My friend Andy and I were walking the golf course thirteen years ago when we saw some old guys in their seventies playing together. “That’s you and me in 20 years,” he said.

We then spoke about the importance of our friendship and male friendship generally and thought of who, amongst all the people we jointly knew that we’d like to have in our lives as we grow old and how best to assure sustaining those friendships over time.

“A book group,” one of us said.

“Great idea,” said the other.

So… we selected a dozen mutual friends who were smart, liberal-thinking, interested in the world, thoughtful, reflective, verbal, and liked to read.

We ended up with a varied lot: lawyers, a judge, physicians, entertainment executives, a journalist, an engineer and inventor, a media analyst and former political speech writer, business guys, a psychotherapist, and a rabbi. Four have written books. Half are now retired. We are American-, French-, and Egyptian-born. We include a child of survivors and a Jew-by-Choice. We are all – or were – married. We’re dads and granddads. Our grown kids live all over the place including a Haredi in Israel. A few of our originals dropped out and we added two or three new guys from time to time. We’ve met consistently every other month for the last twelve years.

The first book we read was Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope. Since then, we’ve read sixty to seventy books, fiction and non-fiction, from Franz Kafka’s Short Stories to Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. Everything we’ve read was, in one way or another, worthwhile even if some of us didn’t like the book. Our conversation was always engaging, and we genuinely like and respect each other.

This past week after fifteen months of zoom meetings, we met on my backyard patio to discuss the contemporary Irish writer John Banville’s novel Snow. As host, before we began discussing the book I asked everyone to share whatever silver lining he might have gleaned during the lock-down.

Many of us said we bonded more deeply with our spouses, children, and grandchildren, how much we appreciated a more simplified life, solitude, working from home, and grateful that we didn’t suffer financially as so many millions did around the country.

We’re between 50 and nearly 80 years old now. We noted, as Andy and I used to say on very hot summer days on the links plodding along from hole to hole that we feel fortunate to still be on this side of the grass and more or less healthy. Only one among us got sick from Covid, but he – thankfully – recovered.

After the meeting, I thought more about the silver lining during this horrendous period of Covid. I’m naturally an optimist. But, I have fewer illusions about human nature than I did. The Trump era showed how many millions of Americans are bigoted, mean-spirited, and susceptible to demagoguery, and where the injustices and weaknesses are in our imperfect democracy, but also how many more millions of people (again, my optimism speaking) are good and decent who believe in a shared society based upon justice, compassion, and respect for others and for America’s democratic traditions.

Our discussion of John Banville’s Snow had at least one relevant theme consistent with our reemergence from isolation. Set in Ireland in 1957, the plot centers around a brutal murder of a Roman Catholic Priest in the middle of a frigid winter. The book is both a mystery who-done-it and a novel. “Snow,” actually, is a key character in the book, as is the sea, wind, trees, and animals. Like all the anthropomorphisms and human characters, what lies beneath the surface is a deeper, more disturbed, and complex order of things, not nearly as pure and straight-forward as they may wish to appear. Each character held secrets, and though the murderer of the Priest seemed obvious from the beginning of the story, at the end we were shocked to learn the identity of the true killer.

Of course, everyone has secrets – including us – and Covid helped bring many of those into focus. We became more aware of what we really want, need, value, and cherish, and how and with whom we wish to spend our time, energy, and treasure. For us, most of our lives are behind us in the rear-view mirror. We find ourselves therefore focusing more on the present and short-term future, as well as on the future well-being of our children, their partners, and grandchildren. We feel less patience for wasting our time on that which either doesn’t interest or engage us and more patience with the people we love and for meaningful pursuits.

There was much clarity spoken between the twelve of us on my backyard patio this past week. Andy and I no longer play golf weekly for all kinds of reasons, but we do have each other still and, of course, our book group. Dayenu – that’s enough for which I feel grateful these days.

