Capitalizing on this trend, the Palestinians are explicitly transforming the vote into a referendum on Israel. Just days ago, Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority claimed that the Palestinians' land had been occupied for 63 years. The “occupation” to which he refers is thus not the result of Israel’s victory in 1967, but rather, Israel’s very creation in 1948. If the U.N. votes to recognize Palestinian statehood in light of this attitude, it will simply be tightening the noose further.
Because such hatred of the Jewish state cannot be appeased, Israel has no good options at the moment. It will thus hunker down and hold on, hoping that the international community that voted to create the Jewish state just decades ago might soon return to its senses. excerpt from Gordis' A Referendum on Israel--see below
The challenges Israel currently face transcend party lines, politics and whether or not American Jews like Bibi or not. Israel is besieged on a multitude of fronts, and it behooves us to use our seichel, pick our battles judiciously, and stand with Israel today, more than ever. In this season of reflection and Teshuvah, let us return to the ethical mandate of "Ahavot Yisrael," and love and support our fellow Jews in Israel in their time of need.
Those of us who live outside Israel have a choice. We can help, or we can stand on the sidelines.
The battle didn’t begin yesterday. And alas, it’s hardly likely to end tomorrow.
Strikingly, there are many disengaged from the battle, at least for now. I see them every day.
They’re the ones I seek to reach.
I’m not talking about the “ABJ” crowd – the “Anyone But Jews” Jews, who are inclined to help just about everyone in the world except fellow Jews.
Nor am I talking about the “IOI” crowd – those convinced that “If Only Israel” did this or that, all would be solved, as if the problems and the solutions were solely in Jerusalem’s hands.
No, I’m talking about those who understand that Israel has no easy answers in dealing with its regional challenges, recognize the immense burden Israelis shoulder to build and secure their democratic and Jewish state, believe that Israel eagerly seeks peace but needs trustworthy partners, and know that Israel isn’t being treated fairly in the international community.
Until now, for whatever reasons, they haven’t been active.
But, as Rabbi Hillel famously said, “If not now, when?”
Look at what Israel faces today.
Iran is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear-weapons capability.
Turkey has undergone a political earthquake.
Once a close friend of Israel, over the past nine years, it has reversed course. It has now vowed, while seeking regional ascendancy, to isolate Israel.
Hezbollah has become Lebanon’s power broker.
The terror group has amassed more than 40,000 missiles and rockets, courtesy of Iran and Syria. It proclaims its arsenal can reach anywhere in Israel.
Then there’s Syria.
It should be pretty clear by now that, whatever the eventual outcome of the present turmoil, those in charge aren’t going to be batting their eyelashes at Israel anytime soon.
To the contrary, in societies that have been fed a steady anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-Semitic diet, the best way to whip up political support is to fan the flames of those hatreds.
How about Gaza?
If I could, I’d make the Hamas Charter required reading. It’s all spelled out there, just a click away on the Internet. The determination to obliterate Israel. The vision of a Shari’a-based state. Bone-chilling, classic anti-Semitism.
Then there are developments in Egypt.
Again, it shows that when Israel is demonized over decades in schools, the media, the mosques, and the street, given half a chance, the power of those accumulated feelings explodes, making a vital Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty extremely tenuous.
Precisely such a critical time in Israel’s life is the moment to stand up and be counted.
Israelis, whatever their own political affiliations might be, are shouldering more than outsiders can possibly imagine.
They do so day in and day out, without fanfare or self-congratulations. They’ve defied all the odds and achieved miracles.
They must never feel alone. It is not their exclusive battle. It is also ours.
Our faith speaks of Zion and Jerusalem. That is where they are.
Our tradition teaches us collective responsibility. Nearly half the world’s Jews live in Israel.
Our value system is rooted in the defense of democracy. Israel is such a democracy.
And, on a practical level, the battle against Israel is going on in our universities, our political process, even our retail stores. If that’s not a frontline battle, what is?
There are those who say they’d get involved if only there were a different government in Jerusalem. They forget one basic fact: the battle is bigger than the government du jour; it’s really about Israel, no matter who is in power.
In 2000, an unprecedented wave of terror against Israel broke out with a left-of-center coalition in power and a sweeping two-state proposal on the table.
What to do?
