By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — Tuesday’s (March 17) democratic election in Israel gave us two results: a likely returning prime minister and the most egregious display of racial pandering I can ever recall displayed in my troubled birth land.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s fear-mongering screeds about “the Arabs” being bussed to vote was reprehensible and totally inconsistent with the moral character of the historical narrative of Israel. I hoped, not only that Netanyahu would be defeated but that the majority of Israelis—the people I know and love—would be exonerated from any association with his blatant bigotry and myopia. His anti-Arab hysteria and abject baiting of right-wing citizens in the closing hours of the campaign distorted the very charter of a nation carved out of the greatest racial genocide in history. “The Arabs” that Netanyahu impugned so ignominiously constitute 1.6 million fully-enfranchised and equal citizens of the State of Israel. Despicable!
That’s how far we’ve sunk since June 5, 1967—when Israel, responding to the largest per capita military build-up since World War II, from all the Arab nations surrounding it, launched a stunning pre-emptive attack.
It destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground in a matter of hours and reunified the divided city of Jerusalem in ferocious hand-to-hand fighting by June 7. It conquered the West Bank of the Jordan (which had been occupied for 19 years by the Jordanians), and by week’s end, threw back the Syrians from the strategic Golan Heights up north—which the Syrians had used to randomly shell Israeli towns and villages and meadows below unrestrained for decades.
The Six Day War, which surprised most Israelis in its brilliant efficacy, completely up-ended the then-Soviet Union’s strategy for dominion in the Middle East, solidified the US-Israel alliance, awakened Jewish pride worldwide and ended the post-Holocaust silence about what Europe had done to the Jews. It made Israel muscular and cool. It also, tragically for both sides, helped spawn the modern Palestinian terror movements because:
1) It exposed that the sovereign Arab nations had let the Palestinian refugees who were left homeless after Israel’s creation by the United Nations in 1947-48 simply fester in border camps rather than do the right thing by their brothers and sisters—even as Israel began to gather in millions of unwanted Jewish exiles from Yemen, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and all over the world.
2) It created an opportunity for Jewish radicals in Israel and elsewhere to begin a colonization process of settlements in areas that were not necessarily sovereign, thus exacerbating the issues and distorting the truly classic accomplishments of Israel in the areas of democracy, the sciences, culture, and, yes, human rights. The occupation, which was—for the record—never fully embraced by a majority of Israelis and despised by Israel’s secular and young—has distorted the national soul.
I sat in the dining room of one of my family members in Israel several years ago and greeted a young cousin who had just returned from an army stint in Hebron—a biblical town in the West Bank profoundly sacred to both Jews and Muslims.
Twentyish, olive-skinned, athletic, I recalled Yossi (not his real name) as a wonderfully mischievous little boy with a thick mane of dark hair, shining laughing eyes, and a love of life. Now, as a group of family sat and devoured a delectable lunch of trademark Israeli breads, tomatoes, cheeses, hummus, and dark coffee, we naturally discussed “the situation.” The little boy who became a soldier looked at me and said without compunction: “The only good Arab is a dead Arab.”
Of course, that sick phrase may have been co-opted from the ugliest scar in American history, as per the Native Americans that we exterminated and then lampooned as drunken fools. But I am haunted by it. I love my cousin and I pray for his safety. But I don’t remember such a sentiment at all in June, 1967, when, within weeks of the ceasefire, I arrived as a 14 year-old to a jubilant Israel that truly believed it had won the peace with its neighbors.
So will peace come when everybody is happy because everybody is dead? Or will Israel’s exemplary, inclusive democracy and enlightenment have pre-deceased the peace, anyway? I’m voting no on that.
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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer based in Encinitas, California. Your comment may be sent to him at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com or posted on this website, per the instructions below.
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