A Letter to a Liberal Minister Friend

Dear Reverend L.,

Thank you for your note. I, too, am saddened that the Jewish-Muslim program in which I was invited to participate was cancelled for Sunday. I am very committed to these sort of programs and agree that they are more important than ever.

And I very much appreciate the spirit in which your note was written.

I probably should stop writing here. But I cannot.

 
You write, “I am someone who believes in both Israel’s right to be a nation as well as the rights of the Palestinian people to have their own state.” I do too.

“I appreciate that you believe in “Israel’s right to be a nation,” but please consider what a paltry statement that is. ”

But: Is that what you think this war is about? Seeking a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

Two weeks ago, at least 1,400 Jews were massacred; more Jews in a single day than at any other time since the Shoah (“the Holocaust”). Perhaps you saw the videos of the teenagers who were slaughtered at a desert music festival in Israel. Or the images of towns where most of the populations were murdered by terrorists who went house to house, executing everyone within. (I recommend Anderson Cooper’s “The Whole Story” on the festival massacre, which was released on HBO-MAX today.)

Perhaps you have seen how the terrorists have posted videos to social media of beheadings, burnings alive, desecrated bodies, and humiliated hostages, with the same sort of twisted satanic joy that we saw on the faces of the perpetrators of the lynchings years ago in the American south.

There are currently at least 230 Jewish people who have been kidnapped and held hostage by Hamas, secreted away in subterranean tunnels that were constructed for the purpose of terror. Some of them are octogenarian grandmothers and grandfathers. Some of them are children.

Today, a friend of mine—an Israeli rabbi, a lifelong advocate of peace and interfaith bridge-building—officiated at the funeral of a family of four; two parents and two of their children. One son, the lone survivor of his family, spoke, somehow, at the ceremony. They were members of Kibbutz Be’eri, a communal town that in 2021 had a population of 1,047. At least 10% of Be’eri is dead.

Do you think this massacre of Jews is about the failure of the two-state solution? It is not.

“Hamas” is not equivalent to “the Palestinian people.” Speaking as someone who knows Palestinians, who has spent time in their homes and knows well their frustrations and true grievances and injustices they have suffered, I know that those of good faith are likewise held back by the Hamas—a fascist and repressive terrorist organization. What Israel is experiencing is the proportional equivalent of twenty 9/11’s. The elimination of Hamas is not only just—it is rational and necessary for both Israelis and Palestinians in order to have any sort of livable future.

What about Iran? Every indication is that this terrorist assault was planned meticulously for months—and that it has the fingerprints and probably a greenlight from Tehran on it. Do you think Hamas and Iran are working for a two-state solution? They are working for the goal that is articulated in the Hamas charter: the annihilation of the Jewish state.

I appreciate that you believe in “Israel’s right to be a nation,” but please consider what a paltry statement that is. “We agree you have a right to exist.” That’s really not a very high or generous standard, is it? (Although there are plenty of monstrous people in the world who will not even grant that.)

“Hamas is the “good people on both sides” moment of 2023.”

Reverend, I want you to know about the conversation that is happening in every Jewish community in America right now:

First, we are grieving. Jewishness is first and foremost about being part of the Jewish people. Our history and our traditions emphasize that Jews are one interconnected family, a subset of our larger human family. So there is pain—an open, bleeding wound—in every Jewish community in the world right now.

We are praying collectively for the hundreds who are being held hostage in terror cells. We are praying for those families that have been ripped apart. We are praying for the dead.

Second, we grieve for the suffering of innocents everywhere. Most every Jewish community grieves for the suffering of innocent Palestinians, and those who will inevitably suffer in this war.  Anyone who cannot feel compassion for all innocents who suffer has surely lost any figment of a moral compass. I know that my community prays for all the victims of war and terror everywhere, and we pray for peace.

But we also know that the Palestinian people suffer from Hamas’s fascism and cruelty. We are not warmongers—but we also are not pacifists; we recognize that there are moments when evil must be counteracted with the force of justice. We learned that lesson in World War 2 and many other times in the history of the past century.

