The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
March 5, 2013
A Series of Lectures for People Who Prefer Pondering to Pandering
The Most Dangerous Enemy of Israel: A Hard Look at a Continuing Reality
The Jews of the area which eventually became known as Palestine twice revolted against the Roman Empire, first from 68-72 CE, and then from 132-135 CE. Both times the rebellions were severely crushed by the Romans. Many Jews were driven out of their homeland by the Romans in the first rebellion, and nearly all of them were expelled in the second rebellion. From the year 135 until the early 20th century, there were relatively few Jews who lived in what had been called Israel, and then Judah, and then Judea, and finally Palestine. Despite what you may have heard to the contrary, those are facts. From the middle of the second century CE, the vast majority of Jews were in what was called in Greek the Diaspora, which means the Dispersion.
Prior to World War I, but especially between the wars, Jewish immigrants began moving into the biblical land of Israel in increasing numbers. At the conclusion of World War II, however, many thousands of Holocaust survivors and other Jews started to move into the British Mandate of Palestine in large numbers. The British tried unsuccessfully to stem the tide, until they left Palestine in 1947.
As we all know, six million Jews were killed by the Nazi Holocaust. Were it not for that tragic historical reality, there would have been no State of Israel instituted by the United Nations in 1947, and there would be no Israel today. It is beyond dispute that international sentiment swayed dramatically in favor of establishing a Jewish state after World War II. But without the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust, that never would have happened. Other peoples have wanted to carve out states for themselves in various places and at various times, but short of bloodshed, these longings almost never were successful. The Zionist slogan in the mid-1940s was “A People Without Land for a Land Without People.” But of course there were hundreds of thousands of Arabs who were living in Palestine, and their ancestors had been there for nearly two thousand years. There weren’t many millions of Arabs, but there were hundreds of thousands of them, and perhaps even a million or more.
A United Nations commission drew a map dividing the land west of the Jordan River between the Arabs, who eventually became known as Palestinians, and the Jews, who became known as Israelis. Curiously, prior to 1948, the Jews were called Palestinians and the Palestinians were called Arabs. A further historical curiosity is that in biblical times, the Israelites or Jews did not especially like living beside the Mediterranean Sea, but when the division of the holy Land occurred, the Israelis were given the western half, along the sea, and the Palestinians were given the eastern half, along the Jordan. Odd.
When the UN resolution declared Israel a state, the Israeli War of Independence began shortly afterward. Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinians all sent armies into the new state of Israel, intending quickly to crush it into oblivion. Miraculously, or to many it seemed a miracle, Israel defeated the large and well-armed coalition arrayed against them. There were a few changes made from the original UN map as a result of the Israeli victory, but the two new entities, Israel and Palestine, agreed to live within the two somewhat altered maps.
The Six Day War in 1967 changed all that. Again the Arab states on the borders of Israel (Syria, Jordan, and Egypt) had rather openly planned a joint invasion of Israel. (Iraq chose to sit out that conflict.) Israel pre-empted their adversaries, striking hard at all three countries, destroying much of their ability to wage war before they had even fired a shot. As a result, Israel occupied all of what soon became known as “the West Bank.” The familiar Green Line set off the West Bank and Gaza from the rest of Israel, but it was the Israel Defense Forces which controlled and occupied virtually all of the Palestinian territory which from 1948 to 1967 had been officially under the protection of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank has continued to the present time, although a few years ago, after continuous armed harassment, it removed its forces from Gaza.
As I presume all of you know, Gaza now is ruled by Hamas, the Syrian-backed radical anti-Israeli political organization, and “the Palestinians,” minus the Gazans, are ruled by Al Fatah, the West Bank Arab political party whose origins go back to Yassir Arafat. The West Bank Arabs are officially amenable to recognizing Israel’s right to exist, but by no means do all of them feel that way. Thus far Hamas has refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist.
