Left, right, and birthright

In a 2001 episode of the NBC series The West Wing, the White House staff hears the news that an American teenager has been killed in a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.

“What was he doing there?” asks President Jeb Bartlett — a question that exposes the yawning gap between how Israel is perceived by Zionists and by just about everybody else.

If you’re Jewish and even mildly engaged in Jewish life, you could easily answer Bartlett’s question. If you haven’t gone to Israel, you’re probably thinking you will one day. Anyway, your friends have been, and, despite the reports of terrorism and warfare, they came home with pictures of themselves bobbing in the Dead Sea, riding a camel in the Negev, or posing in front of the Western Wall. You might even know repeat travelers, who keep an apartment in Jerusalem or drop off a son or daughter for a semester abroad at Tel Aviv University or a yeshiva.

Bartlett’s question implies that the show’s writers don’t get this normalcy and consider a stroll down Dizengoff Street in 2001 as unthinkable as a pleasure cruise down the Euphrates in 2006.

And that’s probably the most benign example of the gap. More troubling is the political one. It’s the gap between those who see identification with Israel as an ethnic and religious given — and others who see even a tourist junket to Israel as a profoundly political (even anti-Palestinian) statement.

If you heard about the recent kerfuffle over Taglit-birthright israel, the program that offers free 10-day trips to Israel for young people, you are standing at the very edge of this chasm. Celebrations of birthright’s 100,000th participant were somewhat derailed last week by a debate over the program’s decision to dismiss a participant who intended to follow up her birthright trip with a guided tour through the Palestinian territories. The Palestinian tour is being conducted by Birthright Unplugged, which takes young Jews through the West Bank to “try to get people to understand what it means to live under occupation,” as an organizer told JTA. Its itinerary includes stops at refugee camps, checkpoints, and a “formerly Palestinian village taken in 1948.”

Birthright organizers resent that its donors end up subsidizing the activities of Unplugged, which acts as a de facto recruitment office for the International Solidarity Movement. ISM is described by the Anti-Defamation League as a “well-organized movement that spreads anti-Israel propaganda and misinformation and voices support for others who engage in armed resistance against Israel.”

Unplugged counters that birthright has “political” goals as well — which birthright denies. “I don’t think it’s political for Jews to support Israel,” a birthright organizer tells Salon.com. “It should be an integral part of every Jew’s identity.” And then he goes on to draw the very sane distinction between supporting Israel and supporting Israel’s policies.

But for Unplugged, who unfortunately represent a point of view that swells beyond the narrow confines of the Far Left, support for Israel — the very idea of a Jewish homeland, of Zionism as a marker of Jewish identity — is political. Salon.com reporter Rachel Shabi keeps quoting “birthlefters” — disillusioned Jewish kids — who find the emotional tug of the various birthright tours manipulative. Shabi helps them along with ominous transition sentences: “But some former birthrighters say that there’s no such thing as a free holiday,” she writes, and goes on to quote a participant’s experience at the Western Wall. She tells how the tour guide asked participants to close their eyes and imagine their ancestors who prayed at the Wall. “And you open your eyes and there it is,” says the participant, “and there are tears streaming down everyone’s faces.”

The horror! Tears at the Wailing Wall!

The joke is that I know of no other country that offers tourists so many competing political voices — goodwill tours of the Jewish settlement in Hebron, feel-bad tours to the territories conducted by Rabbis for Human Rights, and do-gooder missions to women’s shelters and the separation barrier by the New Israel Fund. The full story is there for those who seek it out.

All birthright israel is trying to do is build a connection to Israel so young Jews will consider seeking it out. Its target audience is, on the one hand, kids who have no impression of the Jewish state and what it could possibly mean to them, and, on the other, kids who were exposed since childhood to negative impressions of Israel. Birthright wants to establish a baseline of identification — knowing full well some kids will go on to support the Left, others the Right, and still others to wash their hands of the whole enterprise.

At one level, birthlefters aren’t wrong — in choosing a trip heavy on tourism and light on discussions of the conflict, birthright has made a political decision. Where Unplugged’s critique gets sinister is not in its criticism of Israeli policies, but in its insistence that the very idea of Israel — what one birthlefter calls “the levels of Zionism” — is still an open question. It’s one thing to suggest that birthright add some political sophistication to its message (I know what it’s like to be trapped on a tour bus with a guide who thinks he has the solution to the “Arab problem”). It’s another to reject Jewish history and demonize those who insist that Israel — the fact of it and the fate of it — is central to our Jewish identities.

When you see how groups like Unplugged and ISM view every visit to Israel as a political act, you understand how some of their followers begin to view tourists as political targets.