WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Organized American Jewry, lay and religious, isn’t as “pro-Israel” these days as in years past, as columnists lamented this High Holy Days week. Here’s a trio of suggestions for pro-Israel grassroots American Jews.
Did You Ever Expect To See as Worrisome a Pro-Israel Headline As This? The Ball’s in Grassroots U.S. Jews’ Court
I didn’t make a big deal about his headline last week when I quoted JNS Editor Jonathan Tobin’s article calling on non-Orthodox U.S. rabbis to plead with their High Holidays crowds to stand by Israel and Zionism. I just cited his article as a jumping off point to call on grassroots pro-Israel U.S. Jews to make that case, peer-to-peer, closer than pulpit-to-pew, to our fellows.
But ponder for a moment what Tobin sought to convey last week in his 9/20/22 JNS article headline:
Can Reform and Conservative Judaism Support for Zionism Be Revived?
Be “Revived”?! Here’s Microsoft Word’s Encarta Dictionary on “revive”: to “come around, come to, regain consciousness, wake up.” Non-Orthodox American Jewry’s in a bad state if, regarding our people’s homeland’s sovereign rebirth in our own very time, we have to wake up.
Alas, given our U.S. Reform and Conservative Jewish movements’ mindset, rabbis and all, such revival, wake-up call, is unlikely to come from those we call our communal leaders. Our Reform and Conservative movements, rabbis and all, openly called on then President Trump in a 2019 open letter to push for a “two-state solution” with borders that “hew precisely” to “the 1967 borders” [i.e., 1949 non-border ceasefire lines that were obliterated by infinitely more meaningful and secure for Israel 1967 fighting ceasefire lines] save for any agreed-in-writing “territorial adjustments” thereto. And they demanded that Trump oppose Israeli “annexation” [as though Jews already didn’t have a bona fide, post-Ottoman Palestine Mandate, claim to it] of any part of “the West Bank.” Well, on President Biden now, they don’t have to call.
Nor do future Reform and Conservative movements’ prospects look any brighter. Last year, ninety–three non-Orthodox rabbinical and cantorial students from multiple U.S. Jewish clergy educating institutions wrote an open letter accusing Israel of “violent suppression of human rights,” enabling “apartheid in the Palestinian territories” and waving “the threat of annexation” thereof [letter quoted in Forward, 12/11/21, Gates of Tears: Rabbinical and Cantorial Students Stand for Solidarity With Palestinians]. Ycch!
This week, Mitchell Bard cited that letter in a JNS article (9/29/22), The Tragedy of Jews Who Can’t Stand With Israel, contrasting it to a sign his rabbi posted this week in front of his own synagogue, “We Stand With Israel.” Bard wrote : “What could be less controversial? What could be more fundamental to Jewish identity?” He then added that his rabbi doubted that he could have posted that sign at the synagogue he’d previously served: Bard wrote: “Alas, at too many synagogues, standing with Israel is too much for some,” and “even worse, the problem is no longer surprising.”
And it’s not just our non-Orthodox American Jewish religious movements. That infamous “hew precisely to the 1967 borders” [excluding historic Jerusalem!] and “no West Bank annexation” letter was signed by more than just the Reform & Conservatives. Its authors: ADL, Ameinu, ARZA, Central Conference of American Rabbis, Jewish Women International, Israel Policy Forum, MERCAZ USA, National Council of Jewish Women, Rabbinical Assembly, Union for Reform Judaism and United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. And there were other articles this High Holy Days week lamenting less-than-positive attitudes towards Israel of organized American Jews.
So, pro-Jewish homeland grassroots American Jews, the ball’s in our court. Here’s a trio of things we might individually personally do.
Be as clear in claiming our people’s homeland as are its opponents in counter-claiming it. Our adversaries go around chanting “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free!” The answer is not for us to say “But UNSC 242, in calling for Israeli withdrawal from territories that came into Israeli control in the 1967 war, doesn’t say “the” territories. Acquiesce, if you must, in “the two-state solution,” but not because the 1949 ceasefire lines are “Israel’s 1967 borders” and that applying Israeli law to Judea-Samaria [not “the West Bank”] is “annexation” of another state’s lands, but as a compromise sacrifice of core parts of what’s our homeland’s land for promised peace.
And in stating our rightful claim to our land of Israel beyond “the green line,” we’re not being the media’s “ultra-nationalists” laying groundless claim to a “Greater Israel.” Exactly the opposite, it’s Israel’s enemies who aren’t satisfied with Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan, sitting on 78% of post-Ottoman Mandated Palestine, who’re chanting for Lesser Israel, indeed, as in “From the River to the Sea,” for No Israel.
Stop Saying Dirty Words Designed to Disinherit Us: Stop letting our adversaries’ loaded lexicon of anti-Jewish homeland poisoned pejoratives flow from our own mouths – “West Bank … East Jerusalem …occupied territories … Palestinian territories … occupied Palestinian territories … settlers and settlements [in the media’s loving contradistinction to Palestinian residents of Palestinian neighborhoods, villages, towns] … Israel’s Creation & Founding in 1948 … captured by Israel in 1967 …ultra-nationalists’ Greater Israel … Palestinian Arabs as THE Palestinians [as if 3,000 year-present Palestine Jews are not Palestinian], etc., etc.