Ever since the end of the Six Day War, various Israeli governments have promoted the notion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. (Almost no one created settlements in Gaza, concluding that Gaza wasn’t worth settling in.) The policy of establishing settlements has continued almost without let-up, until there are now 400,000+ Israelis living on what was Palestinian land. Benjamin Netanyahu, the current Israeli Prime minister, was re-elected in January. He has just approved a major settlement east of Jerusalem which, if it is completed, will effectively cut the West Bank in half, north and south. This is the clear intent of Mr. Netanyahu’s decision, although and he and his cabinet would never admit that.
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With this as a general overview, let us now turn to some historical factors about Israel before we look at some other current “facts on the ground,” as journalists are now wont to say.
The original Zionists were almost all secular. That is, they vociferously considered themselves culturally but not religiously Jewish. As time has gone on since the founding of the state of Israel, there is a growing percentage of Israelis who are religious, and most of them are Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox. The latter group also are identified as the Haredim. Very few Israelis are what we in the US would recognize as Reform or Conservative Jews. Much of this growth among religious Israelis comes from a much higher birthrate among the Orthodox and Haredi Jews than among other Israelis. To add to the complexity, there are many Jews in Israel who refuse to recognize Israel as a proper nation, because they believe there will be no divinely-sanctioned nation of the Jews until the Messiah comes. (Almost nothing about Israel is simple or straightforward. Keep that in mind as we go along. As Al Jolson, who happened to be born an Orthodox Jew, would say, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”)
The Haredi movement did not begin in Israel, but rather in Poland, in the 1920s. It started in opposition to the secular Jews of Poland. The first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, gave the ultra-Orthodox in Israel certain concessions, thinking it politically expedient, but also thinking they would soon fade into oblivion. He agreed to declare Saturday the official state Sabbath, for the rabbinate to be independent of the state, and to defer Haredi students from serving in the military. He also agreed for the government to pay the costs of Orthodox students in their yeshiva schools, and many remain there for life in Torah studies. Sixty per cent of the Haredim do not work, and they are heavily subsidized by the national government. This double standard is causing heightened political unrest among the non-religious Israelis.
It is not surprising that these concessions to the Haredim have met with growing resistance among secular Israelis. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that many Haredim have become politically active through their Agudat party. Furthermore, many of the ultra-Orthodox are among the most belligerent of the settlers in the West Bank. They believe that God intended Israel to contain all of what they call “Judea and Samaria,” which means everything west of the Jordan River. Oddly, used in this way, these are New Testament terms, not Old Testament terms. This view that Judea and Samaria should all be included in Greater Israel is also shared by many secular Israelis. Again, odd.
The political party of most of the early Zionists was the Labor Party. It governed more or less unimpeded until 1977, when the Likud Party, under Prime Minister Menachem Begin, took the reins of power. Labor coalitions won subsequent elections, but for the past 35 years, there has been growing and strong conservative support for constructing settlements in the West Bank. In the main, Labor and their allies favor a two-state solution, and Likud and their allies have come to favor a state of Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, and from Lebanon in the north to the Gulf of Eilat in the south. They have never officially said that, but everything they have done proclaims that the 1948 border settlement is void.
The Israeli Knesset, or Parliament, is elected through one of the most unusual electoral processes in the world. The system intentionally grants advantages to small parties, which, with only a few delegates, wield power far greater than their numbers would seem to warrant in any other parliamentary system of government. No political party has ever won a majority of the seats in the Knesset, and so it is always necessary to form coalition governments. Through the years since 1948, Labor-dominated governments have basically favored making peace with the Palestinians and creating two separate and distinct states, Israel and Palestine. However, Likud-dominated coalitions increasingly have moved toward a one-state solution, although they have carefully refrained from stating that as their official policy.
There is an enormous problem with a one-state solution. If it were constituted immediately inside any proposed set of borders, there would be almost as many Palestinians as there are Jews. Furthermore, because of a much higher birthrate among Palestinians, very soon there would be more Palestinians in this newly formed nation. So the question naturally arises, would such a state be a Jewish nation, or would it be a secular democracy in which Jews, Muslims, Christians, and secular citizens all have equal status? And if there were more Muslims than Jews, would Muslims control the government? And because Israel was established precisely because it was to be a Jewish state, how could it be Jewish with a minority of Jews living within its borders? In 2013, what does it mean that Israel exists as a Jewish state?
