Every time I go to Israel I experience the same sensation: wonder. Although I’ve been going since I was a child, there comes a moment on every trip when I ask myself: Did I just board a plane in New York and disembark in a Jewish state? For hundreds of generations, Jews were a stateless people. By what bizarre stroke of luck am I among the handful to have witnessed the rebirth of Jewish civilization in our ancestral land? For thousands of years, Jews lived in communities scattered across the globe, developing their cultures largely in isolation. Now I can walk down the street and watch Yemenite, German, Moroccan, Lithuanian and Ethiopian Jewish culture collide.
These aren’t sophisticated insights. They’re not really insights at all. They’re an emotional reaction over which I don’t have much control. My grandfather was never happier than when he was on Dizengoff Street. My father, in middle age, began working in Israel and made closer friends than he had made in an entire lifetime in South Africa and the United States. I’m now approaching the age at which they began travelling regularly to Israel and I feel the same joy. In some way or another, we all become our parents. This is one of mine.
People often tell me I hate Israel. And I guess I understand why. I do hate Israel’s policy of holding millions of West Bank Palestinians as non-citizens under military law, without free movement or the right to vote in the state that controls their lives. But what others interpret as hatred feels to me like dread. I dread the prospect that my kids, when they reach adulthood, won’t be able to board a plane, disembark in Israel and feel the same wonder as their father, grandfather and great-grandfather. I dread the idea that prior generations were like the Maccabees, who created a miracle-country, and that we’ll be like the Hasmoneans, who squandered it.
In 2007, Ehud Olmert warned, “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights… the State of Israel is finished.” I don’t think that day is too far off. That’s what I dread.
This dread separates me from many of the Palestinians I deeply admire. Even if they might accept a two-state solution on practical grounds, they consider Zionism a nightmare. And given their life experience, I understand why.
But, strangely, my dread links me to the right-wing Jews who tell me I hate Israel. They too dread being undertakers for the Zionist dream. They just believe the cause of death will be leaving the West Bank, not keeping it. They’re so convinced that what I see as medicine is poison that they assume I think it’s poison too.
Our dread is what we share. Often when I finish giving a lecture, someone walks up to me and begins screaming. I don’t mind. Once, after I spoke at a New Jersey yeshiva, a pack of indignant students followed me all the way to my car. I remember it fondly. I like being around people who know the stakes are high. We may be on different sides, but we’re both in the game.
The Jews who bother me most are the ones who don’t care enough to shout. I only had to convince those New Jersey yeshiva students to think differently about Israel. I didn’t have to convince them to care about Israel. That’s much harder.
The deepest gulf is not between those American Jews who think Israel should leave the West Bank and those who think it should stay. It’s between those who believe our lives are intertwined with Israel and those who consider Israel as just another country. I appreciate Birthright for moving some college students from the latter category into the former. Once they care, they’re more likely to let an organization like Encounter or Extend or Breaking the Silence take them to meet Palestinians in the West Bank and see the things Sheldon Adelson tried to hide.
My wife and I have enrolled our children in their own kind of Birthright. It’s called Jewish day school, and it’s a journey they take most days of the year. It’s a journey to a place where many people don’t share my views on Israel. Some actively loathe them. If I wanted to maximize the chances that my children would end up on my political side, I’d enroll them somewhere else. But that’s not my priority. My priority is making sure they’re in the game.
