What Israel Means to Me

In light of the extraordinarily difficult circumstances facing Israel today, we felt it all the more important to share with you David Harris's chapter in the new book edited by Alan Dershowitz, What Israel Means to Me. Though written eighteen months ago to meet the publishing deadline, it is a poignant reminder of Israel's significance to the Jewish and larger worlds. Best Regards, Kenneth Bandler Director of Communications, AJC What Israel Means to Me by David A. Harris Executive Director, AJC Let me put my cards on the table right up front. I’m not dispassionate when it comes to Israel. The establishment of the state in 1948; the fulfillment of its envisioned role as home and haven for Jews from around the world; its wholehearted embrace of democracy and the rule of law; and its impressive scientific, cultural, and economic achievements are accomplishments beyond my wildest imagination. For centuries, Jews around the world prayed for a return to Zion. We are the lucky ones who have seen those prayers answered. I am ever so grateful to witness this most extraordinary period in Jewish history and Jewish sovereignty. And when one adds the key element, namely, that all this took place not in the Middle West but in the Middle East, where Israel’s neighbors determined from day one to destroy it through any means available to them—from full-scale wars to wars of attrition; from diplomatic isolation to international delegitimation; from primary to secondary to even tertiary economic boycotts; from terrorism to the spread of anti-Semitism, often thinly veiled as anti-Zionism—the story of Israel’s first fifty-six years becomes all the more remarkable. It is a tale of nation-building entirely without precedent. Here was a people brought to the brink of utter destruction by the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany and its allies. Here was a people shown to be utterly powerless to influence a largely indifferent world to stop, or even slow down, the Final Solution. And here was a people, numbering but 600,000, living cheek by jowl with often hostile Arab neighbors, under unsympathetic British occupation, on a harsh soil with no significant natural resources other than human resources in then Mandatory Palestine. That the blue-and-white flag of an independent Israel could be planted on this land, to which the Jewish people had been intimately linked since the time of Abraham, just three years after the Second World War’s end—and with the support of a decisive majority of UN members at the time—truly boggles the mind. And what’s more, that this tiny community of Jews, including survivors of the Holocaust who had somehow made their way to Palestine despite the British blockade, could successfully defend themselves against the onslaught of five Arab standing armies that launched their attack on Israel’s very first day of existence, is almost beyond imagination.   To understand the essence of Israel’s meaning, it is enough to ask how the history of the Jewish people might have been different had there been a Jewish state in 1933, in 1938, or even in 1941. If Israel had controlled its borders and the right of entry instead of Britain, if Israel had had embassies and consulates throughout Europe, how many more Jews might have escaped and found sanctuary? I witnessed firsthand what Israeli embassies and consulates meant to Jews drawn by the pull of Zion or the push of hatred. I stood in the courtyard of the Israeli embassy in Moscow and saw thousands of Jews seeking a quick exit from a Soviet Union in the throes of cataclysmic change, fearful that the change might be in the direction of renewed chauvinism and anti-Semitism. Awestruck, I watched firsthand as Israel never faltered, not even for a moment, in transporting Soviet Jews to the Jewish homeland, even as Scud missiles launched from Iraq traumatized the nation in 1991. It says a lot about the conditions they were leaving behind that these Jews continued to board planes for Tel Aviv while missiles were exploding in Israeli population centers. In fact, on two occasions I sat in sealed rooms with Soviet Jewish families who had just arrived in Israel during these missile attacks. Not once did any of them question their decision to establish new lives in the Jewish state.  And equally, it says a lot about Israel that, amid all the pressing security concerns, it managed, without missing a beat, to continue to welcome these new immigrants. In the mid-1980s, I saw firsthand Israel do what no Western, much less Arab, country had ever done before—bring out black Africans, in this case Ethiopian Jews, not in chains for exploitation, but in dignity for freedom. These Ethiopian Jews, numbering tens of thousands, had lived as Jews since the time of Solomon and Sheba and had yearned for a return to Zion ever since. In our lifetimes, their dreams came true, though the perilous journey out of Ethiopia cost the lives of thousands who fell victim to bandits, unforgiving terrain, and hunger. And how can I ever forget the surge of pride, Jewish pride, that completely enveloped me in July 1976 on hearing the astonishing news of Israel’s daring rescue of the 106 Jewish hostages held by Arab and German terrorists in Entebbe, Uganda, over 2,000 miles from Israel’s border? The unmistakable message: Jews in danger will never again be alone, without hope, and totally dependent on others for their safety. Not least, I can still remember as if it were yesterday my very first visit to Israel. It was in 1970, and I was not quite twenty-one years old. I didn’t know what to expect, but I recall being quite emotional from the moment I boarded the El Al plane to the very first glimpse of the Israeli coastline from the plane’s window. As I disembarked, I surprised myself by wanting to kiss the ground. In the ensuing weeks, I marveled at everything I saw. To me it was as if every apartment building, factory, school, orange grove, and Egged bus were nothing less than a miracle. A Jewish state was unfolding before my very eyes. After centuries of persecutions, pogroms, exiles, ghettos, pales of settlement, inquisitions, blood libels, forced conversions, discriminatory legislation, and immigration restrictions—and, no less, centuries of prayers, dreams, and yearning—the Jews had come back home and would be masters of their own fate. I was overwhelmed by the mix of people, backgrounds, languages, and