In late May of this year, I traveled to Israel for 10 days as a fellow with the Sinai Temple Israel Center Fellowship. Our fellowship, consisting of 25 US rabbinical students from across the denominational spectrum, met with a number of Israeli journalists, politicians, scholars, activists, a few Holocaust survivors, and a parent of two adult sons still being held hostage somewhere in the ruins of Gaza.
My takeaway from the trip is that Israel – the nation, the people – is stronger, saner, and in a much better place than I imagined it would be, based on US coverage of the conflict. And conversely, as seen from Israel, the US is more detached from reality, both in regard to itself, and to the world, than I suspected.
How could this be?
First, Israel: Despite its complicated, fraught internal-political situation, and despite its multi-front war with enemies bent on its total destruction, I was struck by the palpable sense of solidarity and common cause among the Israeli people. It is a feeling of unity and togetherness unknown in America for many years. Part of Israel’s sense of unity is, no doubt, a reflection of the existential threat now facing it.
Make no mistake: Israel is, right now, fighting for its life.
Forget all the oppressor/oppressed narratives. Forget one’s personal feelings about violence and war. Many left-leaning friends and colleagues in the US have responded to Israel and its conflict with unease and disdain simply because they think of themselves (or would like to be seen) as peace-loving and anti-war – as if conflict-aversion, in every possible scenario, were the highest possible virtue.
While I share their love of peace and unease with armed conflict (who doesn’t?), this response to Hamas’s invasion and atrocities on October 7, 2023, and the threats now facing Israel, are feckless and absurd.
Israel has no choice but to respond. Every Israeli knows this. If only more Americans would get a clue.
ONE PROBLEM, paradoxically, can be found in America and Israel’s shared liberal democratic tradition. In the US, liberalism has broadly come to be understood as a benign global, historical force that has moved the world beyond the need for armed conflict. With science, technology, and popular culture now leading the way, this thinking goes, what is there to possibly fight about?
Israel is in a more dangerous neighborhood
Israel, which lives in a far more dangerous neighborhood than we do, knows, first hand, the answer. Israel understands the fraught balance between maintaining an open, liberal-democratic society, on the one hand, capable of waging war against brutal adversaries who seek its destruction, on the other.
Consequently, Israel is caught between looking good in the eyes of the Western liberal media and doing the right thing. And it just so happens that looking good and doing the right thing, at this moment, are not aligned.
America, by and large, is on the wrong side of this looking glass. The US is so concerned with looking and seeming good to itself, and to the world, it can hardly see that Israel is fighting its fight. Israel’s war is America’s war. The US should be aiding Israel without condition or reservation. And if there are conditions and reservations, they should be expressed behind closed doors.
Following American coverage of the war, one would think that Israel has erred, at every step, by not heeding the caution emanating daily from the White House and State Department. As it turns out, the Israeli intelligence and military establishment (despite its atrocious errors in the lead-up to October 7) know what’s best for Israel.
How long will it take for the Biden-Harris administration (which I enthusiastically voted for) to figure out that a ceasefire – until all immediate threats to Israel have been vanquished – is simply not in Israel’s best interest?
Because this is the kicker: America is also fighting for its life. It just doesn’t know it yet.
In the US, it’s hard to appreciate reality as it actually is, so distorting is the American lens through which – unless one exerts tremendous effort educating oneself otherwise – all one can see is America. And what is America now but a distorted image of itself?
The writer is a rabbinical student at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in Los Angeles, and a fellow with the Sinai Temple Israel Center Fellowship.