WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: A recent article I cite herein says that young American Jews are becoming increasingly “agnostic” about the need for Jewish sovereignty and a national Jewish home. If this is so, whose fault is this, theirs or ours? I think ours, through the disrespect we show Israel by forcing our peace views upon it, and by failing to instill in our kids and grandkids senses of Jewish peoplehood and of the heroism of those who in our own time reestablished that ever-needed Jewish national home.
Grading Us American Jews For the Past Year: I’d Give Us a Seventeen
I don’t know how law schools grade law students today, but a shade over a half-century ago, when I attended the University of Pennsylvania’s Law School [my graduation from which my father devoutly revered as ‘The Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street’], you spent from September to May reading cases, seeking each case’s “finding” buried within mountains of “dicta.” One hundred percent of your grade was the exam booklet you anonymously wrote out for each course at the end, discussing the legal issues raised by the sets of facts the professor posed in the questions. Sixty was considered passing, seventy the equivalent of an “A.” Your ranking in the class was carried to four decimal places (really), so, to prevent disaster occurring from one single fail, there was a floor grade for each subject beneath which your ignorance thereof could not sink. One student complained to a Prof, “Why did you give me a 55?” Consulting his pre-computer-days grades’ notebook, the Prof responded, “55? I didn’t give you a 55. The Dean gave you a 55. I gave you a 17.”
Looking back at how our American Jewish community, both the establishment and us grassroots, have handled ourselves regarding our Jewish homeland of Israel over the past year, the grade I’d give us both is somewhere around 17. I cite below three instances over the past year where I’ve dissented in these weekly emails from the course that our community’s mainstream took regarding our homeland of Israel. If the assessment in the May 3 Haaretz article, Two-State Solution_U.S. Jews Won’t Budge. Will It Cost Them Their Relationship With Israel?, is anywhere near reality, we are very deeply failing in instilling Jewish peoplehood in our kids.
“Young American Jews may not be ideologically anti-Zionist, but – distanced from the trauma of the Holocaust and generally averse to displays of nationalism – they are increasingly agnostic when it comes to the need for Jewish sovereignty and a national Jewish home.”
#1: Our Federations’ Response to Israel’s Nation-State Law
Last summer, Israel passed its Nation-State Law, formally declaring the State of Israel in the land of Israel the Jewish people’s national home. The Jewish Federations of North America, publicly joining its voice to international criticism of this law, called Israel’s designation of Hebrew as the sole official language, downgrading Arabic from official under the old Mandate law to “special” status, “a needless affront” to the land’s Arabs, and criticized the law’s attribution of “national value” to establishment of Jewish communities as discriminatory. Our BSMW #915 decried this official American Jewish joinder in officious international lecturing of Israel on matters the world regards as sovereign prerogatives of the world’s other nation states.
#2: CAMERA’s Correction of “Palestine” to “the Palestinian Territories”
Last summer the Los Angeles Times used the word “Palestine” in the context of “Israel and Palestine.” Noting that Palestine is not a nation state, America’s premier media-fairness-to-Israel monitoring organization CAMERA suggested to the LA Times use of “the Israeli government and the Palestinians,” “Israel and the West Bank” or “[Israel and] the Palestinian territories.”
I took issue in BSMW #911 with all three of the “Palestine” alternatives CAMERA proposed to the LA Times. We published CAMERA’s reply in #912:
“…. Use of the terminology Judea and Samaria is historically justified. Nevertheless, the insistence that mainstream media outlets adopt a term which is used by only a very minute fraction of the world population, and which ignores the political reality for some 40 percent of the West Bank in which Palestinians rule themselves, guarantees irrelevance. An emailed request for use of the nomenclature ‘Judea and Samaria’ will immediately end up in the editor’s trash box.”
We appended: “CAMERA may well be correct that only ‘a very minute fraction of the world population’ uses the Jewish-origin name ‘Judea and Samaria,’ but that very minute world population fraction is us, the homeland people that, with clear historical and international treaty validation, claims this area, along with Jerusalem, as intrinsic part of its homeland…. the more an historically justified place name that we use differs from the name that the media and most of the rest of the world use, the more important it is that we use it.”
What’s most dismaying here is that none of this used to be so. The United Nations itself in its 1947 partition resolution said “Samaria and Judea” and called Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.” When we ourselves cede “Palestine” – a dirty word only when used in exclusive reference to Arabs – to Arabs as “The Palestinians,” and use “West Bank” as though it were a synonym and not antonym of “Judea and Samaria” [and call the 1949 ceasefire lines Israel’s “1967 borders”] what value of the Jewish homeland are we transmitting to our kids?
#3: Jewish Establishment [all of it] Pushing of “Two-States” on Israelis
“The alphabet soup of organizations comprising the so-called American Jewish establishment – from the muscular pro-Israel AIPAC to the ‘pro-Israel, pro-peace’ J Street, through the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, the policy arms of the Reform and Conservative movements, the Jewish Federations of North America and the rest – are all in lockstep agreement that a two-state solution is a declared goal to securing a Jewish and democratic state.”
These are the words of that May 3 Haaretz article cited above. And nine American Jewish groups – the Reform’s Central Conference of American Rabbis and Union For Reform Judaism, the United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism, its Rabbinical Assembly and Mercaz, ADL, Ameinu, National Council of Jewish Women and Israel Policy Forum – in April signed an open letter to President Trump, calling on him to block Israeli “annexation” of territory in “the West Bank,” and demanding that any territorial adjustments “to the 1967 borders” be done through “a signed agreement between the two sides.”
Here again are key American Jewish organizations, including those of the Reform and Conservative religious movements, pushing a peace process position on Israeli Jews with which Israeli Jews no longer agree. And it is not just these organizations’ leadership. Haaretz article:
“Though the leadership of such groups isn’t elected, they faithfully reflect their constituency on this issue.”
So what are we grassroots American Jews telling our children and grandchildren? That it’s for American Jews to tell Israeli Jews where Israel’s borders should be? That those Israel borders are “the 1967 borders,” that it has no rights in “the West Bank” beyond those that might be gleaned from “annexation”?
When I was a kid going to “Hebrew school” after public school in 1948, I remember them showing us slides of a kibbutz under attack by the Egyptian army, that it had many more gun emplacements than guns, that it moved the few guns it had from one to the other, to make it seem there were more. I remember them showing us a slide of four World War II fighters, “the Israeli air force,” and I knew from news reels of WWII bombing runs that four was not a large number of planes. I wonder what slides they’re showing kids in Hebrew school now?
I think we’re making a mistake in not getting kids to read, and ourselves to read, books that make very clear what that Haaretz article said “young American Jews” are becoming “agnostic” about, “the need for Jewish sovereignty and a national Jewish home.” This weekend I [re-]read a couple books about the Aliyah Bet – Destination Palestine and The Voyage of the Ulua. Kids could learn a lot about the need for Jewish sovereignty and a national Jewish home from reading such books.