Israel at 70: A Personal View

Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, Israeli public figure and author, has this to say about Americans and the Jewish state:

“The Right loves Israel and hates Jews; the Left loves Jews and hates Israel.”

With characteristic ironic wit, Sharansky thus deftly labels the current spectrum of American attitudes towards the Jewish state currently marking its 70th year of existence. On the celebratory day of May 14, 2018 when the United States embassy was officially moved to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, scores of Palestinians were killed and thousands wounded storming the gates of Gaza — a searing split screen image.

A recent coincidence of events has led me to examine my feelings about Israel, not to justify or condemn, but to attempt understanding beyond emotion.

I recently visited Poland, land of my family heritage, and spent time in many sites associated with Jewish history there, past and present: Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Schindler Factory Museum in Krakow, the impressive Jewish museum in Warsaw and the Jewish cemetery there where both my grandfathers were buried before the war.

Just before the trip, the Israeli Embassy in Washington notified me that on May 14th it would be honoring 70 Americans who have been especially important in U.S.-Israel relations over the decades, one of whom was my first cousin, once removed, Marie Syrkin. Among many other achievements, Marie was a close friend of Prime Minister Golda Meir and her chosen biographer. I was invited to attend the ceremony along with her other closest relatives.

The medals were distributed at a Washington gala in the evening, hours after the clashes in Gaza had happened. I was moved to be associated with Marie and her part in the story of Israel. In a note to me, Sam Norich, president of leading Jewish New-York-based newspaper The Forward, said she was “as close to aristocracy” as Jews have.

Then Vice President Mike Pence arrived and spoke of the embassy “opening” in Jerusalem and Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Iran nuclear deal, to the great satisfaction of Benjamin Netanyahu and his government.

This was an especially jarring juxtaposition in a variety of ways. Pence’s triumphal spirit on a day of terrible bloodshed and his declaration of pride about abrogating an agreement limiting the spread of nuclear weapons was enough to make me leave early.

But in the days afterwards I began to think through my feelings about Israel. The subject I believe has now become among the more contentious in Jewish history.

The divide is deep between American Jews and the majority of Israelis on issues such as the policies of Netanyahu and his adherents, the presidency of Donald Trump, the shifting of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv and the role of the ultra- orthodox in determining religious protocols. A great many American Jews see Israel as a belligerent and increasingly autocratic state. The idealized moral authority at the creation of a secular-led, open society for Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust has diminished to the point where it might seem irreversible.

To take a popular culture example of how the perception of Israel has changed both inside the country and across the diaspora: When Leon Uris’ novel Exodus was published in the mid-1950s, it was a huge bestseller. My mother gave me $5 dollars to read this heroic portrayal of Jews arriving in and settling Israel. The Palestinians were seen as a minority in a Jewish state with little regard for the multitudes sent into refugee exile. Among Jews, virtue abounded.

The Exodus movie had Paul Newman in the starring role of a blue-eyed Jewish superhero. I was told as a child to be proud that Newman was half Jewish.

The current portrayal of Israelis and Palestinians in the Israeli- made series Fauda (chaos in Arabic) is by contrast a very graphic portrayal of extra-legal brutality and violence among both Israelis and Palestinians. It is gripping story-telling as Exodus was but the tales it tells show the dark sense of human nature in this holy land.

There are still significant segments of American Jewry who believe that the history of Jews and the founding principles of Israel demand a degree of support that transcends criticism of today’s realities. But that is not new. In the late 1970s, after Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem and the signing of the Camp David accords the peace process seemed destined to succeed. And yet as the foreign editor of The Washington Post, we received more complaints about our anti-Israel “bias” in coverage from Jewish readers than on every other topic combined.

Those were the good times.

Today at Human Rights Watch, the most important global human rights organization by any measure, the issues around Israel are a source of abiding disagreement among several former board members (including the organization’s founding chair) whose belief in human rights matters elsewhere in the world are otherwise in accord. HRW insists that Israel should be judged by the same standards as every other country. The supporters of Israel say that it remains at threat of annihilation and should respond accordingly, even at the cost of humanitarian practice.

