Walking with Israel

Parshat Bechukotai

Walking With Israel

© Rabbi Neil A. Tow, 2011

This past week the President gave a foreign policy speech and said that post-negotiation, final status Israel will move back to the lines at the end of the 1967, Six Day war.

This past week Mahmoud Abbas wrote an op ed for the New York Times full of revisionist history and other misinformation.

Neither of these two offerings change the fact that the Arab world adopted anti-Semitism, anti-Israel, and anti-Western feelings as a core part of its way of thinking about the world.

In this Arab Spring, the people on the street have shown that they want an alternative to dictatorships and oppression.  We don’t yet know what that alternative will be – we’ve seen how difficult the concept of democracy is in the Middle East, to date, to my knowledge, Israel is the only stable democratic state in the middle east, except perhaps for Turkey on Syria and Iraq’s northern borders.

Neither of the two offerings from this past week change the fact that Israel has successfully fought four wars, and countless more battles to maintain the legitimacy it earned in the November 1947 vote in the United Nations, nor the fact that the Arab side rejected the 1947 vote for partition, a partition that would have left Israel and the other side each with 3 chunks of sovereign land.

The early Israelis accepted it.  The Arab side rejected it, and since then has never stop saying to itself or to the world that it does not recognize Israel, is at war with Israel, wants to eliminate Israel as a sovereign country.

As David Harris, AJC executive director, points out that between 1948 and 1967 the Palestinians did not seek their own sovereign state.  Why didn’t they?  For that matter, why didn’t they fight for their land in World War 1?  Why does the world not talk about how the Arabs and Germans agreed to wipe out the Jews in the area when they planned to march in?  Why doesn’t anyone talk about the Arab countries that expelled their Jewish people and held onto their assets? 

22,000 soldiers have lost their lives in defense of Israel.  50,000 wounded.  There are MIAs for whom we still pray.

I have hope that just as civilizations of the past deteriorated and disappeared, just as Arab countries surrounding Israel flail and struggle in response to their own people seeking justice, somehow Israel will make it through and continue to shine a light in the region.  Somehow, our participation in the Israel Day parade on June 5^th, and buying Israeli products, and interacting with Israelis here and abroad, will have an impact, at least on some people.

Let’s agree to make it a priority in the next several months to talk about Israel, to check the current news from both American and Israeli news services, to support a good cause in Israel like the Masorti movement or other gemilut chasadim projects there, to buy Israeli foods and other products, to contact our congressmen and women to let them know that we need a pro-American, stable democracy in the middle east more than ever, to travel to Israel – come with me and the group on the mission in April of 2012.

With our hope, with our efforts, we can help assure that according to the words of this week’s parsha, Bechukotai, that the people will have security in the Holy Land and that there will be peace and wholeness there, we pray that this comes, bimherah beyamenu, quickly in our days.  Amen.