Two years ago, Prime Minister Netanyahu proposed a law which would require all non-Jewish citizens of Israel to swear loyalty to a “Jewish and Democratic state” as their condition of citizenship. The law would not require Jews to take the same oath. This proposed law was intended to force Arab Israelis to accept the notion that Israel is both a Jewish state and a democratic state. But if it is Jewish, what about the hundreds of thousands of Muslim and Christian Arabs? Should they be disallowed as citizens? And if Israel is a democracy, how can it require anyone to affirm Israel as a Jewish state? Are Americans or Germans or Italians or Peruvians forced to recognize those nations as Christian states?
Arab-Israeli voters have become more and more discouraged through the passing of the years. Since Israel was founded, never has a coalition government invited any Arab political party to join a governing coalition. Twenty years ago more than 60% of Israeli-Arabs voted for Jewish parties; now less than 20% do. The rate of unemployment for Arabs in Israel is twice as high as it is among Jews, and 66% of Arab children are classified as poor, compared with 24% for Jewish children. However, without question Israeli Arabs are much better off financially than Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank.
Perhaps by now in this lecture you have concluded that life in Israel is very complex. In that you are absolutely correct. Israelis believe that no one outside Israel, including Jews living anywhere else in the world, really understand what life is like in Israel. Pessimism abounds on both the right and the left. Rightists seem to become ever more hawkish, while leftists strive against all odds to make peace with their Palestinian neighbors. Some Israelis claim that anyone who criticizes Israel is anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish, or anti-Israeli. Is that true also for Israelis who criticize the policies of their own government? In any case, any Israeli who doesn’t feel stress simply by living there probably is incapable of having any very serious feelings about anything. And whatever I have said about Israelis also applies to Palestinians. Israel is located in a very tough neighborhood.
The most visible sign and symbol of the growing division between Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land is the security wall which the Israeli government constructed a few years ago. It more or less follows the Green Line, except that here and there it was extended fairly deeply into areas previously under Palestinian control. The purpose of the wall, which is fifteen to twenty feet high, was to prevent acts of terrorism by Palestinian extremists. That it has largely succeeded in doing. Terrorism has become almost non-existent in Israel proper, except for Hamas rockets fired from Gaza. But the wall has further added to the geographical and political separation of the two societies and cultures, and Palestinians feel more isolated than ever.
Two years ago a group of ultra-conservative Israeli rabbis issued a religious ruling, rather like a Muslim fatwa, which said that all Israeli Jews were forbidden to rent or sell property to non-Jews. To their credit, the ruling was denounced by the country’s two chief rabbis and by Mr. Netanyahu. But the fact that the rabbis thought they could force their adherents to follow their dictate suggests how badly relations between Israelis and Palestinians have deteriorated.
There was a proposal to build a $300 million Museum of Tolerance in West Jerusalem, the Israeli part of the holy city. But it was going to be built over a 400-year-old Muslim cemetery. The US-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, which intended to fund the museum, felt it would improve relations between Jews and Arabs, but the location which was selected does anything but create inter-ethnic tolerance.
Many leading Israelis are speaking out against the treatment of Arabs on both sides of the security fence. In those instances where the Israeli government has stepped in to clear settlers from settlements which were not approved by the government, many times the settlers have tried to stop the Israeli troops sent in, and they have set fire to Palestinian fields in protest to the decisions of the Israeli government. If their anger is at their own government, why do they burn the fields of Palestinians? It is because they don’t like Palestinians, and they want them gone, elsewhere, anywhere but in the West Bank.
Ehud Olmert, a former prime minister, has declared that Israel’s democracy is being threatened by “an evil wind of extremism.” Peace Now is perhaps the most influential Israeli group seeking accommodation with and the cessation of all hostilities against the Palestinians. They want all settlements dismantled, and the settlers to go back into Israel proper, i.e., Israel before the Six Day War. Their leader, Yariv Oppenheimer, said, “The radical extremists in the right-wing camp understand that the government is just too afraid to confront them.” With 400,000 settlers now living in the West Bank, it is not surprising. Moving that many people against their will would be a supremely daunting task for any government, both politically and militarily. When they moved the few hundred settlers out of Gaza several years ago, it was a terrible experience for everyone. But when there are hundreds of thousands of settlers beyond the Green Line, it becomes horrendous. However, let no one forget that there are 400,000 settlers in the West Bank precisely because the Israeli government allowed every one of them to move into the West Bank.
