I don’t write things to please or piss off segments of people; I write to report what I know and share what I think. I don’t claim to be objective; I do claim to be fair.

All of my colleagues know that I am an Orthodox Jewish person who is a strong supporter of the concept of a Jewish state that today we call Israel. That makes me a Zionist. Many of my good friends are profoundly affected by the existence of Israel to their detriment and I don’t apologize for my Zionism in exchange for their friendship. However, we are friends because my vision of Zionism does not preclude others from their aspirations and because, to some extent, we agree to disagree and find other mutual interests to be more relevant than the matter of Zionism.

This article addresses complaints I receive from the Jewish side, mostly from religious people who feel I am too liberal. They basically say that I am too nice to people who are not quite human or are not acting humanely and that, at the end of the day, my role should be to back up the “Jewish” position no matter what because, after all, I’m Jewish and the Arabs are not. 

I have a real problem with this. Somewhere along the line, we religious people started thinking that (1) our enemies down to each individual person are less than human, (2) that the Palestinians are sitting on OUR land because the Bible says so, and (3) they really ought to go away because there are over 20 other countries in the neighborhood they can go to while we have no other Jewish state.

I certainly agree that the leaders of the Palestinians are not democrats and are waging war against the Israelis. I agree that the majority of Palestinians and Arabs support violent uprising against the Israelis and wish that Israel wouldn’t exist. I also agree that this is perfectly reasonable given the circumstances. I don’t understand why Israelis or armchair Jewish quarterbacks should expect anything different.

We fled from homes in Europe during a war (anybody who didn’t was considered pretty dumb in retrospect) and expected to get our property back. We have not been entirely unsuccessful and keep plugging away at this even after 50 years. I don’t see why a regular Palestinian guy with a farm somewhere in Palestine should be satisfied to spend the rest of his life in a refugee camp somewhere in the middle of Lebanon because he and his family fled his home when he was being told (by Israelis and Arabs alike for their own reasons) that the Israelis were raping and pillaging Arab villages during a war. I think it is a crock to justify the land seizure on the idea taken as gospel among Jews that “he wanted to leave because he was so sure that they’d win the war and he’d be back next week.”

It is considered gospel among Jews that all Arabs are alike and that the only reason a Palestinian sits in a refugee camp is that the Arabs want to keep them there as bargaining chips against Israel. The truth is that the Arabs don’t want the Palestinians in their countries because they view them as domestic threats. Jews have become comfortable and have absolutely no idea what it means to be a Palestinian living in another Arab country or even in the USA; just like Arabs don’t appreciate what the Western Wall means to Jews, likewise Jews today have no idea of how degrading it is to be a Palestinian. It is not viable to say that the Palestinians should be assimilated in any of the 22 Arab countries in the Middle East because at present they are discriminated against (ie: university admissions, professional occupations, land ownership) and really have no place to go. Jews in America have it pretty good but imagine if you told all the Jews in New York that they had to move to any one of the other 48 states they’d go nuts – what, me go live in Pennsylvania?

If I were to live in a country that has discriminated against me for 50 years (ie: an Israeli Arab) or that has occupied my land for some 35 years with no end in sight, after 7 years of manipulative and fruitless negotiations with both Labor and Likud governments that promised interim withdrawals that were not carried out, I’d be damn frustrated and want my enemy wiped off the map too. I have never held Barak’s comment to that effect (If I were a Palestinian Arab, I’d be a terrorist) against him. What is amazing is how little resistance Israel has faced by what was for a long time a rather docile population (which they mistakenly thought would continue muted forever). In fact, Jews don’t like to consider that their freedom fighters against Nazi and British occupation were called terrorists by their occupiers. As we all know, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. We Jews hate this moral equivalency thing, but sometimes it is proper to go beyond the tit for tat and consider the bigger issues and I do believe there are moral equivalencies at work here even though each side claims the moral high ground in specific cases. Not everything is equivalent, but some things are.

One point of digression: I am not a pacifist or a patsy. If someone rises to kill you, kill him first. I support wholeheartedly Israel’s policy of targeted killings against those who plan and carry out terrorist acts, and those who hide behind them. I don’t know of anyone else who would or should act differently. There is, after all, a war going on here. (That doesn’t mean that I always believe the Israelis when they say that the person they killed was a terrorist; the Israelis sometimes err or fib, but then again common law doesn’t require 100% certainty to convict either – the standard is “beyond a reasonable doubt.”)

That said, I think it is asking too much to ask those being occupied and those being treated as second class citizens to sit back, enjoy the rape and keep smiling. Somewhere, we have become too smug with our religiosity and general sense of cultural superiority. We feel the other side has no pain, or that it is strictly self-inflicted. We feel the other side is less moral and therefore less human. The other side is primitive and therefore less deserving of respect. It is easy to find targets; after all, the other side puts up suicide bombers and glorifies them. Of course, we conveniently forget that the poor mother is being told that she either gets in front of the camera and says what they tell her to say and takes a $10,000 reward (which the family will need for sustenance) or else get no money and be an outcast. Besides, what do you expect a mother who just lost her kid to say – that his life was useless and that he died as a pawn? The Israelis certainly glorify their dead; nobody dies in vain.