The claims are spurious; that Israel is a state founded on the displacement of the Palestinians; that Israel’s Jewish character excludes millions of people based on religion; that Israeli policy inevitably leads to ethnic cleansing; that Israel is an illegitimate state.

These wild and largely untrue assertions are being disseminated more brazenly by anti-Israel proponents and are accepted by many far left American progressives including some young Jewish Americans. How many Jews believe this is not known. Regardless of the numbers, progressive Zionists need to understand what is motivating these Jews, consider what their extreme positions say about the character of their Jewish identity, and the impact upon the well-being of American Judaism in its relationship with Israel itself.

The 2020 Pew Research Center study of the American Jewish community is not specific about the numbers of Jews who hold anti-Israel positions, but it does report that younger Jews generally feel less emotionally connected to Jewish peoplehood and the State of Israel than their older counterparts:

“Eight-in-ten U.S. Jews say that they feel at least some sense of belonging to the Jewish people, and three-quarters say that ‘being Jewish’ is either very or somewhat important to them…

Young U.S. Jews are less emotionally attached to Israel than older ones. As of 2020, half of Jewish adults under age 30 describe themselves as very or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel (48%), compared with two-thirds of Jews ages 65 and older…

Among Jews ages 50 and older, 51% say that caring about Israel is essential to what being Jewish means to them, and an additional 37% say it is important but not essential; just 10% say that caring about Israel is not important to them. By contrast, among Jewish adults under 30, one-third say that caring about Israel is essential (35%), and one-quarter (27%) say it’s not important to what being Jewish means to them.” (https://www.pewforum.org/2021/05/11/jewish-americans-in-2020/)

There has not been much change in these numbers since Pew last studied the American Jewish community in 2013. Nevertheless, it seems that there are more American Jewish progressives who are critical of Israel’s policies vis a vis the Palestinians than there used to be. But, this does not necessarily mean that these Jews have turned their backs on Israel or joined with Israel’s enemies in attacking Israel’s legitimacy. It would be a serious mistake to lump into the same pot responsible critics of Israeli policy with delegitimizers of Israel.

I have always believed that criticism from love is the highest form of patriotism. There are many who love Israel in the progressive American Jewish community but who oppose Israel’s hardline right-wing policies towards the Palestinians. There are others, however, probably a small minority among America’s 7.5 million Jews, who feel no love for Israel and challenge Israel’s legitimacy. All that said, something new seems to be happening amongst younger American progressive Jews that progressive Zionists ignore at ours and Israel’s peril.

We have to ask what motivates those far left American progressive Jews who hold anti-Israel views?

Being an American progressive Jew legitimately can be confusing. Historically, Jews have experienced oppression, and now Israel has become an oppressor in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, territories Israel occupied after the 1967 War. The occupied lands are not de jure part of Israel, though Israel’s right wing presumes de facto that they are. These Palestinian areas are administered under the Israeli military and not according to Israel’s democratic institutions and processes. The IDF often confiscates Palestinian-owned land, demolishes Palestinian homes built without permits, threatens the expulsion of Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarah and Silwan, and humiliates Palestinians at check-points and in middle-of-the-night raids. Settler violence against  West Bank Palestinians and their olive groves and crops continues with few arrests and prosecutions of the culpable extremist Jews. The people living under occupation are oppressed and victimized, and that is intolerable and unsustainable for a democratic Israel.

Gaza is something else entirely. Hamas rules over it, though Israel and Egypt control its borders, and its policies and intentions are clear – to kill Israeli civilians, destroy Israel, and replace the Jewish State with a Palestinian-Hamas State from the river to the sea. Hamas cares little about the lives and safety of its own civilians or it would have built shelters with the millions of dollars and tons of cement it used to build tunnels to move Hamas fighters and weaponry and attack Israelis in their homes.

