Is There a Jewish Political Tradition?

During the recent Gaza campaign, and into its aftermath, some of the most vocal critics of Israel have been Jews, and some of these have grounded their criticism in appeals to Jewish values. There’s nothing new in that: in 1988, as the first intifada raged, the New York Review published an open letter by Arthur Hertzberg, a well-known rabbi and historian, denouncing Israel for its allegedly brutal response to Palestinian rioters and chastising its Jewish supporters—in particular, Elie Wiesel—for their blindness to what the Jewish tradition “commands”:

Morally, the Jewish tradition commands us to act justly, especially when [doing so] seem[s] imprudent and embarrassing, and never to be silent, even to protect Jewish unity. . . . Even in bad times, when Jews were under fierce attack, their moral teachers gave no exceptions. The prophets knew that Assyria and Babylonia were far more wicked than Judea, but they held Judea to account.

This statement, taken on its own, bespeaks a limited and quite doctrinaire view of the Jewish moral and political tradition, a considerably more variegated body of thought than is suggested by such categorical pronouncements—“never to be silent, even to protect Jewish unity,” “no exceptions,” and so forth. Even assuming that Hertzberg is right about the uncompromising nature of the “prophetic” message itself, that message is one among others that are equally representative of traditional Jewish reflections on power and politics. Sweeping claims about the “Jewish tradition” always and everywhere dictating one or another absolute course of action almost always oversimplify a multifaceted story.