In 1948, if any Israeli would have talked about post-1967 borders the Jewish state would never have come into existence. Nobody anticipated it. Somehow, after 1967, some of us thought this was an entitlement. We convinced ourselves that we deserved it, had no right to let go of it and that we had nowhere else to go. In a country that is 80% secular and which 2% of its population crossed the Green Line to live, this business of Biblical Israel became an albatross around the entire country. As long as the Arabs wouldn’t talk about it, we could additionally say that we had no choice but to keep occupying the place for security reasons. Some of us believe that the security imperative remains; it is a point of debate. The majority of Israelis support Sharon’s security policies in the current climate; however, the majority of Israelis also support land for peace when it becomes feasible.

An important reason the 1967 debate is perpetuated is that it diverts us from the fact that a lot of what happened in 1948 wasn’t pretty and we have never had to really face up to it. The problem is that there are certain sins that exist but cannot be forgiven or repaired because to repair the cancer is to kill the patient. So we go on, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be honest. We can’t turn back the clock here, but a bit of honesty would probably mean a lot to the honor of Palestinians who took the hit. Israelis will never bring themselves to apologize because they can’t see the logic of it; we only know our own propaganda of 50 years and our side of history is ingrained in our conscience. Likewise, the Syrians are also convinced of the rightness of their positions after so many years of hearing their side of it. So we should not stand on too much ceremony here because we humans are, after all, humans.

The crux of the matter is that regardless of whether Israel in its 1948 borders is or is not entirely legitimate, it is a fact of life and life is not always fair. The question for the Arabs is whether or not they can go back to 1967 borders (give or take some adjustments) without questioning 1948 Israel. Camp David failed in Israeli public opinion because they believe (because they have been told) that the Arabs wouldn’t budge on the Right of Return and therefore wanted to pocket 1967 borders and a newly created Palestinian country as a concession and continue to attack the Jewish state as a whole. I think that the two-state solution is the only possible one; I don’t believe that a binational state over all of the area is workable or desirable. Arab and Jewish societies are distinctive and should remain divorced.

Zionism for its own sake is a universal idea. It is nationalism for a nation of people, in this case it is Jews. It is no more or less racist than any other nationality seeking its own nation. I don’t know what the Palestinians call their version of Zionism but by whatever name it goes it is the same thing and I know the Palestinians are not expecting Jews to populate their state, so the idea that a national state favors the nation is not racist but natural to both sides. The question we Zionists have to ask ourselves is: As human beings, are we happy if the people around us are not happy? Do we have an obligation to go out of our way to take care of the Arab-Israeli in the land (ie: the Stranger in the Land as per the Bible) and make him our equal to the extent he has the same opportunity to live his life in freedom and pursue his occupation? Do we remember that the mafia that runs Palestine (that we created and maintain) and its terrorists are a few hundred people in a sea of several million human beings that want to live normal lives? Is a Yeshiva in Hebron and 50 families with attitudes worth putting the lives at risk of thousands of soldiers and creating the hostility of close to 150,000 city residents? Is God more concerned with us settling every inch of the land or being a light unto the nations and maintaining the standards he set for us?

I personally have a big problem as a religious Jew seeing the corruption of our army and people maintaining an occupation over another people. We justify lower standards as a result. We are not as moral as we think; our necessity is not as urgent as we say it is, and the threat is not entirely external but one which is also of our own making. I refuse to believe that doing the right thing will result in national suicide; to believe so is to ultimately deny God’s role in our destiny. I think the right-wing nationalistic-messianic religious movement perverts the religion the builders of the state of Israel were taught and that it is a freak generation of dogma that is inconsistent with the ideals of Judaism over the long term of its history. My own sense of religion is strong enough to withstand this fad of our era.

We need to reestablish our priorities in a religious and nationalist framework and think about the things that are truly meaningful. It is not a question of what WE want, but an honest appraisal of what God expects of us. I fear that too many of us use God as a crutch to justify what we ourselves want; God has been used in vain too often for too many misadventures by people with agendas and religious leaders that have no responsibility for the human consequences of their directives. That was probably why God created Kings and Generals and told the others to defer to them.

I don’t know what Truth is. I believe there is room for everyone to have his tent under the sun. Let everyone be a “zionist” for his cause and let everyone also be humanists for his fellow. Sometimes I am wrong but I generally do believe and my life experience has been that those who tolerate, give respect and deal fairly will be tolerated, respected and dealt with fairly. We have no right to believe otherwise until we have actually done so and we have not. We are obligated to try our best and avoid excuses or rationalizations to the contrary.