The consequences of every war are awful, with many innocent dead. But, as difficult as it is for a progressive Zionist like me to say it, I do not know what Israel was supposed to do except to fight back in response to Hamas firing 4500 rockets at Israel’s civilian population centers with the sole intent to kill and terrorize as many Israelis as possible. Israel’s Iron Dome defense system vastly limited the damage, but that does not diminish Hamas’ evil intent.

Of course, negotiations must happen with Palestinian leadership to reach a diplomatic resolution of the conflict. But Israel has no negotiating partner in Hamas and never did. Hamas is maximalist. It does not nor will it accept Israel’s legitimacy. To think otherwise is delusional.

Perhaps the difference between young progressive Jews who challenge Israel’s legitimacy and people like me is based in our different generational experiences. The Pew statistics suggest as much. I was born a year after the establishment of the State and raised with the narrative that Zionism and the State of Israel are responses to historic Jewish vulnerability and powerlessness, the need for Judaism to blossom culturally in its historic homeland, and as a way to test Jewish ethics in the context of having and exercising sovereignty and power.

I know Israel’s history and Jewish history well, and I understand the Palestinian’s history and narrative too. I suspect that most young progressive Jews do not know that history nor do they remember personally the Oslo process or an Israeli government trying to make peace with the Palestinians. All they know is an increasingly hard-line right-wing Israeli government supporting the settlement enterprise, oppressing Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and fighting wars against Hamas in which apartment buildings collapse and hundreds of Palestinians die, including many children. Over the last decade, they’ve watched as PM Netanyahu favored a relationship with the right wing of the Republican party, with the despised Donald Trump, and with American evangelical Christians instead of maintaining a non-partisan relationship with American Jewry as a whole and dismissing the needs of 75% of the American Jewish community that votes with the Democratic Party. Is it any wonder that many progressive Jews feel outrage and alienation?

As American progressives, they support cultural diversity and intersectional politics. Their political values are simple, based in what’s right and wrong. They affirm equality, justice, and respect for the “other” as means to building a better America. They are not wrong. I agree with them. But, the situation in the Middle East is not simple nor is it America.

American Jews are faced with the challenge of squaring our connections with the Jewish people and the State of Israel and our concern for fairness, justice, and the well-being of other oppressed groups in our imperfect American democracy. But American institutional racism is not similar to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That conflict is not a racial conflict. Israel is not a racist nation, though there are many racists in Israel. Nor is Israel an apartheid state as the far left in American politics is claiming with more and more frequency. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is about two peoples who claim the same land as their people’s homeland.

In Israel itself (i.e. the 1948 armistice lines) Israeli-Palestinian citizens enjoy the same rights as Israeli-Jewish citizens. Palestinian Arab-Israelis are members of the Knesset and now an Arab political party will be in the ruling government coalition for the first time in Israel’s history. There are many Arab-Israeli judges including an Arab-Israeli Supreme Court Justice. This isn’t to say that Israel’s Palestinian citizens are treated equally to its Jewish citizens. They aren’t. They deserve equal treatment and equal rights as promised in Israel’s Declaration of Independence.

All this said, I ask two questions of progressive Jews who are anti-Israel:

Do you believe that even the most progressive secular Jewish state is an anathema?

Do you believe that Judaism cannot live with a Jewish state, that your being a Jew is inconsistent morally with the idea of a State of Israel?

If your answer is yes to either or both of these questions, what are you saying about Judaism itself?

Judaism that devolves into universal humanitarianism is no longer Jewish. Judaism teaches that essential to Jewish identity is a commitment to Jewish peoplehood on the one hand and to ethical values on the other. At times, they may clash – but holding both together is essential to maintaining Jewish integrity. To teach one to the exclusion of the other results in a truncated and reductionist Judaism that is ultimately destructive to the Jewish people and to the Jewish State.

What worries me the most is that a growing (albeit currently relatively small) number of young American progressive Jews have become so alienated from Israel and the Jewish people that they have turned their backs on who they are as Jews in history and on the Jewish right to self-definition as a people. Critics of Israeli policies are not antisemitic. However, when critics say that Jews have no right to a state of our own, that is antisemitism.

