What a warm feeling of Zionist solidarity awaits me in London next week. To stand before UK Jewish groups and cry: "Gevalt! Israel is becoming an apartheid state"- and know this warning is no longer repressed heresy but mainstream discourse within Anglo-Jewry.
I was invited by the New Israel Fund to speak about anti-democratic trends in Israeli politics and society. I accepted willingly because I believe that recent vicious attacks inside Israel against the NIF exemplify those worrying trends. I was wondering how to make my points without stirring resentment, when slowly I began to realise that the long-held stereotype of this community is crumbling.
Mick Davis's brave, pained, honest criticism of Israel's occupation policies and his questioning of its courage and sagacity, has led other leaders in Anglo-Jewry finally to cast off misplaced inhibitions and to rise to the responsibilities that Jewish leadership demands of them. Suddenly, Anglo-Jewry is no more a mere adjunct of AIPAC, a hurrah chorus for unconscionable - and, worse, unsustainable - Israeli policies.
The message of the shocking apartheid analogy invoked by Davis is not that we should back the Palestinians and boycott Israel as right-thinking people backed the blacks and boycotted white South Africa in the days of apartheid. That is the false message that the hurrah corner tries to pin on Zionist realists, as though they were Israel's enemies rather than its loving friends, fearful for its future.
The message of realists like Mick Davis is: Look to recent history for a compelling precedent of what happened to a strong, rich but beleaguered country pursuing an ultimately untenable domestic policy. It imploded under the weight of domestic strife and international opprobrium. Of course, historical analogies are never perfectly applicable. But they are ignored at peril.
Now that Davis and other key figures in this community have made their voices heard, one can hope they will percolate through the thickening layers of smug xenophobia speciously portrayed as Zionist patriotism.
"Percolate", because sometimes a lone, prophetic voice, like that of Jerusalem philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz 40 years ago, or that of Britain's own Chief Rabbi Jakobovits nearly 30 years ago, needs time to achieve its full resonance. "A smaller and more intensively Jewish Israel," Jakobovits wrote in 1984, "is both safer and more ideal than a greater Israel in which the Jewish majority and its Jewish ethos are increasingly at risk… Military strength cannot guarantee Israel's security indefinitely; only moral superiority can… Nothing menaces Israel and Judaism more than the explosive compound of religious and political extremism."
Meanwhile, three tasks for Zionist realists:
1. To ensure the divide between them and their traducers does not follow the fault-line between Liberal and Orthodox in the Jewish People. That would be disastrous. Anglo-Jewry has a unique contribution to make, by revisiting and revitalising the religious-Zionist heritage of its late, great Chief Rabbi.
2. To ensure their voice is heard inside Israel. Israelis don't like being lectured to, especially by Jews. They grew to maturity showered with philanthropic beneficence and uncritical political support. J Street shows it can and must be done. Israel needs its friends - and foremost among them world Jewry - to help haul it back to pristine Zionist pragmatism. The rabbis taught: tafasta merubeh – lo tafasta. If you grab too much – you end up with nothing.
3. To pray that when the great Jewish enterprise of our age, the state of Israel, recovers its Jewish wisdom, it won't be too late.
David Landau is a former Editor of Haaretz and is writing a biography of Ariel Sharon
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