WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: One of the sayings I’ve tried to live by is “It’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness.” I need to amend it. You have to curse the darkness first. You have to acknowledge how deep and malevolent it is. Then you have incentive to go around lighting candles.
This week, I want to suggest to us just plain grassroots American Jews, not machers of Major American Jewish Organizations, a way, on our own individually, to light a modest candle or two kindling more fervent American Jewish support for our homeland’s Jews. But first I need to describe the deepening darkness.
This Week: Seeing the Darkness, Then Spreading Light
Darkness
Last week, I railed against the letter that nine American Jewish groups, including the Conservative and Reform religious movements’ official institutions and members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, wrote to President Trump, urging him to clearly express his opposition to “annexation by Israel of any territory in the West Bank” and demanding that any territorial adjustments to “the 1967 borders” be effected through “a signed agreement between the two sides.”
I further deplored the Jewish Federations of North America having publicly joined in international criticism of Israel’s Nation State Law last summer by calling that Law’s relegation of Arabic from the official status it had had under the Mandate to “special” status under the Nation State Law “a needless affront” to Israel’s Arabs, and the Law’s attribution of “national value” to formation of Jewish communities as discriminatory.
And I deplored CAMERA, champion of media fairness to Israel, having suggested to the Los Angeles Times that instead of referring to “Palestine” as a state, it use “West Bank” or “the Palestinian territories.”
And I quoted a Haaretz article last week that “Young American Jews … are increasingly agnostic when it comes to the need for Jewish sovereignty and a Jewish national home.”
This week, the darkness got darker.
[1] This week, Jewish U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, credible candidate twice now for U.S. President, reacted in horror to Israel under Netanyahu seeming “to be preparing for a future in which Israel controls the entire territory between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River in perpetuity.” He decried this as contra to the “overwhelming international consensus” on “two states based on the 1967 lines with Jerusalem as the capital of both states.”
[2] And this week, a half-dozen Democratic U.S. Senators – Sanders, Warren, Feinstein, Merkley, Durbin and Duckworth – introduced a non-binding Congressional resolution “decrying,” in the words of the JTA, “any Israeli plan to annex West Bank territory.” Resolution text:
“Unilateral annexation of portions of the West Bank would jeopardize prospects for a two-state solution, harm Israel’s relationship with its Arab neighbors, threaten Israel’s Jewish and democratic identity, and undermine Israel’s security.”
JTA: “The liberal Mideast policy organization J Street welcomed the resolution.”
[3] And this week, per the JTA, a resolution was introduced in Congress to restore funding, which Trump had cut, to “peace dialog programming” and “seed investment in the Palestinian areas.” The bill states: “It is the sense of Congress that building a viable Palestinian economy is essential to the effort to preserve the possibility of a 2-state solution.” Congresswoman Lowey, a sponsor, said: “Time and time again, Congress has reiterated its support for a two-state solution that leads to two states for two peoples.” JTA identified as supporters of the bill AIPAC, J Street, Americans For Peace Now, the Jewish Federations of North America, and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, “an umbrella for Jewish policy groups.”
[4] Jewish Press this week:
“On Thursday May 30, the Israel Land Authority announced plans to advance tenders for 556 housing units in East Jerusalem.
“[British] Minister for the Middle East Andrew Murrison said:
“’The UK government is gravely concerned by plans announced on May 30 to advance tenders for hundreds of settlement housing units in occupied East Jerusalem.
“’We are clear that settlements built on occupied Palestinian territory are contrary to international law and an obstacle to a two-state solution. Regrettably, this takes us further away from a negotiated peace agreement.
“’I visited Jerusalem on May 28-30 where I reiterated UK support for a two-state solution, with Jerusalem as a shared capital for both states.’”
Let us be clear what forcing on Israel a “two-state solution” that’s “based on the 1967 lines,” as Bernie Sanders put it, more accurately than along “the 1967 borders,” as the American Jewish powerhouses that wrote to President Trump put it, would do – undo the Six Day War, period.
And the forcing of that “two-state solution” on Israel would be required. As, e.g., that Haaretz article our #958 cited last week recognized, in Israel today “post-Oslo euphoria has slowly been replaced with disenchantment and bitterness over the viability of such a solution.” And that disenchantment and bitterness is not just that ceding the Judea-Samaria hill country would be security-wise suicidal. For three millennia, Jews lived in twice Jewish state capital historic Jerusalem without anybody calling them “settlers.” That they live now, in third time Jewish state capital Jerusalem with its renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Ottoman rule, in “settlement housing units in occupied East Jerusalem …on occupied Palestinian territory,” as Her Majesty’s Minister put it this week, is a Jewish homeland concession few Israelis would willingly make.