This blog is also posted at The Times of Israel – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/young-progressive-american-jews-and-israel/

I have just completed a translation into English of a Hebrew biography of Avraham Shapira (1870-1965), known as “The Shomer (Guard) of Petach Tikvah,” who was my Great-Granduncle, my maternal grandmother’s uncle or, my Great-Grandfather’s brother.

The title of the book is “Avraham Shapira – Veteran of the Haganah and Hebrew Guard” and was written in 1955 by Getzel Kressel, a prolific Israeli mid-century author, journalist, and bibliographer, and published by the municipality of Petach Tikvah. The second Prime Minister of Israel, Moshe Sharet, wrote the Preface.

Avraham Shapira was an historic figure from the earliest years of the Yishuv in the Land of Israel to the mid-20^th century. He established the foundational principles and strategic practices of defense for Petach Tikvah and the Yishuv that influenced the formation of the Haganah and later the Israel Defense Forces. He set the standard in how the Yishuv related to its Arab neighbors who called Shapira with the honorific appellation “Sheikh Ibrahim Michah.”

Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel and Shapira’s close friend of many decades wrote about Shapira in his autobiography the following:

“Avraham Shapira was in himself a symbol of the whole process of Jewish readaptation. He accompanied me on most of my trips up and down Palestine, partly as guide, partly as guard, and all the while I listened to his epic stories of the old-time colonists. He was a primitive person, spoke better Arabic than Hebrew, and seemed so much a part of the rocks and stony hillsides of the country that it was difficult to believe that he had been born in Lithuania. Here was a man who in his own lifetime had bridged a gap of thousands of years; who, once in Palestine, had shed his Galuth environment like an old coat.” 

I met ‘Uncle Avram’ (as my family called him because my grandmother, his niece, referred to him that way) as a 6-year old in 1956 when he visited us in Los Angeles. He gave a signed copy of this biography to my aunt and uncle who left it for me after their deaths.

I am printing only a few copies of my translation for my immediate family, but I want to make it available in pdf format to anyone who might be interested in learning more about him, his life and times. The book is a quick-read of 39 pages of English text plus my notes and photographs, including one of Uncle Avram and Chaim Weizmann on the occasion of Avraham’s 80th birthday in September 1950. I undertook this project as a labor of love and respect for an esteemed member of my family and a hero in the history of Petach Tikvah, the Yishuv, and the State of Israel.

I attained the rights to publish this work from the son and heir of the author Getzel Kressel. Kressel’s son Ido Kressel lives in Holon, Israel.

Please let me know if you would like a pdf copy by responding with a comment. Your return email will appear, come to me, and I will happily send it to you as an attachment by return email. 

Note: For those who do not subscribe to the NYT, I’m reprinting Tom Friedman’s op-ed from May 25 here.

For what it’s worth, I agree wholeheartedly with Friedman’s dire assessment. He does not mention Hamas and Gaza directly for good reason. Hamas’ long-term mission is simple, to destroy Israel and sacrifice its own people (children and everyone else) to this end. Israel has no one to talk to in Hamas and, frankly, never did. But there is still a possibility of partnership with the PA, though (as Friedman notes) there will be no progress towards a two-state solution as long as Bibi is PM. I’m not a doomsayer, never was, but I realize I’m sounding more and more like one not because I’m getting older but because the situation is getting worse!

Here is Friedman’s piece:

“Lord knows, I sympathize with President Biden’s desire to avoid getting dragged into mediating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the 11 days of fighting between Israel and Hamas made something crystal clear to me: Unless we preserve at least the potential of a two-state solution, the one-state reality that would emerge in its place won’t just blow up Israel, the West Bank and Gaza; it could very well blow up the Democratic Party and every Jewish organization and synagogue in America.Yes, that’s what I learned last week.