Point Out that Divesting Jews’ Holy Place Equity Divests Christians’ Too: And let us point out to Christians that when, e.g., the media, in its zeal to squeeze out any Jewish equity in a Holy Land holy place, wholeheartedly endorses the extreme Muslim exclusive claim to that holy place, it’s selling out Christians’ claim along with the Jews’. E.g., last year when my hometown Philadelphia Inquirer endorsed the extreme Muslim claim that the entirety of the Temple Mount, not just the al-Aqsa Mosque itself at the Mount’s southern end, is the “mosque” that’s “Islam’s third holiest site,” so that Jews ascending the Temple Mount plaza far from al-Aqsa itself were “visiting the mosque,” aren’t Christians so ascending the Mount “visiting the mosque” too? So, sorry, Christians, better luck next shrine.
And, finally, let Dr. Jerry briefly prescribe for you vitamins. Some of you know my “hobby” is collecting (and sometimes reading) books about our Jewish homeland – ancient and modern. Through decades of haunting used book stores (physical and now in my elder years internet) and Jewish neighborhood library book sales, I’ve accumulated more than a thousand. There are multiple reasons for grassroots American Jews reading books about Israel. One of them’s relevant here – inspiration. Read inspiring first person accounts of what it took to reclaim and rebuild our people’s national home at the end of a political (not physical presence) hiatus of eighteen hundred years, during and on the heels of the murder in enlightened Europe in our time of six million of our people while the world just silently watched.
Here’s a dozen inspiring books by and about those engaged in today’s Israel’s sovereign rebirth, about the courage and determination it took, and what the ingathering of the exiles and 1948, 1967 and 1973 accomplishments mean for our people.
Yoram Kaniuk, Commander of the Exodus
Gordon Thomas, Operation Exodus
Nissan Degani, Exodus Calling
Arie Eliav, Voyage of the Ulua
Rudolph Patzert, Running the Palestine Blockade
Murray Greenfield & Joseph Hockstein, The Jews’ Secret Fleet
Howard Blum, The Brigade
Craig & Jeffrey Weiss, I Am My Brother’s Keeper
Menachem Begin, The Revolt
Steven Pressfield, The Lion’s Gate
Abraham Rabinovich, The Yom Kippur War
Eliezer (Cheetah) Cohen, Israel’s Best Defense
Ok, half of these dozen vitamins are about the Aliyah Bet. You’re likely familiar with David Holly’s Exodus 1947 and Ruth Gruber’s Destination Palestine, both excellent reads, but if what you’re looking for is rivetingly inspiring first person accounts of how participants – Palestinian Jews, American volunteers and Holocaust survivors themselves – made their courageous way to and participated in this sailing of packed rickety ships into the teeth of Britain’s anti-Jewish Palestine blockade, these half-dozen above are the books for you.
There’s a scene in The Brigade, the Palestinian Jews’ brigade that had fought with the British against the Germans and then stayed on in Europe first against Nazis and then in aiding post-War escape from Europe of Jews, that symbolizes that change from “first” to “then.” Pursuing a Nazi into a church, wearing their Brigade badge on their uniforms, two of the pursuers encounter a young girl in the choir who hesitantly points to their badge and says “Mogen David.” “Are you Jewish?” “Yes, but the nuns want me to become Catholic and I don’t want to.” The two Nazi-hunting Brigade members take the young girl by the hand and walk out of the church.
The Weiss’ I Am My Brother’s Keeper is a remarkably moving account of American and Canadian volunteers in Israel’s War of Independence. I stumbled on this book and commend it.
Begin’s The Revolt became a manual for national liberation movements all over. Was Israel’s “Creation & Founding in 1948” really the national liberation movement of the Jews, as Tobin, for one, called it last week? Read The Revolt and you’ll see.
The preface to Steven Pressfield’s The Lion’s Gate says his book isn’t a complete history of The Six Day War (by all means, read one), but an effort to bring the reader “into the cockpit, inside the tank, under the helmet” through first person-told accounts, day by day, of selected soldiers, airmen and others of their participation in that war’s battles and what Israel’s victory meant to them. Did Pressfield succeed in doing that? In riveting first-person words.
What if Israel, instead of its Arab foes, were on the receiving end of a war begun with preemptive strikes? It was, in the Yom Kippur War, of which Rabinovich’s book (among others) gives a moving account from existentially perilous start to ultimate victory.
Eliezer (“Cheetah”) Cohen’s Israel’s Best Defense is a highly readable tracing of the Israel Air Force’s growth from a few light civilian planes of a flying club to the world-class professional air force it became, well-told by a key participant in that evolution. The first person “stories” of major clash participants are key parts of the tale.
Take a vitamin now and again.