Richard Goldstone is a Jewish South African judge who was named the head of a United Nations delegation which went into Gaza to investigate the issues which had led to bloodshed between Israelis and Palestinians for years, but especially in 2009. Specifically, he was asked by the UN to see if war crimes had been committed by either side in the Israeli/Hamas conflict. The report indicated that both sides had indeed engaged in atrocities. But the Israelis did everything they could to suppress the report, castigating it as “one-sided and irrelevant.” It clearly stated that Hamas had engaged in atrocities, but because it also said the Israeli Defense Forces did that, it was “one-sided and irrelevant.” When the findings of the report were published, Bibi Netanyahu said, “There are three primary threats facing us today: the nuclear threat, the missile threat and what I call the Goldstone threat.” Iranian nuclear weapons are certainly a threat, as are missiles fired against Israel from Lebanon, Syria, Iran, or Gaza. But it is what the Prime Minister calls “the Goldstone threat” that is really the heart of this lecture. Israel’s unresolved treatment of Palestinians is its own greatest enemy. If the Israeli government does not rectify its abuses, it shall lose all international support, and Israel shall become as much a pariah nation as North Korea or Iran or Zimbabwe.
The treatment of the Palestinians by the Israeli government must change dramatically if Israel is to survive. The greatest enemy of Israel is, in a few words, its continuing and unrelenting mistreatment of the Palestinians. If it is not altered, Israel will have no allies left, including its all-time Number One ally, the United States of America. However, by a vote in the US House of Representatives, the Goldstone Report was declared to be “irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy” by a vote of 344-36. Anyone who doubts the power of the American-Israeli Political Action Committee or the pro-Israel lobby in Congress need only glance at that vote to validate that American governments under all our Presidents and political parties have expressed unwavering support for the state of Israel, and relatively little substantial support for the Palestinians, other than financial assistance. Only President Carter, after he left the presidency, has voiced strong backing for a truly viable Palestinian state.
There are understandable reasons for why Israel seldom has any serious diplomacy with the Palestinians. The Palestinian government, both in Ramallah and Gaza, has made it very difficult for the Israelis to engage with the Palestinians under any circumstances. Hamas in Gaza has never declared that Israel has a right by international agreement to exist. Its intransigence is widely recognized. President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority has very little real power to come to the table with the Israelis, if the Israelis were willing, which they aren’t. Therefore almost no diplomacy happens between the two sides. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers keep gobbling up more and more Palestinian territory.
Last October the United Nations General Assembly, by a vote of 138-9, with 41 abstentions, passed a resolution granting the Palestinian Authority non-member observer status as a non-voting state, whatever that might mean in political reality. Israel opposed this measure, because they feared that if Palestine was accepted as a valid state by the UN, even a non-voting one, they might bring action against Israel for war crimes in the International Criminal Court by promoting settlements in the West Bank. Nothing significant happens in either Palestine or Israel without strong protests from someone.
There are many Jewish voices, within and outside Israel, who decry many Israeli government policies. Ehud Olmert, as I have mentioned, opposes Israeli intransigence, as do former prime ministers Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak. Noam Chomsky is an American-born Jewish linguistics professor of decidedly leftist but also unpredictable views. A couple of years ago he was slated to deliver a lecture at a Palestinian university. When he went to the checkpoint to cross the border from Israel into the West Bank, he was grilled for three hours. He was ultimately told he could not enter Palestinian territory. Noam Chomsky being Noam Chomsky, he had a rather pointed observation about what happened at the border. He said, “I really don’t know of any other examples outside of totalitarian states where people are denied entry because they are going to talk at a university. It may in part be just a reflection of the change in climate in Israel; the country has visibly got more paranoid, circling the wagons, and so on. In fact, it is rather reminiscent of South Africa in the early 1960s, when it began to be recognized that they were becoming a pariah state and reacted pretty much the way Israel is acting now.” Those are very strong words for a professional linguist to utter. They’re rather like some of the language in this lecture.
