Kind regards

In 2007 Gideon Meir presented this concept as the new policy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Now another Israeli politician discovers it again !

Israel has to consider more about what the outside world thinks about it.

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מעניין וכרגיל כתוב נפלא. אבל את בטוחה שיש פתיחות גדולה יותר למגוון הקהילות שבתפוצות? אני מתרשם שמגמה מקבילה היא הדרה של מגוון זרמים ביהדות (ראי את חוק הגיור שאמנם, עדיין, לא עבר אבל המסר חזק ואת מעצר הנשים שקראו בתורה בכותל). זרמים אלה אמנם לא חזקים בארץ אבל הם מהווים את עמוד השידרה של יהדות התפוצות בכלל וארה”ב בפרט. אם, כך נדמה לי, המגמה הנוכחית תמשיך, אני לא בטוח שהגדלת מספר המשתתפים ב”תגלית” תוכל לכפר על הניתוק שעניין זה יביא עם הקהילות הלא אורטודוקסיות בעיקר בארה”ב. האם עירבבתי שמיטה והר סיני? מה דעתך?
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This is an excellent quesion that is at the heart of the matter- thank you Daniel:)

Reut’s new paradigm regarding the future relations of Israel and the Jewish world offers several principles for action. Two of them relate directly to our discussion: The first has to do with the need to ‘flatten’ the Jewish world by promoting direct community links around the world, deemphasizing aliyah and focusing on global connections instead. The other principle has to do with fostering pluralism in Judaism, thus allowing any Jew who is interested in his ‘Jewishness’ to be part of this global community.

So to answer your question, the two ideas complement one another- by itself, neither is sufficient. The idea of diversity as a source of strength is not new; it is now our job to advance this idea in the context of the Jewish world. When a single stream of Judaism claims ownership over such a complex network of people, the nework suffers. As you implied, this is not as easy task.. which is why we have to keep working!

General separating Jews community from Israel…even if its not bad enough

Thanks for your comment. Some thoughts:

While the sense that Israel often serves the ‘whipping boy’ of the global community can yield an inclination to disengage, in an increasingly interdependent and rapidly changing world, Israel must continually pursue common cause with elements of this community with which it shares fundamental values.

Tactics for contending with questionable elements in that regard – such as the UN Human Rights Council – should probably be navigated on a contextually bound, case-by-case basis.

However, a larger point is that by simply navigating crises with tactical responses, Israel fails to address the real challenge, which lies in an infrastructure of conceptual inferiority. Years of Israel’s neglect of the diplomatic and political arenas are the reason the upcoming UN investigations may gain the kind of traction that the Goldstone report did.

Reut recently published a conceptual framework on creating a political firewall to combat Israel’s delegitimization (http://www.reut-institute.org/en/Publication.aspx?PublicationId=3769). In it, we outline response guidelines that aim at cultivating a global network to contend with the network mobilized towards Israel’s delegitimization, driving a wedge between critics of Israeli policy and those seeking to delegitimize it by engaging the former and ‘naming and shaming’ the latter, and re-organizing Israel’s foreign affairs establishment, among other elements.

In the absence of a proper recognition of the delegitimization challenge as a strategic and potentially existential threat, and lacking a coherent response strategy that harnesses both the official establishment and global civil society, Israel will continue to manage the crises that reflect the deterioration of its international standing.