After the
Flood Came The Rainbow- Reflections on
Israel and the Flood of Stabbings
This
Shabbat we read the account of Noah and the Flood, the restoration of human and
animal life, and the start of civilization as we come to know it.
What
is it that brought the flood on in the first place?
We
started with a wonderful world, a Gan Eden, a Paradise, literally. From
thereon, all fell downhill. By the end of last week’s portion of Bereshit,
we read:” Va timaley ha'aretz hamas"- The world is filled with violence.
(Gen 6)
I
note with poignant irony that the center of the world, the Gan Eden that is
destroyed, is the very fertile and fruitful land between the Tigris and the
Euphrates, Nahar Hidekel and Nahar Prat. This is called Mesopotamia, the Land
Between the Rivers. In Arabic, it is Al Sham, and on the geopolitical map, Iraq
and Syria. As it was before the flood, so it seems now to be a region filled
with Hamas-violence; people of common and shared heritage, ancestry, and
history, engage in active self-destruction. An entire region is depopulated as
millions have escaped to neighboring lands and there is a flood of refugees as
has not been seen since World War II.
It
is with even greater irony that I note that the word for violence in Hebrew, “Hamas”,
is also an abbreviation for Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah,
the Islamic Resistance Movement – the Political movement that today rules over
Gaza. The most fitting image that I could find for Hamas, today, besides
rockets and tunnels, is one that has been posted by Hamas approved media of
Sheikh Muhammed Sallah delivering the Friday prayer at Rafah Mosque as he holds
a butcher knife in his hand:
“attack in threes and fours...cut them into body
parts. . .Some should restrain the victim while others attack with axes and
butcher knives."
It is eerily reminiscent of the SA, Sturmabteilung,
song of Nazi thugs as they terrorized their way to control of Germany ( we tend
to forget that terror was a highly respected tool as founding principal of
Nazism):
Wenn das Judenblut vom Messer
spritzt Geht’s noch einmal so gut
“When Jewish blood spurts from our
knives things will go twice as well.”
We are told by foreign policy experts that this
is the reaction of poor and underprivileged people, even though most of
the attackers come from middle class and
educated backgrounds. We are told by our Secretary of State that this is a
response to resent settlement policies but that has actually gone down in
numbers.
We are told that this goes back to 1967, when
Israel took over the Gaza strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Sinai
Desert.
But Israel
returned the Sinai to Egypt in exchange for peace. Yet even with that Egyptian TV and media produced
anti-Semitic programming comparable to
that of Der Sturmer. ( Only this year, for the first time, they broadcast a
show that presented Jews in a positive light, and the country was in shock.)
So, we are told, this goes back to 1967. Israel
pulled out of Gaza ten years ago, only to have it turn into an armed camp,
loaded with missiles fired at civilian targets.
So, we are told, this goes back to 1967.In 1993
Israel started the Peace talks that would lead to a Palestinian state and
pulled back from most of the West Bank. Bloodshed followed.
Maybe, we are told, it is because Israel entered
southern Lebanon in 1982 to push back Arafat's PLO. Israel pulled out, unilaterally,
unconditionally, in 2000. But that led to the dominance of Hizbollah and
thousands of missiles fired at Israel.
No. The anger that we see, whether in Gaza or in
the West Bank or from anywhere else in the Arab world, is not from 1967 and
settlements on the West Bank, and it is not from some fictional takeover of the
Temple Mount by some imaginary conspirators. It goes back to 1948 and the shame
of failure of the Palestinian Arabs and their supposed brothers of the other
Arab nations. It goes back to 1917, the date many Palestinians consider the
beginning of the Zionist invasion. (While Zionist Weizmann and Arab liberator
Emir Feisal tried to cooperate on a Jewish homeland in Palestine, this was
torpedoed by the Emir's fellow Arab leaders). It goes back to 1881, when the
first wave of modern settlers came.
But it goes back, even earlier. No other people
on earth have had to defend their right to live in their own land, except the
Jews. How far back?
As far back as Genesis. The story of creation
leads the great Bible scholar, Rashi, to ask," Why bother with the ancient
account of creation? Why not start with what we need to do? Mitzvoth,
observances.”
His answer:
We need to show that there is a creator of the
world, who established the nations on earth, and determines history and
determines what people live in what lands, because the nations state:"Listim atem”: You are thieves- You stole the
land from Seven Nations!" No, we did not steal; it was God's prerogative
to determine that we deserved it.