Third, Jewish communities are asking today who our allies are. Every day, I’m hearing shock and dismay—and worse—from Jews who are experiencing the ugliest sort of old-school antisemitic hate, especially on social media. We see the pro-Hamas rallies in the streets of some cities, where the protestors seem positively euphoric about the deaths of Israeli Jews. We see demonstrations on college campuses from “progressive” faculty and students who point their fingers at us to say: It’s your fault. While we’re attending funerals, these people tell us that we are responsible for the rapes, beheadings, and abductions.  

Jewish students on college campuses are shocked by the amorality of their professors, administrators, and others in authority, in their “both-sidesism”. Every synagogue and Jewish community center in America has amped up its security for protection in ways that we never imagined we would have to do in the 21st century. We are waiting to see who our allies are.

Last year, we all flew Ukrainian flags in support of the victims of unchecked terror and aggression. We suspect that, no matter how many Jews are murdered, our neighbors will not be flying Israeli flags anytime soon. The title of Dara Horn’s recent book on antisemitism is People Love Dead Jews, and she has a point: Dead Jews can be martyrs, but Jews who defend themselves from those who would murder them are somehow less sympathetic.

After Charlottesville—when white supremacists chanted “Jews will not replace us”—the President of the United States claimed he saw “good people on both sides.” He was appropriately excoriated for it.  Hamas is the “good people on both sides” moment of 2023, especially for progressives. Anyone who cannot unequivocally say, “We stand with Israel in its fight against terrorism,” will fail the test.

So, L., please know that I understand where you’re coming from; you thought you were being compassionate with your note. I appreciate that. Please know that I wouldn’t have taken the time to write if I didn’t hold you in high esteem as a man of peace. But Jews need to know who our friends are right now, and who will stand on the sidelines, in that Swiss sort of amoral neutrality.

Sincerely,

Neal

Purim after Huwara

This week, leading up to the holiday of Purim, has been an awful one for anyone who cares about Israel and the Jewish people and the Image of G-d, tarnished and violated as it is. Violence in Israel is spinning out of control.

On Sunday, two brothers, Hallel and Yagel Yaniv from the Israeli settlement of Har Bracha were murdered by Palestinian terrorists.

On Monday, another terrorist murdered Elan Ganeles, a 26 year-old Jewish man from Connecticut, in the Jordan Valley on his way to a wedding near Jerusalem.

“The measure of our integrity will be how forcefully, how clearly, we speak out against these forces. To make clear that the filthy ilk of Smotrich and Ben Gvir will not be the defining voices of Judaism and Zionism.”

We mourn them without equivocation. We are pained as part of the interconnected body of the Jewish people, and we insist that their killers be brought to justice.

And then there is Huwara.

After the murders of the Yanivs, scores of radical armed settlers stormed through the Palestinian town of Huwara, rampaging through its neighborhoods throughout the night, burning houses and stores and cars, and leaving at least one man dead.

Even some Israeli military leaders are calling the settler rampage a “pogrom.” And it’s not hyperbole. After all, “pogrom” is the term that was created to describe mob violence against the Jews of Europe with the backing of official institutions like the Church, the government, and the press. Huwara would seem to be the first Jewish-perpetrated pogrom in history, as far as I know. The most radical elements in the government coalition have been seeding settler vioence for a long time—and have spent the past few days since the riot nodding at the perpetrators.  That should make every one of us shudder with nausea and disgust.

After all, perhaps the biggest disgrace is how all this was so predictable. For weeks, it has seemed like Israel is coming apart at the seams, as the most extreme and vicious coalition in its 75-year history gives its blessing to hate. The hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have been pouring into the streets to demonstrate, week after week, show that this government is beyond the pale in it extremism for a huge swatch of this democratic society.

The despicable Bezalel Smotrich—a Kahanist, a racist, and also the Finance Minister who shares responsibility for civilian affairs in the West Bank—says, “Huwara needs to be wiped out.”

The vile Itamar Ben Gvir—another former leader of Kahane’s movement, the man whom Netanyahu saw fit to make National Security Minister with authority over the police in the West Bank—“likes” a tweet from a settler leader saying “Huwara should be erased today.” Ben Gvir is sponsoring a bill calling for the death penalty for Palestinian terrorists, while as of this writing no Israeli terrorists have been arrested for the Huwara violence.

And Prime Minister Netanyahu—who raised these men and others to positions of authority; a disgraced leader who has demonstrated beyond any shadow of doubt to have not a shred of decency or integrity—has the audacity to compare hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators in Israel’s streets to the pogromists in Huwara!