I don’t expect Biden to summon Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to Camp David. As long as both are in power, no serious compromise is possible. But it is vital that Biden urgently take steps to re-energize the possibility of a two-state solution and give it at least some concrete diplomatic manifestation on the ground.

Because without that horizon — without any viable hope of separating Israelis and Palestinians into two states for two peoples — the only outcome left will be one state in which the Israeli majority dominates and Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank will be systematically deprived of equal rights so that Israel can preserve its Jewish character.

If that happens, the charge that Israel has become an apartheid-like entity will resonate and gain traction far and wide. The Democratic Party will be fractured. A rising chorus of progressives — who increasingly portray the Israeli army’s treatment of Palestinians as equivalent to the Minneapolis Police Department’s treatment of Black people or to the treatment by colonial powers of Indigenous peoples — will insist on distancing the United States from Israel and, maybe, even lead to bans on arms sales.Meanwhile, centrist Democrats will push back that these progressives are incredibly naïve, that they have no clue how many two-state peace plans the Palestinians have already rejected — which decimated the Israeli peace camp — and that none of their causes, from women’s rights to L.G.B.T.Q. rights to religious pluralism, would last a minute on the Hamas-run campus of the Islamic University of Gaza.

As the past two weeks demonstrated, every Jewish organization and synagogue in America will be heatedly divided over this question: Are you willing to defend a one-state Israel that is not even pretending to be a democracy anymore, a one-state Israel whose leaders prefer to rely on the uncritical support of evangelicals than the critical support of Jews?

Finally, Jewish and non-Jewish students on every college campus also will be forced to wrestle with this question or run as far away as possible from the debate. More and more will abandon Israel. You can already see it happening. And anti-Semitism will flourish under the guise of anti-Zionism.

It will get very ugly. All nuance will be lost. Twitter and Facebook will become battlefields between Israel’s critics and defenders, and Donald Trump and the Republicans will fan the flames, telling American Jews that they have no future in the Democratic Party and beckoning them to come over to the G.O.P. — which, with its evangelical base, does indeed unquestioningly support the Jewish state … for now.

“People need to understand that this issue has been transformed in the past two weeks,’’ said Gidi Grinstein, the president of the Reut Group, a leading Israeli think tank. “The place of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict inside American society and politics — and inside the Jewish community — has morphed from a bipartisan issue to a wedge issue.’’And it is a wedge issue now not only between Democrats and Republicans, he added, “but also between Democrats and Democrats. This is very bad news for Israel and for the Jewish people. Israel and Biden must urgently collaborate to defuse it.’’

Therefore, I hope that when the secretary of state, Tony Blinken, meets with Israeli and Palestinian leaders this week, he conveys a very clear message: “From this day forward, we will be treating the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank as a Palestinian state in the making, and we will be taking a series of diplomatic steps to concretize Palestinian statehood in order to preserve the viability of a two-state solution. We respect both of your concerns, but we are determined to move forward because the preservation of a two-state solution now is not only about yournational security interests; it is about our national security interests in the Middle East. And it is about the political future of the centrist faction of the Democratic Party. So we all need to get this right.’’

These are deeply challenging times for liberal American Jews vis a vis our humanistic values and our particular relationship to the Jewish people, to Zionism, and to the State of Israel. Anyone who cares about the health and stability of the American Jewish community ought to be worried in light of so many American Jews seeming to turn their backs on or against the Jewish state because of the frequent wars fought between Israel and Hamas, the unresolved inequities in Israeli society vis a vis Arab-Israeli citizens, and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Liberal American Jews who are turning away from the Jewish people and State of Israel is, I believe, a substantive threat to our American Jewish identity, to our being part of the Jewish people as a whole, and to our understanding of the meaning of the State of Israel in Jewish history.

