a guest post by Dr. Harold Goldmeier
We are in the season when Jews
admit their guilt for sins committed and repeated. We promise to repent and act
better next year. What better time for
liberal Jews to encourage Israelis to forgive their enemies, be serious about
making peace, and forsake religious extremism? Are Israelis so evil that
co-religionists are justified calling Israelis militarists and racists?
In a recent
New York Times editorial, Israel is warned that American Jews feel a
growing dissonance with Israel as Israel moves to the political right. Moving
to the right means taking a hard line on negotiations for a two-state solution.
Israel is growing intolerant of rocket fire from Gaza pounding back with ever
increasing ferocity. Making the Palestinians pay higher prices in land appropriations
and nighttime raids in response to terror attacks on Jews.
This forewarning of the price
Israel is paying was explained in more detail by Antony Lerman’s assessment of
modern Israel in his Op-Ed piece. The Britain-based persistent critic of Israel
claims liberal Zionism is gasping its last breath. He bemoans its replacement by a tenacious web
of “shock and awe militarism” and religious extremism. I agree with Lerman, and with the Times, not because Israel is evil and
bloodthirsty, but for another reason, which Lerman and the left give short
shrift.
The swing to the right is a natural
reaction to constant existential threats, repeated sardonic abandonment by
one-time friends, decades of war, terror attacks, missiles and mortars, denial
and degradation of Jewish history.
Lerman, and what remains of the Left, misses the Israel of
yesteryear: the pioneering kibbutniks dancing the Hora in their shorts and kova
tembel hats; fighting off British supplied Arab armies and Palestinian marauders
with smuggled Czech rifles, pots and pans. The only sweet, cold and thirst
quenching in the desert heat were Sabras sold by street vendors floating in
tubs of ice water.
Politics and government were in the hands of socialists,
liberals, and anti-religious decision makers then. Freedom from moribund
religious ties became the cornerstone of the utopian socialist Zionists. Zionism
replaced Judaism. The 1950’s and 60’s were heady times. His service in the IDF
was enthralling and romantic.
The new power elite is
neo-conservatives and religious fanatics, he claims. They tarnish “the reality
of modern Israel” attacking freedom of speech and human rights organizations.
They are land-grabbing settlers. The country is infected by anti-Arab and
anti-immigrant racism, and intolerance of religious differences. The “mixture
has pushed liberal Zionism to the brink,” he pines in a daze of nostalgia.
I believe Israel is a more
tolerant, dynamic, and free society today than in Lerman’s memory. Today we
integrate immigrants of color into society.
Liberal Zionists shipped Sephardic immigrants Jews off to segregated camps,
dust bowl communities, and stole their kids. Lerman’s heroes indoctrinated
immigrants with imperious and impious Zionistic East European culture.
Sephardic and religious Jews were systematically locked out of government. The
liberal Zionists never initiated a two-state solution, but ruthlessly, for self
preservation, authorized special forces like those under Ariel Sharon to track
down and eliminate Palestinian terrorists no matter leaving dead civilians in
their wake. They kept Gaza occupied and underdeveloped. The liberal Zionists
exacted revenge worldwide for the killing of Jews.
Today, Israel enjoys its
multinational mishmash of peoples, including significant intermarriage rates
between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, black Ethiopians and whites, chyulim
secularists and observant traditionalists. It took 60 years for Sephardim and
religious Jews to break the glass ceilings in military, politics, and industry.
Concomitantly, urbanization
replaced rural life; hi-tech and bio-med replaced agricultural economic
dominance; higher education meant more than physical labor in the changing
Israel; and most significantly, a hi-tech, disciplined military replaced the
ragtag civilian defenders, but it also made Israel into an arms exporter and
top dog.
The miraculous events of the Six
Days War thrust the tiny State of Israel onto the world scene slaying the
powerful unified Arab armies. She lost her innocence, as
European religions, values, military
prowess, and old World power crumbled. Post
1967, the Woodstock generation saw Israel as another nuclear armed, prodigious
fighting force, oppressors and colonizers. Israel’s economy began morphing into the
start-up nation. Capitalism sliced through old socialist hamstrings in Israel.
Social liberals in the West became more
resentful of Israel, and excised Israel’s socialist leaders Golda and Rabin
from their leftwing club. Israel’s
leaping standard of living, achievements in education, health care, medical,
science, and a plethora of Nobel and other prizes, produced envy not
admiration. Israel’s military and intelligence successes make her the
neighborhood bully, blamed for Arab peoples languishing in misery, without
mention of Arab leadership living lavishly on Europe’s and American handouts.
Lerman returned home from his
Israel excursion to Britain nurturing liberal Zionism philosophy from afar. Elsewhere,
he wistfully describes life with his Christian wife, their celebration of
Christmas and other holidays, as an exemplar of what Liberal Zionism has to
offer the open-minded and good hearted.
Israelis became less tolerant over
the decades of Arab hatred, boycotts, and launching wars. In time, the voters
turned to conservative politicians and religious salvation, since the left
never brought lasting peace or prosperity to the country. Years of lost lives
and opportunities with young adults serving in the army; families torn asunder
by dead fathers or disappearing for months serving in military guard duty;
politicians with no time to focus on social problems for a developing society,
because of the unquestionable demand to remain five steps ahead of sworn
enemies like Hamas today who in each generation of the State promise to wipe
Israel off the map.
Israel’s social fabric frayed. High
taxes to pay for self-defense stymied economic growth. Immigrants and survivors,
the memory keepers of Jewish history, rejected the misology of their centuries in
Arab lands and Europe. They revealed how brutalized they were by Muslim
persecutors and Christian anti-Semites. Jews hone hate and their children mistrust.
Israel’s fortitude is not limitless.
Nevertheless, few countries treat
their enemies with the kindness the Jews treat Arabs, give of themselves during
tragedies like Haiti, and throughout Africa. Suffice to say Israel is one of
the most generous countries on earth in spite of not being a nation run by
liberal Zionists.
Lerman declares, “They should know
that Israel is not Judaism. Jewish history did not culminate in the creation of
the state of Israel. Regrettably, there is a dearth of Jewish leaders telling
Diaspora Jews these truths.”
There you have it. The elusive explanation of why some Jews are
so fed up with Israel they may not care if the State survives. It has been a heart
rendering mystery to Israel supporters—Jews, Christians, and Muslims. We are confused
and slightly heartbroken when our own people attack Israel; when they undermine
their own people collaborating in name-calling, boycotts and sanctions.
Israel is better behaved than her
neighbors. Israel has a better human rights record than the world superpowers,
holds regular, free elections empowering minorities in her sovereignty. Israel more
than most strives to ensure the values expressed in the Magna Carta, the French
Declaration of the Rights of Man, the U. S. Constitution and Bill of Rights
ensured by an activist judiciary and hot-tempered parliament.
Dr. Seuss asked his countrymen
during World War II, “What have you done today to help save your country from
them?” It’s a shame Lerman and the anti-Israel cabal of Chait, Friedman, and
Beinart he names cannot be as loyal to Israel as Dr. Seuss was to America.
Dr.
Harold Goldmeier is a university instructor in Tel Aviv, business advisor, and writer.
He was a Research and Teaching Fellow at Harvard, worked for four U.S.
Governors, and President of a company before moving to Israel.
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