Israel will be 56 years old next week, and I wonder if at any time since 1948 has its very right to exist been as intensively under question and denial as it has been in the past year or two.
Even some Jews have jumped onto that ship. See, for example, Tony Judt’s imbecilic essay “Israel: The Alternative” published last October in the New York Review of Books, in which he advocates turning Israel into a Jewish-Arab “binational state.”
Such Jews ignore or refuse to believe that the Palestinians, the Arab-Muslim world and those sympathetic to them who are already aboard will toss such Jewish “stowaways” out as soon as they feel they can.
Worse, the intractable stalemate that is the 56-year-old Arab-Israel conflict has people in the region and elsewhere so frustrated that some might want to “kick over the chessboard.”
This is the memorable image New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman applied to the results of last week’s Bush-Sharon meeting, in which the Israeli and U.S. leaders apparently decided to act and set policies unilaterally without consulting or even thinking about the Palestinians and their many sympathizers.
However, after spilling the chess pieces there are only two possible things to do. Israel and the U.S. either have to walk away from the game completely, which is not doable in the Middle East; or they eventually will have to come back and start the game over, wasting time and energy — and, given the Palestinian movements’ proclivity to violence, probably also Israeli lives.
But Friedman’s column this past Sunday contained some other memorable lines. (I guess that’s why he wins Pulitzer Prizes.) “I’m fed up with the stalemate in the Middle East,” he wrote. “All it has produced is death, destruction and endless ‘he hit me first’ debates on cable television.”
I understand the frustration over the stalemate. I understand the disgust over the death toll. I feel those emotions, too. But that bit about “the endless ‘he hit me first’ debates” disgusts me for a different reason.
Refusal to die
There’s a tendency among some to view the Arab-Israel conflict as analogous to two boys fighting. A parent or teacher asks what happened. One boy says, “He hit me first,”
and the other denies it or reverses the accusation. Finally, the parent or teacher throws up his or her hands and punishes both boys, rationalizing this as an attempt to teach that fighting is wrong and “it doesn’t matter who started it.”
Comedian Bill Cosby has a great comment about similar family scenarios: “Parents are not interested in justice. They want quiet.” But while this observation is funny because it’s often true, that doesn’t make the behavior right.
That scenario infuriated me as a child, and it infuriates me now. Is justice an important moral value or isn’t it — more important than a shallow peace born of laziness? If it is, then it does and should matter who really hit whom first — and with how much force and with what ultimate intent.
For 2,000 years, too much of the non-Jewish world — Christian and Muslim — has been hitting the tiny and usually powerless Jewish people first with intent to destroy Jews and Judaism.
The Arab-Muslim campaign to destroy Israel is one more manifestation of that effort. It has little or nothing to do with the so-called “plight of the Palestinians,” save insofar as that can be exploited for cover. It has everything to do with the idea that Muslims and Islam should have supremacy over and ultimately quash Jews and Judaism.
And it doesn’t matter whether a majority or minority of the world Muslim community really believes in this piece of religious bigotry and religious fascism, because it is plain that Muslims who do believe it are the ones in charge of governments, propaganda technologies, armies and terrorist groups.
There have been real instances of Israeli crimes against Arab Palestinians, and real instances of unnecessary and cruel discrimination against Israel’s non-Jews. I would not want to pretend such things never happen or never have happened. But none of these are remotely equivalent to things that have been done to Jews over the centuries.
Attempts to make them so are mainstays of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda and demagoguery, and, indeed, expose them.
In the big picture, Israel’s creation was an act of justice, one of the few in international relations. There is now one country on earth where the well-being of Jews and Judaism is priority number one instead of priority number 10,001.
And the more that bigots and ignorant-but-supposedly-well-meaning fools insist there is no need or justification for such a place, the more evident is that need and the clearer is the justice of Israel’s existence.
“Zionism is not a plot against the Arabs,” wrote Israeli historian Yaacov Lozowick in his superb recent book “Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel’s Wars,” “but the most recent chapter in an ancient story, an attempt by the Jews to define their place in the modern world, and a refusal of the Jews to cease being, to die out, to fade away.” That is something well worth celebrating every Yom HaAtzmaut.
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