Rabbi Michael Lerner is the editor of Tikkun Magazine. At the time of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, he wrote an editorial for The Times of London. He began with this jolting sentence: “Israel’s attempt to wipe out Hamas is understandable, but stupid.” He followed that with a more moderate – and valid – observation. “No country in the world is going to ignore the provocation of rockets being launched from neighboring territory day after day.” But he followed that up with another zinger, although one with which I agree: “Hamas can harass, but it cannot pose any threat to the existence of Israel.” Up to the present, that most certainly is correct. Hamas cannot find enough military support from anyone -- Syria, Iran, Egypt, or elsewhere -- to pose sufficient military strength by itself as to obliterate the state of Israel. But they can and have made life miserable for Israelis living within rocket range of the Gazan border, and that must stop.
Prime Minister Netanyahu has vacillated between being extremely hard-line and moderately hard-line for all the years he has headed the Israeli government. For example, he openly talked of attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities. Meir Dagan, the former director of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, and Gabi Ashkenazi, who was the Chief of General Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, strongly advised him not even to contemplate such a step. “You are likely to make an illegal decision to go to war,” they warned. Further, Bibi has proposed building 5000 more Israeli housing units on Palestinian territory in East Jerusalem, in addition to 9,000 other units which are already being built.
On January 22 a national election was held in Israel. Polls had prognosticated that there would be a turn to the right, and that parties wanting more settlements in the West Bank and no accommodation with the Palestinians would win a majority of the seats in the Knesset. Perhaps that is why the Prime Minister was so belligerent leading up to the election. Pollsters especially predicted that a relatively new name in Israeli politics, Naftali Bennett, would do well. His party is called Habayit Hayehudi (The Jewish Home.) However, the election resulted in an exact split between moderates and Labor on one side and Likud and the rightist parties on the other side, particularly the religious rightists, all of whom seem to favor a one-state solution. The surprising factor is that a brand new party of relative liberals came in second only to Likud. It is led by a man who has never been involved in politics, Yair Lapid, whose party is called Yesh Atid, which means “There Is a Future.” I want first to address the views of Naftali Bennett and The Jewish Home (Habayit Hayehudi) before coming back to Yair Lapid and There Is a Future (Yesh Atid).
Naftali Bennett’s parents were secular Jews born in San Francisco. They emigrated to Israel just after the Six-Day War. Naftali was raised in Israel. (By way of comparison, Bibi Netanyahu’s parents were born in Europe, but moved to America, which is where Bibi spent most of his youth and early years. This is why he speaks English with a flawless American accent, if “flawless American accent” is not an oxymoron. (Many people, especially Brits, would say that is an oxymoron.) Naftali Bennett started a successful computer business, and he came to the US to market his idea. Therefore he presumably speaks English with an Israeli accent, but he is very familiar with America and American politics. Over time, both he and his parents became religious Jews, and he married an Israeli woman who is also a religious Jew.
Mr. Bennett believes that everything west of the Jordan, and maybe even much of the land east of it, belongs to the Jews by a divinely-determined manifest destiny. He and Netanyahu are devotees of the Revisionist teachings of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who supported the idea of a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River. Because Jabotinsky died in 1940, he didn’t live to see a state of Israel at all, but both Netanyahu and Bennett have lived to see it. And now they are both seeking to lead the state of Israel. Netanyahu currently is doing it, but Bennett is hoping someday to do it. Bennett castigates Netanyahu for breaking from Revisionist dogma in a speech in 2009 at Bar-Ilan University where Bibi talked about a “demilitarized” Palestinian state. He has never followed up on what that might mean, but Bennett wants no part of whatever it might be. Bennett insists there is no occupation of the West Bank, because he insists there is no West Bank. All the land belongs to the Jews, he contends. Hence the name of his political party, Habayit Hayehudi, the Jewish Home.
