Pulling the Strings of Israeli Policy

Let us be straight and honest for just a moment. It is profoundly presumptuous for Mr. Obama, Ms. Clinton, and other United States officials of varying ranks to tell the world just how Israel must behave, to tell Israel how it must behave. Frankly, we did not ask for their opinions.

The argument sounds reasonable enough. The US funnels untold billions upon billions of dollars into Israel. They sell (or give) Israel weapons, fighter planes, and heaps of other destructive technology. The US profoundly jeopardizes its own international alliances and popularity with its ongoing loyalty to Israel, defending Israel for the most unpopular maneuvers and strategies in the stickiest of situations. Much of the world hatred and resentment of the US, where that is the dominant sentiment, couches itself in the claim that the US is too protective of Israel. On the global scene, the US has unquestionably been the greatest friend to the modern state of Israel since its founding.

But on what authority does the US dictate to Israel how to manage its land, where it may build, and where it is bidden to dismantle communities, neighborhoods, or even single buildings? As the argument goes, leaving aside the speculative issue of motivation, the US is concerned for the rights of the Palestinian people to live their own lives in their own land. After all, these people have been living in this land for untold centuries. What’s more, the same United Nations partition plan that paved the way for Israel’s statehood also called for a Palestinian state at its side. Israel’s population of territories not held before 1967 threaten and compromise the autonomy of these people. That’s the claim. But in this regard, the United States’ assumed moral authority is actually quite absurd.

To put things in perspective, consider someone ordering the US to liquidate San Antonio, Santa Fe, or Phoenix. After all, the Southwest was won in what was widely considered an offensive expansionist war, the territory seized from those who had lived there for centuries or millennia before the Caucasian Europeans overran them. Actually, the Southwest is just the tip of the iceberg. The entire continental US was forged in this manner. Millions of Native Americans were unceremoniously forced from their lands and homes; programmatically assimilated and slaughtered; and essentially erased; all in the name of Manifest Destiny. Put simply, the US was built on the cemetery of the once rich culture of the Native American peoples, insultingly ruined and reduced to the fate of casinos and reservations. And this was perpetrated by Europeans who, three hundred years earlier, didn't even know that North America existed! But no one would take seriously a motion to shut down Cleveland or return Boston.

And yet, with all the bitter irony and hypocrisy in the US purporting to be the international arbiter of morality, there is a much more fundamental issue at play. The right of the Jewish people to live in Israel does not originally emanate from UN resolutions or US support. This right comes from the divine covenant recorded in Jewish tradition.

The claim to divine right, however, is not a free pass. When Abraham was first settling himself in the land (Genesis 13), Tradition asserts that he kept his animals muzzled as he passed through fields that he did not own. Although the land was promised to his descendants, it was not yet his. Grazing on others’ properties was nothing short of theft. Generations later, the people of Israel sent spies into Canaan and listened to their pessimistic appraisal of their chances in the land. When they squandered their chance to enter straightaway, a band of determined Israelites attempted their own conquest (Numbers 14). But without divine guidance and protection, they were doomed.

What is this divine right? The land is provisionally delivered into the hands of the people with the understanding that they will honor its sacred trust. It is meant to be a bastion of divine worship and a haven of divine justice. “You must observe my statutes and laws and do not perform any of these abominations, the citizen and the foreigner among you. For all these abominations, the people of the land before you performed, and the land was defiled. And the land shall not purge you for your having defiled it, as it defiled the nation that was before you” (Leviticus 18:26-28). “Do not corrupt the land in which you live, for the blood will corrupt the land...” (Numbers 35:33).

As uncomfortable and unfamiliar as it may be to acknowledge it, Israel’s subsistence, prosperity, and enormous relative success over 61 years are pure functions of divine gift. The stability and security of the Jewish people in the State of Israel depends on providential guidance, without which, no amount of US support will make a bit of difference.

Ultimately, our domestic policy, our foreign policy, and our defense policy will benefit greatly from a simple realization. Israel does not belong to the US; it is not a colony. But the land does not belong to us either, insofar as allowing us to rule it by our own whims and inclinations. The land belongs to the Creator, and He has entrusted us to sanctify it.

Riots in Jerusalem

We have to stop.

Here’s where our deep-seated mistrust and resentment has gotten us, just in the past week. A community cries foul when one of its identifying members is arrested upon suspicion of endangering her toddler son’s life. The strong evidence is dismissed as libelous propaganda, part of a much wider conspiracy to discredit and incriminate the woman’s community.

The community erupts in disruptive protests, destroying public property, crippling traffic, and in a number of instances, causing bodily injury to those representing the government. The government responds by suspending the municipal services tendered to the larger community in those areas that are affected by the violence, citing the danger to municipal employees in their stations and places of work.
The conflict dominates the local news and makes splashes in international news. “Jews attacking Jews in the holy city of Jerusalem.” And that’s all it needs to say, really.

Have we had enough?

The headlines don’t identify which group is the “aggressor” and which is the “victim.” To the world, there is a bloody, messy, fiery image of Jewish infighting. It’s a picture of how we treat our most sacred city, and how we behave within it. Visitors of the world, please do not come and disrespect or defile our city. We would rather do it ourselves.

Pay attention. We do it. This is our collective responsibility. We gain nothing by pointing fingers at a particular community, or at the government conspiracy, for that matter. We are supposed to be one community. We are expected to be one community. We are one community. We are not fighting with foreign entities, with enemies from without. We are fighting with our brothers. We are fighting with ourselves.

The problem is that we don’t mind. The rift of values runs so deep that we have lost interest and motivation in resolving the conflict. But in the meantime, we viciously tear away at the common bonds that necessarily bind us. We neglect, trivialize, and ignore how interdependent our lives are and how much we need each other.

This is actually not a new problem. We’ve been in this situation before. The Talmud describes how just under 2000 years ago, the Jews of Jerusalem were also divided along religious and political lines. And instead of finding a common course and presenting a unified front, the factions cannibalized each other and literally destroyed their own resources if only to strike at the other factions. The end result, of course, was that Jerusalem was defenseless in the face of the belligerent enemy, and the Temple was destroyed. And this, we know, took place in the same season, the same weeks, in which we find ourselves now.

The labels, the deep-seated mistrust, the alienation, the stereotyping, and the apathy have to go. The distinctions that we draw between ourselves are relative and superficial. We adhere to these barriers at our own peril.

We have to stop.

With hostile neighbors busily bolstering their arsenals and issuing their insults and threats, the last thing we need to do is to weaken our own defenses and fight ourselves. To the others, the intermarried American journalist Daniel Pearl is as much a Jew as the Chabad emissary in Mumbai. When the international community sees us as a singular unit with a common fate, why don’t we see the same thing?