WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: “The Prostitution of Passover”? That’s a serious charge. But come look at J Street’s 2020 haggadah and see.
This Week: The “J Street” Haggadah and the Prostitution of Passover
This week, at the invitation of the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” American Jewish organization “J Street” to visitors to its website, I downloaded its 2020 haggadah, which it compiled “to apply the themes and lessons of the Passover seder to what it means, in 2020, to be pro-Israel, pro-peace and anti-occupation” (p. 2).
I object, of course, to the document’s delegitimizing of Jewish presence in Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem as “occupation.” I believe, on the contrary, that all Jews, even those who are (by me, naively) convinced that ceding these core areas of the Jewish homeland to Arabs, rendering Israel nine miles wide in the lowland middle, will bring peace with the Arabs, must support our historical and legal Jewish claim to Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, at least to give these places value in peace negotiations.
But let’s traverse this J Street haggadah.
The First Cup
Breast-beating over “occupation” begins with the first cup (p. 4), with quoting Amos Oz back in 1967 bewailing Israelis being “condemned now to rule people who do not want to be ruled by us.” Of course, they don’t. Who would want to be ruled by others?
But J Street’s haggadah doesn’t mention that these people, Palestinian Arabs, are the majority population of adjacent eastern Palestine, Jordan, 78 percent of the Palestine Mandate. As an alternative to halving the tiny Jewish homeland of Israel to make it “democratic and Jewish,” Jordan might be made “democratic and Arab.” J Street’s haggadah just appends to this Amos Oz quote: “With the occupation now in its 53rd year, we continue to work toward ending it.”
Breaking the Middle Matzah
Then comes the breaking of the middle matzah (p. 5). The J Street haggadah tells of two old ladies on a kibbutz, Holocaust survivors, who each night eat only a little of their dinner, saving most for fear, still, of not getting another. But this is not Israel today, says J Street’s haggadah. “We have land, we have plenty. Yet, too often the tears of our [people’s former] affliction blind us to these realities. Israel grabs and settles territory out of fear that the enemy will return to decimate us.”
Not exactly. In the Six Day War, Israel did not “grab and settle territory.” Faced with credibly militarily-backed threats of annihilation in a May 1967 which all of us of age at that time will always remember, Israel struck out in June to liberate the heart of the Jewish homeland – Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem – not redeemed in the suspended, not ended, war of 1948-49.
The Four Questions
Now comes “The Four Questions: A Ma Nishtana for Our Generation” (p. 6). “… in all other generations, we have sought justice for ourselves against outside forces, but now a portion of our people perpetuate injustice against the Palestinians…. Can we be forgiven for the ways in which we have mistreated Palestinians, and what actions on our part might be necessary before we are?”
First of all, Palestinian Arabs aren’t “THE Palestinians.” We Jews were and still are Palestinians first. Like many of you, I’ve spent much of this forced stay-at-home time reading books (I have about a thousand Jewish history books to choose from). I’ve read/re-read several on the Aliyah Bet and Israel’s 1948 and 1967 wars. One inescapable lesson in them is that neither Europe nor Arab lands are the Jewish people’s home. The United States, God Bless It, is the only place outside the Jewish homeland of Israel where the Jewish people are home. Beyond our historical and legal right to the land of Israel, we have to have it, not half of it, and the much less Jewishly-meaningful half at that.
Secondly, given that we are in our homeland by right, not by their sufferance, it’s “the Palestinians” who have been mistreating us. And if they want to be forgiven, which they don’t, they can begin by acknowledging, which they don’t, that the land of Israel, including Jerusalem (capital of three native states in the past 3000 years, all Jewish, and with a renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Ottoman rule, and which Palestinian Arabs have never ruled ever) and Judea-Samaria, is our historic Jewish homeland as of right.
The Four Sons
In a parody of The Four Sons titled “Four Children For a Contemporary Passover Seder” (p. 6), “the troubled son” asks: “How did you let all those settlements get built, and how do you tolerate the mistreatment of Palestinians by settlers and soldiers?”
The calling of Judea-Samaria Jewish communities and “east” Jerusalem Jewish neighborhoods “settlements,” in gleeful mainstream western media same-sentence contrast to nearby Arab “towns, villages and neighborhoods,” is a shanda we can’t blame on J Street et ilk. For that gratuitous self-denigration we must blame all of ourselves. But seeing how the likes of Jewish J Street leap on it, the rest of us might decide it’s time now to stop.
The Ten Plagues
J Street haggadah: “As a Jew, as someone connected to Israel, how do I reckon with the terrible price paid by the Palestinian people for the creation of the Jewish state?” (p. 8).
The “nakba” annually commiserated by “the Palestinians” is not that the Jewish people renewed the sovereign independence of their homeland state, but that in league with the Arab states they failed to destroy it, to push the Jewish homeland’s Jews “into the Sea,” to perpetrate a Second Holocaust three years after the First.
More Middle-eastern Jews, mostly Israel-absorbed, left many centuries-rooted homes in vast Arab lands than Arabs left tiny Israel. That some descendants of these Arabs live today in “refugee camps” from a seventy-years-ago war, including in Arab-controlled parts of Palestine, maintained by their fellow Arab “hosts,” they can thank enemies of the Jewish people in Europe and the Mideast who want to perpetuate that self-inflicted “terrible price.”
This J Street haggadah section continues with “Ten Modern Plagues of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” one being “The Plague of Settlements”: “The two-state solution and therefore Israel’s democratic and Jewish nature are severely threatened by the continual and seemingly unabated expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.”
This “Plague” is partly our fault for acquiescing in loaded terms like “Israeli settlements” and “West Bank.” “Jewish communities in Judea-Samaria” is rhetorically and historically accurate. And “the two-state solution” insisted upon by not-just-J Street among American Jews is not the only, and indeed not the first, Palestine two-state solution. Israel and Jordan are alumni of the Palestine Mandate, with respective Jewish and Palestinian Arab population majorities.
My After-the-Fourth-Cup Comment
A few years ago, a liberal rabbi in Philadelphia garnered some publicity by making Hannukah a campaign against global warming. I called this “the hijacking of Hannukah.” I suspected that he picked Hannukah because it celebrates, for however in historical measure fleetingly, rebirth of Jewish homeland sovereignty. (And how everybody lighting more and more candles every night for a week fights global warming, only a liberal can tell you.) But we should note that the Hasmonean kingdom’s independence, though it lasted less than a century, was longer than modern Israel has lasted so far.
The “hijacking of Hannukah”? I feel the same way about this Prostitution of Passover. The land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, all of it including historic Jerusalem, with the Temple Mount and City of David, is the homeland of the Jewish people. Period. Israel’s job is not to be a democracy like the United States, though it’s good that it is, unlike its Arab neighbors. Israel’s job is to be Jewish, a place, the place, where Jews can live as openly and natively as Arabs in Arabia and Europeans in Europe. The Arabs, of whom “the Palestinians” are indistinguishably part, have 99% of the Mideast. If you’d spent these stay-at-home weeks reading, like me, about how we Jews have been treated in Europe and the Mideast over the past century and before, and about the incredibly heroic roles homeland Jews played in bringing back far-flung Jews to our homeland (which we Never Left, I wrote a book on it), you’d agree that beyond our legal and historical right to our Jewish homeland of Israel, we have to have it, all of it, the 1% of the Mideast that that is, not the nine-miles-wide-in-the middle less Jewishly meaningful half of it.