It took us almost half a lifetime to visit Israel.
It has taken a lifetime to understand it.
We often wish it still had the European leadership it began with. Native born Israelis, called Sabras, have only produced Benjamin Netanyahu…born there but educated here.
When America began helping Russian Jews to leave Russia before they were killed or jailed, they either came to America to live in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach section or went to Israel.
Israelis had come to Brooklyn to help the newcomers assimilate and build neighborhoods.
We met our first Israelis as cab drivers in NYC. In the brief exchanges during traffic we were aware of a certain toughness about them, a hardness, a determination in their tones of voice that was apparent and very illuminating.
We came to know our first Israeli when we worked to establish Innisfree, a self-contained community for young adults located just outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. Its purpose was to house and raise young adults with serious lifelong development issues. Many of these so-called retarded young people were already of high school age and came to Innisfree to live in houses built especially for them. They were cared for by house parents – couples, sometimes with their own children – who came to Innisfree to devote themselves to helping these young people achieve all they possibly could by living a life in their own community…living, working, producing, becoming young adults with jobs, responsibilities and talents they would never have developed living at home with parents for the rest of their lives.
Innisfree was built by James Hormel of Hormel Foods as part of a divorce settlement to his former wife, who along with her new husband, directed the community. Our job was to add corporate and foundation funding and to publicize the very existence of Innisfree so that families and young people who needed it could seek it out.
One of the young people in the first group to live there was an Israeli. His Father was an Israeli government official – the Air Force Consel. We met him and his wife at a family meeting and he invited us to dinner in their home just outside of Washington, DC.
We were pleased to be able to learn more about Israel right from the source and looked forward to the visit.
It turned out to be very revealing – and a nightmare.
After a brief getting to know you chat, he asked a simple question “When did you visit Israel?”
His guest said he hadn’t had the opportunity to do that – although his parents had twice and loved it – but he had been unable to get free of business responsibilities to make the trip yet.
And that answer triggered an unending monologue from the host about why his young guest had not visited Israel. The comments became badgering and then insulting, ferocious and finally impossible to hear but it never stopped all during dinner.
“What kind of a Jew are you…not going to Israel…”
Finally, his wife – furious and embarrassed – couldn’t stand it and told her husband to shut up and stop insulting their guest. The guest was first stunned and then resentful and left before coffee and dessert. Enough was enough.
Later in life, our youngest daughter worked for three different Israelis and is in business with one today. They were and are tough, single-minded, not easy to work with and ferociously stubborn wanting their own way no matter what. When their efforts prove fruitless, they simply laughed it off.
REALITY
And why not be tough?
Those coming to Israel or born there understood that at any given moment the Arab World surrounding them, hating them and refusing to recognize their right to existence, could go to war trying to destroy them.
Each and every young man and woman – unless they belonged to religious communities and were studying religion – had to serve two years in the Israeli Army and then remain in the military reserve for the rest of their lives.
The fear and self – concern and the attitudes that follow those feelings are built right into them. The “hardness” is trained in, essential to the preservation of life itself.
The 1945 United Nations decision to permit the establishment of Israel was driven by the United States but directed by Great Britain who remained in control of much of the Arab world. It was their decision to place the new State of Israel right in the middle of the Palestinian community established years ago along the Jordan River on one side and the Red Sea on the other side.
The decision to establish Israel right in the middle of the Palestinian community immediately broke the Palestinian world in two and caused more than 100,000 people to lose their homes and businesses.
The peoples now known as Palestinians came to this World in the year 7 AD from Greece. They conquered territory and never left – even as they never grew large or influential enough to maintain control of any land in that World.
No Arab country wanted these new refugees – who were neither Arab nor Muslim – to settle in their land and so there were years of wandering seeking a place to live.
In time Israel and the Palestinians agreed that Israel would remain in the center of the land and some Palestinians would live on one side of them near Jordan River – the West Bank – while another major group of Palestinians would live on the Red Sea side of Israel along the Gaza Peninsula – the Gazans.
The Gazans were led by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority led the West Bank Palestinians.
Hamas was a military group with no government experience – and were funded by Iran.
And so, Israelis were surrounded not only by the major nations of Arabia who refused to acknowledge them but by the Palestinians, rejected by much of Arabia – but sitting right in the midst of Israel itself.
