Why We Jews Need Israel
By
Leonard Zwelling
I have just broken the Yom Kippur fast with lox and assorted salads from Kenny and Ziggy’s. It is the first time in years we have not gone to a break the fast party, primarily because the close friend who usually throws these dinners lost her husband this year. That weighed heavily on my mind all day in synagogue. On most Yom Kippur mornings, her husband would be sitting next to me as he had for more than 40 years. He was a great friend and I miss him a lot. This was a particularly heavy Yom Kippur for me because of his absence.
Every year Yom Kippur is six and a half hours in synagogue without food or water after having fasted since dinner the night before. This serves to concentrate the mind. Along with thoughts about those loved ones and friends I have lost, especially during the beautiful Memorial Service at 3 PM, I thought a lot about being a Jew and about my relationship with Israel. I am a committed Zionist even as the current government in Israel makes that a politically fraught stance for us diaspora Jews.
This is a difficult time to be a Jew in America. Israel is being used as a campaign weapon by the left and right. The left thinks the Israelis are committing genocide in Gaza even as it was these same Gazans who elected Hamas to lead them after Israel voluntarily vacated Gaza. It was Hamas that killed and captured more Jews in a single day than had happened since the Holocaust. What was Israel supposed to do, allow that butchery to go unanswered?
The right attacks Israel for depending so heavily on the United States for its security and for the U.S. spending so much on Israel’s defense. But Israel is the only democracy in the region and the only truly dependable ally the U.S. has in the Middle East. Again, what would the conservative critics have Israel do? Surrender to the hostile forces surrounding it? How many more times does Israel have to go to war to stop those Arabs who wish the Jews driven into the sea?
But the real reason there has to be an Israel is far more personal for me as it should be for every Jew on the planet.
Back in the beginning of Zionism in the late 19th century, there were those Jews who opposed Zionism and the founding of a Jewish homeland in what became British Palestine. This sentiment lasted among Jews in the United States for over 50 years. Rather than have a Jewish homeland in Israel, these anti-Zionists wanted to depend on assimilation for the survival of diaspora Jews. The only problem with this idea is that there may never have been a Jewish community more assimilated in the country in which they resided than the Jews of Germany and Austria before WWII. We all know how that turned out.
The point is that Jews can NEVER depend on assimilation for their survival because sooner or later we will be discriminated against. Antisemitism is never dead. It’s having a major comeback in both right- and left-wing America, not to mention Germany. The extremists on the right want to treat us like the Nazis did and those on the left are falling over themselves running for Congress by being as pro-Palestinian as possible. Has it ever occurred to these people that the Palestinian Arabs they champion have done nothing to gain their own country, but rather resort to terrorism instead of negotiation at every opportunity they get?
We Jews must have Israel because we must have a place to go to when we have nowhere else to go. I know Jews in America, especially young Jews, cannot imagine ever being driven out of the country. It almost happened before the Second World War. If Charles Lindbergh had been elected president, it probably would have. (Here’s a slice of 1939 Nazi reality in Madison Square Garden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZp5VHe0pV0).
I try to have no illusions about who I am. I have been pretty lucky in my life and haven’t faced a great deal of anti-Semitism, but there was some when I got to Duke and some even here in Texas. Some was even at the hands of other Jews who were filled with self-loathing.
It is not likely that I will have to move to Israel in my lifetime. But, it is a great comfort knowing Israel is there for me if need be. As for my children and their children, well, I won’t be here to see what happens, but if I could be and they were forced to emigrate, I would not be surprised.
The United States has a deep history of racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism. I lived through the 1960s. We thought we had turned a corner in our fight against hate, but today, we can add anti-immigrant sentiment and Islamophobia to the growing list of reasons some Americans hate other Americans. Anti-Semitism is on the rise in this country and you never know when that will reach the point it reached in civilized Germany and Austria in the 1930s.
That’s why we need to have Israel as a Jewish state in the Middle East. It is also why the one-state solution of a single country from “the river to the sea” harboring all the people, Arabs, Jews and all others, cannot be viable. That would never result in a Jewish homeland. We must have a place to go when everywhere else wants us gone.
We in America are no more assimilated than the Jews in Germany and Austria in the 1930s. They thought they were safe. They were not as the Tony-winning play Leopoldstadt demonstrates. It could happen again. With a Jewish Israel we have a prayer of making “Never Again” real. We must have a Jewish state in the Middle East.
Am Yisrael Chai. The people of Israel live.