(By the way, as of this writing, Smotrich is still the invited guest of American supporters of Israel Bonds in Washington, DC next week. It is imperative that American Jews make clear: Smotrich is persona non grata; he is not welcome in our communities; he must be denied a U.S. visa. He is a disgrace to everything the Jewish community stands for; a true Hillul Hashem.)

It may feel like Israeli society is imploding. I happen to think Israeli democracy is resilient—but not automatically so. For far too long, Israelis and the American Jewish community have been complacent about the poisonous weed of hate that has sprouted in the Israeli far-right. Now that it has moved to the mainstream, given authority and power by a corrupt and desperate Prime Minister. Will we continue to make excuses for it?

Democracy is a muscle that needs to be exercised or it will atrophy. I, for one, see a battle before us for the soul of the Jewish state. It is of desperate importance that anyone who cares about the Jewish future realize their stake in this, and that we do everything we can to support those hundreds-of-thousands-strong protesters for democracy and decency.

What might we learn from this week’s horrors—and how can we celebrate Purim on Monday night in the shadow of Huwara?

Let’s talk about the Megillat Esther.

Esther, it must be recognized, is a comic Jewish revenge fantasy. It’s not historical; it’s a rich and quite marvelous satire, that takes in lots of targets.

We need to understand the comic dimension of Esther in order to grasp the violent denouement that takes place the end of the book:

For Mordecai was now powerful in the royal palace, and his fame was spreading through all the provinces; the man Mordecai was growing ever more powerful. So the Jews struck at their enemies with the sword, slaying and destroying; they wreaked their will upon their enemies. (Esther 9:4-5)

…

The rest of the Jews, those in the king’s provinces, likewise mustered and fought for their lives. They disposed of their enemies, killing seventy-five thousand of their foes; but they did not lay hands on the spoil That was on the thirteenth day of the month of Adar; and they rested on the fourteenth day and made it a day of feasting and merrymaking. (Esther 9:16-17)

In Esther, Jews who have been terrorized and threatened with mass destruction suddenly find themselves in a position to control their own destinies, with the precious ability to defend themselves against those who would destroy them. And then they massacre their enemies.

Did Esther anticipate Huwara?

We should note that violence—exaggerated, cartoonish violence—is an audience-pleaser. Consider, for example, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. It, too, is a revenge fantasy about a group of American-Jewish soldiers out to wreak revenge against every Nazi they can find in WW2-era Europe. The violence is grotesque, over-the-top, cathartic: at the end, Hitler and Goebbels and the entire Nazi senior staff are memorably executed by the “Basterds” en masse. Whether or not you find this entertaining (I must admit, I do) depends entirely on your sensibilities and your tolerance for fantasy violence.

To understand Esther, you have to understand the genre in which it is written. Esther is operating in this sort of mode. Did the Jews historically—in the name of self-defense and retribution against their genocidal enemies—slaughter 75,000 Persians? Of course not. It’s the projection of a community who heretofore has been oppressed.

And too many people don’t get what the Megillah is trying to teach with its outrageousness.

The theme that permeates Esther is inversion—events turn out to be 180 degrees from what they are expected or supposed to be. “…The very day on which the enemies of the Jews had expected to get them in their power, the opposite happened, and the Jews got their enemies in their power” (9:1).

But it’s not just the inversion of events that happens in Esther. There’s also an inversion of people:  And many of the people of the land professed to be Jews, for the fear of the Jews had fallen upon them (8:17). Can you imagine?! Those Persians were so scared of the Jews that they even pretended to be Jewish!

And perhaps that’s what’s behind the violent retribution of the Jews in Chapter 9 of the Megillah. When the Jewish defense squads of Shushan go wild and kill tens of thousands—is it so farfetched to say that this is the greatest inversion of all? Their enemies act like Jews, and the Jews act like their enemies!

And here’s where I’m going to stop laughing this year.

Because, as we know, humor is often a tool that reveals deeply hidden truths. “If you want to understand a society,” said Rebbe Nachman in one of his greatest stories, “you have to understand its humor.” Humor exposes things that a community strives to keep under wraps.

