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This article originally appeared in the Summer 2023 issue of CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly and is reprinted with permission of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. The full special issue on “Israel at Seventy-Five” can be found at https://ccar.co/summer23.

“A Tough Neighborhood”

This is the line of Noah. Noah was a righteous man; he was blameless in his age; Noah walked with God.

— Genesis 6:9 JPS 1962, 1985, 1999

A rabbinic midrash on this verse suggests that a person should not be judged by absolute standards — that time, place, and circumstances should be considered. I believe the same consideration should apply to judging nations, including Israel. Rabbi Jeff Salkin wrote in this journal, in 2007, that many Reform rabbis have been too effective critiquing religious inequality in Israel before teaching love of Israel. Eleven years later, he wrote that religious issues are not a major reason for Reform Jewish alienation from Israel. In this article, I will address what I believe are some of the major reasons for that alienation and my responses to them.

Is it fair to compare Israel to other nations that are at peace with their neighbors? As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu famously said, “Israel lives in a tough neighborhood.” Just as retail stores in crime-ridden areas of the U.S. have roll-down gates; just as private homes in crime-ridden areas of many countries have bars on their windows, Israel built a wall to reduce terrorist attacks. Although it was widely denounced, it has saved lives.

The destruction of Israel is the official policy of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Authority which rule the Arab Muslims of Gaza, Lebanon, and the “West Bank,” respectively. Iran, which does not share a physical border with Israel, calls publicly for Israel’s destruction. Iran is developing offensive weapons with that stated purpose and supplies weapons to Hamas and Hezbollah. Any discussion of Israel’s defensive measures must be in the context of this reality.

Critiques and Responses

The Elephant in the Room

Israel’s continued occupation of the Arab Muslim areas of the West Bank has been a public relations disaster. Israel has failed to embed in public opinion, in the U.S. and elsewhere, the fact that it never sought such a long occupation. In 1967, Israel offered to return this area to Jordan in exchange for recognition and peace. The Arab League conference in Sudan that fall replied “No peace. No negotiation. No recognition.” Israel did give up land for peace with Egypt in 1978. In 1994 Israel and Jordan concluded a peace agreement which included minimal land transfers from Israel to Jordan and left the status of Jordan’s former West Bank territories unresolved.

Israel has also failed to embed in world opinion the facts that it withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, forcibly evicting Israeli citizens, which allowed Hamas to turn it into a military base from which to launch rockets and build tunnels. Israel offered the PA 96 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, including the Temple Mount, in 2000 and 98 percent in 2008 and was rebuffed both times. President Bill Clinton, who worked closely with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in the 2000 negotiation, told PA President Yasser Arafat when he rejected Israel’s offer “You are leading your people and the region to a catastrophe.” It seems that the PA preferred their stated long-term goal of eradicating Israel completely over immediate nationhood.

I remember vividly the heartbreak of one liberal rabbi, who spoke from the pulpit on Rosh Hashanah 2001, about having seen video of Arab Muslims in the West Bank rejoicing over the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in New York City on September 11 of that year. This rabbi, who I believed was a “dove” concerning Israel’s relationship with the Arab Muslims in the West Bank, said publicly that “There are some people whom you just can’t make peace with.” While I would like to believe that it may someday be possible for Israel to make peace with the Arab Muslim residents of the West Bank and even of Gaza, this does not seem likely or even possible under current conditions. The misguided sympathy for their situation which has been aroused in international opinion probably bolsters their determination not to make peace.

Apartheid “Catnip”

One of the charges against Israel which resonates most strongly among young Americans, including young American Jews, is that Israel is an “apartheid state.” This is “catnip,” calculated to provoke an emotional response, impervious to reason or fact. It plays into the “intersectional” dogma conflating all “oppressed minorities”: Blacks, Hispanics, LGBTQ, etc. My response to this charge is that most Israelis would not want to be occupiers of others if Israel’s safety could be secured. Prime Minister Netanyahu has said that if the Arab Muslims laid down their weapons there would be no more war, but if Israel laid down its weapons there would be no more Israel. Because Israel’s attempts to return the West Bank have been rebuffed, its efforts to protect its citizens must be understood within the context of constant threats they face.

