Do diaspora Jews change their nationalities like jackets?

Conal Urquhart:

One of Israel's most celebrated novelists has been denounced by American Jews for questioning the depth of their faith and suggesting they would swap their national allegiance as they would swap a jacket.

AB Yehoshua, who was nominated for the Booker International Prize last year, was invited to speak on the future of Jews at the inaugural event to celebrate the centenary of the American Jewish Committee. Later events were attended by President George Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Hundreds of guests gathered at the US Library of Congress in Washington to hear Jewish thinkers discuss Jewish identity and the future of the Jews. The warm start quickly descended into anger as Yehoshua lambasted his co-panellists for their abstract notions of Jewish identity and their fears of anti-semitism.

He left his hosts speechless as he said that there was little to celebrate in the 100-year history of the committee and the Jewish people. 'There is a sense of joy in this event and I am sorry I will have to spoil it a little bit,' he said.

The committee is one of the US's oldest Jewish organisations and Yehoshua is one of Israel's leading authors. A former paratrooper in the Israeli army, he is renowned for having a certain Israeli bluntness.

The panel included Cynthia Ozick, a writer, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz and Leon Wieseltier, professor of literature. TV presenter Ted Koppel kicked off the discussion with the question, 'What is a Jew?' He said that Jews always try to be like everyone else in whichever country they are in. The warmly received remark infuriated Yehoshua, who gave his definition of his Jewish identity.

'I am what I am. I have a language, I have a people; like the Dane; like the Norwegian. I cannot be Danish. I cannot be Norwegian,' he said.

He said that the past 100 years had contained a series of failures for the Jewish people. He said the Jews in Europe had been given the opportunity to return to Israel by the British government's Balfour declaration in 1917, yet they had failed to take it, even though the warnings of disaster were everywhere.

He scoffed at Ozick, who tried to define her Jewishness as living her life in the US but also being hurt by events in Israel. 'You sit in America and you think of Israel,' he mocked. 'In Israel, the Jew takes responsibility for all the components of his life. In Israel there will never be a question of a Jew becoming assimilated just as there is no question of Frenchman being assimilated in France.'

He said that diaspora Jews changed their nationalities like jackets. Once they were Polish and Russian; now they were British and American. One day they could choose to be Chinese or Singaporean, he said.

The relationship between Israel and the Jewish diaspora is complicated. In Israel many, such as Ariel Sharon, have said that Israel needs Jewish immigration as much as ever to contend with growing Arab populations in the country.

Others, on the left, question why the US's six million Jews have the right to become Israeli citizens while tens of thousands of foreign workers and Palestinians who live there and speak Hebrew do not.

Shmuel Rosner, the Washington correspondent for the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, said Yehoshua had an agenda. 'The problem was that he was very blatant and he wasn't listening to the other panellists. He was fairly rude and very unAmerican.'

According to Rosner, people at the conference described the writer as 'impertinent', 'tasteless' and 'foolish'.

Yehoshua's performance sparked a debate in Israel. In Haaretz last week, Natan Sharansky, who was jailed in the Soviet Union for his desire to emigrate to Israel, wrote that Yehoshua was weakening the justification for the state of Israel by claiming, 'everything outside Israel is obsolete and its fate is to be lost'.

Rabbi Michael Lerner wrote that both Israel and US Jewry had substantial failings. 'Much of America's organised Jewish community is mired in a religion of Holocaust and Israel-worship that sends it into a fury if anyone dares compare our Holocaust to theirs, or uses universally accepted criteria of human rights to criticise Israel,' he wrote.

Yehoshua admitted in Haaretz that he had been overly blunt. He said he had been trying to explain 'that for me Jewish values are not located in a fancy spice box that is only opened to release its pleasing fragrance on Shabbat and holidays.'

First and foremost a Jew

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