Israel

Rabbi Melanie Aron

April 5, 2002

I remember raising money for an ambulance for the Magen David Adom, the Israeli Red Cross, in school during the Six Day War, but I don't recall any of the anxiety and fear that those who were older in 1967, describe in the period before the war. Perhaps I was too young, or perhaps we as children were purposely shielded from the worries of the adult community.

In retrospect it is already clear that the two months we spent as a family in Israel will be remembered in history books as the lead up to the war that Israel is in the midst of today. Certainly we were aware during that time of the breakdown both of security and confidence. The terrorist attacks, as you know, grew more and more frequent as the weeks went on, reaching what we thought was a climax during our last few days in Israel. The Israelis we talked with during our visit, were all over the political spectrum, but they all seemed to be moving to a point of less and less confidence that their assumptions in the past about the acceptability of a two state solution to the Palestinian people were really warranted.

I will talk more about the political situation tonight, but first I want to backtrack just a little, and talk about some things that we noticed about Israel during our trip, when we didn't yet know what was to follow so soon after our leaving the country.

The first thing that was very evident to us was Israel's prosperity. The last time I lived in Israel for an extended period was just after the Yom Kippur War in 1974. The material differences are astounding. Even though Israel's economy has been hurt significantly by the intifada, both in the tourist sector and in other ways, one can still see the effects of the peace dividend of the 1990's. Following Oslo, the Israeli economy experienced a significant boom and evidence of that boom remains in large and small things.

In 1974 peanut butter and tape recorders were wonderful gifts to bring from America, as it was still hard to get a variety of consumer goods. That time is over. There is nothing that one cannot buy in Israel and consumer goods are found in Israeli homes in proportions similar to America. Certainly cell phones, computers, dvd players were if anything perhaps more ubiquitous in Israel: the only difference we did note is that though some Israeli families now have two cars, three cars still seemed to be the exception and driving was not for Israeli kids what it is for Americans.

In 1974 Jews from Northern African and Arab countries were not for the most part benefiting from Israel's economic development. Israel at that time had its own Black Panther organization and the marriage of someone of European descent with a Mizrachi Jew was considered intermarriage. Today a gap still exists, but Jews from North African and the Arab countries and their descendents now make up a majority of the population, and many have become very successful. "Intermarriage" has accompanied this social integration and influenced many things in Israel including the market for kosher-for-Passover goods with kitniyot, beans and legumes considered kosher by this community.

We found evidence for the economic progress of various Israeli ethnic groups when early in our trip we went down to Eilat to spend the weekend with my parents and in-laws who had come to Israel for a medical convention. We stayed at a lovely, new and pretty expensive hotel. It was sad that there were very few foreign visitors, but we were happily surprised to see so many Israelis from so many different backgrounds, Mizrachi Jews, Russians and even Ethiopians, who though perhaps not rich, had the money to afford to be guests for the weekend in this hotel. Affluence was apparent in the homes we saw in Caesaria that would stand up in comparison to the best that Saratoga or Los Altos Hills has to offer and in the fact that international travel was becoming more routine, not just during that year after army service.

We also saw the downside of the turn to capitalism in Israel. In a country where the differential between the highest and lowest salaries was once a factor of 7, the gap between rich and poor in Israel has grown exponentially. Through Rabbis for Human Rights I became personally more familiar with the plight of the foreign workers, with whom Israeli society has a very ambivalent relationship. Labor unions in Israel no longer command the prestige they once did, and while we were there we witnessed the annual budget process where many felt the poor lost out in favor of allocations required to pay off certain political parties so they would agree to stay in the governing coalition.

