Whose ox has Israel gored? The test of support for Israel is when Israel gores your ox.
When Israel for decades denied the existence of the Armenian genocide, playing along with the mean-spirited charade of Turkey, Israel seriously undermined its moral authority as worthy of special international support due to the Holocaust. Israel was founded on the ashes of the Holocaust. The least Israel could do was to acknowledge the paradigmatic, prior suffering of the Armenian people at the hands of the Turks during WW I. But no. Smooth diplomatic relations with Turkey took precedence.
Sorely disappointed in Israel, we did not reevaluate our support for Israel due to its misguided denial of the Armenian genocide. This policy turned out to be entirely gratuitous, as Turkey scorched its relations with and respect for Israel upon the assumption of the Islamist Erdogan to power. But that was later. During the long period of Israel’s Armenian genocide denial, we did not reevaluate our support for Israel.
When Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2005 in hopes of creating an opening for peace with the Palestinians, we were skeptical, but did not oppose the move. It was a new approach. Maybe it would work. With reluctance, we said: Give it a try. However, when Israel failed to resettle the Israelis who had lived in Gaza and were removed from Gaza — Israelis went originally to Gaza at the express request of the Israeli government 30 years earlier — Israel showed a level of indifference and incompetence that added up to cruelty. Years and years after their forced dispossession, these Israelis from Gaza were still being shoveled from one bureaucracy to the next, denied housing, employment, education.
Sorely disappointed in Israel, we did not reevaluate our support for Israel due to its disgraceful treatment of its citizens — both secular and religious — who were the innocent pawns of an Israeli policy that turned out to be an unmitigated failure. In exchange for the withdrawal from Gaza, instead of peace Israel got indiscriminate terrorist rockets of Hamas. Yet, we did not reevaluate our support for Israel.
When Prime Minister Netanyahu held within his hands both the necessary information and the opportunity to end, or seriously degrade, Iran’s nuclear program in 2011, but instead listened to President Obama’s counsels of patience, Netanyahu put the long-term security of Israel in danger. The subsequent nuclear agreement with Iran and six world powers extracted no permanent commitment on the part of Iran not to pursue nuclear power.
Sorely disappointed in Netan- yahu, we did not reevaluate our support for Israel, notwithstanding what proved to be the emptiness of Netanyahu’s sharp rhetoric about his willingness to stand up for Israel’s long-term security, no matter the political price.
In 2017, various religious and political circles among American Jewry are sorely disappointed in Netanyahu’s change of position regarding places for Jewish prayer at the Western Wall. These circles threaten to reevaluate their support for Israel.
We get the disappointment.
We do not get the reevaluation.
Israel is not perfect. Israel never will be perfect, no matter what it does or doesn’t do, no matter how it responds to pressures in Israel or in the Diaspora, no matter how it configures or reconfigures its political system, no matter how successful its military is, no matter how innovative its economy is.
Criticisms, comments, suggestions, demands, disappointments, puzzlements, outrages over Israel — all this is in order for a democracy, all the more so for a democracy with essentially two geographical sets of constituencies: citizens and Diaspora supporters. But reevaluation of support? We do not agree with this. We do not support this. We do not do it.
Given the suffering the Jewish people had to endure before securing a state; given the length of time the Jewish people had to endure before securing a state; given the unremitting hostility the state has faced from before its founding; given the contingent, historical, rather narrow conditions out of which the Jewish people secured a state — a mixture of secular European nationalist ideology, Marxist socialism, flimsy military materiel, beaten- down Holocaust survivors, and old world Jewish piety — is it any wonder that Israel will not always satisfy this vastly diverse entity that we call the Jewish people?
Israel is too precious — indeed, indispensable — to the welfare, the security, the integrity and the existence of the Jewish people to have its Jewish support “reevaluated.” This is a luxury that the Jewish people cannot afford.
Copyright © 2017 by the Intermountain Jewish News
