False Dichotomies

Sitting down to my hummus in Cerem Hatemanim this morning, I caught a glance at a neighbouring diner’s copy of Haaretz (Hebrew edition). The headline read as follows:

עשרים אלפ יהודים צפויים להגיע לחברון בסוף השבוע

(20,000 Jews are expected to arrive in Hebron for the weekend)

Back home, I checked Yediot Ahranot, where the description of the participants in the event was rather different:

בסוף השבוע צפויים לפקוד את חברון 20-25 אלף ישראלים

(At the weekend 20-25 thousand Israelis are expected to visit Hebron)

This is worthy of comment. The context is Shabbat Hai Sarah (named after this week’s parshah), in which Hebron features prominently. As a result, it’s turned into an annual show of strength by those who believe in Jewish sovereignty over the city. It’s a particularly sensitive pilgrimage this year, though, because of the High Court order to remove settlers from one of the buildings in the town.

Why does one newspaper describe the out-of-towners as Jews, and the other as Israelis? Which is the best way to describe them and what is the significance of the choice? We can presume that not quite all the celebrants will be Israelis, that there will be – for example – the odd American yeshiva bocher or two burgeoning their ranks. But perhaps not all of them will be Jews, either. Perhaps a gaggle of Christian-Zionists will blend in with the crowd? Hard to say. But I think, on reflection, that Yediot got it right, and Haaretz got it wrong.

We hear a lot about Israel’s Jewish nature excluding those citizens who aren’t Jewish. But we hear less about how the Israeli/Jew dichotomy is used to delienate boundaries within Jewish discourse. By describing the Hebron pilgrims as Jews, Haaretz is outing them as the other, as a rabble alien to the secular liberal values of the, ahem, hummus-scoffing, Friday morning apathising denizens of the Tel Aviv bubble. When Yediot calls them Israelis, it is acknowledging their common-bond with the rest of the Israeli people, even if they so often represent the worst of what this country has to offer.

Settlers and their supporters are Israelis, as are Israeli-Arabs, Olim, and Scandinavian kibbutzniks who fell in love and stayed here. Calling them Jews is a way of washing our hands of responsibility for them. This is a dangerous step, and one unbecoming of the newspaper that strives to represent Progressive Zionist values.