WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: My hobby, as some of you know, is collecting and sometimes reading books about Israel, ancient and modern. I commend the most gripping-reading of them to you as a B12 shot-in-the-arm. Beyond that, I think that inducing wavering-in-Israel-support grassroots American Jews to read these books might encourage them to support our people’s homeland “unconditionally” and to rethink their support for a suicidal pre-1967 war boundaries “two-state solution.”
In Our Hands: A Way of Awakening Grassroots American Jews From “Conditional” Support of Our People’s Homeland of Israel
Driving home late one summer Saturday night, all right early Sunday morning, with a car full of party-goers who’d been to a live one with me in New Hope, I found myself suddenly soberingly enmeshed in a sobriety check on route 263. Lousy liar that I am, when I arrived at the front of the line (which you can tell by there being a policeman in front, behind and on both sides of your car) and was confronted with the inevitable “How much had you to drink?”, I looked Hatboro’s Hattest square in the eye, give or take a standard deviation, and told him the Truth, if not necessarily the Whole Truth: “I had a beer with my dinner.” Let off, I recollected with relief a sign I’d once seen in a traffic court: “Don’t be mad, think of all the summonses you did deserve and didn’t get.”
So that’s what I’d discuss with you this week, not just Truth, but Whole Truth. When asked what’s kept me going writing these weekly Alerts lo these now eleven hundred fifty weeks, I’ve invariably responded, “One thing – the stream of emails of support and encouragement from you readers whom I not unappreciatively address as You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly. That’s the Truth, but the Whole Truth is that that’s been one of my two inspirations. The second is a stream of Israel (ancient and modern) books, not a few of them inspiring reading, I’ve been gathering, mostly from haunting “used” bookstores and library book sales. I brag I’ve amassed “over a thousand,” but ok my database tells me as of now “953” (plus two on the way).
I fancy that reading a sampling of the most moving of these books would instill in many more of today’s American Jews a fuller understanding and appreciation of the magnitude and seminal significance of the Jewish history event occurring right now in our time, what Ben-Gurion back in 1948 rightly called the great struggle for fulfillment after eighteen hundred years of the Dream of Generations for our people’s homeland’s sovereign redemption. B-G rightly called on us Jews of the world to stand by Israel in this, but today we U.S. Jews are agonizing right now over whether, given debate in Israel over political power-sharing among its branches of government, our support for our people’s homeland of Israel should be “conditional.”
Actually, by me, our American Jewish situation is worse. A majority of us don’t regard our people’s homeland with indifference, which would be just unhelpful, but subscribe to Jewishly and defensibly suicidal “two-states along the 1967 [1949] lines with mutually-agreed swaps,” wrenching from Israel historic Jerusalem (Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David and all) and Judea-Samaria hill country heartland. I’m not consoled by some of you assuring me, “don’t worry, it will never really happen.” It’s American Jewish support for the concept of such a dismemberment of our people’s historic homeland, championed by most of the rest of the world in its condescending contempt for our homeland and us, that sickens me.
So, You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly, here, from my actually reading a measurable fraction of these 953 Israel books I’ve amassed, are a few truly moving ones I’d have you read or re-read as a vitamin shot, and better yet put in the hands of conditional-on-Israel grassroots American Jews who, hopefully, might awaken, rather than be put to sleep, reading them. My primary selection criterion is that the books, beyond making our homeland case, must, usually in first person accounts of intense courage and determination in the face of great danger, be grippingly moving. There are three aspects of Israel’s rebirth I’ve found most fully meeting this “gripping reading” criterion. (You can likely find these “used” books on Amazon or AbeBooks.com.) Here goes:
Aliyah Bet
Nowhere are the courage and endurance of pre-State Palestinian Jews, of Jewish American WWII vet volunteers, and of Holocaust survivors and partisans themselves brought together more movingly than in accounts of the Aliyah Bet, the multi-continent effort to bring together Jewish “Displaced Persons” to Europe’s shores, gather them into surreptitiously-acquired and outfitted rickety ships and sail them into the teeth of Britain’s still-in-effect anti-Jewish Palestine blockade.
An exceedingly readable book of this genre is Arie Eliav’s Voyage of the Ulua, moving reading throughout but a couple scenes in which are indelibly memorable. The first of two groups of refugees the ship is to embark are young women who’d ended up in Sweden. The port is iced-over and the Ulua, ultimately renamed the Chaim Arlosoroff, has to seek temporary shelter in Denmark, where the British bring pressure on the port authorities to block it from leaving. The inspector comes aboard and questions what are all these shelves filling the holds, are they bunks for people far beyond the ship’s passenger capacity? Oh, no, says the captain, they’re for little fish tanks. The ship’s going up to the Arctic to study the oceanic food chain. “Ok,” says the inspector, “scientific expedition, free to go. But I want to ask you [under his breath] one question: “How much are the Jews of New York paying for this fishing expedition?” The second unforgettable moment occurs in Italy, where the Ulua is loading a second group of young Jewish survivors seeking escape from Europe. One of these is the sister of one who’d boarded in Sweden, each of them believing she’d been her family’s sole survivor. The crew member rushing to inform the captain tells him, “Come see the sight of a lifetime.”
