign armies or participation in foreign elections. This has forced Americans in Israel to a choice not required of their British, or other Western, compatriots.
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Whatever the reasons, Isaacs has found the Americans of Israel to be a group apart, commonly referred to by other Israelis, with a mixture of irony, malice, envy, and a certain amount of grudging admiration, as “the Anglo-Saxons.” Even their status as an immigrant group is ambiguous. There are in Israel, as in other countries containing a large immigrant population, a plethora of national associations like “The Association of Immigrants from Poland,” or the “Association of Immigrants from Central Europe.” American immigrants have thus far shied away from such appellations; they call themselves simply “Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel.” Significantly, a motion to change the name to “Association of American and Canadian Settlers in Israel” was rejected by the membership in 1962. Isaacs makes the point that the simple matter of a name is probably the most elementary of all identity symbols. It carries a great freight of meaning, and while it is seldom itself the heart of the matter, “it often points directly to where the heart can be found.”
As the author of a related inquiry into group identity patterns of American Negroes who have gone to live in West Africa, Isaacs finds certain similarities between the two groups. He writes: “I found that despite obvious differences of kind, scope, scale, and circumstance, many of these American Jews in Israel did indeed have something in common with the American Negroes I had met earlier in West Africa. In both cases they were people who felt themselves to be outsiders in the American society and out of this common feeling had gone off to Africa or Israel to find ways of belonging among their own kind, to become ‘insiders’ as Negroes or as Jews. What they most commonly found instead, in both cases, was that they remained outsiders, as Americans.”
This phenomenon of dual alienation is characteristic, admittedly, of only the first generation of immigrants; it largely disappears among the second generation of native-born, who, in Israel as elsewhere, are susceptible more to the pull of the society in which they have grown up than to the influence of the parental home. The children of Americans in Israel usually opt for Israeli citizenship, serve in the Army, and vote in elections. But the dilemma of the first generation of American immigrants remains.
Isaacs points out in his introduction—written as the book was about to go to press—that the U.S. Supreme Court may have outdated some of the more formal, or legal aspects of this dilemma. In a case involving an American citizen who had voted in an Israeli election and lost his citizenship as a result, the Supreme Court, in May 1967, stated that Congress had no power to deprive Americans of their nationality without consent. Whether or not this decision means that Americans may now take out Israeli citizenship papers with no threat to their American nationality, is not yet clear; nor is it clear whether or not they may serve in the army, or vote, or be elected to office in Israel. While there is little doubt that the May 1967 ruling, which reverses a number of previous decisions, has been received with relief by many Americans living in Israel, it still remains to be seen whether this is the answer to their particular problem.
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In this book Isaacs is, by his own account, attempting to pinpoint a situation that is in the process of change, “trying to catch and hold it for a moment of scrutiny like a frame of a motion picture stopped for a longer look.” Isaacs seems to hold out some hope that the dilemma of identity can disappear, but he is far from committing himself. What he says, in effect, is that it is hard, if not impossible, under the present circumstances, to be both a good Israeli and a good American at the same time. Many Israelis and many Americans will agree—some gladly, others reluctantly or sadly. Still others may hold out the hope for new, perhaps more civilized forms of nationality growing out of a new sense of Jewish solidarity, forms of allegiance less mutually exclusive, and less absolute. But before this can happen much will have to change in Israel, as well as in America.