The Megillah predicted that Jews are just as capable as anyone of behaving monstrously. Huwara proves this to be so. In Huwara, we saw that Jews are just as capable as anyone of behaving monstrously, just as Esther predicted. Is there anyone left who believes that Jews, once in power, are immune from committing horrible acts? Everyone is capable of atrocities, and just because, on the historical balance sheet, Jews have usually been the victims, that is no reason to believe Jews can’t commit horrors. Huwara proves that, Q.E.D.

The measure of our integrity will be how forcefully, how clearly, we speak out against these forces. To make clear that the filthy ilk of Smotrich and Ben Gvir and the rioters crying for blood will not be the defining voices of Judaism and Zionism. Every one of us has to say yesh gvul (there is a limit to what we will allow in our names), and we must be the voice of democracy, decency, and justice—as envisioned by our Torah and by the founders of the State of Israel.

On Monday night, I’ll be with my community and we’ll read Esther again. We’ll boo and drown out the name of Haman; we’ll celebrate Esther’s bravery. We’ll drink a few L’chayims. But I’ll be reflecting on how Purim is ultimately about inversion and disguises—and how those Purim costumes have a powerful way of revealing deep truths about what lies behind the mask of seemingly civilized people.  

Jews, Once Again in the Crosshairs

Do you remember Dr. Barnett Slepian?

Dr. Slepian was an Ob-Gyn and abortion provider at Buffalo Women Services in Buffalo, New York, who was shot in his kitchen in October, 1998. Before the murder, Dr. Slepian’s personal information had been posted on a public website (and afterwards, his name on the site was x’ed-out). He was far from the only victim of this special symbiosis of terror: an extremist group publishes private information—including a home address and the names of relatives—and then washes its hands of any complicity when an unhinged supporter of their cause takes their implication to its logical conclusion.[1]

And tragically, that is hardly the only example of homegrown terror in these bloody times.

I was thinking about the murdered abortion doctors while the latest form of anti-Jewish hate has emerged here in Boston. A new toxic website called the “Mapping Project”[2] has slithered up from the primordial sludge of the internet, purporting to out communal organizations that are “responsible for the colonization of Palestine or other harms such as policing, U.S. imperialism, and displacement.”  The agenda is to intimidate and threaten every organization with ties to Israel—which means virtually every Jewish organization in New England. And judging by the list, the politics of right vs. left are irrelevant; every Jewish group (except synagogues) is indicted in the slander.

The website identifies and gives the addresses of approximately 500 organizations. Among them are the organizations that are the backbone of the Jewish community of New England: the Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the Boston JCRC, the ADL, the Jewish Arts Collaborative, the Synagogue Council of Massachusetts, the New Israel Fund, J Street, and more. Addresses are listed, as are the names of board members and major donors.

Also: University Hillels (including Babson College, where I work) and Jewish day schools.

Got that? Our schools.

This, as the nation still seethes from the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.

Let’s take a moment and review what the Jewish community has experienced in the past three years. In January 2022, a rabbi and three worshippers were held hostage at gunpoint in Colleyville, Texas. In December 2019, two terrorists shot up a kosher grocery store in Jersey City, New Jersey, killing three. In April 2019, a gunman fired an assault rifle in the Chabad synagogue of Poway, California, killing one woman. And on October 27, 2018, a gunman massacred 11 people and wounded 6 in a mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA, the deadliest attack on a Jewish community in U.S. history.  And those, of course, are just the most tragic of the near-weekly assaults and acts of vandalism, not to mention the cesspool of hate found on social media.

Into this context, the people behind this “Mapping Project” have the gonads and ugly souls to put these institutions in their crosshairs.

No doubt, if an act of violence is perpetrated against one of these Jewish organizations (G-d forbid), the BDS crowd in New England will profess their innocence—just like those who post the home addresses of abortion doctors.

Are Jews on edge in America? Yeah, I’d say so. We have learned how to live with increased security in our synagogues and communal institutions, in this land of alleged religious liberty. And we know who our allies are—as well as those who have remained sadly silent.

The message of the “mapping project” is clear: the Jewish community as a whole bears responsibility for the oppression of Palestinians, as well as every other social injustice on earth. (There is no room in BDS for the complexity and nuance in the Israel-Palestinian crisis; just demons and martyrs.)