A second most readable Aliyah Bet book is non-Jewish captain Rudy Patzert’s Running the Palestine Blockade on the voyage of the Paducah, renamed Geula. And a moving summary of each of the ships manned by U.S. volunteers, with an intro by Sir Martin Gilbert, is Murray Greenfield’s and Joseph Hochstein’s The Jews’ Secret Fleet: The Untold Story of North American Volunteers Who Smashed the British Blockade of Palestine.
The incredible climax of the Aliyah Bet was, of course, the voyage and aftermath of the Exodus. Two widely-known moving books on it are David Holly’s Exodus 1947 and Ruth Gruber’s Destination Palestine. But three others are super-charged. One is acclaimed Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk’s moving bio of that ship’s (and others’) commander, Commander of the Exodus, Yossi Harel. A second is Gordon Thomas’ Operation Exodus and a third Nissan Degani’s Exodus Calling. I cannot recommend these three books highly enough. Among their incredibly courageous accounts are those of Holocaust survivors who made their way to that ship. If, like me, you cannot bring yourself to read thick books on the Holocaust, and even on the survivors’ DP lives in its wake, you’ll find these individuals’ incredible accounts filling that void.
The Six Day War
Over half-a-century later, I vividly remember not only those early days of June, 1967, but of late May, when it seemed to me, as to many other American Jews, that a second Holocaust loomed in the offing. Tiny Israel, nine-miles-wide in the lowland middle, surrounded by hugely larger Arab states, their armies massed and poised on its borders, howling for its imminent destruction, the UN having abandoned its armies’ separation role, the Straits of Tiran closed, etc. I recall listening to the radio that first day of fighting, Egypt repeatedly proclaiming Israeli forces being “annihilated,” and then hearing an “unconfirmed” report from one news source early on, “the war is over … and Israel has won.” It wasn’t and it hadn’t yet, of course, but I knew then that the threat of imminent annihilation had passed. Years later I read in Eric Hammel’s Six Days in June that among Israel’s own soldiers, there was no fear of not being victorious, “None.”
Of the many good books on the Six Day War, the one I would recommend to you and to put in the hands of wavering grassroots American Jews is Steven Pressfield’s The Lion’s Gate. There’s more than one reason. Not a full account of that war, the book follows a handful of participants – fighter and helicopter pilots, paratroopers, tankers, a recon company, in their own words, fully fulfilling the author’s striving to be “in the cockpit, inside the tank, under the helmet.” There are first-person accounts of the planning and successful execution of “Moked,” the down-to-the-second devised opening plan to destroy the Egyptian air force on the ground. But that’s not the main reason, and nor is the book’s flashbacks to participants’ actions in the 1956 and 1948 wars and before. Beyond these specific battle accounts, the reader will come away with two critical-to-understanding-Israelis impressions. One is of the depth of meaning to Israelis, and largely to Diaspora Jews, of historic Jerusalem with its holiest of holy Jewish sites, and the other is of the vulnerability of the narrowness of the Jerusalem access corridor, with Arab-occupied Latrun on one side and the far-to-the-west-of-Jerusalem ridge extending to Radar Hill on the other, and of course of the nine-miles-wide in the lowland middle further north. Readers will begin to think twice of “two-states on the pre-1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps” after reading this book.
The Yom Kippur War
Good books on the Yom Kippur War include, e.g., Abraham Rabinovich’s The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter that Transformed the Middle East, and Jerry Asher and Eric Hammel’s Duel For the Golan. But for full understanding, with a professional’s concluding analysis of the war’s causes, failures and successes, and consequences for the future, I recommend Chaim Herzog’s The War of Atonement, cogently concluding that for Israelis a “War of Atonement” was exactly what that 1973 war actually was.
Summing Up
So, as a B12 shot-in-the-arm for us “Zionists,” and as a way to awaken to the seminal significance of our people’s continuing struggle for fully securing what Bibi once called Israel’s “Place Among the Nations,” in the face of we American Jews talking about making our support of Israel “conditional,” and many of we ourselves favoring forcing restoration of the pre-1967 war Jewishly meaningless and militarily perilous lines, I commend the above books as apt reading.