WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: It seems to me, for one, that American Jews’ joinder with the UN, EU and others in pressing Israel to walk out of the Jewish homeland’s Judea-Samaria hill country heartland and historic Jerusalem in a western Palestine “two-state solution” is not only misguided but arrogant intervention in Israelis’ decisions. If you read about the incredible heroism of those Jews who redeemed our homeland’s independence, brought home European (and Arab lands’) Jewish refugees to it, and fought Israel’s 1948, 1967 and 1973 wars for survival, you’d shrink from telling these homeland Jews to walk out of the core of the homeland.
This Week: Inoculating Against that OTHER Virus
There’s a second virus raging amongst us, this one infecting only American Jews, the majority of whom are for pressing Israel, against the will of most Israelis, to relinquish the Judea-Samaria-historic Jerusalem heart of the Jewish homeland, redeemed by Israelis in an heroic war a half-century ago, to a “Palestinian state” in a western Palestine “two-state solution.”
I’ve been inoculating myself against this contagion, by reading account after account of the incredible endurance and courage of those who redeemed our people’s homeland from almost two millennia of successive foreign empires’ rule and who defend it today. By me, no American Jew who reads these accounts could exhibit the chutzpah, the intrusive arrogance, to tell these redeemers of our people’s redeemed homeland that they should give the core half of it up. This week, by your leave, I’ll tell you about a few of my books.
For decades, I haunted used bookstores and Jewish neighborhood library book sales, seeking and collecting “Jewish history” books – not dusty tomes dryly titled “A History of the Jews” (though I have a couple of those in my maybe a thousand), but accounts of particular times and events, in our time’s case especially by participants in or witnesses to them. Here’s a sampling.
Zionism: What will strike you, if you read Herzl’s Jewish State, which every Jew should, is how such a naïve little book could have launched a thousand ships, most of them British destroyers. Herzl’s Diaries gives you a more worldly view of this driven driving force of the Zionist movement. He wrote of the first Zionist Congress that he convened in Basle, Switzerland, in 1897 that at Basle he had founded the Jewish state, that if he said that aloud people would laugh, but that in five years, certainly in 50 years, everyone would see he was right. In 1947, fifty years to the year, with the UN’s adoption of the Palestine partition resolution, everyone did.
The Holocaust: I’ve collected a hundred books on the Holocaust. I’ve read, I think, three – The Wall, Mila 18 and Blessed Is The Match, each of which I commend to you as historically-grounded accounts of Jewish endurance and courage. If you yourself have the strength to descend into Auschwitz and the other death camps, I have 97 accounts of them to lend you. The ordeal of the Jews in the Holocaust of course pervades accounts of the B’riha and Aliyeh Bet, not least Yoram Kaniuk’s bio of Yossi Harel, Commander of the Exodus, so I haven’t completely escaped the vicarious tour.
B’riha: If you read books about the B’riha, the years’ long effort (which actually began before the Holocaust) to bring its survivors home to our homeland, several things will strike you. The first, of course, is that the Holocaust was no anomaly, but a culmination of contempt for the Jews that preceded and succeeded it. The next is the Jewish people’s absolute need for sovereignty in our homeland, imbuing us Jews with the same status as everyone else, not homeless exiles but people with a homeland state of their own, and establishing a de jure mechanism for going there, obviating the need for phony Latin America visas in a world in which nobody wanted those surviving Jews but their homeland. The next is recognition that both the drive to leave Europe, which had never been Home to the Jews, and to go specifically to Palestine, originated and was propelled by the survivors and surviving Jewish partisans themselves, and that what the people from Palestine did was to enable it. And finally what comes through in all these accounts is both the resolve and endurance of the survivors themselves and the incredible bravery of the Palestinian Jews, including some who had themselves escaped from Europe, who before, during and after the Holocaust clandestinely went to Europe to help the Jews there.
Readability is an indispensable attribute of books one reader recommends to another, and if you would read only one book on the B’riha, I would commend to you I.F. Stone’s remarkably moving and readable short Underground To Palestine. The Redeemers (I can’t find the damn thing at the moment) begins on the last day of WW II and ends on the day that last survivors who wanted to leave Europe left. Open the Gates by Ehud Avriel, Flight and Rescue: Brichah by Yehuda Bauer, B’riha: Flight to the Homeland by Ephraim Dekel, and The Gate Breakers by Bracha Habas are fuller if heavier reading accounts.
Aliyah Bet: I’ve read every book I could find on the Exodus, Kaniuk’s Commander of the Exodus, Holly’s Exodus 1947, Gruber’s Destination Palestine, Grauel’s Grauel, Degani’s Exodus Calling, Thomas’ Operation Exodus. Start with Holly, then Gruber, then Kaniuk, which has some tough reading on what particular passengers had gone through.
On other Aliyah Bet ships, Rudy Patzert’s account (can’t find it at the moment) of his ship’s voyage is worth reading, and also Murray Greenfield’s The Jews’ Secret Fleet. But for inspiration, read Arie Eliav’s Voyage of the Ulua. The British get wind of the Ulua being refitted in Copenhagen for refugees and bring pressure on the Swedes not to let it sail. The Swedish inspector comes aboard and asks the commander what are all these shelves for bunks that are being installed? “For aquariums. The ship’s going to the Arctic to research the base of the fish food chain.” “Ok, scientific expedition, free to go,” the inspector says, and then, under his breath, “And how much are the Jews of New York paying for this fishing expedition?” In Italy, the Ulua picks up a sister of a survivor girl who’d boarded in Sweden, each of whom had thought she was her family’s sole survivor. You can’t make this up.
Israel’s Wars: There are a lot of great books written about Israel’s wars, including by their participants. On American Jewish involvement in the War of Independence (the U.S. having barred military aid to the Mideast – i.e., to the Jews, the Arabs having other, including British, arms’ sources), see, of course, Slater’s The Pledge, but a particularly good read on American pilots is the Weiss’s I Am My Brother’s Keeper.
Can’t-put-down on the Six Day War is Steven Pressfield’s recent The Lion’s Gate, vividly following some of the key air and armor participants, and there are many very readable accounts covering the broader picture. A number of books vividly recount the Yom Kippur War on the Egyptian and Syrian fronts.
In the 1948 war, newly sovereign Israel had no choice but to throw Aliyah Bet refugees newly released from British Cyprus camps, untrained even in how to fire their weapons, into the lost battles at Latrun. It used American and other foreign pilots, along with Israelis, flying obsolete planes brought in frantically at the end of the British blockade from Czechoslovakia that in their first fight stopped the Egyptian army advance twenty miles from Tel Aviv. In 1967, supremely trained courageous Israeli air and armor forces fought ferocious battles that still had moments of doubt, starting with non-detection of the all but 12 of Israel’s planes that it threw against the airfields of the Egyptians to destroy their runways and enormous number of latest planes on the ground. But still, in 1973, Israel’s fate teetered on the brink in the first days on the narrow Golan Heights and in Sinai. Incredible heroism throughout.
Who are we American Jews to join with Israel’s enemies, and the UN and EU in telling Israel’s Jews to withdraw back to the ceasefire lines of 1949, to walk out of Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem? What we must do instead, this One Hundredth Anniversary of the San Remo Treaty this week, is make the case to the world, starting with our own grassroots American Jews, and our “communal leaders” who just wrote Gantz imploring Israel not to “annex” parts of “the West Bank,” that the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, is the homeland of the Jews (Palestinian Arabs having 78% of the Palestine Mandate as Arab if not democratic Jordan), by history and international law, and that we will not implore Israelis to walk out of the most meaningful and most strategically situated part of it.