lifestyles, and by the intensity of life itself. Everyone, it seemed, had a compelling story to tell. There were Holocaust survivors with harrowing tales of their years in the camps. There were Jews from Arab countries, whose stories of persecution in such countries as Iraq, Libya, and Syria were little known at the time. There were the first Jews arriving from the USSR seeking repatriation in the Jewish homeland. There were the sabras, the native-born Israelis, many of whose families had lived in Palestine for generations. There were local Arabs, both Christian and Muslim. There were Druze, whose religious practices are kept secret from the outside world. And on and on. I was moved beyond words by the sight of Jerusalem and the fervor with which observant and even not-so-observant Jews prayed at the Western Wall. And I was particularly struck by the youth and their dedication to the state. Coming from a nation that was at the time deeply divided and demoralized, I found my Israeli peers to be unabashedly proud of their country, eager to serve in the military, and, in many cases, determined to volunteer for the most elite combat units. They felt personally involved in the enterprise of building a Jewish state. To be sure, nation-building is an infinitely complex process. In Israel’s case, that nation-building began against a backdrop of tensions with a local Arab population that laid claim to the very same land, and tragically refused a United Nations proposal to divide the land into Arab and Jewish states; as the Arab world sought to isolate, demoralize, and ultimately destroy the state; as Israel’s population doubled in the first three years of the country’s existence, putting an unimaginable strain on severely limited resources; as the nation was forced to devote a vast portion of its limited national budget to defense expenditures; and as the country coped with forging a national identity and social consensus among a population that could not have been more geographically, linguistically, socially, and culturally heterogeneous. Moreover, there is the tricky and underappreciated issue of the potential clash between the messy realities of statehood and, in this case, the ideals and faith of a people. It is one thing for a people to live their religion as a minority; it is quite another to exercise sovereignty as the majority population while remaining true to one’s ethical standards. Inevitably, tension will arise between a people’s spiritual or moral self-definition and the exigencies of statecraft, between our highest concepts of human nature and the daily realities of individuals in decision-making positions wielding power and balancing a variety of competing interests. Even so, shall we raise the bar so high as to practically ensure that Israel—forced to function in the often gritty, morally ambiguous world of international relations and politics, especially as a small, endangered state—will always fall short? On the other hand, the notion that Israel would ever become ethically indistinguishable from any other country, reflexively seeking cover behind the convenient justification of realpolitik to explain its behavior, must be equally unacceptable. Loving Israel certainly doesn’t mean overlooking its shortcomings, including, in my judgment, the excessive and unholy intrusion of religion into politics, the marginalization of non-Orthodox Jewish religious streams, the dangers posed by political and religious zealots, and the unfinished, if undeniably complex, task of integrating Israeli Arabs into the mainstream. But it also doesn’t mean allowing such issues to overshadow Israel’s remarkable achievements, accomplished, as I’ve said, under the most difficult of circumstances. In just fifty-six years, Israel has built a thriving democracy, unique in the region, including a Supreme Court prepared, when it deems appropriate, to overrule the prime minister or the military establishment, a feisty parliament that includes every imaginable viewpoint along the political spectrum, a robust civil society, and a vigorous press. It has built an economy whose per capita GNP exceeds the combined total of its four contiguous sovereign neighbors—Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. It has built universities and research centers that have contributed to advancing the world’s frontiers of knowledge in countless ways. This year alone, two of its scientists shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It has built one of the world’s most powerful militaries—always under civilian control—to ensure its survival in a rough-and-tumble neighborhood. It has shown the world how a tiny nation, no larger than New Jersey or Wales, can, by sheer ingenuity, will, courage, and commitment, defend itself against those who would destroy it through conventional armies or armies of suicide bombers. And it has done all this while striving to adhere to a strict code of military conduct that has few rivals in the democratic world, much less elsewhere—in the face of an enemy prepared to send children to the front lines and seek cover in mosques, schools, and hospitals. It has built a thriving culture, whose musicians, writers, and artists are admired far beyond Israel’s borders. In doing so, it has lovingly taken an ancient language, Hebrew, the language of the prophets, and rendered it modern to accommodate the vocabulary of the contemporary world. It has built a climate of respect for other faith groups, including Baha’i, Christianity and Islam, and their places of worship.           Step back from the twists and turns of the daily information overload coming from the Middle East and consider the sweep of the last fifty-six years. Look at the light-years traveled since the darkness of the Holocaust, and marvel at the miracle of a decimated people returning to a tiny sliver of land—the land of our ancestors, the land of Zion and Jerusalem—and successfully building a modern, vibrant state against all the odds, on that ancient foundation. In the final analysis, then, the story of Israel is the wondrous realization of a 3,500-year link among a land, a faith, a language, a people, and a vision. It is an unparalleled story of tenacity and determination, of courage and renewal. And it is ultimately a metaphor for the triumph of enduring hope over the temptation of despair.

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