Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 2, 1994 TAG: 9410040004
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: G3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WILLIAM RASPBERRY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
That, at least, is the burden of a recent front-page article in The Wall Street Journal - and it rings true. American Jews, the thesis goes, have committed so much of their time and substance to the survival of the Jewish homeland that Israel has become the center of Jewish identity.
But if peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors really takes hold, what will be left to preserve that identity? In addition, Amy Dockser Marcus wrote, ``The peace process has divided the Israeli and American Jewish communities in a way neither anticipated: by making them realize that, once Israel's survival is assured, the two sides no longer share a common agenda.''
Marcus' solidly reported and fascinating piece is a reminder of something I've suspected for a long time: We need enemies. (Or, at any rate, we think we do, which, in political terms, may amount to much the same thing.)
What Marcus sees through the prism of Jewishness, I've observed through the lens of blackness. For all the philosophical differences between, say, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, followers of both men were unified in their assessment that racism was the barrier that had to be overcome. The unifying force of the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was that black people were uniformly victims, at least in the American South. For the black person seeking a home or a job in a whites-only enclave, education, accomplishment and behavior meant nothing. Skin was all that mattered, and black people were unified.
But slowly that started to change. Job skills and education and money started to count. Behavior started to matter. And the more these other things came to be taken into account, the less black unity there was.
White oppression, it turns out, was the glue that held us together. And that, I suspect, may be one of the reasons some of us are tempted occasionally to magnify the oppression that still exists - just as Jews have sometimes magnified the threat to Israel as a way of enforcing Jewish solidarity.
Disadvantage-based solidarity has been such a powerful force in the lives of minorities that we come to value - to cultivate - the disadvantage.
What will we do when racism loses its bonding power? Will we, like the Old Testament Israelites - beyond the reach of Pharaoh's power, but still needing him as a source for their own identity - fall into counterproductive internal feuding? Or will we learn to welcome relative peace and form bonds based on something other than shared enmity and race?
Yuval Rotem, an Israeli native interviewed by The Journal's Marcus, made the point, ``We have more in common with the [Muslim] Druze living here than we do with the American Jews.''
Some individuals have always reached beyond their ethnic imperatives, of course. There are people who manage to put race on the back burner while devoting their energies to children, the environment, community building - whatever carries weight on their personal scales. These are the lucky souls who find their identity as healers, nurturers, bridge builders and peacemakers.
But for others, identity seems to depend on fears and grievances: on enemies. And maybe for them, the best thing to do, when the old enemies weaken their hold on us, is to find new enemies worth engaging - perhaps the decline of traditional values, youthful violence or official corruption, regardless of what color the corrupt officials happen to be.
Many of the American Jews interviewed for Marcus' piece reported that they are taking up new causes, ranging from hot meals for the elderly to picking up tires from an eyesore landfill.
But others miss the ethnically specific enemy represented by the menace to Israel.
The political and economic defense of Israel was ``at the heart of our communal agenda,'' Bernard Steinberg of the Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel told The Journal. ``Without that, nothing about our lives was Jewish, collectively.''
Will cultural, economic and political gains leave us with nothing about our lives that is, collectively, black? Can we manage without enemies?
Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB