WASHINGTON — There is a danger of civil war if Israel reaches a territorial compromise with the Palestinians, but the risk of not making such a deal due to pressure from Orthodox settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is even more dangerous, says a journalist-historian who has written extensively on the Middle East.
“By not compromising with the Palestinians, we will see more and more bloodshed on both sides,” said Milton Viorst of Washington, whose new book “What Shall I Do With This People: Jews and the Fractious Politics of Judaism” deals with the divisiveness of the Jewish people and its effects on Jews and Israel.
Viorst concedes there is a danger of Israeli civil war, as settlers may resist giving up territory.
“But if it requires a certain amount of coercion and pressure from outside forces like the U.S., so be it,” he said. “I would hope that pressure from the outside would prevent civil war. But I can’t imagine allowing settlers to prevent Israel from arriving at a peace settlement.”
The problem is, the author noted, that “if you believe you are doing God’s work [as those settlers do], you have no incentive for compromise.”
The title “What Shall I Do With These People” refers to a rhetorical question a frustrated Moses asked God in the Sinai about the “stiff-necked” Israelites, while the book itself chronicles the fractious nature of the Jewish people.
But, Viorst argues, the intolerance of Jews for the opinions of other Jews has grown worse in recent years.
This radicalism can be traced to the effects of the 18th century Enlightenment, which fractured Jewish unity, he says. The liberal, secular ideas of that movement, which the Jews absorbed as they burst out of the ghettoes, undermined rabbinical authority and created a world of denominational Judaism.
But anti-Semitism rose in the 19th century, and the Jewish people countered it with the Zionist movement, Viorst continues. Within that movement, religious Zionism arose, which at first was a very small minority, claiming to combine traditional Judaism with a return to the Jewish people’s historical land.
After the 1967 Six-Day War, those religious Zionists combined with the Revisionist movement, then led by Knesset member and later Prime Minister Menachem Begin, to prevent the return of the land taken in that war.
“We are in crisis,” he says. “Not only are Jews deeply divided by conflicting concepts of Judaism, but also religious Zionists — who have substituted the worship of land for the worship of God — in alliance with the Revisionists, have become the dominant political force in Israel making it difficult to compromise.”
These forces came together, he believes, in the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
“In retrospect, it is clear the anger that produced the assassination [of Rabin] had been simmering not just since 1967 but since the schism between religious and secular Jews during the Enlightenment,” he writes. “Though the breach seemed harmless for many decades, it had never healed. The Six-Day War only reopened it. When Rabin signed the Oslo Accords, religious Jews seemed to lose all interest in bridging their differences with Jewish secularism.”
Viorst, who was born in 1930 in Paterson, N.J., traces his interest in things Jewish to his childhood. As a boy, he remembers attending the Orthodox shuls of his Eastern European grandparents on the High Holy Days to spend time with his mother’s and father’s parents.
“All my grandparents were reasonably devout,” he writes, “but it never occurred to either side to worship at the other’s shul.”
His parents, however, belonged to a Conservative synagogue where he became bar mitzvah.
After getting a bachelor’s degree from Rutgers, he studied French history as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Lyons and received a master’s in history from Harvard, before getting his master’s in journalism from Columbia University and going to work for The Washington Post in 1957.
As a columnist for The Washington Star in the 1960s, he began traveling to Israel and was “fascinated” with what he saw. He says he has always been interested in Israel (“My roots are all in Judaism”), but these trips sparked his professional interest.
Viorst has covered the Middle East for 30 years for The New Yorker and other publications and written about the region for periodicals including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, The Nation and Time. His dozen books include “Sands of Sorrow: Israel’s Journey From Independence” (1987) and “In the Shadow of the Prophet: The Struggle for the Soul of Islam” (2001).