Saperstein: "Stop Being Jewish!"

Indulging in quite a bit of hyperbole with his premise (or conclusion, I'm not sure which), Jeffrey Goldberg recently published an article in the New Yorker about the threat against Israeli society posed by the so-called "settlers." I read this article a few weeks ago and have thought about it a lot since then. One passage has stayed with me. Goldberg is interviewing Moshe Saperstein, a resident of Neveh Dekalim in Gaza:

I suggested that he try to imagine himself in the place of a Palestinian. "You're Palestinian, you're here, you have your farm, your grandparents are from here, and - "

But Moshe interrupted me. "Stop being Jewish!" he yelled. "Stop being Jewish! Only a Jew would say 'Imagine yourself as a Palestinian.' Could you imagine a Palestinian imagining himself as a Jew?"

Saperstein isn't just talking about empathy, he's talking about an intellectual habit and a theological imperative. The intellectual habit is Talmudic - you have to find every side of the argument, parsing and interpreting it, making profound, razorsharp distinctions. The theological imperative is this: "remember that you were slaves in the land of Egypt."

I don't know for sure, but I'd speculate that precisely this tendency to "imagine yourself in the other guy's shoes" is something you'd find Jewish parents telling their kids in Boro Park as well as Scarsdale; Antwerpen as well as Tel Aviv.

This, you would think, is both a virtue and a strategic advantage. A virtue because it encourages things like chesed and tzedakah; and a strategic advantage when you need to outsmart your adversary.

But Saperstein doesn't see it that way. At the risk of putting words in his mouth I think he'd say that this is a habit that goes unappreciated by the outside world and unreciprocated by the Palestinians. In his view, it's a waste of time and energy, and costs human lives. It's one thing to be idealistic, it's quite another to give it all up for the sake of idealism.

A lot of people - especially those hostile to Israel - won't accept Saperstein's premise at all. They repeatedly claim that Israel has no compassion and no ability to see things from the Palestinian point of view. They typically divide the world's Jews into those that have seen the light and condemn Israel and those who are brainwashed and support Israel.