Look at yourself in the mirror and ask whether this battle really is about someone else, or whether it’s also about you.
Now is precisely the time to visit Israel... to buy Israeli products... to express support for the vital U.S.-Israel relationship to elected officials... to vacation in friendly countries and avoid unfriendly ones... to get involved with pro-Israel organizations... to help those around you understand what’s going on and why it’s so important to friends of Israel and, more generally, to democratic nations.
The battle is here. The need is urgent. The time is now.
At this time of reflection and renewal in the Jewish calendar, won’t you please say “Hineni!”
click above to read the article in its entirety
As the international noose grows ever tighter about Israel’s throat, the learned classes of Diaspora Jewry are not asking themselves the right questions.
‘Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen. 4:9). “And Moses said unto the children of Gad and the children of Reuben: ‘Shall your brethren go to the war, and shall ye sit here?’” (Numbers 32:6). These should have been the besetting questions for American- Jewish intellectuals during Hitler’s twelve-year war against European Jewry; but generally they were not.
They should be the pressing ones for the learned classes of Diaspora Jewry today, as the international noose grows ever tighter about Israel’s throat; but they are not.
Long after World War II had ended, William Phillips, co-founder of Partisan Review, recalled that Irving Howe, the most astute political mind among the Jewish intellectuals, “was haunted by the question of why our [Jewish] intellectual community ... had paid so little attention to the Holocaust in the early 1940s.... He asked me why we had written and talked so little about the Holocaust at the time it was taking place.”
One may, for example, search the pages of Partisan Review from 1937 through summer 1939 without finding mention of Hitler or Nazism. When Howe was working on his autobiography, he looked through the old issues of his own journal Labor Action to see how, or indeed whether, he and his socialist comrades had responded to the Holocaust. But he found the experience painful, and concluded that the Trotskyists, including himself, were only the best of a bad lot of leftist sects. He told Phillips that this inattention to the destruction of European Jewry was “a serious instance of moral failure on our part.”
The leading New York intellectuals had shown appalling indifference not only to what had been endured by their European brethren, but to what had been achieved by the Jews of Palestine. Events of biblical magnitude had occurred within a single decade. A few years after the destruction of European Jewry, the Jewish people had created the state of Israel. Of this achievement, Winston Churchill, addressing Parliament in 1949, said: “The coming into being of a Jewish state in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand or even three thousand years. This is an event in world history.”
The moral failure of ignoring the Holocaust was now compounded by a related failure: having averted their eyes from the destruction of European Jewry, the Jewish intellectuals now looked away from one of the most impressive assertions of the will to live that a martyred people has ever made. The writers had been immersed in the twists and turns of literary modernism, in the fate of socialism in the USSR and the US, and most of all in themselves, especially their “alienation” not only from America but from Judaism, Jewishness, and Jews. Indeed they defined themselves Jewishly through their alienation from their Jewishness.
IN ONE sense, (Irving) Howe and (Saul) Bellow were the (embarrassed) prototypes, if not exactly the progenitors, of today’s bumper crop of “anti-Zionist” Jewish deep thinkers.
Howe, even more contrite than Bellow about his “moral failure,” was among the first to see what was coming, and by 1970 found the treachery of the younger generation of Jewish intellectuals literally unspeakable: “Jewish boys and girls, children of the generation that saw Auschwitz, hate democratic Israel and celebrate as ‘revolutionary’ the Egyptian dictatorship; ... a few go so far as to collect money for Al Fatah, which pledges to take Tel Aviv. About this, I cannot say more; it is simply too painful.”
Many of these “Jewish boys and girls” are by now well-established figures in journalism and academia, tenured and heavily-petted, warming themselves in endowed university chairs, or editorializing from The New York Times or New York Review of Books. But the “alienation” of which the older New York Jewish intellectuals belatedly grew ashamed became the boast of the Judts, Kushners, Butlers, Chomskys, and their acolytes.
These are people who do not merely “sit here” while their brothers go to war. They take the side of their brothers’ enemies and call their cowardice courage. Others, more cautious, discover that the Jewish state, which most Europeans now blame for all the world’s miseries (with the possible exception of global warming,) should never have come into existence in the first place, and that “the [non-Zionist] roads not taken” would have brought (and may yet bring) a “new” Diaspora Golden Age. They are forever organizing kangaroo courts (called “academic conferences”) to put Israel in the dock; or else they are churning out articles or monographs or novels celebrating those roads not taken; or they are performing as “public intellectuals,” breathlessly recommending a one-state solution or a no-state solution or (this from the tone-deaf George Steiner) “a final solution.”