Light
There’s an army, scattered and lost in the shadows, that we ordinary grassroots American Jews can bring into the light, into the fore in this fight. This army can negate Bernie Sanders’ horror over Israel claiming the entirety of the land from the Sea to the River, and Her Majesty’s Minister’s grave concern over Jewish settlements in occupied East Jerusalem, on occupied Palestinian territory, by making the case that the land of Israel is Ours, that Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem are core parts of we Jews’ historical homeland over which we have the most valid legal and historical claim. This army can answer President Trump’s pen pals’ concerns over Israel annexing territory in the West Bank over Israel’s 1967 borders by making the case that it’s Judea-Samaria, not the West Bank, that they were 1949 military ceasefire lines, not 1967 political borders, so exercising sovereignty over what Israel has the most valid historical and legal claim is not annexation of others’ land.
The generation of Jews who fought for the fulfillment of the dream of generations for Israel’s sovereign redemption, the authentic articulate-by-their-actions advocates of the legal and historical legitimacy of that redemption, is dead. But their voice is not stilled. I’ll tell you how I stumbled upon it.
A considerable time ago, when my sons were considerably younger than my grandsons are now, I religiously took them on Sunday mornings to Sunday school at the “suburban” branch of the synagogue to which we belonged. Tiring of the ritual of driving them there and a couple hours later coming back, I started staying there, going into the kitchen and pouring myself a cup of coffee and taking it into the library, which apparently only the librarian and I knew was there, and settle down with a Jewish history book. Every week the president of the congregation, on his rounds of whatever he did, would pass by the library on his route, passingly greet the librarian and me, and continue on. One month, well into the school year, the congregation’s president paused and asked me could he ask me a question. “Certainly.” “Just what is your job here?”
I learned a lot from those books. And, traversing my own kitchen-library coffee route, I discovered something else, a symbol explaining non-Orthodox American Judaism as the flexibly pragmatic creature it is. One Sunday morning the door to a room behind the sanctuary was open and an electrician was working on the open electrical panel with its many circuit breakers and labels. One was marked “Eternal Light: On | Off.”
One of the books that I read, and have re-read over the years more than once, was Arie Eliav’s Voyage of The Ulua, the Chaim Alosoroff of the Haganah’s fleet of a dozen or so main conveyors to Israel of Holocaust survivors that sailed into the teeth of the British blockade in the Aliyah Bet. What this powerfully moving book authored by the commander of that ship, and those by the Aliyah Bet’s other captains, commanders, refugee passengers and reporters there at the time, not least those on the Exodus, instill in the reader, first, is awe and wonder at the courage and determination, in the face of incredible hardships, of all involved.
But there’s something more in these books, an explanation to those young American Jews whom last week’s Haaretz article characterized as “increasingly agnostic when it comes to the need for Jewish sovereignty and a Jewish national home” of why there’s a need in our time, as in all past time, for Jewish sovereignty and a Jewish national home. Although “illegal immigration” of European Jews to Palestine went on before and even during as well as after the War, the main wave was after the War – when everyone in Europe knew even clearer than theretofore all that had been done to Europe’s Jews. But not just the British government, but the population of Europe exhibited an endemic anti-Semitism that greatly exacerbated the already enormous effort imposed on survivors and their enablers in emigrating from that darkest continent.
And not just of course books by participants and witnesses to the events of the Holocaust and the Aliyah Bet. The Six Day and Yom Kippur wars, individual events like Entebbe and the Iraqi reactor, the bringing home of Ethiopian and Yemenite Jews, etc., etc.
These first-hand account books that can instill in Jews indifferent toward Israel an awakened sense of the import of the momentous Jewish history event of our time, with its prime place among those of all three millennia Jewish history time, are out there – on Amazon, Abe, other internet places, used book stores (for years I haunted them), Jewish neighborhood library book sales (haunted them too), and elsewhere. Go find them. I’ve done this. Over decades I’ve assembled a “used” Jewish history books private collection (not “A History of The Jews,” but of particular eras and events), up to domestic tranquility’s limit, circa a thousand.
I would leave you with this. Perhaps, through individual initiative we can spread this gospel to those in our tribe who aren’t familiar and moved by these, sometimes first-hand, accounts. We have a website, www.factsonisrael.com. Perhaps we can post on it 1-page reviews which you’ve read and recommend to others as offering information and inspiration to readers. If there’s interest, we can append book suggestions to these weekly “media watch” emails. We could start a “virtual Jewish history book club” – no meetings, no required readings, no dues. So, if the spirit so moves you, now and then go find an inspiring, perhaps first-hand account, “Jewish history” book. Email me, for other potential readers, a 1-page review of it. Perhaps, between us out here in the darkness, we can light a few candles.