Big Lie #1: “White European Colonialism”

An additional charge which resonates strongly among young Americans, including Jews, is that Israel is an outpost of “white European colonialism.” The facts refute this charge:

There has always been some Jewish presence in the land, notwithstanding the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Jews by the Romans in the wars of 66-70 CE and 132-135 CE. In 2008 I visited a 4th century CE synagogue in the Galilee. Clearly Jews lived in the area.

The estimated 567,654 Jews who were expelled from Arab Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa, from May 1948 to the end of 1967, almost equaled the number of mostly European Jews who were in Israel in 1948. It was not much less than the number of Arab Muslims who left Israel after May 1948.

Most of the Jews who came to Israel from those Arab Muslim countries were not “white Europeans.” Since 1948, Israel airlifted in thousands of Yemenite Jews and, decades later, Ethiopian Jews. They became citizens under the Law of Return.

Today, a majority of Israeli Jews are at least partly descended from Middle Eastern and North African Jews. Objectively, they can’t be considered “white Europeans.”

Anyone who has visited Israel has seen Jews of many skin tones, some of whom would be considered “persons of color” in U.S. colleges and universities. In 2013, Titi Aynaw, an Ethiopian Jewish orphan, was crowned Miss Israel. In February 2022, an Arab Muslim, Khaled Kabub, was appointed a justice of Israel’s supreme court.

Big Lie #2: “Israel Stole the Land”

Another charge against Israel is that it sits on land that was “stolen” from the indigenous inhabitants. In fact, large areas of the current State of Israel were unoccupied desert and swampland when major Jewish immigration began in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The Jewish pioneers who arrived to join the existing Jewish population irrigated the desert and drained the swamps to make the land arable. Much of the land onto which Jewish immigrants moved was bought from absentee Turkish owners, Arab owners, and other entities by the Jewish National Fund and individual Jewish philanthropists. Denials of this, by anti-Israel propagandists, have been swallowed whole by liberal Jews whom I know personally.

The Abraham Accords

The Abraham Accords of 2020 have somewhat altered the situation on the ground. The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain apparently acted in what they believed to be their own best interests, without giving the Arab Muslim residents of the West Bank and Gaza a veto. Moreover, I’m confident that the UAE and Bahrain had tacit approval from Saudi Arabia to enter their new relationship with Israel. I believe that the leaders of all three of these Sunni Muslim countries, and some others, have more fear of Shiite Muslim Iran than disdain for Israel.

(In November 2022, at my local Costco, I bought a box of kosher baklava bites, in the holiday season entertaining section. It was produced in the UAE in enough quantity to sell in Costco.)

Israeli Exceptionalism

Military Restraint

What other nation warns its enemies of impending attacks? It is well documented that in Israel’s actions against Hamas in Gaza and against Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Israel Defense Forces have exercised tremendous restraint by delaying retaliatory attacks and reducing their effectiveness to warn nearby civilians. Both Hamas and Hezbollah have stored munitions in civilian buildings and neighborhoods and launched rockets at Israel from them, with callous disregard for the lives of their own population. The IDF has dropped leaflets into these areas and has even made phone calls to warn vulnerable civilians.

Foreign Disaster Relief

As I write this in February 2023, Israel has just sent 150 disaster recovery and medical workers and lifesaving supplies to Turkey in response to its terrible earthquakes. This is especially noteworthy because of Israel’s rocky relations with Turkey since Recip Tayyip Erdogan’s election in 2003 and ongoing Turkish support for Hamas. That support was highlighted by the 2010 “Freedom Flotilla” which sailed from Turkey and seemed intended to promote international hostility toward Israel via a public relations incident.