It was also clear as the weeks went by, that the Israeli economy was sliding downhill fast, that foreign firms were less and less willing to send their people to Israel, closing up projects that were already in the works, and that there was worry that the European Union's Palestinian sympathies would negatively affect Israel's economy as well. The only business that was booming was security. We experienced that personally when we gave a neighbor from our building a ride up to the University one afternoon. A librarian by training, his position at the University's National Library, the equivalent to our Library of Congress, had been discontinued in recent budget cuts but he had enough tenure to be on a list for other jobs that the University had open. Unfortunately the only jobs on that list were security, and he was now working the main gate, checking people and their bags as they entered the campus.

One thing that was particularly interesting to me, as someone who had once seriously considered making aliyah, was the effect of the American baby boomers who had come to Israel to live in some number in the 1970's. These are individuals who have now spent as much of their lives in Israel as in America and it was evident to me that they had made a significant contribution to Israeli society. These "Anglo-Saxim" as they are called in Israel, are evident everywhere, in business, government, journalism, education, but particularly in the non-profit sector, a sector that barely existed in the l970's when the only NGO's were political parties. These Americans have also made a significant contribution to the Israeli Reform movement, but what is perhaps most interesting, they no longer dominate our movement.

One very wonderful discovery we made as we visited lots of Reform congregations and communities and as I attended the annual two day conference of Israeli Reform rabbis, is that there is a native Reform movement, a movement of Israeli born and trained rabbis and of congregants born in Israel. The Israeli movement has also benefited to some extent from the immigration from South America and the Former Soviet Union, but its most significant growth has been in attracting large numbers of "secular" Israelis to institutions like Beit Daniel in Tel Aviv and Or Hadash in Haifa for bar mitzvah and weddings. Even as the Reform movement makes only halting legal progress, it has crossed a threshold and become, to average Israelis, an option to consider when seeking religious services.

For all the progress we saw in other areas, for all the other interesting experiences, cultural and social, we had while we were in Israel, the elephant in the living room was the security situation. We were, like everyone else in Israel, making calculations each time we left our apartments, making pseudo-rational decisions that this place was safe and this place wasn't. We came home all four of us, consistent with the statistical expectation, untouched physically by the terror, but it wasn't far away. My study partner's brother was on a bus that was hit, Shifrah's classmate's brother was hospitalized after the bombing of the Moment Cafe, where the young physicist with whom Michael shared an office had also been present. An older rabbi, very active in the interfaith movement in Israel, who had graciously welcomed us to his home for Shabat dinner, was in the Caffit restaurant while a suicide bomber was apprehended before his bomb went off. While this was all of concern, what was really more frightening was the sense we had while we were there that no one saw a way out of this situation and that things we and others were doing that we thought would help bring peace might have contributed to violence instead.

I don't believe that the idealistic bilingual bi-cultural schools I visited, where Arab and Jewish children from both sides of the green-line in Jerusalem and other places studied together, were anything but a blessing, but as time went on I wondered a bit about some of the other projects and people I met. Some of the Europeans that I met in the West Bank with Rabbis from Human Rights and even some Israeli peace activists, were, in the view of at least some, providing the Palestinian with a false hope that Israel would collapse in the face of continued terrorism, that continuing the violence and refusing to negotiate would bring them reward. Having no experience with democracy, the Palestinians interpreted dissent in Israel as lack of resolve, and welcomed things like the small number of reservists refusal to serve in the territories as the beginning of the end. Viewing a two state solution, if acceptable at all, as a mere step along the way, I think they also interpreted the general acceptance of a Palestinian state on the part of the Israeli population as a sign of weakness and not of an attempt to be fair and just or at least to resolve the demographic problem of a Jewish democratic state.

My sense is that while many Israelis have deep reservations about Prime Minister Sharon and worry simultaneously that he has no end game in mind and that he does have an end game and it includes swallowing up the territories, there is no relinquishing of the Zionist dream, the dream that the Jewish people, like other peoples on the face of this globe, has the right to national self determination in a land with which their people have historic ties. Few of those who criticize the Jews for seeking a Jewish state are such internationalists that they would dismantle France or Belgium, let alone give up United States sovereignty.

