After the funeral of my two daughters in April, I woke up in the middle of the night with a strange idea. I wrote down my thoughts and went back to sleep. In the morning, I asked Oded Revivi, the mayor of my town, Efrat, to call an international press conference and that afternoon, to my surprise, it took place. I spoke about the need to differentiate good from evil. How the terrorists destroy while we Israelis build. About how the world looks on and justifies their destruction, telling us that if we hadn’t built, they wouldn’t have destroyed. Little did I know that six months later, following the horrific October 7 massacre, these tropes would become a daily theme in the global press.
At the end of the press conference, I requested that anyone who stands for good should share a picture of the Israeli flag on their social media, to represent good and hope. Again, to my surprise, millions of flags were shared during Passover. This became known as “Dees Day” and it represented an outpouring of international sympathy for the murder of Lucy, Maia, and Rina that has astonished and comforted me every day and in every place that I visit.
flags and their symbolism
The Israeli flag is a symbol of everything we hold dear in our society. It represents our unconditional support for our soldiers during too many wars, our feeling of attachment to one another despite our differences, and our pride of living and building a strong Jewish, democratic and free society in our ancestral homeland. The surprising prevalence of the Israeli flag in both the demonstrations against the judicial reforms and in the pro-government counter-demonstrations during 2023 confirmed its status as a symbol of unity.
So many feelings are encapsulated in one flag. That is why I am particularly distressed when I see thousands of Palestinian flags being carried down the streets of New York, Chicago and San Francisco, and in anti-Israel demonstrations across Europe. The Palestinian flag represents blood (red), jihad (green) and death (black). Its bearers are frequently heard shouting anti-American slogans, and during “Free Palestine” marches American flags are nowhere to be seen. I have observed that there are more Palestinian flags being waved on American streets these days than star-spangled banners. I find this shocking.
Imagine that the Red Sox came to play at Yankee Stadium and their fans marched across the field with their red and blue flags. How long would it take before the Yankee supporters would flood the pitch with their blue and white flags and push them away? After all, it’s their home territory. How long will Americans tolerate foreign flags being marched down their streets before patriots start to bring out “Old Glory” to challenge the demonstrators?
POLLS OF Americans are showing that Gen Z are half as likely to be patriotic as Boomers. Comments such as “Learning US history had made me ashamed to be American” are commonly heard in schools across America. Today, the American flag is less likely to be waved at Independence Day parties than at any time in US history. I believe that these indicators have severe ramifications for the future of America.
Army enrollment is so low that a new policy of recruiting immigrants with the promise of granting them US passports has been adopted as part of the solution. Surely it would be dangerous for the US to rely on an army of foreign conscripts to fight against foreign armies? This is one more indication that America is abandoning its patriotism in very worrying ways.
I believe that America must rebuild pride in its flag and everything it stands for. And it is not just an issue for the Democratic party. During his recent trip to Russia, Tucker Carlson visited a Moscow grocery store and was ecstatic to demonstrate that the equivalent weekly shop cost just a quarter of the price of a similar basket of groceries in the US. His message was that America could learn a lot from Russian President Vladimir Putin about how to run a country! However, this completely ignores the fact that Russia is a totalitarian state, where Putin’s one political opponent was recently murdered in prison; a country where free speech and religious freedoms are almost nonexistent.
Apparently, Carlson takes his freedoms so much for granted that he feels comfortable extolling the virtues of a society that denies those freedoms, and no one even notices. Similarly, those who wave the Palestinian flag while supporting the oxymoronic “Gays for Palestine” and other liberal causes, have no idea how disastrously incompatible a Palestinian state would be with their real interests.
We must return the American flag to the streets of America, and the Palestinian flag must go. Americans need to rebuild pride in their values or their future is uncertain. They need to understand the value of the freedoms that they hold dear, and check whether the regimes they support are committed to those same values. When it becomes permissible for Gen Z to wave the Stars and Stripes once again, America will ensure the survival of its hard-won freedoms into the next century and beyond.
The writer is an educator living in Efrat, and Israel’s special envoy for social initiatives. His book Transforming the World: The Jewish Impact on Modernity has been republished in English and Hebrew in memory of his wife Lucy and daughters Maia and Rina, who were murdered by terrorists in April 2023.