My friend Rabbi Ammi Hirsch of the Stephen S. Wise Free Synagogue in New York City is as eloquent a proponent of what Liberal Zionism is and means to Reform American Jews as there is. In his sermon last Erev Shabbat, May 21, 2021, he spoke to what he called “The Fracturing of Liberal Judaism.” I ask you to watch and listen and, if you have children or grandchildren in high school or college, to forward this sermon to them as Rabbi Hirsch addresses the challenges they face on campuses today and how they ought to respond and position themselves.

https://swfs.org/sermons/the-fracturing-of-liberal-judaism/

This is an inspiring, purposeful, and hopeful piece in the midst of so much suffering and polarization, from the Head Master of the Reform movement’s Leo Baeck School in Haifa.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/this-is-the-most-jewish-thing-about-the-jewish-state/

Are you confused about what led to the recent war between Israel and Hamas? Who ought you to trust when reading the volume of op-eds now being written about who did what when?

These are just two broad-based questions so many of us are asking. To understand what has happened and will likely continue to happen, it is important to self-educate. To that end I have listed a number of books that address the history of relations between Israel and the Palestinians, the history of Zionism, Jewish and Palestinian narratives of the conflict, and personal statements by a number of individuals about the meaning of Israel and Palestine in their lives.

What should you read first? It doesn’t matter. Start anywhere, but if you are serious about understanding as much as possible this seemingly intractable conflict of more than a century between two peoples that claim the same land as their rightful homeland, then keep reading. Here are my recommendations:

ISRAEL, ZIONISM AND THE PALESTINIANS

ISRAEL – A HISTORY – Anita Shapira – offers a breath-taking history of Israel from the origins of the Zionist movement in the late 19^th century to the present day.

THE PALESTINIANS – Benny Morris – researches the development of the Palestinian national consciousness in response to the establishment of the State of Israel.

THE LEMON TREE – Sandy Tolan – a true story of the experience of exiled Palestinians who return to their home in Jaffa from which they had been driven out by Israeli forces in the War of Independence to discover Holocaust survivors as the new occupants. The book tells the story of the evolving personal relationship between the two families set in the historical context of the founding of the State of Israel.

TALES OF LOVE AND DARKNESS – Amos Oz – the autobiography of one of Israel’s greatest writers from his early years as the nephew of a prominent Zionist revisionist to his own evolution as a member of a left-wing kibbutz.

ONCE UPON A COUNTRY – A PALESTINIAN LIFE – Sari Nusseibeh with Anthony David – a personal memoir of the President of Al Quds University whose story dramatizes the consequences of war, partition, and terrorism.

A NEW VOICE FOR ISRAEL – Jeremy Ben Ami – a personal memoir and a political analysis of what American Jews need to do to advocate for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Washington to the administration and legislative bodies by the founder and President of J Street, a pro-Israel pro-peace political and educational organization.

PATHWAYS TO PEACE – AMERICA AND THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT – Edited by Daniel C. Kurtzer with a Foreword by James A. Baker III and Samuel Berger – a series of articles by experts on how to advance the peace process.

DEAR ZEALOTS – LETTERS FROM A DIVIDED LAND – Amos Oz – 3 essays on the universal nature of fanaticism and its possible cures, on the Jewish roots of humanism and the need for a secular pride in Israel, and on the geopolitical standing of Israel in the wider Middle East and internationally

LETTERS TO MY PALESTINIAN NEIGHBOR – Yossi Klein Halevi – letters that help to understand the painful choices confronting Israelis and Palestinians that will ultimately help determine the fate of the region.

WHY ISRAEL [AND ITS FUTURE] MATTERS – LETTERS OF A LIBERAL RABBI TO HIS CHILDREN AND THE MILLENNIAL GENERATION – Rabbi John L. Rosove – makes the case that American non-Orthodox Jews need Israel as a source of pride, connection, and Jewish renewal, and Israel needs them for the liberal values they bring to the Zionist enterprise.

