#898 4/8/18 – This Week: Thinking About Israel’s Upcoming 70th

This Week:  Thinking About Israel’s Upcoming 70th

You don’t have to be some years past 70, as I am, to feel, as I do, that one of three-millennia Jewish history’s most momentous events – rebirth of homeland Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel – is taking place in your time.  That historic moment didn’t begin when Ben-Gurion stood up beneath Herzl’s portrait and began reading Israel’s Declaration of Independence and end when he sat down.  That historic moment’s beginning may be debated, but there can no debate when it will [n.b.] end.  It will with the end of the State of Israel’s one war – its War of Independence, of which history will record that the “wars” of 1948-49, 1956, 1967, 1973, etc., etc., were just battles.  If you’re a Jew and old enough to read this, then The Dream of Generations – the Jewish homeland’s sovereign rebirth – is taking place in your time.

What then?  Does living in this time, being a member of this homeland sovereignty rebirth, after eighteen hundred years, generation impose any duty, any obligation, upon you?  I argue it does.

First off, we were called upon.  Before he sat down, Ben-Gurion turned his gaze from the Yishuv and addressed the diaspora:  “Our call goes out to the Jewish people all over the world to rally to our side in the tasks of immigration and development, and to stand by us in the struggle for the fulfillment of the dream of generations for the redemption of Israel.”  He was speaking to me.

And not just B-G.  I’m haunted too by Dr. Weitzmann’s despair during the Holocaust about the world being divided between places Jews could not live and could not enter.  I think back from the Holocaust through all the generations of diaspora Jews ruthlessly persecuted for being Jews.  President Obama was right about this:  “Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust.”  I sometime picture some Jew in a ghetto, about to be dragged out and murdered in a pogrom, wondering whether he’d support a homeland for Jews in Israel if he could change places with me today in America.

But our obligation to Israel as Jews runs deeper than this.  The Jewish sense of homeland is place specific, Israel-specific.  It would not play, e.g., in Uganda.  At the 1903 Zionist Congress, also at Basel, Herzl announced “the Uganda plan” as a temporary refuge in Africa especially for “the amelioration of the terrible condition of Russian Jewry, for which purpose Zion at that particular moment was unavailable.”  It was mostly those Russian Jews, protesting “a Zionism without Zion,” who after bitter debate had walked out.  (Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland: From Earliest Times Until the Present Day (1920, pp. 84-85, quoted in Verlin, Israel 3000 Years (xiii).

And that is merely one instance.  It’s always been about, not just some place of refuge someplace for Jews, but about the Jewish homeland of Israel, rooted not just in biblical history but in post-biblical history too.  Historian Parkes was right that we never left, that the “heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement,” wrote our time’s Zionists’ “real title deeds.”

I write a lot in this media watch about Jewish homeland-delegitimizing terms, beloved by the media, which we Jews should not use.  Gil Troy this week wrote about a term – the “Z” word, “Zionism” –   which we should be using more these days than we are.  Troy says “Zionism” is broader than particular policies of any Israeli government, and we all should ardently embrace it.

“You cannot defeat those delegitimizing Israel by surrendering Zionism, the movement that established Israel.  If, a century ago, Zionism brought pride back to the term ‘Jew,’ Jews and non-Jews today must bring pride back to the term ‘Zionist.’”  (Troy, “Israel at 70: It’s Time To Reclaim the Z-Word, Zionism,” Times of Israel, 4/4/18.)

My friend Steve Kramer, an Israeli, wrote this week about his just-concluded several weeks visit to Florida.  He lamented, especially among our young people caught up in today’s social causes, a lack of special connection to Israel.  He blames us for failing to adequately educate them.

“Generally, Millennials and others know next to nothing about Israel and what they ‘know’ isn’t even true.  Most of their complaints are either a product of ignorance or of propaganda from liberal American organizations with an ax to grind.”

I don’t think we can fully convey to Jews who weren’t born yet during World War II and the Holocaust, during the 1948-49 and even 1967 war and dark days preceding it, what it was like in those times.  But that is the context, desperate in its early days, in which the Jewish homeland’s sovereign rebirth is occurring.  We have to try harder to get that across.