A Start-of-Summer Night’s Dream: American Jewish Leaders Lost in the Promised Land
I dreamed last night that an Israeli soldier, I didn’t catch his rank or name, who’d been fatally shot while charging deeply dug-in Jordanian troops in the 1967 war’s battle for Jerusalem’s Ammunition Hill, was conducting (ok, it’s a dream) an Israel tour for today’s lay and religious leaders of America’s Conservative and Reform movements, today’s main religious frameworks for today’s American Jews. It was my dream, so I tagged along.
The “Israel” we toured was what today’s American Jewish leaders call “Israel” and “the West Bank” beyond “the 1967 borders,” Israel’s “annexation” of “any territory” of which these main American Jewish religious movements’ leaders – who believe that Israel’s borders with a new Palestinian Arab western Palestine state should “hew precisely” [2-4-2, 2-4-shmoo] to those “1967 borders” – in April publicly implored the American President not to allow.
We began our dream tour by visiting some sites beyond those “1967 borders” that Israel had desperately tried to reclaim for the Jewish homeland in the 1948 War of Independence, but tragically failed. We paused on the road leading up to Jerusalem at the rusted remains of homemade-armored vehicles of convoys that had relentlessly tried to break through the Arab blockades to bring supplies to Jerusalem’s Jewish residents and defenders, and most often fatally failed. We paused at what had been the desperately clawed out “Burma Road.” We paused at Jerusalem-blocking Latrun, where three battles had been fought in the ’48 War, all of them lost, in one so desperate that Israel threw into the fight just-rescued Holocaust refugees so ill-prepared to fight that they didn’t know to unlock the safety catches of the weapons Israel had desperately thrust in their hands.
We toured Jerusalem’s Old City, with its Temple Mount and Western Wall, and Jewish Quarter, every synagogue of which Jordan’s army methodically destroyed after the ’48 War, and the Mount of Olives ancient-to-modern-times Jewish cemetery, stones from which after the ’48 War Jordanians used to pave latrines. We toured the City of David, with its incredible archeological finds, Mount Scopus, Rachel’s Tomb, Hebron – one of the post-biblical homeland Jews’ four holy cities – with its Cave of the Patriarchs, of which Jews could ascend only to the outside seventh step when Hebron was not held in Jewish hands.
We stopped for lunch, at which we recalled the fear for our homeland and people we Diaspora Jews felt so deeply in late May, 1967, as Arab armies marshaled on all Israel’s narrow borders, Nasser kicked out the U.N., closed the Straits of Tiran and daily issued blood-curdling cries for the Jewish homeland’s annihilation from the earth.
And then we recalled how it felt to be a Jew, even a Diaspora Jew, when Israel decisively won – miraculously, it seemed to us – that 1967 War in only Six Days.
After lunch, we went on to Jerusalem. We passed the Hill of Evil Counsel, where Jordan had made its first thrust to capture Jewish-held Jerusalem, which the IDF in severe trench fighting, threw back. And then we went to the Police School and Ammunition Hill, where Israel made its Jerusalem break-through in the fiercest, most ferocious fighting of the 1967 War. We went around to the Old City’s southern wall, to the place beneath which Israeli tanks and jeeps had been trapped and destroyed on the night before the historic break-through. We entered through the Lions’ Gate and arrived, as had the paratroopers of the ’67 War, at the Temple Mount and Western Wall. We placed our hands on that Wall, which Jordan, all through those nineteen years of its occupation of historic Jerusalem, had forbidden Jews to do.
I don’t know whether that Israeli soldier-led tour of those American Jewish leaders continued on after that. I woke up.
My friends, I would have you wake up. That open letter that the lay and religious leaders of American Jewry publicly sent to the President of the United States this year calling for a “two-state solution” that would “hew precisely to the 1967 border,” a solution which our homeland’s Jews have in rare agreement rejected, is a definitive disservice to our Jewish people both in Israel and here.
Of all the issues – borders, refugees, religious site access, etc. – to be resolved between Arabs and Jews, none is as definitive as the drawing of borders. Unlike ceasefire lines, borders stick. Our adversaries understand this and would no more say “1949 ceasefire lines” than say “Judea-Samaria.” They’ve succeeded. Witness the lay and religious leaders of American Jewry having succumbed to sanctifying the old 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire lines – nine-miles-wide in the lowland middle, expressly declared in their defining document not to be political borders, obliterated and replaced by the infinitely-more-secure-for-Israel 1967 War ceasefire lines – as “the 1967 borders.”
It’s not for American Jews, lay or leaders, to tell Israel’s Jews, who defend Israel’s borders, what Israel’s borders should be. Our Diaspora Jewry’s homeland stake is in the land of Israel, not in the State of Israel inside that land. It’s for Israel to do whatever Israel determines it needs to do re Judea-Samaria, except call it “West Bank.”
It may be that the leaders of the American Conservative and Reform religious movements, in demanding borders that “hew precisely to the 1967 borders” (save for any territorial adjustments agreed in writing between the two sides), intended that language to embrace just Judea-Samaria and not Jerusalem, where everything holy or archeologically important to us is on such borders’ other side. But the line that was drawn with a green pen in the 1949 ceasefire agreement is the same shade of green in Jerusalem as in Judea-Samaria. And that is how the world at large will interpret it.
What can we do, we ordinary grassroots American Jews, many of us lay members of the Conservative or Reform denomination, to mitigate any of this? I don’t know. Perhaps, try to talk sense, self-respect, to our leaders? Sleep on it. If any of you Gentle Readers dream up anything, email me. Perhaps we can voice suggestions next week.