THE WAY TO THE SPRING – LIFE AND DEATH IN PALESTINE – Ben Ehrenreich – a journalistic gathering together of the stories of Palestinians living under occupation and near Israeli settlers who want to drive the Palestinians from the land.

SIDE BY SIDE – PARALLEL HISTORIES OF ISRAEL-PALESTINE – Edited by Sami Adwan, Dan Bar-On, and Eyal Naveh – a dual narrative of Israeli and Palestinian history comprising the history of two peoples, set literally side by side, so that readers can track each against the other, noting both where they differ as well as where they correspond.

APEIROGON – A NOVEL – Colum McCann – an Israel father and a Palestinian father each lose a child in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and learn of each other’s stories, recognize the loss that connects them, and attempt to use their grief as a weapon for peace.

CATCH-67 – THE LEFT, THE RIGHT, AND THE LEGACY OF THE SIX-DAY WAR – Micah Goodman – sheds light on the ideas that shaped Israelis’ thinking on both sides of the debate, and among secular and religious Jews about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

THE UNMAKING OF ISRAEL – Gershom Gorenberg – offers a penetrating and provocative look at how the balance of power has shifted toward extremism, threatening the prospects for peace and democracy as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict intensified.

Each week my friend Rabbi Josh Weinberg, President of the Association of Reform Zionists of America (ARZA) and Vice President for Progressive and Reform Zionism for the Union for Reform Judaism, writes a d’var Torah that discusses both the Torah portion of the week and our relationship to the State of Israel and progressive Zionism. His column this week, as every week, is worth reading. Here he unpacks among the most complex issues facing the Jewish people, State of Israel, and the Palestinians.

https://arza.org/guide-to-the-complex/?utm_source=ARZAWeekly&utm_campaign=Feature&utm_medium=email&utm_content=2021_5_21

My friend Rabbi Ammi Hirsch of the Stephen S. Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan always speaks eloquently, with insight, and with moral precision, and his sermon delivered last Friday on the 73^rd secular anniversary of Israel’s birth is worth listening to and watching here –

https://swfs.org/sermons/a-tragic-week-of-war-five-comments/

The following is a letter sent by Rabbi Jill Jacobs, Executive Director of “T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights” representing over 2000 rabbis in the United States. It is a balanced, moral, and thoughtful reflection on what is taking place currently in Israel/Palestine and how we got to where we are.

“I have been watching the events in Israel and the occupied territories with fear, pain, and anger. First, I am mourning the deaths of those killed in Israel by Hamas rocket fire, including, as of this writing, a five-year-old boy, an Indian home health aid, and six other Israelis, including both Jews and Palestinian citizens; the more than 100 Palestinians — including 28 children — killed in Gaza by Israeli airstrikes; and the Palestinian citizen of Israel killed seemingly by a vigilante in Lod earlier this week.  

And my heart breaks watching the violence between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel in the streets of Lod, Ramle, Akko, Haifa, and other “mixed” cities. The images and videos of attempted lynchings, of synagogues burning, and of destroyed businesses and homes are devastating. 

Throughout this week, I have been in close contact with friends and colleagues in the human rights and civil society community in Israel, who have spent the last few weeks protesting on the street, and some of the last few days ducking into bomb shelters. This includes Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are attempting the impossible task of simultaneously fighting for equal rights within Israel, and protesting in solidarity with Palestinians living under occupation. Even yesterday, we saw Jewish and Palestinian Israelis stand together throughout the country calling for an end to the bloodshed. 

Some within our Jewish community describe the current conflict as starting when Hamas launched rockets into Israel earlier this week. But we can’t start the story there. 