The evangelical Christian and right-wing political regard for Israel as the Holy Land should not be, by any fair measure, dismissed. And yet, as Sharansky observed, it awkwardly mixes with simmering anti-Semitism among many of the same people.

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My effort at understanding Israel today falls into three categories:

1-Views based on my experience as the son of Jewish refugees from Poland in World War 2;

2-My recognition of the changed composition of Israel’s population

3- My dismay over the corruption of Israeli politics and values. They are Jews after all.

1-This spring, standing at the sprawling plains of Birkenau, the railhead in the Polish countryside where hundreds of thousands of Jews were herded into adjoining gas chambers in my lifetime, I was profoundly and unexpectedly disturbed. In the museums at neighboring Auschwitz, Krakow and Warsaw photos and films of Jews of all ages shuffling helplessly towards extinction are heartbreaking. And the question immediately arises, what would I have done? My parents and brother escaped and I was born when they were safe in India. At Auschwitz I found 17 people listed with the Osnos name who died during the war.

Israelis are still to a large extent descendants of those dead European Jews. But the population of Israel now also has millions of Jews from the former Soviet Union and elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa where they were no longer able to remain as a community. As a people, Israelis have a reputation ranging from formidable courage in repeated wars and against terrorism everywhere to arrogance and prejudices against the “other” groups at home and abroad, akin to racism, alas.

I found myself thinking after Birkenau, with some confidence, that Israelis would not be shoved into cattle cars and gassed, at least without a ferocious fight. “Never again” makes complete sense in the context of what amounts to modern Jewish history.

2-The early Israeli settlers, the Sabras, were seen as strapping men and women. Moshe Dayan the general with the eye patch was the beau idéal. The leadership were on the whole European Jews, many of them socialists by instinct and others were intellectual politicians typified by Abba Eban, the long-time foreign minister with a British accent.

Today’s Israelis are far more complex ethnic mix. Sephardim from the Arab lands, and the Soviet-era immigrants for whom democracy was never an option. The ultra-orthodox have the most children. The reform and conservatives who drive Israel’s economic success have far fewer and see themselves as able to live anywhere. Many tend to relocate to New York, Toronto and other enclaves at least for a break from the tensions at home.

We should recognize that Israelis are now the result of 70 years development of a society shaped by events and demography into a people of their own. One of the features of the Fauda series is that the Israeli operatives can readily impersonate Palestinians in appearance and language. They are, for better or worse, their own nationality who happen to be Jewish. They have their own characteristics both noble and less so that are true of peoples everywhere.

3-Corruption is a real issue in Israeli politics. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert went to prison. Now Netanyahu is under investigation for a variety of cheesy transactions and his wife’s abuse of privilege. The issue has been long simmering. The revered and martyred Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, had to resign as ambassador to the U.S. decades ago because his wife was fiddling with expenses.

This is sad, but it is so very much like the political realities in other places. In the United States in the past 45 years, two presidents faced impeachment. And the current president: well, no more need be said.

So what do these issues mean for the attitude of American Jews, particularly the majority who are secular, reform and conservative?

As for me, I wish Israel was not an occupier of so much Palestinian land — “lebensraum” however framed in biblical terms is not a concept that should ever be associated with Jews.

I want Israel to maintain the highest standards of openness, expression and personal options for all its inhabitants.

In a world replete with violence, bigotry and suppression, including among global powers, I don’t think Israel should have to defend its right to exist. There are countries, Iran in particular, that still call regularly for Israel’s destruction.

My conclusion? I would challenge Israel to do better in many respects, especially when it comes to intolerance and unnecessary aggression. I would join those in the U.S. and elsewhere who hold Israel accountable for failing to meet the vision of its founders. I feel the same commitment and beliefs about the United States.

But I will never agree that Israel in whatever form its people freely choose has no right to be itself, forever.