NOpinion Editorials are posted and archived on JN Online: www.detroitjewishnews.com Dry Bones One State, No Way O ne of the most stupid suggestions in recent memory is making the rounds of the chattering classes, talking heads and would-be experts who fill up a lot of our time with buckets of pretentious blather. The idea, in case it slipped by you when you were attending to serious matters, is that the world might be better off with a single Palestinian-Israeli state that incorporated all of the pre-Green Line territorial mandate that the British were so eager to dump on anybody else after World War II. The concept has been put forward in some of the otherwise mostly sensible and respectable journals as a way out of the current dilemma of what to do about those poor, dear, freedom-loving Palestinians who are being so infamously tortured by Israel's heavy-handed occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The notion is actually an old one, something that has been tossed around even before the world's formal recognition of Israel in 1948. While Theodor Herzl was all for Jewish sovereign- ty, many of his contemporaries were envisioning a harmonious Arab-Jewish bi-national arrangement and worried that the Zionist ideal would call unfavorable attention to Jewish power. The Holocaust put an end to that argument, of course. But after the last three years of Palestinian-led violence and with no end to it apparently in sight, some substantial Jewish figures have decided that the best course would be for us to again blame ourselves. Avraham Burg, who was speaker of the Knesset when the Labor Party had power, recently pro- claimed in a widely reprinted op-ed for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot that "The Zionist revo- ME EUROPEAN COMMISSION IS GOING TO DISCUSS ANTI- SEMITISM IN EUROPE. lution is dead" and that Israel should be scrapped because it is built on foundations of corrup- tion, injustice and oppression. On this side of the Atlantic, Tony Judt, a well-regarded historian, told readers of the New York Review of Books that "there is no place in the world today for a `Jewish state.'" Others then hastened to pro- mote this notion that Israel could solve the problems of the Arab world by disemboweling itself. Whether that would be an effective act, much less a means to sustain- ing a Jewish majority seems not to be the issue. Do we detect just the faintest whiff of anti-Semitism here? Probably not. After all, similar thinkers likely believe that Yugoslavia's problems could be resolved if Bosnia and Kosovo would reattach themselves to Serbia and Montenegro. That South Korea should allow itself to be ruled by the "Dear Leader" of North Korea. If only Taiwan would submit to the mainland, they must be thinking. Or that India and Pakistan could go back to what they were under the Raj. It is heady stuff, this ability to deal with the intractable by a single slice through the Gordian knot of reality. So here's our resolution for 2004. When people MAYBE THEY'LL COME UP MTN AN ALTERNATIVE TO THEIR CURRENT POLICY. EDIT RIAL at cocktail parties ask us if we don't agree that the time has come for a single state of Israelis and Palestinians alike, we resolve to just walk quietly away. ❑ Preventing Intermarriage T his started out as a refutation of your editorial "Confronting Intermarriage" (Dec. 5, page 43), which more aptly should have been titled "Acquiescing to Intermarriage." But, then there appeared several more articles on the subject: a piece about interfaith families in Ann Arbor ("People To People," Dec. 19, page 57); one about some in the Conservative movement who wish to explore ways to make intermarrieds a more integral part of shul life ("Integrating Intermarrieds," Dec. 19, page 60); and another about a phenomenon called "Jewbilation," an unaffiliated fellowship primarily for interfaith families who want some (presumably not too much) connection to Judaism ("New Pathway," Robert P. Roth is a founding president of the Jewish Academy of Metropolitan Detroit and a past president of Congregation ffnai Moshe, both in West Bloomfield. He a longtime cabinet member of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. Dec. 19, page 60). The very premise of defining the solution Could it be that the Jewish News has some to intermarriage by welcoming its conse- agenda or has it simply caught that most con- quences institutionally into our synagogue tagious "inclusivitis" Christmas/Chanukah life necessarily removes any effective basis holiday spirit so prevalent this time of year? from which to combat it. The problem has been clear since the 1990 I challenge any proponent of this form of National Jewish Population Survey: About half keruv (outreach) to posit one scenario of of Jews marrying are doing so with non-Jews. making the non-Jew an integral, connected We are committing demographic suicide. and welcome part of the synagogue, which ROBE RT E The purported solution of the JN ("The does not simultaneously result in the implicit, ROT H Conservative movement must connect to if not explicit, imprimatur of approval. How Comm unity intermarried couples" because "intermarriage do you combat something you accommo- Perspe ctive can no longer be ignored in our inclusive open date? It cannot be done. What form of society") and some in the movement (Rabbi acceptance is contemplated? Joseph Krakoff suggests "making intermarried house- Surely one cannot be an integral part of a holds a more integral part of synagogue life") is to Conservative shul without committee involvement. institutionally accommodate this self-destructive Are non Jews to be excluded from committee life (the choice. This approach is not only inherently contra- prospect makes one think seriously about converting dictory, but has already been proven to be ineffective, the other way)? Certainly such tolerant proponents not to mention sacrilegious. ROTH on page 26 t.k: 1/ 9 2004 25