From my perspective, and I hope yours as well, Yair Lapid may represent the best hope for Israeli politics to emerge since Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by a religious rightist West Bank settler years ago. Rabin believed a two-state solution was the only way for Israel to progress into an affluent and acceptable future. Anwar Sadat, the President of Egypt, was also assassinated by religious rightists from the Muslim Brotherhood, the same group who have taken over the government of Egypt after the revolution against Hosni Mubarak. In the volatile neighborhood of the Middle East, religious extremists are often a dangerous element in an already dangerous mixture of unstable political and cultural elements. For that matter, in the USA religious extremists aren’t very helpful either.
Yesh Atid (There Is a Future) came in second in the Israeli election several weeks ago. No one predicted this remarkable outcome. This is not to say Yesh Atid is yet a large or influential party; out of 120 seats in the Knesset, it won only 19 seats, compared to 42 for Likud. But this was its very first electoral outing. And neither the pollsters nor anyone else saw that Yesh Atid might represent a major swing in Israeli politics toward a brighter and more peaceful future. Maybe There Is a Future after all. If Yesh Atid continues to grow in subsequent elections as it did in its first election, it could be the best thing to happen since 1948. Let no one miss what I am attempting to say here, nor to mistake the fact that I, who have always had a proclivity for inserting my views into American politics, am now doing it in a brazen fashion in Israeli politics.
It is somewhat unsettling that it is now six weeks since the Israeli election, and Mr. Netanyahu has still not created his coalition. Does that he mean he can’t make the coalition he wants, or that he can make a coalition he doesn’t want, or that he can’t make a coalition at all? And does this inability to move forward bode ill for the future? With Yesh Atid there presumably is a future, but is there a future with a Likud-led government?
What is the most dangerous enemy of Israel? It is not the Palestinians, or Hamas or Hezbollah. It is not Syria or Jordan or Egypt or Iran or Iraq. It is the insupportable notion that somehow the Jewish people deserve all or most of the land west of the Jordan River! It is the concept, whether it emerges from Zionist ideology or Jewish religious zeal, that God or the Jews or the world or something or somebody has decreed that the state of Israel must include all of what some choose to describe as Judea and Samaria. If the majority of Israeli voters conclude that, they will doom their small but powerful state. No other nations of the world, I would hope especially the United States of America, should ever give even grudging acceptance to that idea, because inevitably woven into it is an immoral and unjust corollary, namely, that the Palestinians do not deserve a land of their own. The UN resolution which established Israel would never have been passed unless there was a provision for two separate and independent states, a state of Israel and a state of Palestine.
Might does not make right. The end does not justify the means. Since 1967 far too often the government of Israel has quietly allowed or brazenly encouraged settlements of Israelis to be built on Palestinian lands. It is often claimed that all the land was purchased. Perhaps in a few instances it was, but in the main, it has simply been confiscated from relatively powerless people by a much more powerful foreign occupying government.
Of the top twenty names on the Likud election list for the Knesset, twelve favor at least a partial annexation of the West Bank. One who was victorious on January 19 is Moshe Feiglin, a co-founder of the Zo Artzeinu movement, which means This is Our Land. He believes the original secular Zionists made a mistake trying to gain world acceptance by giving up land to the Palestinians. He wrote, “The concept we’ve [Zo Artzeinu] started to develop is that the answer is not with the neighbors – it’s with us. We are not like all other nations. The Jews are different. Our goal should be to develop our special culture based on the Torah and the Prophets as a message and a symbol to the family of nations, to all of entire humanity.”
This extreme ethno-centrism is taking over Israeli politics on the right. It has prevailed throughout the creation of new settlements in the West Bank. Approaching half a million settlers, the brazen ploy is to make it impossible to re-locate all those people back into the Israeli borders prior to 1967. One of the candidates for the Knesset proclaimed that each Palestinian family should be given $500,000 to move out of the West Bank to somewhere else, anywhere else. How about $500,000 to each settler family to move back into Israel? By my rough calculations, there are perhaps 75,000 Israeli families in the West Bank. It would perhaps the best $3,750,000,000 of foreign aid the USA ever expended to pay to move the illegal settlers out. It could happen in six months or less if the Israeli government agreed to it, which I admit is a huge “If.”
