WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: It seems to me a sad contradiction that many American Jews who still celebrate today the Jewish Temple’s liberation and rededication two millennia ago advocate a “two-state solution” along borders that would exclude historic Jerusalem, Temple Mount and all, from our Jewish people’s national home. We have a powerful weapon, riveting books in American participants’ own words describing their motivations in participating in Israel’s great events, to try to re-instill in such Jews a stronger commitment to our people and homeland, which we simply don’t use. We should put it to use.
A Hanukkah Shot in the Arm: Read a Riveting Book on American Jews’ Involvement in Great Israeli Events, and Pass It On to Others
Hanukkah, commemorating the liberation, cleansing and rededication of our Jewish Temple from foreign overlords bent on our people’s extinction, back in the second century BCE, when failure of that revolt against Alexander’s Seleucid successors would have ended our peoplehood, is a time of year to assess Israeli-Diaspora Jewish relations. Back in 1948, the American Council for Judaism represented a small minority of American Jews. Today, alas, the Hanukkah candles notwithstanding, the majority of American Jews, affiliated, e.g., with the Reform and Conservative movements, call for a “two-state solution” with borders that would “hew precisely to the 1967 borders” save for any agreed “territorial adjustments,” excluding from Israel the very site, Judaism’s holiest, on which that Temple, and before that Solomon’s Temple, had stood for a millennium.
A few weeks ago, we started in these weekly emails a “Jewish Homeland Word Warriors’ Workshop” (to join just email me “I took the pledge,” text in #1084 under Media Watch on our website, www.factsonisrael.com) to activate us activists to get through to grassroots American Jews that the entire parlance of Arab-Israeli conflict discourse is one big loaded lexicon of Jewish homeland-delegitimizing pejoratives, not the least of which is western newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer calling the Temple Mount exclusively by its Muslim name, Haram al-Sharif. Last week I appended that the Workshop’s work of shunning the dirty words is not enough, that we must contest Jews diminishing the significance of terms embodying homeland Jewish equity, rights and achievements – to wit, “Palestine, Palestinian” and “Hanukkah,” the latter the focus of last week’s #1088.
The goal of all this, naturally, is to try to re-instill in more grassroots American Jews the intense closeness and support of our homeland, historic Jerusalem (Temple Mount and all) included, that lived in American Jews in the perilous days of 1948, 1967 and 1973. This was not a gratuitous gesture by us. Ben-Gurion, standing beneath Herzl’s portrait, had put it this way: “Our call goes out to the Jewish people all over the world to rally to our side in the tasks of immigration and development, and to stand by us in the struggle for fulfillment of the Dream of Generations for Israel’s redemption.” Shortly before his death, Charles Krauthammer lamented that American Jews insufficiently appreciate the magnitude of the Jewish history event of our time, the rebirth of our homeland’s independence after eighteen hundred years. I ask Jews at best lukewarm towards Israel how the generations of Diaspora Jews persecuted or worse over the centuries as homeland-less outsiders in Christian and Muslim lands would feel today about Israel if they could exchange places with us.
We have a powerful weapon we neglect to use in trying to evoke stronger feeling toward our homeland of Israel in the souls of American Jews. That weapon is the grippingly readable, indeed riveting books written by and about Diaspora Jews who at great danger to themselves joined with homeland-residing Jews in the great events of Israel’s rebirth. I refer here not to academic “history” books dispassionately recording what happened, but those telling, especially in these participants’ own words, their motivations for the commitments they made. I have, as some of you know, about a thousand Jewish homeland history books, and here are a few I feel meet this readability test of American Jewish involvement. Read one of these books as your Hanukkah gift to yourself, and then hand it to a fellow grassroots American Jew who’d benefit from reading it.
“Riveting” is the word used by Bibi Netanyahu in his Foreword to Jeffrey and Craig Weiss’ I Am My Brother’s Keeper, American Volunteers in Israel’s War of Independence 1947-1949 (Amazon). I agree with Bibi’s assessment.
I’ve bought and read all the books I’ve encountered on the Aliyah Bet, the rescue of Hitler’s Holocaust survivors from the Dark Continent, Europe, and the sailing of them into the teeth of the anti-Jewish British Palestine blockade. American WW II vets helped man these mostly rickety ships over-packed with surviving Jewish partisans and DPs. Particularly moving are Arie Eliav’s The Voyage of the Ulua and Rudy Patzert’s Running the Palestine Blockade. I’ve read several books on the Exodus. Those that I’ve reread more than once include Yoram Kaniuk’s Commander of The Exodus, Gordon Thomas’ Operation Exodus, Nissan Degani’s Exodus Calling, Ruth Gruber’s Destination Palestine, and David Holly’s Exodus 1947. Beyond telling of the Americans’ involvement and the heroic roles of Palestinian Jews, these books tell harrowing Holocaust tales of the partisans and survivors and the incredible efforts against constant British obstruction to bring these brutalized but utterly determined-to-go-to-Palestine people to the ships.
If you would read and refer just one book on the Six Day War, including the meaning to Israelis of historic Jerusalem’s liberation, I commend to you Steven Pressfield’s The Lion’s Gate. It follows only a select few of Israel’s armed forces’ units, and only some people in them, but in the fighters’ own words it gets “into the cockpit, inside the tank, under the helmet.” In its flashes back to 1948 era and other earlier roles of those whom it follows, it captures these episodes in these participants’ own words, including the bringing to Israel and early battles of American pilots Lou Lenart (to whom the book is dedicated) and Collie Goldstein. By me, “riveting” is too pale a term.
I have a last suggestion for you in lighting all eight candles Sunday night. Turn off the room’s lights and for a few minutes sit in the dark save for the menorah and stare at the flames. Perhaps you’ll see the faces of our Jewish homeland heroes of long ago, of the second century BCE, and of our people’s heroes and martyrs of not so long ago. Ask yourself what right have we American Jews, relatively historically safe and secure here in America, to tell our fellow Jews today defending our people’s three-millennia homeland to walk meekly out of historic Jerusalem and Israel’s defensible Judea-Samaria hill country heartland back to the exclusively military existentially perilous ceasefire lines of 1949. May you and they have had a Happy Hanukkah.