WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: I’ve long been in the minority of American Jews. I don’t view Bibi (or even the Donald) as the Devil Incarnate, I support Israeli judicial reform and oppose “the two-state solution.” But things happened this week that push me even further away from the majority of our community. Here’s why I’d have you come along.
This Week: My Estrangement From Most American Jews
Judicial Reform
Ok, let’s start with judicial reform. Rabbi Dov Fischer had a reasonable Jewish Press article last Sunday, 7/23/23, A Reasonable Solution to Israel’s Judicial Reform Debate, in which he pointed out two huge domain scope differences between Israel’s and America’s Supreme Courts, which I doubt that most American Jews, in assuming that except for the “reasonableness” standard and justice appointment procedure the two are roughly analogous, adequately appreciate.
One limitation on America’s high court’s power that Rabbi Fischer, himself an attorney, points out is “justiciability” – the case before it must involve legal and not political issues. A second, he also points out, is “standing” – the party bringing the case must be personally affected by the issue involved. Neither of these limitations on the scope of the court’s jurisdiction applies in Israel. It is in this sweeping limitless context that the Israeli Supreme Court’s arrogation to itself long after Israel’s independence of the power to invalidate a Knesset law as “unreasonable,” a power vouchsafed to no other democracy’s supreme court in the world, must be evaluated.
To call the reining in of this unique subjective Israeli Supreme Court power what’s the threat to democracy is Orwellian. Yet Philadelphia’s Jewish Exponent framed its weekly poll question this week (emphasis added, a little):
“On Monday the Knesset passed the first piece of a proposed overhaul of the country’s judiciary. Where do you stand?
“[ ] Israel needs judicial reform. I support it.
“[ ] The Israeli government is threatening democracy. I oppose these draconian measures.
“[ ] There needs to be compromise.”
Here’s the results: Support for judicial reform got 17.22%. Need for compromise got 20.57%. “The Israeli government is threatening democracy” got 62.20%. Really?
America, Arabia and “The Two-State Solution”
David Israel had a disturbing Jewish Press article this week, 7/28/23, Tom Friedman: Biden, Not the Saudis, Conditions Israel-Saudi Reproachment on 2-State Solution. His lede:
“NY Times pundit Thomas Friedman revealed on Thursday that neither Saudi Arabia nor Israel cares a hoot about the future of a Palestinian State, and the only one pushing for the 2-state solution as a condition for peace between Riyad and Jerusalem is President Joe Biden.”
If you’re among the majority of American Jews who, unlike me, support “the two-state solution,” a new sovereign Arab state in Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem – “two-states along the 1967 [1949] lines with mutually agreed territorial swaps,” as the Democrats put it – I have this request of you. Read three not-long moving books – Steven Pressfield’s The Lion’s Gate, Yoram Kaniuk’s Commander of the Exodus, and Leen Ritmeyer’s Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount – and then tell me you still believe in ripping from our Jewish homeland of Israel its defensible Judea-Samaria hill country heartland and historic Jerusalem, Temple Mount and all, and handing them over to “the Palestinians,” who’ve never ruled western Palestine, the land of Israel, ever.
The Lion’s Gate at one level is a gripping “in the cockpit, inside the tank, under the helmet” first-person account of Six Day War battles, but deeper than that through flashbacks and fighters’ testimonies reveals what liberating Jerusalem and our people’s homeland’s biblical heartland meant to Israelis, religious and secular all. And maybe like me you remember May and June 1967 and what they meant to we Diaspora Jews. Acclaimed Israeli author Kaniuk’s sterling bio of Yossi Harel, commander of Aliyah Bet ship Exodus 1947, grippingly tells the saga of that heroic voyage, but more than that movingly recalls the context, not just of the unbelievable endurance of those ships’ Holocaust survivor passengers and Palestinian Jewish rescuers, but of our Jewish homeland’s irreplaceable place in our peoplehood. And Ritmeyer’s detective tale revealing of Jerusalem’s Jewish Temple Mount, down to Solomon’s still-visible slot cut in the Foundation State floor of the Temple’s Holy of Holies where the Ark of the Covenant stood, makes clear that the Temple Mount, where Judahite kings and prophets and Jesus walked, is significantly still there, much as Herod reconstructed it, for all that the Philadelphia Inquirer, for one western paper, seditiously calls that whole complex “a mosque.”
I was a little American kid during World War II and the Holocaust, but my mother was president of a local ORT chapter, and after the War I met a few refugees and remember meeting them. I was of age during May and June 1967 and remember how I felt during those dark and then suddenly illuminated days. There are still those today who’d push our people’s homeland’s Jews into the Sea. By me, Jews who’d facilitate these enemies’ first step, a sovereign Arab state inside the land of Israel’s narrow land, are lemmings, rushing en route into the Sea. But if after reading these three books – Pressfield’s Lion’s Gate, Kaniuk’s Commander of the Exodus, and Ritmeyer’s Secrets of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount – you’re still for “two-states along the 1967 lines with mutual agreed swaps,” I give up, I’ve provided what reality I can for you.