Two-thirds of Israelis age 15 to 24 described themselves as being right-wing in a 2010 survey. They expressed considerably greater support for “a strong leader” over widely-recognized democratic values in that survey. As the old time Zionists die off, who got along with the Palestinians, what will become of the Israeli body politic? IS There a Future, Yesh Atid?
I have been to Israel ten times since 1975. The first time was with a group of Christian clergy from New Jersey, led by a wonderful Reform rabbi, one of the people I have most admired in my lifetime. The other nine times I led tour groups, including one group which Rabbi Ted Levy and I together led, with half of the group from Congregation Beth Yam and half from First Presbyterian Church on Hilton Head Island.
For the first few of those visits, I was captivated by what the Israelis had accomplished. They made the desert blossom, and their industrial and technological progress was amazing. But as time passed, I sensed a definite hardening by many Israelis in their attitude toward the Palestinians. That is understandable, because Palestinian terrorists have long made life in the Holy Land dangerous and stressful, and the various intifadas further promoted ethnic division. Nonetheless, it seemed to me there was a growing resistance to making any kind of meaningful peace with the Palestinians, and the settlement program continued more or less unabated. As an outsider, I believed a decreasing number of Israelis truly wanted to have two peaceful states living side by side on the west side of the Jordan River.
At the current time, are things getting better or worse? It depends on who is asked, or whose views you read. The fact that there is a 50-50 split between moderates and rightists in the Knesset as a result of the January 19 election is very encouraging, because for the past couple of decades, the religious right and Likud have controlled the Israeli government. Whether the new coalition will hold together very long remains to be seen. It will depend largely on the considerable political skills of the Prime Minister.
A key to the future, if not the key, is Binyamin Netanyahu. In my judgment, if he continues to list strongly to the right, Israel cannot long survive. World opinion will unanimously turn against it, despite the uncritical support of American Christian-rightists and other uncritically pro-Israel conservatives in the Republican Party. The irony of most American fundamentalists is that they detest Judaism but they love Israel for their own very peculiar theological reasons. And Israel, to its discredit, gladly accepts their financial and moral support while equally and privately disdaining their peculiar and outlandish beliefs.
On the other hand, if Yair Lapid should eventually become Prime Minister, and the Yesh Atid party rises to the prominence once held by the Labor party for the first twenty years of Israel’s existence, things could improve enormously. As Shakespeare said, ‘tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
The American relationship with Israel has long been the third rail of American politics. All those from either of our political parties who did not exhibit unabashed support for Israel were in danger of losing their political posts if they dared to come near that lethal third rail.
Barack Obama is considered by many on the American political right not to be a friend of Israel. Nonetheless, he, like all previous Presidents, is a strong supporter of Israel, but he is not the most enthusiastic fan of the man who has served longer as the Israeli Prime Minister than anyone other than the founding Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion. Bibi Netanyahu is not Israel, and many people inside and outside Israel, I included, are convinced his policies are inimical to Israel’s truest interests. Our government has expressed strong disfavor of the heads of states of many nations throughout the world for as long as we have existed as a nation-state ourselves. At various times we have officially favored the UK, France, Germany, Iraq, Iran, South Korea, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, for example, but not the people who were their chief political executives. But when it has come to Israel, every President and every Congress has always shown at least unflinching public support for whomever happens to be the Israeli Prime Minister.
For once, let’s flinch. Let’s tell Israel: No More. No more settlements, no more hints or veiled references of a one-state solution, which is no solution at all, but merely the institutionalization of an unacceptable problem. No more government-sanctioned treatment of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs as second- or third- or fifth-class citizens, or more likely, non-citizens. Let’s see some hardball diplomacy. Israelis understand hardball; they have gotten very good at it over the past 46 years since the Six-Day War and the occupation of the West Bank.