Recently Arab countries have used biblical criticism to argue that the Jews have no ties to the land of Israel. Perhaps it is useful to state for a moment what that is all about. Some contemporary archeologists, particularly a group from Denmark, argue that the lack of historical evidence for the Patriarchal period and for the Exodus, undermines the sense of Biblical historicity. There is no universal acceptance of this view, but let's suppose we grant them their argument. Does it really matter in this current political debate if Israel's first ties to the land are from 1800 BCE as non-critical readers of the Bible would argue, or 1,000 BCE as demonstrated by the recent archeological findings of a group of Hebrew Union College scholars, or 800 BCE in the time of Omri where there is much archeological evidence of a Jewish kingdom, or even 500 BCE as the most radical archeologists argue. Even this late dating is still hundreds of years before the formation of the Christian church and more than a thousand years before Mohammed. You don't have to be a Fundamentalist in your reading of the Bible to recognize a tie between the Jewish people and the land of Israel. Except for periods when the Jews were banished, brief periods in the times during the Romans and Crusaders, there has been a continuous presence of the Jewish people in the land of Israel and a continuous tie between Jewish culture and this Jewish homeland. Beginning already in the 1600's and continuing to grow as travel became easier, there was a flow of Jews to their homeland even before the beginnings of political Zionism. Even revisionist historians acknowledge that by the late 19th century, Jews were a majority of the population of Jerusalem.

On the Israeli left there is a very small contingent that has disassociated themselves from Zionism, but no one should be confused and think this represents a movement within Israeli society. Israel remembers the bi-national state of Lebanon and the destruction of what was once one of the most cultured countries in the Arab world. Even in the midst of all that was going on this winter, there were still Jewish refugees who came to Israel feeling safer there than in their country of origin, whether in Argentina or the FSU. I found no evidence that they were pressured to do so, not even economically. They wanted to be in Israel and to feel even in these circumstances a sense of control over their destiny that they did not feel they would have elsewhere.

What is our role at this time as American Jews? We need to work on several fronts at once. Israelis need to feel that they are not forgotten, that they will not be abandoned. Support for Magen David Adom, for the Israeli Reform movement, for Israel's social needs should be incumbent on all of us, regardless of our feelings about the current government. Keeping up an email or telephone conversation with Israeli relatives, friends and even business associates is important as more and more of the country is in virtual lockdown. Miriam Feinberg, for example, the woman who was our guide on our Temple Israel trips, perked up from her worries about her daughter in the army at kissufim junction, when I would mention regards from one of our members. Our family's trip to Israel was a morale boost to everyone we met, beyond what I would have anticipated. Though I could not in good conscience advise people to travel there with children right now, I hope some of our adult members will consider visiting, if not right now, then later this summer or fall.

It is also important that we stay very informed and share what we know about Israel with our American friends and neighbors. I am going out to a number of churches and even, God help me, to the United Nations club in Los Altos Hills. Americans on the whole are very poorly informed and I have heard some pretty amazing assertions in informal conversations. Having some basic facts at your fingertips is vitally important when talking with those who have been influenced by other views of recent history. Responding to media errors and distortions in coverage of the situation is critical.

I believe that ultimately there will need to be a political solution, and that the United States will play a significant role in shaping that settlement. The existence of so many terror organizations in the territories and the pipeline of arms and instigation from the wider Arab world make reaching a meaningful settlement difficult, but armies alone cannot resolve this problem. While I was in Israel I had two nightmares, both about Israel's long term existence. In one nightmare the other Arab states joined in war against Israel using weapons of mass destruction, and in the second, the ongoing situation led all but the most fanatic to leave the country, such that the state of Israel that remained was a Kahane state with which I could not identify. Both nightmares are far from our current reality, but both chill me to the bone.

Security will safeguard Israeli democracy and respect for individual rights and civil liberties -- violence and terror only feed the forces that make a peaceful solution less and less attainable.