WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: My usual pitch to grassroots American Jews in these weely emails is that by three-millennia homeland Jewish presence and international treaty the land of Israel in its entirety, Palestine west of the Jordan River, is ours, and that Palestinian Arabs have a Palestine homeland, where they’re the majority, Jordan, sitting on 78% of the Palestine Mandate. Last week, I added a third ground in one sentence: “God knows we need it.” Let me explain.
The Land of Israel: “God Knows We Need It” Explained
Late one afternoon late in the unusually hot summer of 1947, American journalist Ruth Gruber stood on France’s Mediterranean shore at Port de Bouc, watching three British prison ships – Ocean Vigour, Empire Rival and Runnymede Park (named after the place the Magna Carta was signed) – weigh anchor and begin sailing to prison camps in defeated Germany’s British Zone, bearing four thousand Holocaust survivors who’d escaped from Europe on Exodus 1947. They’d been intercepted by the anti-Jewish British blockade in an hours-long repeated destroyer-ramming, potatoes and food tins-resistance battle off Palestine’s coast, and been brought back to France in these British prison ships, where they’d refused during weeks in brutally hot holds to debark. “One of the Haganah girls near me,” Gruber wrote, “watching the ships set sail for Germany, said softly, ‘Now you will see the birth of the Jewish State.’” Gruber, Destination Palestine, p. 126.
I’ve devoured all the books I’ve found on the Aliyah Bet, the Palestinian Jews’, American and other volunteers’ aided, rescue of survivors from Europe, not least of course those on the Exodus – Gruber’s Destination Palestine, Holly’s Exodus 1947, Grauel’s Grauel, Kaniuk’s Commander of the Exodus, Thomas’ Operation Exodus, and Degani’s Exodus Calling. For inspiration from riveting reading of the iron determination and sheer guts during the Holocaust and after of all involved, I commend especially these last three to you.
But the ship’s voyage that should have made every American Jew of its time and thereafter a relentless supporter of a whole, secure, Jewishly meaningful sovereign Jewish homeland of Israel isn’t that of the Exodus, or of other rivetingly recounted trips of ships of the Aliyah Bet (Arie Eliav’s The Voyage of the Ulua and Rudy Patzert’s Running the Palestine Blockade are riveting reading), but that of a years’ earlier ship, the St. Louis. In 1939 it sailed from Hamburg (to which the Exodus’ passengers were later returned) to Cuba with valid passenger documents, but Cuba reneged, and the ship fruitlessly sailed America’s coast, but the U.S. and Canada refused their admission. The St. Louis sailed forlornly back to Europe, where some of its passengers were allowed entry while many died in the Holocaust. What the St. Louis symbolized was that it wasn’t just Germany that subjected Jews to the Holocaust. The whole world knowingly abandoned the Jews to their fate.
If this seems an exaggeration to you, and like me you can’t bring yourself to read the entirety of David Wyman’s The Abandonment of The Jews, read at least the summary in chapter 20 (pp. 153-159) in Kaniuk’s Commander of The Exodus. The allies didn’t bomb the camps they flew over or railroads to them. “Conferences like the one in Bermuda were convened with the goal of killing time and prolonging inaction.” Cited U.S. State Department documents, Kaniuk wrote (p. 154), “were open to only one possible interpretation: the two great democracies, the United States and Great Britain, were, in the words of an official of the American Treasury Department, ‘deeply committed not to save the Jews.’”
Israpundit’s Ted Belman republished a super-cynical Haaretz “Analysis” article this week, “Israel Is Heading For Its Most ‘Jewish’ Election Ever” (Thursday, 6/23/22). The “Analysis” begins by citing Netanyahu’s statement accusing the just-fallen Bennett-Lapid coalition government of having endangered Israel’s “Jewish character.” Haaretz’ s “Analysis” goes on to accuse Bibi of having “no interest in projecting any Jewish value; just in using Judaism as a mechanism for manufacturing hate against those who are not Jewish.” In his preface to the article, Belman of course disagrees. He sees the divide as between “nationalists v universalists, or between those wo want Israel to be a Jewish state as opposed to a state for all its citizens. I thought that ‘pay homage to their Jewish identity’ is intrinsic to Zionism.”
Israel gained independence, not because of the Holocaust, but just three years after the Holocaust, in a world in which anti-Semitism had not gone away. It’s now three-quarters of a century since the Holocaust, more than half-a-century since Israel liberated historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
In 2016, in the Obama administration’s way out the door, the US abstained in an otherwise unanimous Security Council resolution, UNSC 2334, that sought not Arab-Israeli peace but just to eradicate Israel’s core-of-the-homeland gains in that war. A resolution’s pending in the US Congress to declare Israel’s independence a “nakba” [“catastrophe”] and recognize the ‘rights” of millions of descendants of Arabs who left Israel in 1948 to go “home.” The big human rights’ NGOs and others accuse Israel of “apartheid” and worse, anti-Israelism rages on college campuses, and the UN has established unprecedented investigative bodies with jurisdiction over just one state in the world, Israel. So do you think the world’s view of “the Jews” has changed? Do you think that if Jews anywhere in the world were subjected to unrelenting pogroms or worse, the world would do for them now more than it did (i.e., nothing) in a full-fledged Holocaust during our own time in Europe’s heart?
American Jews need to understand, as the late Charles Krauthammer understood, that not Jewish victimhood and the Holocaust, but the rebirth after eighteen hundred years’ dreams of Jewish sovereignty in our historic homeland of Israel is the seminal Jewish history event of our time. Krauthammer put it this way:
“It would be a tragedy for American Jews to make the Holocaust the principal legacy bequeathed to their children. After all, the Jewish people are living through a miraculous age: the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty, the revival of Hebrew (a cultural resurrection unique in human history), the flowering of a new Hebraic culture radiating throughout the Jewish world.
“Memory is sacred, but victimhood cannot be the foundation of Jewish identity. Traditional Judaism has 613 commandments. The philosopher Emil Fackenheim famously said that the 614th is to deny Hitler any posthumous victories. The reduction of Jewish identity to victimhood would be one such victory. It must not be permitted.” (Charles Krauthammer, “The Holocaust and Jewish Identity,” Washington Post, 3/10/16)
This week’s Haaretz “Analysis” article may be right that “Israel Is Heading For Its Most ‘Jewish’ Election Ever,” but not over whether Likud’s leaders obey Judaism’s 613 commandments vel non. Israel’s role isn’t to be “Democratic & Jewish” in the universalist sense of a homeland for all of its residents. It’s to be there for Jews, a place where they can freely live as Jews, observant or not, not as a tolerated or persecuted minority, and to be there – which in our own time the whole world was not – for Jews living elsewhere who need or want to come home. For this it has to be Jewishly meaningful and geographically defensibly strong, coextensive with the historic land of Israel in its entirety – Palestine west of the Jordan River, historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria hill country heartland included. God knows we need it.