When did Rashi write this? At
the start of the Crusades. Jews were murdered by Crusaders while Christians and
Moslems fought over who ruled the Land of Israel and Jerusalem in particular. I
can only think that he chose this interpretation to remind himself and his
fellows whose Promised Land it was.
But even this insight is older
than Rashi's time. He adapted it from a Midrash composed centuries.It was a
response to on long-going attacks on Jews and Judaism dating to Greek and Roman
times.
The great Roman historian,
Tacitus, writing shortly after the destruction of the first Temple, imagines
the ancient Jews to be a band of outcasts that invaded Egypt and then were repulsed,
sent to the desert. These brigands then went on to conquer the land of Canaan
and expel the inhabitants. The Roman emperors from that period refused to
called the land Judea and instead labelled it "Palestina" in order to
deny the Jews a connection to their.
But it goes back even before the Romans.
There was an exhibition at the Getty Museum of
the original of Persian King Cyrus, calling on the peoples that had been
conquered and exiled by Babylonia to return to their homeland. This is recalled
in the Bible; with that royal authority, the Judean exiles returned to Judea.
Even then, even with the force of the Persian government edict to back them and
with Nehemiah, a Persian court official given general authority, the returnees
were opposed. Nehemiah describes how the builders of the new walls of Jerusalem
were attacked: with one hand they worked at construction and with the other
held a weapon.
For centuries, we have had to apologize for
being in the land of Israel. Greeks never apologized for overrunning the
original Mycenaeans. The Indo-Aryans never apologized for overrunning the
original inhabitants of India. The Europeans have never apologized to the Native
Americans for overrunning the Americas, and so forth. Only Jews have to
explain.
Now, I have to bring some personal perspective
to this spate of violence.
This has been on-going, unabated for decades.
My
grandfather's grandfather and grandmother, in 1881, gave their possessions to
their children and went to spend their last years in the holy city of Safed,
Tzfat. It was a strenuous journey in those days, from Austro-Hungary to the
Land of Israel, from the liberal Austrian Empire to a very corrupt Ottoman
Empire. They did not live out their last years in peace but were murdered by
their neighboring Arabs who stole the silver that they had brought with them.
We can talk about the Hebron Massacre in 1928,
before there was a state of Israel, or
the on-going murders carried out by Fedayeen gangs before 1967.
In 1969 I came to Israel as a student and I was
told constantly to be on the lookout for explosives left by terrorists. One
such explosion had occurred at the Hebrew University shortly before I arrived,
causing much bloodshed.
This was only one of many such waves of violence
before there was massive construction when the Israeli government was still
waiting naively for the Arab states to sit down and negotiate a peace after the
six-day war.
In 1986, we moved for a few years to Israel. The
first thing our children learned was " Chafetz Chashud", a suspect
object. Bombs were planted by the Palestinians everywhere.
We lived in Kfar Saba where one bomb went off at
the bus station and another was found before it could go off at a kindergarten.
A fire bomb was thrown at an Israeli car that had driven through a Palestinian
neighborhood; the family was burned to death.
In 1993, we had that delusion of peace, with the
Oslo accords and the Noble Peace Prize.
Arafat shortly thereafter gave a speech, to
which both Americans and Israelis were deaf:
"This agreement is no more than the
agreement signed by our Prophet Muhammed and the Qurasyh in Mecca." He repeated this reference many times but we all
chose to be deaf to it.
The treaty, every student of the Koran understood,
was a ruse, to buy time till Muhammed was ready to conquer Mecca. The Oslo
accord was now Arafat’s ruse.
So it is no wonder that in the years following
the Peace accords, there were ongoing acts of terror, winked at or actively
encouraged the Palestinian Authority, by Fatah, and Hamas.
Our daughter spent a year as a student at the
Hebrew University in 1996, the year of café bombings and bus bombings. She saw
firsthand what the Israelis got for reaching out a hand of peace.
Yes, Netanyahu can be obnoxious and stubborn. Yes,
Israelis can and do make mistakes. Yes, there are be Israeli extremists,
extremists who are roundly condemned by Israeli leadership, from both left and
right. Israelis never pass out candies and never shoot fireworks if an Israeli
extremist kills a Palestinian; such celebrations are common when the reverse
occurs. Israelis never pay to support families of Israeli extremists as a
reward, but the Palestinian Authority has paid reward money to the tune of many
multiples of millions to the families of the “martyrs”.