Over the past several weeks, we saw protests in East Jerusalem over the attempt by Israeli settlers and the state that backs them to evict Palestinian residents from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, based on 19th century legal deeds. (While some have attempted to portray this as a real estate dispute, and as a just attempt to restore lost property to Jews, Palestinians have no parallel right to return to homes that they lost in 1948.) These protests, as well as protests against the closure of Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate, a popular hang-out area for Palestinian teenagers, were met with police violence, including stun grenades and rubber bullets. We also witnessed police violence against worshippers in the Al Aqsa mosque.

The shocking violence in the streets is the result of years and years of provocation by Prime Minister Netanyahu and others, who cast Palestinian citizens as a fifth column; passed the Nation-State Law, which enshrines legal inequality; and neglected Palestinian communities, who spent much of the past year protesting against the indifference by the Israeli government and police to intracommunal violence. In the past few days, Israeli Jewish extremist groups have organized on Telegram and WhatsApp to travel to mixed cities in order to carry out violent and destructive attacks against Palestinian citizens, their homes, and their businesses. In these same towns, Palestinian citizens have torched synagogues, seriously wounded Jews, and attacked Jewish homes and businesses. There is no justification for such violence, by either party. But it is not random — it is the direct effect of years of government policies and incitement. 

Part of the background is also Netanyahu’s desperate attempt to hold onto power, during a week when a potential new governing coalition came close to ousting him. Hamas, too, is playing a power game with their rivals in the Palestinian Authority, after President Abbas canceled planned Palestinian elections. 

The real background, of course, is the occupation that has lasted more than half a century, and that violates the human rights of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza every single day. Like everyone else in the world, Palestinians have the right to citizenship in a country, to self-determination, to freedom of movement, and to safety and security. Those of us who want these things for Jews must support the same for Palestinians, and the reverse is true as well. 

Shavuot celebrates Matan Torah — the giving of the Torah. It’s no accident that we received the Torah in the wilderness, on our way out of Mitzrayim (Egypt), and before we arrived in Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel). In order to assume sovereignty in a land of our own, we need first to accept a moral legal code aimed at ensuring justice for everyone living in this land. The Torah warns of the danger of power: “When you have eaten your fill, and have built fine houses to live in…beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget the Eternal your God — who freed you from the land of Egypt, the house of bondage…and you say to yourselves, ‘My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.’” (Deuteronomy 8:12-20)

The establishment of Israel as a modern nation-state brought with it the obligations to follow international law — including the laws of occupation. And the Torah serves as an ever-present reminder not to let strength and success get in the way of making Eretz Yisrael a place that reflects the divine presence.

As American and Canadian Jews, we cannot ignore our own communities’ role in justifying decades of occupation, and the rise of right wing extremists. Too many of our organizations made their first statement on the weeks of violence and tension only when rockets from Gaza started flying toward Israeli towns, and ignored the experience of Palestinians both in East Jerusalem and in Gaza. Too often, we have given Netanyahu and other right wing politicians standing ovations in our own communities, even as they incite violence against their own citizens, woo Kahanists into the Knesset, and implement de facto annexation of the West Bank.

And too often, we have invested our donor money in the status quo — whether in supposedly apolitical organizations like JNF-USA that contribute to the settlement project — or in outright extremist groups, as documented in my recent Haaretz article, written after a right-wing Jewish mob rioted through Jerusalem. Or we have thrown up our hands in exhaustion and diverted our money altogether from groups — both at home and in Israel — trying to make positive change there. By pulling back, we create a vacuum for right-wing donors laser-focused on turning Israel into their fantasy of a fundamentalist fortress. 

To paraphrase an old slogan, if we’re not investing in solutions, we’re investing in the problem. 

All of us who care about the future of Israel and Palestine, and of Israelis (Jewish, Palestinian & other) and Palestinians should be putting our money, advocacy energy, and organizing power into working to end occupation, investing in organizations both here and there that are doing so, and supporting the extraordinary activists on the ground who are devoting their lives to this work.

With wishes for a speedy end to violence, and a recommitment to building a better future.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach,

Rabbi Jill Jacobs 
Executive Director”