Israel is even sending aid to help people in Syria, which is openly hostile to Israel, to recover from the same earthquake. Israel has famously been the first or one of the first countries to give emergency assistance to victims of natural disasters in Florida, Texas, Mexico, Haiti, and many other places. In 2016, I attended a New York Board of Rabbis Yom Ha-Atzmaut flag raising, at Bowling Green in Manhattan, at which a Haitian member of the New York City Council thanked Israel for its assistance to his homeland.

Israel knows how to serve humanity and is committed to doing so, even in places where it is hated, even in places where the government is openly hostile to it. I question whether Israel’s hostile neighbors, as well as other nations which vote consistently against Israel at the UN, would send aid if Israel were to suffer a similar disaster.

Technology for the World

In 2018, my wife and I rode Israel’s coastal highway, from Haifa to Tel Aviv. We passed campuses of nearly every major high-tech company you could name. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Motorola, etc. were all there. People throughout the world, in places where Israel is admired and in places where Israel is hated, use technology developed in Israel to earn their livelihoods and to communicate with one another. It’s ironic that much of the hatred for Israel which is spewed daily online travels via technology that Israel pioneered or helped to develop.

Regional Medical Resource

On a Friday in July 2008, I stood on Mt. Scopus in Jerusalem, near the gates of the original campus of Hadassah Hospital. Most of the people I saw coming out of the gates that afternoon were Arab Muslim men and women in traditional dress. Hadassah’s hospitals are duly proud of their record of employing Jewish, Muslim, and Christian doctors and nurses to treat Jewish, Muslim, and Christian patients. Israel has even provided medical treatment to al-Qaida fighters wounded in the Syrian civil war.

In July 2008 I also visited Efrat, in the Gush Etzion enclave, which is surrounded by an Arab Muslim population. At the time, Efrat was starting work on a medical urgent care facility. I was told that the local Arab Muslims declined the opportunity to share in the staffing and running of the urgent care center. Nevertheless, the stated purpose of the facility is to treat “residents of the region,” not specific groups of residents.

Human Rights in a “Tough Neighborhood”

In the spring of 2016, I taught Jewish Life and Thought at Rollins College, in Winter Park, Florida, to a diverse class of Christians and Jews. Two of my Christian students were also taking a Middle Eastern Studies course, taught by a Muslim woman. These students told me that their professor had shown her class a video on the Israel lobby in the U.S. I replied that of course there is an Israel lobby in the U.S., and that it’s needed to defend Israel in a mostly hostile world.

Thinking about what matters to liberal college students, I created and handed out a listing of human rights in Israel. I wanted to show that unlike many of its neighbors, Israel respects:

Women’s Rights — sexual freedom, business ownership, election to public office

Religious Freedom — Mosques and churches are built. Muslims and Christians hold public office.

Freedom of Speech — Anti-government opinions are published. Full internet access for all.

I believe the listing was eye-opening for many of my students and speaks to the concern of today’s young liberal Jews and other young Americans about “social justice.”

At about that time, the University of Central Florida, where I’ve taught since 2014, was visited by Hen Mazig, an openly gay former IDF officer, who spoke at the campus Hillel. I wonder in which of the neighboring countries he would be allowed to live, let alone serve as a military officer. Indeed, Israel is a unique human rights refuge in a “tough neighborhood.”

Disclaimer

I have read charges online of interference with Arab Muslim life in the West Bank by some far-right Orthodox Jews, including destruction of olive groves, seizure of grazing lands, etc. I have no direct knowledge of these matters and will leave their consideration and discussion to others.

Rabbi Sanford Olshansky, AJR 2011, Gratz College MA in Jewish Studies 2011, CCAR 2013, lives in Brevard County, Florida, about ½ hour southwest of Kennedy Space Center, with his wife of 51 years, Marilyn Olshansky, a retired attorney. They have a son, daughter-in-law, and 2 grandsons, ages 9 and 5. They love to travel domestically by car and often cruise internationally.

CCAR is the Central Conference of American Rabbis. The journal has been published since 1953.