Ever feel that people you thought were friends are betraying you while people you feel are enemies are giving you love you can’t trust? This outlines the mental nausea I feel contemplating Israel’s situation today.
People I disagree with on nearly every other issue — conservative columnists George Will and Cal Thomas, right-wing Christians like Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tx.) and Rev. Pat Robertson — are saying things about the Israel-Palestinian conflict that I think are dead right. Today, they seem to be the only non-Jews who take seriously the outrageous and genocidal hatred of Jews and Judaism emanating from the Arab/Muslim world and perceive the justice of Israel’s existence and of its right to self-defense.
And many people on the left — whose domestic policy positions I, like most American Jews, generally approve on such matters as economic justice, gender and racial equality, environmental protection, freedom of speech, separation of church and state — are either outright sympathizers with the Palestinians or claim to find moral equivalency between Palestinian terrorism and Israeli self-defense.
And it’s driving me nuts. I feel ripped in two, politically friendless — and increasingly angry.
In its May 17 issue, The Chronicle ran a debate over the friendship of the conservatives and religious right. I tend to side with Joseph Aaron and others who mistrust the motives and permanence of these “friends.”
The challenge from the left, however, is what distresses me most. It appears based on ethical and political principles that I normally accept, but that get applied to Israel and the Jewish people in ways that seem aimed at their destruction. It sometimes seems that in the value system of this group, it is better that Jews and Israel — and, seemingly, nobody else — should suffer and die rather than the following principles ever should get violated:
• Religion-state separation. Some leftists/progressives do not like Israel being a Jewish state for the same reason they don’t like claims that United States is “a Christian country” — they oppose any government that privileges one religious group over others.
They particularly attack Israel’s Law of Return, asking pointedly why Israel should give automatic citizenship to a Milwaukee Jew (for example) whose immediate ancestors came from Poland, but not to a Muslim Palestinian refugee whose family had lived in Jaffa for several generations. Some argue that Israel should repudiate its Jewish character and become a Jewish-Arab “secular” state.
• Sympathy for “indigenous peoples.” Arabs lived in the land of Israel before 1948 and in the administered territories now; some have lived there for a few centuries. Therefore, say many leftists, whatever claims the Jewish people may once have had to the land should yield to them. Add the notion that the Palestinians are being made to pay for the Nazi Holocaust that they didn’t commit, and Israel can look even more like an imperialistic exploiter and thief.
• Sympathy for underdogs. The Palestinians, taken alone, seem like poorly armed civilians pitted against a major army — as though whether a cause is good or evil depends on how many of what kinds of weapons its backers happen to have.
• Automatic mistrust and dislike for armies and state institutions of violence generally. To many leftists, especially peaceniks, the ideas of the moral use of violence and a moral military are inconceivable oxymorons.
So much of this is so wrong when applied to Israel, so based on ignorance or disregard of the injustices and threats the Jewish people have endured for some 2,000 years that I hardly know where to begin.
All I can say for now is a quick summary of what I would like to say — to yell — in response to these liberal/progressive claims:
• That there are exceptions to every moral rule, particularly when life is at stake, as Judaism itself recognizes.
• That nobody — including the most right-wing Israelis — wants to do to the Palestinians what they and the world’s many other Judeophobes want, have tried and are still striving to do to the Jewish people — wipe us out.
• That behind the “poor Palestinians” at least in theory and often in actuality stand the anti-Semitic states of the Arab/Muslim world, who far outnumber and potentially can out-gun Israel and world Jewry.
• That Israel exists every bit as much because of the prejudice, discrimination and persecution Jews suffered in the Arab/Muslim world as because of what they suffered in Christian Europe — a situation that drove hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab/Muslim lands to Israel in the 1950s. (By the way, while some people demand that Israel should compensate Palestinian refugees, no one seems to be demanding that Arab/Muslim countries compensate their Jewish refugees, who lost at least as much.)
• That the Jewish people are a tiny minority of the human community, that they have a right to survive, and that it is clear from all of Jewish history that there must be one place on earth where the well-being and lives of Jews is priority number one, rather than priority number 10,001, as it is for the rest of the world — including the so-called liberal/progressives.
(I should point out that I mean to criticize here the non-Jewish and anti-Israel Jewish left. The pro-Israel Jewish leftists — Peace Now, Tikkun magazine, etc. — I believe are mistaken, but I do not doubt they are sincerely seeking to preserve Israel and the Jews.)
Finally, what really nauseates me is that I also don’t know whether, as is often the case with those on the right, anyone on the left would bother to listen to someone who has the nerve to disagree with them.
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