Israeli attitudes reflected their situation.
OCTOBER 7, 2023
Mossad, recognized as the finest intelligence and espionage agency in the World, knew one year before the vicious and successful Iran directed Hamas “surprise” attack against Israel, that such an attack was coming. It even knew the date.
And yet the Netanyahu-led deeply religious government which named him as Prime Minister (after he had served a number of different Israeli government parties which no longer wanted him) didn’t believe that Hamas had the nerve or ability to produce such an attack and so ignored the Mossad warning and continued to ignore it – until it took place more viciously and murderously than any attack on Israel during its entire existence.
It is understandable that the people of Israel, shocked and damaged, were more concerned about the hundreds of people taken hostage and the murdered women and children, raped and beheaded, than about why Bibi and his government had ignored the warnings.
Netanyahu, who has served as Prime Minister longer than any other Israeli leader has been found guilty of corrupt business activities which could send him to jail and force him to pay high fines. He has never been sentenced because he found a political group who wanted him as Prime Minister.
It is that very narrow, religious political group which forced the essential overwhelming destruction of Gaza – even as it failed to destroy Hamas. It is now trying to turn Israel into a country existing “from the river to the sea” as it works daily to forcibly destroy the existence of the West Bank Palestinians who had long ago chosen to work with the Israelis and where there has been little reported trouble for years.
If one accepts the obvious physical destruction of Gaza because of Hamas and its tunnels, what should we feel about the anti-Israel noise coming from large segments of America’s young people who feel the West Bank Palestinians deserve their existence?
It is that feeling which underlies the stunning existence of antisemitism in this nation- about as intense as we have ever witnessed.
As these young, so-called radical extremists continue to express antisemitic critiques by working to defeat Democratic candidates who support Israel, let us remind them that many of these candidates are happy to take Jewish support money – often in large sums – for their campaign simply because they support Israel. As we have said regularly, politics is a game where only winning counts.
Many politicians on both sides do not like Israel’s present political scene nor do they appreciate the Blue suit/white shirt/red tie wearing very hush-hush visit from Netanyahu to his buddy CEO Trump in DC to talk again about the United States’ effort to wipe out the Iran government and get our hands on their nuclear material buried deep within the Earth…deeper than our bombs have reached no matter how false the claims that they did.
He had tried to get that same result from Presidents Obama and Biden without success.
“You and you alone can help us wipe out Iran and become the greatest hero of the Jewish people for all time…the man who wiped out the Iran government and the armies it supports…saving us from the constant attacks by Hezbollah and the Yemenites.
“You will be elevated in Israel as you will never be in the U.S.
“You will have finally saved the Jewish people from further harm not only now but in the foreseeable future.
“We will elevate you to the highest stature ever afforded to any of our leaders
“You and you alone will have saved the Jews from further death and destruction and help us to make Israel truly free.”
And CEO Trump, with support from his slavish advisers, went to war with Iran.
And we are where we are.
ANTISEMITISM
Jews in New York and across the country are Americans not Israelis.
Jews here hailed the formation of Israel as a victory over what Germany did to the Jewish people leading up to World War 11. The UN decision was an attempt by the World to recognize the murder of six million Jews and to at least give the survivors a home that was safe and secure.
How and where they did it was a bad joke. Was it done on purpose or was it a genuine attempt to let Jews return to their historical and biblical homeland?
It doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is this: should Jews here be subject to what seems an antisemitic response to Israel’s current attempt to clean out every Palestinian from Israel once and for all?
There is little talk about a two State solution and what talk there is seems almost whimsical and can hardly be taken seriously any longer.
But do the young people, including New Yorks’ Mayor, really believe that all Jews around the World support Israel’s current activities?
Do they know enough about the real history of the issue to come to that conclusion? Or is that conclusion a simple sign of a basic, if honest, ignorance?
We are told now by news sources that Trump had a difficult telephone conversation with Netanyahu blaming him for the mess the Administration has made of the decision to go to war.
Being flattered to mush on one hand and being surrounded by yes men may work in the real estate development business – but not in international politics.
Marching in parades sounding antisemitic may be our young people’s simple way of objecting to international developments.
That’s not an answer but answers for them are difficult these days without AI providing them.
And this:
Three months after our dinner, the Israeli Air Consul was shot dead on the way into his Washington office. The hitman was never found.