Shortly after he became a columnist, George Will wrote an article defending Israel. As a result, he was invited to give a speech in a synagogue.
During that speech, he mentioned that he had never been to a synagogue before — which prompted a woman from the audience to tell him afterward that this fact was “a terrible thing for a nice Jewish boy like you.”
In truth, Will not only is not Jewish, but is the grandson of a Lutheran minister, as he pointed out during his speech at the Wisconsin State of Israel Bonds Tribute Award Dinner at the Pfister Hotel Monday evening.
But his impassioned remarks celebrating Israel, scourging its critics and lauding the U.S.-Israel friendship sparked a standing ovation from the some 475 people attending.
To Will, the terror attacks on the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, made this country learn something about how Israel has lived during the more than 50 years when “it has had not one day that deserves to be called real peace.”
Israel and the U.S. are now “on the same small boat in a turbulent sea,” he said; and the question is, “Can Israel, by the moral power of its example, save the United States?”
Israel has shown it is possible to “combine Athens and Sparta,” i.e., have a free and democratic society, and a powerful military force to defend it. Israel embodies “the response of intelligence to barbarism,” he said.
It is “past offensive” for Israel’s critics, who “live a safe distance away,” to demand that Israel “take risks for peace,” he said to the applause of the audience. “The problem is not that Israel [in its behavior] is being provocative, but that Israel’s being is provocative” to its enemies, he said.
Will said that Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat’s rejection of then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s offers at Camp David in 2000 showed that “the most Israel can concede is not enough” for its enemies.
He added that some 75 percent of West Bank Palestinian Arabs say in polls that they approved of suicide bomber attacks on Israelis, that “nowhere in the West Bank is there a map on which Israel is depicted,” and that denial of both the Holocaust and the existence of a Jewish temple in Jerusalem is taught in Palestinian schools. Therefore, there needs to be “a denazification of the West Bank,” he said.
‘Building an orchid’
Will also asserted that the existence of the U.S. and of Israel are unusual and complex developments in “the tapestry of human experience” and expressed doubts about the idea of “nation building” in a place like Iraq. “That’s like saying you’re ‘building an orchid,’” because the growth of a nation is an “organic process,” he said.
He said that in the U.S., it took more than a century — 1865 to about 1975 — to refashion the “entire civic culture” of the American south to purge institutionalized racial discrimination out of it. “Who believes the Middle East is easier to change than Mississippi? I don’t,” he said.
In a brief conversation with The Chronicle afterward, Will said he believes the Gaza disengagement plan that the government of Ariel Sharon is working on is “a good idea in that it indicates the price Israel is willing to pay for peace.”
But it has to be viewed in the context of President Bush’s speech in 2002, when he said “there has to be regime change” among the Palestinians, so they have leaders “untainted by terrorism.”
Until then, Sharon is “trying to act without a peace process” because at present “there is no Palestinian interlocutor interested in peace.” He added that the security barrier Israel is trying to build between itself and the Palestinians “is a good idea, a step in the right direction.”
The event honored Sue and Allen H. “Bud” Selig for their work on behalf of Israel Bonds and many other Jewish and general community causes. In keeping with Bud’s fame as commissioner of major league baseball, there was a baseball theme to the event, including Israel Bonds “team jerseys” that were given to the Seligs and others.
Martin S. Matsoff, chair of the 2004 campaign, used baseball imagery in his report, describing, for example, the Seligs as the “clean-up hitters” for the campaign.
He said that sales of Israel securities to date is $16 million, which Bonnie Malofsky Jacobson, executive director of Wisconsin’s Israel Bonds organization, said was “the largest mid-year sales ever” in her organization’s history.
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