This “Mapping Project”, in fact, has all the hallmarks of classic antisemitism:

·      Jews run a sinister international cabal that controls world events;

·      Jewish money finances this global network;

·      Zionism is a form of colonialism and white supremacy (it is so utterly self-evidently neither of those things) (and as if these Jewish organizations weren’t in fact the targets of white supremacists!);

·      As Justin Finkelstein of the ADL-New England has pointed out, similar maps have historically been used to target the Jewish community and turn the public against it as a “fifth column.”

The individuals behind the “Mapping Project” are, of course, cowards. In the name of “exposing the truth,” they hide their own identities. The usual bigots have promoted their work – BDS Boston, Mass Peace Action, and their ilk. These are the sorts of groups who went after Boston Mayor Michelle Wu last year for taking campaign contributions from “sinister Zionists”—again, the classic antisemitic phrasing designed to delegitimize and demonize the Jewish community.

Yet, as ever, people of good faith are determined not to let haters win. On Monday, a remarkable online gathering was held, assembled by the ADL, CJP, and Boston JCRC. 1,300 community leaders recommitted to the long fight against antisemitism and all bigotry, as well as doing the hard work with allies who understand that the support of a democratic and peaceful Israel is not simply a hobby or political flavor—it is, in fact, part and parcel of our work towards Tikkun Olam (World-Repair).

Of course, we don’t know when the next assault will come. The memory of Dr. Slepian—as well as Colleyville, Pittsburgh, and all the others—tells us we must be vigilant. These are dangerous times.

To our enemies we say: We will never succumb to terror or be derailed in our own self-determination, nor in our eternal connections to the Land of Israel, nor in our vision of a future of peace for two peoples with valid narratives determined to live alongside one another.

To our allies we say: We remain ever grateful for your friendship, and we will ever be your partners to fight against all hate and bigotry.

[1] As far as I know, the murder of Dr. Slepian was because he was an abortion doctor—not because he was Jewish. It is therefore just an incidental wrinkle that he was murdered at home on Shabbat, shortly after returning from shul where he had been saying Kaddish for his father.

[2] My dilemma: Do I provide a link for readers to see the “Mapping Project” for themselves? I’ve decided not to give them the web traffic. If you want to find it, I presume you know how to do so.

Have We Forgotten What Good News Looks Like?

Today there was good news in the world. After months of unremitting bad news, I fear we may have forgotten what good news looks like.

Watching the historic peace treaty signings today between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, I felt detached and dispassionate about the proceedings. I’m usually much more emotional when it comes to these things. I have strong memories of September 13, 1993, when the Oslo Accords were signed on the White House lawn. I was alone in my apartment in Jersey City, NJ, with tears streaming down my cheeks as Yitzhak Rabin z”l intoned, “Oseh shalom bim’romav…”

And I still have hanging over my desk a large photo of Rabin and King Hussein lighting each other’s cigarettes on the occasion of the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan in October 1994. It makes me melancholy and wistful when I look at the faces of these leaders from a different era. I take these things personally.

Today: no tears, and no goosebumps. Maybe that’s because Trump and Netanyahu are a different species of leader: unvarnished opportunists with grotesque records when it comes to promoting democracy. Or maybe because the UAE and Bahrain have abysmal human rights records, and it feels a bit like making friends with the nasty kid on the playground—he’s cool as long as he picks on others, not us.

But my own sentimentality doesn’t matter. To tell the truth, I am well aware that this is, in fact, a momentous occasion.

I’ve had conversations with lefty friends in recent days who scorned this turn of events. They’ve said that Trump is a self-serving narcissist, and doesn’t care about peace, and this is all about his reelection. They point to his unabashed statement this summer, when he admitted that the relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem in 2018 was “for the evangelicals”—recalling Secretary of State James Baker’s “F—k the Jews, they didn’t vote for us.” They argue that Bibi, too, is an autocrat who is solely bent on self-preservation.

To all of which I say: Point taken, but so what?  It’s not exactly breaking news to say that politicians act in their own political interests.

But I fear there’s something dangerous in my friends’ opposition to these peace deals. I think that they would unequivocally support the exact same deals if they were marshaled together by an American president whom they respected. I think that some left-leaning, pro-Israel people oppose this deal because Trump himself is so noxious, and they imagine that anything that makes Trump look good—anything that he can put in his “win” column—makes his prospect for reelection go up, G-d forbid.

