WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Ben-Gurion called on us American Jews to Stand By Israel in its historic struggle for our people’s homeland’s sovereign redemption. That struggle’s still going on. We need to be in it as active American Jews.
Standing By Israel: The Place For American Jews
“Our call goes out to the Jewish people all over the world to rally to our side in the task of immigration and development and to stand by us in the great struggle for the fulfillment of the dream of generations — the redemption of Israel.”
These words uttered by David Ben-Gurion are as cogent a call upon us American Jews today as they were when he said them, standing beneath Herzl’s portrait in a Tel Aviv museum on May 14, 1948.
Here’s why. We think of today’s State of Israel as having fought a succession of wars – the War of 1948-49, the Sinai Campaign, the Six Day War, the War of Attrition, the Yom Kippur War, the wars in Lebanon, Gaza, etc. Add to that the War of Delegitimization – in the media, in the United Nations, through “BDS” campaigns and lies like “apartheid,” terrorism in the land and elsewhere, etc., etc. But those, my friends, are battles. History will record that Israel has fought only one war, its War of Independence, for its “place among the nations” as Bibi put it, over its “right to exist,” and that war is still being fought.
To we American Jews, the secure substantial Diaspora Jewish community that has stood by Israel especially in moments of crisis like 1948, 1967 and 1973, Ben-Gurion’s words should today be ringing in our ears. But what if those words in Israel’s Declaration of Independence hadn’t been said? We’d have to say them out loud to ourselves. We’re not just standing by Israel, we’re standing by us, our Jewish people, as B-G put it, “all over the world.”
I had the privilege many years ago to help conduct the “Israel fund-raising” campaign of my then-vibrant lodge of the then-vibrant almost then century-old men’s and women’s fraternal order Brith Sholom. In my speech at our big fund-raising dinner I briefly held up the campaign’s pledge card and said, “This is our pledge.” I then went back over the slaughters over the centuries of our Jewish people around the world – in Europe, in the Holocaust, Inquisition, pogroms, and as singled-out dhimmis in Islamic lands. I then held up that pledge card again: “To every Jew who ever died al kiddush haShem, this is our pledge.” We can’t bring back the dead. What we can do, rather what Israel can do, for persecuted Jews living anywhere is an Ingathering of the Exiles, to bring them home to the place where they’re no longer sojourning strangers in intolerant lands.
Relax, I’m not asking for money. What I am doing is quoting Amb. Yoram Ettinger quoting Ben-Gurion this week in his Ettinger Report article, “Israel’s 2023 National Security Challenge”:
“The establishment of the State of Israel has not ended the struggle for Jewish uniqueness and destiny…. The Ingathering is our central undertaking; it is a prerequisite to our independence…. Jewish history did not start upon the 1948 establishment of Israel or the 1897 First Zionist Congress. Jewish history is a 4,000-year-old wealth of values, culture and heroic events, which are based on the Bible and the Land of Israel.” [Ben-Gurion, “Uniqueness and Destiny,” 1951, emphasis B-G’s or Yoram’s]
What I am asking of you this week is to feel part of this Ingathering, this “central undertaking,” this “prerequisite” to Israel’s existence, by standing by today’s Israel in its continuing rightful struggle for secure independence as our people’s historic homeland, world-acknowledged in the Palestine Mandate as our “Jewish national home.”
Put into perspective concerns you may have regarding apportionment of powers between its legislature and judiciary. The United Nations and International Court of Justice today are weighing whether Israel’s violating “the human rights of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.” Palestinian Arabs aren’t exclusively “the Palestinian people,” as though Jews haven’t lived in Palestine for three thousand years. Historic Jerusalem (Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David and all), three times in history Israel’s undivided capital with its renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Turkish rule, isn’t “Occupied Palestinian Territory,” and nor is the Land of Israel’s Judea-Samaria hill country heartland, for all the world calls it “West Bank.”
Understand fully that “the two-state solution along the 1967 [1949] lines with mutually agreed swaps” recognizes zero homeland equity of the Jewish people in Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem. Every inch beyond those old defunct 1949 ceasefire lines has to be bought, paid for, with an inch inside them. No Jew in the world should acquiesce in Judea and Samaria and the heart of Jerusalem not being part of we Jews’ homeland. Even if you feel vicariously empowered to have Israel relinquish “East” Jerusalem and “the West Bank” in a “two-state solution” with “the Palestinian people,” do so loudly proclaiming you’re compromising something that’s the Jewish people’s, that’s ours. And recognize you’re leaving the Jewish homeland militarily indefensible and Jewishly heartless.
If you’re still reading, let’s talk for a minute about American Jews’ Jewish homeland perspective. Right-winger though I am, I see a need for balance between a nation’s legislative and judicial bodies’ powers. I for one think a simple majority (btw, not too easy to come by in a Knesset) overruling any Supreme Court decision would be going too far, but so too is Court invalidating any Knesset-passed law as being “unreasonable,” and also Court justices in effect appointing their own successors ad infinitum. And I have no problem with undoing the law of return’s “one Jewish grandparent” clause. That was for Hitler to decide who was a Jew. Too many non-Jews with no feeling for Jewish peoplehood have come in from Europe. In the case of America, it would just prevent John Kerry from coming there. Good. And I think Israeli women should have as much rights as men, including at the Wall, not just “separate but equal” and at Robinson’s Arch. But to make one’s support for so-isolated Israel “conditional”!?
An historical analogy, if I may: I read some years ago about a U.S. Reform rabbi saying we shouldn’t honor the Maccabees because they were religious fanatics, which they were. If they’d come by here today, you wouldn’t be reading this because they’d have forthwith lopped off my non-kosher head. But I light the candles all eight nights of Hanukkah, honoring them, because but for them – at one of those moments when Jewish peoplehood’s continuity hung by a thread, they kept it going, ultimately for us.
And, by your leave, a personal addendum on us American Jews’ role in the fray: Decades ago, when we visited Israel, we were most affably welcomed by distant cousins, who of course asked us, “So when are you making aliyah?” I countered, “Why do you think the U.S. supports Israel?” “Because it’s the right thing to do.” “Of course, it’s the right thing for the U.S. government to do, but that’s not the sole reason.” The American people are the ultimate deciders of with whom America makes friends. We have to make the case to the American people that the people of Israel share its values of democracy, personal freedoms, religious freedom, helping peoples needing help, and the other values we share.
So, summing up, there needs to be one place on Earth, our Jewish people’s homeland of Israel, to which a Jew from anywhere can come and be home and cease being a sometimes-tolerated, sometimes tormented sojourner in others’ lands, and not be cold-blooded murdered al kiddush haShem just for being a Jew. That isn’t quite the case yet in Israel today, witness the terrorism going on now. But, Abraham Accords, Trump’s realistic peace plan and more, we’re hopefully getting there. Let’s make the case to Americans that it’s Israelis’ values that are in synch with Americans’, and, as Ben-Gurion called on us, let the world know we fully stand by Israel in its sovereign redemption.