Here is what Israeli police do as our Sam
Schwartz, who works with the Raanana police force, wrote after a terror attack there:
"Among
our primary missions were to scour the streets trying to prevent the next
attack but also to prevent any citizens from engaging in vigilante attacks
against innocent Arab residents. Happy are the people of Israel that even in
our hour of fear and indignation, when killers are still roaming free on the
streets, our police still prioritize protecting all members of
society. "
Israeli incitement is not and never was the root
cause of this violence.
The Chinese were colonized and abused by the
Manchurians, the Europeans and the Japanese. They have a historic right to be
mad at the world. Instead, they have built their country into a powerhouse.
The Indians were colonized first by the Mogul
emperors, then by the British. India is now a major world player.
After World War Two, tens of millions of people
were uprooted from their lands in Europe. Tens of millions of Hindus and Moslems
fled when India and Pakistan were established. Eventually, all of these
refugees were settled in new homes.
It is the Arab world in particular that is mired
in unresolved conflict and pain. No Arab country, except Jordan has allowed the
Palestinians any rights to settle in their land of refuge, this has guaranteed
their endless sense of helplessness. No other group of refugees has its own UN
division nor had so many multiple billions thrown at it, guaranteeing their
dependence on such largesse.
I want to make a long case short. We
are not dealing with a normal antagonism, such as English against the French or
French against Germans.
There are underlying
complications of an Islamic world and civilization that is in turmoil, in particular
in the Arab core. It is far behind the Christian west (except in the Emirates,
where we bank our oil money), far behind the Buddhist and Confucian east, far
behind the Hindu civilization to their southeast.
It is exacerbated for an Arab Moslem
population that has had to swallow this fact of modern history. Not only were
they under the thumb of the Turks for centuries, let alone the British and
French for a few decades but now, they are under the lowly Jew!
The situation is closest to
that of the poor white southerner of the past century; no matter how miserable, he could feel
superior to the lowly black, who then dared to sit at the front of the bus.
Here is that lowly Jew, who must walk when a Moslem
rides, who must live in the Meilah, who
may never build a synagogue above a mosque, who is ritually impure, that lowly
Jew now rules over Moslems and over lands considered " Wakf", lands dedicated
to Islam.
This creates a deep-set
emotional quandary that prevents the Palestinians in particular from taking the
steps to get to what they need. It will remain so as long as the world
continues to treat them as incompetent children and fails to demand mature
behavior of their leadership. Only then will anything change.
It is very annoying therefore when people who
are supposed to be our friends try to justify what the Palestinians are doing.
Our government kept
absolutely silent when Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, Mohammed
Abbas, declared," Al Aksa is ours and so is the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
They have no right to desecrate them with their dirty feet." Police went
in briefly, it is true, to the Al-Aksa, but nobody , nobody, went in to the
Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which is far from the Temple Mount. Who cares
about truth!
He accused the Israeli police of executing a
13-year old in cold-blood, a 13-year old who was later interviewed as he lay in
an Israeli hospital, saved by Israelis, and in good condition. Who cares about
truth!
With all this our state
department has been so careful to be " even-handed". Abbas is not
criticized and US money still pours into the Palestinian authority.Our
Secretary of State Kerry lays the blame on " a massive increase in
settlements" that has led to "frustration and violence."
Someone ran a fact check on
this accusation. It turn out that there has been less settlement construction
under Netanyahu than under any other Prime Minister since 1995,less than under
Sharon, Barak, Olmert and even Netanyahu in his first round as Prime Minister.
That is 1554 houses a year. Is that massive construction?
Our country needs to be the
first to call upon the Palestinian leadership to grow up, stop crying, stop
whimpering, and act like a leadership of a mature state they claim to desire. The
UN, under ban Ki Moon, should stop talking about Israeli excessive force and
challenge the Palestinian Authority to begin to act like the government it
pretends to be.
I admit that I do not have
solutions. I am only posting the problems at the core.
I do have one thought, from
our reading of this morning. Noah is given God’s covenant of peace, as
symbolized by the rainbow. I pray that we soon see the rainbow of peace for all
parties—before any flood washes all away.
No comments:
Post a Comment