In 1942 a character named Yudka (“little Jew”) in Haim Hazaz’s famous Hebrew short story The Sermon says that “when a man can no longer be a Jew, he becomes a Zionist.” But the unnatural progeny of the New York Intellectuals embody a new, darker reality: when a man can no longer be a Jew, he becomes an anti- Zionist, building an “identity” on the very thing he would destroy. They have turned on its head the old slogan of assimilationism, which was “Be a Jew at home, but a man in the street.” Their slogan is: “Be a man at home, but a Jew in public.” By the time Howe and Bellow came to recognize that their lack of brotherly concern with Jewish survival had indeed been a “moral failure,” a new generation of Jewish intellectuals was already proclaiming it as a virtue entitling them to put on the long robes and long faces of biblical prophets.
Their prodigious work in painting Israel’s decent society black as Gehenna and the pit of hell has forced a small yet crucial revision of Orwell’s famous pronouncement about moral obtuseness and the ignorance of the learned: “Some ideas are so stupid that only [Jewish] intellectuals could believe them.”
The writer is the author of numerous books, including Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew, and (with Paul Bogdanor) The Jewish divide over Israel: Accusers and Defenders.
A Referendum on Israel--Daniel Gordis
September 14, 2011
Daniel Gordis is president of the Shalem Foundation and a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. He is the author, most recently, of “Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End.”
Not long ago, one could have imagined Israel voting for Palestinian statehood at the United Nations. While some Israelis are merely resigned to Palestinian independence, others actually believe that Palestinian statehood is the only way to resolve this interminable conflict.
If the U.N. votes to recognize Palestinian statehood, Israel will hunker down and hold on, hoping the international community will come to its senses..
Furthermore, Israelis understand that what ignited Palestinian nationalism was, ironically, Palestinians’ witnessing the rebirth of a newly sovereign Jewish people. Independence has enabled Jews to return to their ancestral homeland, revitalize their ancient language, gather their exiles from a far-flung Diaspora and engage in a public debate about what should constitute Jewishness in the 21st century. All of these are hallmarks of a flourishing people, and one can well understand why Palestinians would seek the same.
Nonetheless, Israel will not vote for Palestinian statehood, because the U.N. vote is more a referendum on Israel than it is on Palestine. Marginalized as never before, Israel is now witness to Iran’s continuing nuclear aspirations, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s cozying up to Iran by threatening Israel and Egyptian masses who despise Israel simply for existing. Iran, Turkey and Egypt have assumed their positions because of radicalization in the Arab world, not because of anything to do with the Palestinians.
Capitalizing on this trend, the Palestinians are explicitly transforming the vote into a referendum on Israel. Just days ago, Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority claimed that the Palestinians' land had been occupied for 63 years. The “occupation” to which he refers is thus not the result of Israel’s victory in 1967, but rather, Israel’s very creation in 1948. If the U.N. votes to recognize Palestinian statehood in light of this attitude, it will simply be tightening the noose further.
Because such hatred of the Jewish state cannot be appeased, Israel has no good options at the moment. It will thus hunker down and hold on, hoping that the international community that voted to create the Jewish state just decades ago might soon return to its senses.
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1 comment:
Andrei S. Markovits, writing in the Winter 2005 issue of Dissent, says, "A new European (and American) commonality for all lefts — a new litmus test of progressive politics — seems to have developed: anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism (though not anti-Semitism, or at least not yet)."
Leftists are unaware of the Hamas Charter. Feminists are unaware of the existence of honor murders in the Arab world. They certainly don't know that Golda Meir was the first woman to become a head of government who was not the daughter (like Indira Gandha, daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru) nor the wife (like Sirimavo Bandaranaike) of a previous head of government.
Gay-rights activists are totally unaware of the fact that Israel has annual gay-pride paradees not only in Tel Aviv but in Jerusalem. They are unaware of honor murders of homosexuals in much of the Arab world, and of executions in Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Nothing matters but anti-Zionnism--the most powerful political force on earth.
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