In other words, they say: if it’s good for Trump, we oppose it.

That’s a pretty disastrous way of thinking. It’s just like hoping that the economy will tank, because presidents tend not to be reelected in a bad economy. Or hoping that there won’t be a coronavirus vaccine until after the election. It’s a manner of thinking that says: Trump is so grotesque that I don’t care how many people suffer in the short term, as long as he is booted out decisively in November.

I, for one, hope that in the short term, bad things won’t happen: that the economy won’t completely implode; that there won’t be more slayings of innocent black people by police; that there won’t be any more school shootings; that the fires ravaging the American West will stop.  (Can you imagine someone saying, “I want the fires keep burning until after the election?” That’s just sick.)

And I can hope for all these good things while campaigning with vigor for Trump to lose. You know what they say about broken clocks… 

In that spirit, I can rejoice that finally Israel is normalizing relationships in its “neighborhood.” This is what we’ve been yearning for since at least the Six Day War, when people prematurely fantasized that, due to Israel’s victories, the Arab nations would accept the fact that Israel was a permanent part of the modern Middle East. To hold otherwise is to play right into the hands of those who believe that what is good for them is what’s good for the world—and vice-versa.

What about the Palestinians? Yes, they are going to be the losers here—because of precisely this same logic. People who say, “You shouldn’t be allowed to engage with Israel until there is progress with the Palestinians” miss the whole point. When the PA and its enablers give up the pipe dream of “from the River to the Sea”, and engage with Israel as a permanent neighbor, there will be progress. I’m not absolving Israel of its responsibilities toward the Palestinians—Israel’s policies of dissembling and humiliation have been disastrous. But, frankly, I think that the deals with the UAE and Bahrain (and others that have been whispered) show that this has nothing to do with the Palestinians. Or, if anything, that the Arab world is nearly as exhausted with Palestinian rejectionism as Israelis are.

And while these protagonists make it impossible to feel unmitigated happiness, we should be able to recognize good news when it comes our way. At the end of a year’s ceaseless flow of bad news, this is indeed good news. Kein Yirbu—may it grow and expand in the New Year ahead.

One Good Legacy of 2018: Books about Israel

As 2018 slouches into history, I can think of one item of quality that this year produced: meaningful books about Israel.

Now, “the making of many books is without limit / and much study is wearying of the flesh” (Ecclesiastes 12:12). That warning, tacked onto the end of Kohelet by a revisionist editor, could easily apply to contemporary books about the Middle East. After all, books about Israel that seemed so important just a few years ago have tended to quickly become dated.

Yet there are three books that appeared this year that I suspect will continue to be useful in five and even ten years to come. Each may even guide us on how to talk respectfully to each other again.

My friend Yossi Klein Halevi’s Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor has a heartfelt mission: to cogently and concisely explain the narrative of Israel’s existence. Yossi is a pioneer in fostering Jewish-Muslim understanding, and, G-d willing, this book will contribute to that effort. It is a series of chapters directed to a fictional Palestinian neighbor who lives across the valley from the French Hill neighborhood in Jerusalem where he lives. And he has reinforced the message by publishing a free Arabic version of the manuscript on the internet with a heartfelt invitation for someone to write a “Letters to My Israeli Neighbor” in response.

Yet somehow I can’t shake the feeling that the format of the book is simply a device—its real aim is to make the case for Israel in a clear way to any audience needs it. A big part of that audience is the American Jewish community, which urgently needs to learn how to articulate the case for Israel without anger and defensiveness (despite that fact that we have real enemies on the right and the left who tend to elicit anger and defensiveness from us). In that sense, this book is enormously important—and it will continue to be valuable for years to come.

Also arriving in 2018 was Gil Troy’s anthology The Zionist Ideas, a re-visioning of Arthur Hertzberg’s essential book The Zionist Idea from 1959. Hertzberg was the first to collect primary sources, in English translation, of the great thinkers from the 19th and 20th century who built the intellectual foundations of the Jewish State. And what a diverse group they were! The book captured the dynamic array of thought that sparked the most important revolution in Jewish history since the days of the Talmud—a revolution to which we are the fortunate heirs.

