A Confused Generation

I received a letter from a Jewish student at Duke University, in response to a recent article I wrote, Fearing Our Own Strength.

“I am writing to express to you my disappointment and sadness in response to your latest email, which although claiming to be apolitical, seems to equate Israeli nationalist militancy with the religion of Judaism, which as you know are not necessarily equivalent, and is moreover decidedly political. 

“Pictures that show religious Jews devoutly praying next to tanks which are used to kill innocent people, unfortunately equates piety with state terrorism, and is essentially the same type of equivocation that Muslim militants use when they try to justify their murderous ideology with religious ideals.

“Instead, I would call on you as a fellow human being, a religious leader, and worshiper of the One True G‑d to a higher discourse that calls for sanity, peace, and human compassion in a time filled with insane aggression and hatred — on both sides.

The prophets of Israel were the first to conceive of peace as an ideal. Isaiah gave voice to the great words engraved in the imagination of the West: "Nation shall not lift up sword against Nation; neither shall they learn war anymore." For millennia, Jews have dreamt of the day when a child will ask, "Mother, what was war?"

In the Jewish tradition, when we meet somebody we greet them with the words “Sholom Aleichem,” peace unto you, to which they respond, “Aleichem Sholom,” unto you peace. The reason for this costume is in order to state at the onset of the encounter that the goal of the meeting is to foster peace between the people converging and in the world at large. If there is peace, says the Midrash, there is everything; in the absence of peace, nothing else amounts to anything.

How do we achieve this peace? “I would call on you as a fellow human being, a religious leader, and worshiper of the One True G‑d to a higher discourse that calls for sanity, peace, and human compassion in a time filled with insane aggression and hatred — on both sides.” This is a beautiful calling I’d love to follow. Yet, my dear student, may I ask you a question.

Say, your little brothers were sitting and playing cards with each other on the porch of your home in San Francisco, when a group of gangsters came and kidnapped both of them, killed eight other members of your family, and began launching hundreds of rockets on your neighborhood, killing and maiming children and adults sitting in their homes, playing in the parks, working in their shops and going about their own business. What would be the right thing to do? What would be the appropriate response driven by sanity and compassion? What would you expect of your government at such a moment?

Perhaps you’d opt for the choice of sending roses to the launchers of the rockets, the kidnappers of the youngsters and the killers of your family, with a message of peace. You’d communicate to them how much we would like to reconcile our differences and reach a state of mutual respect.

Granted. Now, following these gestures, including the fulfillment of their demands to redefine the borders of your home, they continue to fire these rockets, targeting men, women and children anywhere and everywhere. Innocent people are being buried daily. Your foe insists that his goal is to destroy your entire family and annihilate your city. What would you do now?

You may choose to meditate on the higher calling of peace and compassion and continue to reach out with affection to the launchers of the rockets. But wouldn’t you in affect be assisting their crimes against humanity, enabling children to be blown to pieces?

If you observed a human being about to launch a rocket on a school filled with children, what would be the moral response? To give the launcher an embrace as he shoots the deadly rocket, or to cut him down right there on the spot and save the lives of the children?

Do you feel that the violent and bloody war against Hitler was also a rejection of the “higher discourse that calls for sanity, peace, and human compassion?” I suspect that deep in your heart you know the answer: If the allies would have not engaged the Nazi regime in war, you and I, together with millions of other Jews and innocent people would not be here today. Hitler was not stopped through love; he was defeated through aggression.

This is why in the present war raging between Israel and Hezbollah, even the Israeli left, usually filled with scorn toward nationalistic militancy, have been fully supportive.

In the past, the Israeli left preached that the Arab aggression toward Israel was a result of its occupation of Arab land. Give up the territories occupied in the 1967 war and reconciliation will follow.

In truth, the war of the Palestinians against Israel has as much to do with occupation as Hitler’s war against the Jews was a result of occupation. A year ago, Israel withdrew from Gaza completely. No more occupation in Gaza; not an inch. The result has been increased attacks from un-occupied Gaza, targeting Israeli civilians almost on a daily basis.

However, this time around, nobody can even claim there is occupied land involved. Israel has left Lebanon in May 2000. Israel would not touch Hezbollah if it did not attack. Israel seeks to live in peace with its neighbors; Hezbollah and its allies seek to destroy Israel, no matter what Israel does. They are culpable for the fate of poor Lebanese innocents amongst whom they hide. To define this war as state terrorism, and describe it as nationalistic militancy, is not only objectively wrong, but also immoral. By demanding of Israel not to eliminate Hezbollah, you are demanding of them to allow their children to be murdered. That is cruel.

Judaism is not political, but it has long ago stated, that “One who exercises compassion toward the cruel, will end up exercising cruelty toward the compassionate.”

During these challenging days, Israel need not be ashamed to stand tall, and not falter nor sway. Tragically, there are signs that Israel may be once again falling prey to immoral criticism that undermines its own safety.

On Wednesday, July 26, nine Israeli soldiers died and 27 others were injured in the hardest day of fighting in southern Lebanon since the war began two weeks ago, as they were searching homes for Hezbollah fighters. The Israeli press reported, that officers in the Golani and Paratroops Brigades charged that the IDF employed insufficient force before the soldiers were deployed to search the homes and that once the civilians had been told to leave the town, the army should have regarded Bint Jbail as a battlefield and destroyed from the air any home where Hezbollah guerrillas were suspected of hiding, instead of sending the soldiers in to the line of fire.

Remember the Jenin tragedy in April 2002? The hand-to-hand, door-to-door combat, among dozens of houses booby-trapped by Palestinian fighters, claimed the lives of 23 soldiers. Israeldid not want to cause the civilian casualties that come with aerial bombardment, as has happened everywhere from Grozny to Kabul. Notwithstanding this, Israel was then charged with massacre and investigated precisely for defending itself against massacres that warrant no UN investigation.