Tikkun Magazine, May/June 2008

Israel's Dilemma 

by Riane Eisler

RABBI LERNER ASKS, "To WHAT EXTENT IS Israel tied to a world view based on the notion that domination of others is the way to achieve security, rather than a world view, implicit in the Torah command of Ve'ahavta la'ger, that security comes through generosity and caring toward others?"

This to me is not the right question because it fails to take into account the fact that, unfortunately, most of Israel's enemies tend to view generosity and caring as weak, as "feminine," and hence an invitation for domination on their part. Research shows that when people believe that men's "honor" depends on absolute and, if "necessary," violent control over women, they also believe there can only be rulers and ruled, winners and losers, dominators and dominated—and that violence on their part is holy and moral.

This then is Israel's dilemma—and the dilemma for the world. How do you deal with cultures where rule by the "strong"—the male head of family, the tyrannical head of tribe or state, the cruel warrior—is honored, and one-sided concessions are seen as weakness? This is characteristic of fundamentalist Muslim cultures; it also afflicts "Christian" fundamentalists, who likewise believe in women's subordination and "holy wars"—wars that the Left fiercely opposes.

Yet when it comes to Palestinian violence and other Arab policies of confrontation, the Left rushes to their defense. No matter how brutal their attacks on civilians, how openly they state their goal of destroying the Jewish state, or how blatantly they continue teaching their children hatred of Jews, to the Left, it's all justified.

Horribly immoral, this double standard brings the indifference of the world that led to the Holocaust roaring back to mind.

In 1946 I found out what happened to those in my family who weren't as fortunate as my parents and I to escape from Europe—my beloved aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, whose survival I daily prayed for as a refugee in Cuba during the war. There were only a handful of survivors, desperate to leave the continent that stood by and often actively participated in the murder of their parents and siblings along with six million other Jews. They wanted to go to Palestine. The British intercepted one and interned him in Cyprus. Another young cousin made it. When the state of Israel was approved by the UN and was immediately attacked by an overwhelming army of its neighbors, she died fighting with the Haganah (which later became the Israel Defense Forces).

What happened during the Holocaust, what almost happened to me, profoundly affected not only my life and my feelings toward Israel but my work as a cultural evolution theorist and activist. My book The Chalice and the Blade cuts to the core of our problem—not East vs. West or religious vs. secular, but the difference between domination systems and partnership systems. The Holocaust led me to passionately work for the cultural shift from domination to partnership worldwide, starting with the foundational relations between women and men and parents and children, where people first learn respect for human rights or to accept human rights violations as normal and moral.

The kibbutz movement was a movement in Israel toward partnership, toward economic, social, and gender equality. These were—and remain—positive ideals. But Israel, again and again, has had to fight neighbors pledged "to push the Jews into the sea." Every war, including the Six Day War, was a war of self-defense. Israel did what any other nation would do if it were attacked, if terrorists were killing its people in buses, schools, and homes. It struck back with armed force.

I know that in the end violence only breeds more violence. But to change cycles of violence we have to look to the underlying culture. Yet the Left refuses to look at the cultures surrounding Israel realistically, to acknowledge that cultures that rely heavily on violence in intimate relations are not going to renounce violence in national and international relations.

We do not help the situation one iota by preaching caring and nonviolence to Israel without just as forcefully asking the same of its enemies, and, even more fundamentally, helping all those—Muslim, Jewish, or Christian—working to change cultural beliefs that idealize and even sacralize brutality and violence.

Riane Eisler is author of The Chalice and the Blade and The Real Wealth of Nations, and founder of the Center for Partnership Studies (www.partnershipway.org) and the Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence.

Eisler, Riane. 2008. Israel's dilemma. Tikkun. 23(3):41.