Yonatan “Johnny” Ariel, the executive director of Makom, the Israeli Engagement Network, spent a couple of days last week speaking with members of United Hebrew, Temple Israel, Shaare Emeth and B’nai Amoona. He came under the auspices of Focus Israel, a five-year program to improve relations between the St. Louis Jewish community and Israel. A native of the United Kingdom, Ariel has lived in Israel since 1983 and has two sons and a daughter. He and his wife live in Har Adar, which straddles the Green Line west of Jerusalem. He spoke with the Jewish Light at the Jewish Federation Building a short time before he was to leave St. Louis.

What brings you to St. Louis?

Several years ago, the Federation made contact with Makom and sought together to try to figure out if we could enrich and enlighten the relationship between the St. Louis Jewish community and Israel on the basis that Israel is changing, Jewish identity is changing, the Internet means the way people learn is changing.

Aren’t things always changing between the Jewish community in the United States and Israel, as they have since 1948?

Yeah, they are, but because of the changing nature of Israel and the changing nature of Jewish identity, the actual content of that relationship is going to have to evolve.

Can you be specific?

Overwhelmingly, Jews around the world have had an image of Israelis as either being heroes or victims. Not all Israelis are heroes, and not all Israelis are victims. A hell of a lot are neither. Therefore, if you want to have a vibrant connection, you have to attend not only to the extreme story. The Canadian literary critic, Northrop Frye, identified four genres of story: the romance, tragedy, irony and comedy. Romance is where the protagonist sets out on a journey, encounters obstacles, manages to overcome the obstacles and reaches the destination. In the tragic story, the hero reaches the obstacles, doesn’t manage to overcome them. Overwhelmingly, the story of Israel is the story of those two.

That’s what kids are taught in school, what people believe, the target is on my back?

Yeah, rabbinic sermons and federation press releases and campaigns. I believe we’ve got to add in to the mix irony, where the hero sets out on the journey, gets hopelessly lost, neither reaches the destination or falls into the abyss. Or comedy. The best comedies are all about bumbling people who do actually set out on their journey, do eventually arrive at their destination but wholly not by the route that they thought they would take. We’ve got to tell the story of Israel in its richer form.

How can Israel counteract the bad press it gets these days?

The headlines out of Israel can easily be understood as a catalog of very tough issues that have not yet been resolved. If they have been attended to, some of them have been a bit messed up. That’s with the Palestinians or the intra-Jewish tensions, the ultra-Orthodox, the ethnic tension, the Israeli Arab population and so on.

I passionately believe that the best way for Israel to tell its story is to expose its vitality. If people begin to grasp all sorts of fizz and buzz of our society, I think that will take care of it. Second, as my chief target is the Jewish population, I don’t want us to be in the situation whereby the barometer for what we do is whether the non-Jews cover it in a way that finds favor in our eyes or not. That’s not the marker. The marker has to be whether Jews are engaged with Israel.

How other people look at Israel is secondary?

I don’t want people living Jewish lives determined by what non-Jews are thinking. We have to be smart enough to mine Jewish history enough to figure out what is the best way we can act in line with our tradition and the culture.

Can you be specific about some of the unresolved issues?

They get resolved with a conversation about principles. Most of us would say there are principles and tensions here, and we have to work through those tensions for a resolution, somehow, in a democratic framework. There will be new elections in a year, year and a half. In many ways, one of the things that has put the Israeli-Palestinian question in the place it is, is that the Israeli left won the argument over it’s not good for Israel to continue to rule over Palestinians. The Israeli right won the argument over with whom we are to negotiate.

How do you characterize yourself: center, right, left? Educator? Provocateur?

I’m certainly an educator. I do not believe the center-right-left terms have any meaning at all. You can be very strongly in favor of Israel not continuing to rule over Palestinians, but you can be very hawkish over what deal should be struck over security. You have people in the right-wing party who are more economically social-welfare than you do in the center parties. Alignment doesn’t work in Israel.

The New York Times Magazine recently had a piece about the possibility of Israel attacking Iran, which may be developing a nuclear weapon. Do you think about that?

I think about it a lot. I don’t necessarily favor an aggressive military option. You’re asking someone who doesn’t have any access to intelligence information beyond what you read in the press. What’s the real situation? Are they really three months away [from having a nuclear weapon]? Are the six months away? Are they three years away?

In a volatile region, Syria’s still fighting it out. We all thought that would topple [President] Assad sooner rather than later. What will emerge in Egypt? What will happen in the Palestinian election? In the Israeli election? In the American election? These will all be played out in the next year or two years. My impression is that much is on hold.

About the effort to reconnect with American Jews, are they disaffected with Israel nowadays?

Some are. Some aren’t. It’s a mixed picture. Some don’t feel they have a space in their Jewish community here to have an honest conversation about the things that interest them or trouble them. So we are very strong on recommending those kind of spaces.

What do you prescribe for that?

We have an activity we call the elephants in the room. We say, “Go on, articulate what are the biggest elephants in the room about Israel.” You get all sorts of things. Some of the obvious ones about the treatment of Arabs and Palestinians, Reform Jews, a variety of things. Sometimes you get some interesting formulations. One said, “I can’t tell my boyfriend, but secretly I’ve very happy that Israel’s bombing Hamas.” That’s not really being given an opportunity to play out very easily. We have to give more opportunities for that.

Why do American Jews sometimes take it personally when Israel is criticized, even if they have never been there?

I don’t think one can understand that without reference to what has happened to Jews in the modern world in particular. Most people aren’t that familiar with what happened to Jews in the medieval world.

In the modern world, there’s the encounter of Judaism with modernity. We are still living through that encounter. We haven’t resolved it yet. Reform Judaism was one way of having that encounter. It set out with very strong principles at the beginning, and they’ve modernized and changed them since, including on Israel, including on patrilineal descent, all these other things.

The encounter of Judaism with modernity is still the key thing that’s being played out. We have not yet worked out what that means. Take the last 60-odd years. The Jews have used their collective energy in establishing and securing the state of Israel, in freeing Jews that needed to be freed, in memorializing the Shoah and richness of Jewish life that was, and in marginalizing anti-Semitism in a Western, democratic world. It’s been an astonishing success. I think that for some people it’s actually not that easy to recognize that we won.

Some people want Israel to be perfect.

The amount of longing that was stored up before it came to be. And it ties up in the Jewish imagination with some kind of exemplary something. All the early Zionist thinkers addressed the question is different ways, what they wanted to build in Israel.

Benedict Anderson wrote a book called “Imagined Communities.” All communities go through, in nationalist terms, an act of imagining. For Jews, the act of imagination was multifold more profound. People not speaking one language and all of that. It was a supreme act of imagination to believe you could actually pull it off. There’s still residue of “Can it really be? Can it really be so?” I think that’s a generational issue.

In time it will pass?

Yeah. The aftershocks of all the wars, even the fight over Zionism-is-racism in the U.N., the aftershocks of all of that are still reverberating through Jewish life.

Won’t these debates always continue?

They will, over some of the identity questions, but not over whether Israel will survive. By far the majority of people on the Palestinian side and the majority of people on the Israeli Jewish side know the terms of the deal.