And yet, for all its breadth, Troy’s rethinking of Hertzberg reaches even wider. His Zionist Idea 2.0 not only updates the original with more than half a century of thinkers and activists, it also incorporates non-Ashkenazi voices (still not enough), women (Hertzberg had none!), a great many Diaspora Zionists, and perspectives from across the Jewish religious spectrum. Today’s Zionist community is even more eclectic, diverse, and contentious than it was in Theodor Herzl’s day—and that is really saying something. 

To make room for all of these, Troy has dropped or abridged much that was in the previous volume. Therefore, instead of replacing Hertzberg, Troy’s book will sit neatly on the shelf next to the original. Together, they are the essential primary sources for understanding the complex foundations of Israel and its meaning in the 21st century. Students will be reaching for both of them for a long time to come.

Finally, 2018 saw the arrival of the English translation of Micah Goodman’s Catch-67, originally published in Hebrew in 2017. Milkud 67 was a runaway bestseller in Israel; it seemed like an entire country had become one big book group, debating Goodman’s analysis of why the country is so “stuck” in regard to the Palestinian land and people it conquered in a just, defensive war over 50 years ago.

The dilemma is well known. The right argues that ceding the West Bank would create an aggressive enemy state within spitting distance of Israel’s population centers; given the Palestinians’ history of implacability and terrorism, relinquishing the territories would be suicidal. The left argues that the occupation of a population that doesn’t want to be ruled by Israel is morally corrosive, drains Israel’s resources, and poisons Israel’s relationship with the rest of the world.

And both sides are correct. Thus, the “catch”, evoking Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Up to now, no one—certainly none of Israel’s current sorry crop of leaders—has envisioned a way out of this mess.

Goodman not only diagnoses the dilemma, he tentatively offers a third way forward. Rather than grasping for ultimate solutions, he asks: what can we do today that will reduce hostility, build trust, and make short term but immediate improvements to everyone’s lives, Palestinians and Israelis alike? It’s a refreshing way of looking at a situation that has become so stalemated that no one has been able to offer any new thinking on the subject in many years.

One other thing makes Goodman so compelling. In his opening chapters, he describes a syndrome that is commonplace in Israel—and in America; namely, the inability of people of good faith and differing opinions to engage in civilized debate. It wasn’t always like this. Once, not so very long ago, friends and neighbors who saw the world differently could have meaningful exchanges with one another. The problem is when ideology becomes an intractable part of one’s identity. When that happens, Goodman argues, our opponents are no longer attacking our ideas, they are attacking our very selves. At that point, we get defensive, angry, and nasty. (For proof, see the public “comments” section of any Jewish current events website. Or better yet—don’t, it’ll make you sick.) If he’s right, then the implications of his book are valid far beyond the confines of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

As 2018 draws to its miserable close, I expect that these three books will have legs. They should give readers concerned about Israel plenty to think about and inspiration to draw upon for years to come.

Twenty-Five Years Ago Today

25 years ago today. My G-d.

I was alone in my apartment in Jersey City, just days before Rosh Hashanah, watching the ceremony with tears streaming down my face. What killed me was when Rabin said, "Enough," and then went on to recite Oseh Shalom Bimeromav...

Even looking at this photo today, with Arafat's devilish grin, I can see Rabin's obvious reluctance. The old warrior had every reason to be reticent, and not to trust Arafat, the founder of suicide bombing and terrorism as a political tactic. But he did it. He did it because he knew the status quo was not acceptable, not tenable. The children of Israelis and the children of Palestinians had the right to a better future than the present.

There is so much water under the bridge since then. There have been many failures, but I reject outright that the whole endeavor that reached a high point here was a failure. History is a flow, a dynamic movement of streams and eddies. This moment in time shows what is possible, what can happen, what can be striven for. I still find inspiration in it, and Rabin - the lifelong warrior who understood better than anyone Israel's security needs - remains my hero, precisely because his vision of peace wasn't a hands-across-the-water, pie-in-the-sky dream, but one born of painful reality. Rabin’s reluctance made him real. He know the blood toll that Israel had paid in its history; he knew what Arafat was. But he recognized that a moment had arrived that would not be available forever.

It was a recognition that pragmatic peace rooted in reality is the best promise of security for everyone. With every well-rehearsed caveat - I know them well - I still believe that to be true.