Not one day of my working life at The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle has passed without my thinking about the state of Israel and worrying about its future. Not one Yom HaAtzmaut (Israel Independence Day) has arrived and passed without my feeling joy and, be it said, relief that the Jewish state has survived for one more year.
And that contends with, and sometimes reduces, the anger, frustration, and near despair I sometimes feel during the rest of the year. Israel is a bit more than two-thirds of a century old, yet it still has to defend its right to exist at all. What other authentic nation-states on this planet face the same, or even a similar, situation? (South Korea and Taiwan, maybe?)
Sometimes I want to go on a rant about the injustice of this. I get sick and tired of the misperceptions, libels, ignorance, and neurotic animus that characterize so many people’s attitudes toward Israel.
While a draft of this column was being written in early March, Israel-haters in college and university campuses all over the world were holding or planning “Israel Apartheid Week” events, including one at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on March 12. Most Arab or Muslim countries treat resident non-Muslim people — even if non-Muslim residents are allowed to be citizens, which they often are not — infinitely worse than Israel treats its non-Jewish populations, including the Palestinian Arabs of the administered territories. Yet Israel — with its Arab Knesset members and Arab judge on its Supreme Court and recently chosen Ethiopian Miss Israel — gets accused of being a racist and apartheid state.
I get just as sick and tired of the misperceptions people have of Israel’s enemies, particularly people on the political left, who should know better. It appears to me that many of them look at the Palestinian Arabs and somehow imagine they see African Americans in the Jim Crow South.
The situation of the former is nothing like that of the latter. Unjustly segregated and discriminated against African Americans were looking for fairness and justice and equality. Most Palestinian Arabs and virtually all their official leaders and organizations are looking to restore Arab-Muslim supremacy and the power to dominate, humiliate, and exploit Jews — and to murder Jews who refuse to accept that situation.
Rosa Parks sought a seat on the bus, not to blow it up and kill as many white southern Americans as possible. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the other great African American civil rights leaders sought to share America, not to dominate it and certainly not to drive whites into the sea. In truth, the Palestinian Arabs and their leaders and organizations actually resemble the Jim Crow white racists who set off bombs and committed lynching to terrorize people they irrationally hated and unjustly sought to keep subordinate and degraded.
I also become angry when I attend our community’s Yom HaZikaron (Israeli Memorial Day) events prior to the Yom HaAtzmaut celebration. Not because I feel the events are inappropriate or badly done — in fact, they are usually very moving. I feel angry that the commemoration is needed at all. I regard as murder victims nearly all the estimated more than 30,000 Israeli Jewish and non-Jewish soldiers and civilians killed in wars and terrorist attacks. Their deaths were as uncalled for and unjust as those of the six million Jews murdered by the German Nazis and their collaborators.
But having gotten all this off my chest, I don’t want to end on this tone. Yom HaAtzmaut should be a time to rejoice, not lament or rage. Former British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks beautifully summarized why in his 2009 book “Future Tense: Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-First Century”:
“Israel has done extraordinary things. It has absorbed immigrants from 103 countries, speaking 82 languages. It has turned a desolate landscape into a place of forests and fields. It has developed cutting edge agricultural and medical techniques and created one of the world’s most advanced high-tech economies. It has produced great poets and novelists, artists and sculptors, symphony orchestras, universities and research institutes. It has presided over the rebirth of the great Talmudic academies destroyed in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust.
“Wherever in the world there is a humanitarian disaster, Israel, if permitted, is one of the first to send aid. It has shared its technologies with other developing countries. Under immense strain, it has sustained democracy, a free press, and an independent — some say too independent — judiciary… In truth, I hardly believe [what Israel has achieved] when I read Jewish history and begin to understand what Jewish life was like when there was no Israel.”
So come on out to the Israel celebration events planned in Milwaukee, Madison, and throughout Wisconsin. In fact, there may be no better answer to the Israel haters than to ignore them totally on Yom HaAtzmaut and to rejoice in the existence and achievements of modern Israel.