Politically, there is one factor more than any other which has enabled the existence of the state of Israel, and without which Israel could never survive. That is the unwavering support of the United States of America. If the US informed Israel it would not come to its aid in the event that the surrounding nations in its very rough neighborhood attacked it, Israel would be gone within a few weeks. We are Israel’s one indispensable ally. We are also its only always-dependable ally. And make no mistake: Our alliance has cost us immensely, especially since 1967, in blood and treasure, in alliances with other nations, and in the cohesion of our own internal body-politic.
Israel most certainly has deserved our allegiance. We, along with most other nations in the aftermath of War II, believed the Jews should be given a homeland, in light of what they had suffered in the Holocaust. For the first twenty years, a majority of Israeli politicians were committed to a Jewish nation living in peace with a Palestinian nation next door. Since the conquest of Palestine in the Six-Day War, however, that vision has tragically and steadily eroded.
For the continued existence of the state of Israel, American foreign policy must begin to meddle very consciously in Israeli domestic politics. We need to be much more forthright to let Israelis know what we do and no not favor in their domestic politics. In the best of all possible worlds, they themselves should properly sort it all out, but they haven’t and they don’t. Therefore we should give them some clear, sophisticated, and unsolicited suggestions. We have done that with nearly every other nation on earth in one way or another, with diplomatic humility never having been a major American factor for so doing. Therefore why not tell our closest ally in the Middle East exactly what is on our minds?
I love Israel. You may find that hard to believe from some of the things I have said, but I truly do love the state of Israel, warts and all. From the first time I set foot onto its territory at the Ben Gurion Airport in Lod in 1975 to the last time I left for home from there in 1999, I have always had a special place in my heart for Israel. If I could have rounded up fifteen or twenty adventurous people to go there every couple of years for the past fourteen years, I would have done so, but I couldn’t, so I didn’t. Whenever I hear Israel’s national anthem, Ha-Tikvah (The Hope), I myself am filled with great hope. I can’t sing its words, because I don’t know them, but I can, and do, happily and loudly hum its notes whenever I hear them, which usually happens on Israel Day at Congregation Beth Yam.
A week ago Saturday evening the USA Network televised Shindler’s List without commercial interruptions. To see Schindler’s List is to understand how Eretz Yisroel became not only politically possible, but almost a moral and ethical necessity. There have been many other genocides in human history, but none with the unrelenting racist horror of the Holocaust. Nonetheless, the Jews of 1939-45 are the Palestinians of 1948, 1967, and 2013. Certainly the Palestinians are not being systematically annihilated, but the opportunity for statehood granted them by the United Nations in 1948 is being crushed by the Israeli political and military juggernaut.
Israel has incalculable importance biblically, historically, culturally, politically, strategically, and contemporaneously. For the good of the world, but especially for the good of the Jewish people, both religious and secular Jews, Israel needs to exist. But if it insists on annexing more and more Palestinian land with what can only be properly termed as imperialistic chutzpah, it shall negate its own reason for its own existence. The USA must not permit that to happen. We need politicians of courage and insight in Washington to deal forthrightly with politicians of courage and insight in Jerusalem.
There is much more to this vast topic than I can describe in an hour lecture. In the discussion which follows you shall hear some opposing views voiced as strongly or more so than my forthright reflections. Those opposing views I understand and trust I shall be adequately prepared for. Fundamentally, however, this entire lecture is about justice and fairness and equity for several million Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line. US foreign policy is being seriously undermined by Israeli intransigence on the Palestinian issue. We need to declare in very clear and convincing words that we will no longer consider Israel an ally so long as they continue to sabotage a viable Palestinian state. Furthermore, to be both candid and blunt, which, for better or worse, has been a longtime modus operandi of mine, the US cannot afford to have 1.6 billion Muslims believe we are anti-Muslim because of our unceasing support for 7 million Israeli Jews. About that I, and I hope you, are very serious.
The world needs Israel. Israel needs Israel. But in order for Israel to continue among the family of nations, it must make peace with its immediate cousins to the east and west, the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. Until that happens, the state of Israel may represent the most problematic flashpoint of multitudes of flashpoints for anyone who strives to maintain world peace.