Israel Just Made Engaging with Israel That Much More Difficult

My friend, colleague, and Hartman RLI hevrutah partner, Rabbi David Cohen, and I have spent the last four weeks presenting the Hartman Institute's Engaging Israel program to our respective congregants and other members of Milwaukee's Jewish community.  The  goal of  the Engaging Israel Project is to respond to growing feelings of disenchantment and disinterest toward Israel among an ever-increasing number of Jews worldwide by creating a new narrative regarding the significance of Israel for Jewish life.  So far it's been an extraordinary experience, but a challenging one nonetheless, as we've attempted to help how our participants reconcile their strongly held and beloved American values with traditional Jewish values as they all relate to Israel.  I think we've made some substantive, real progress.  

But now I wonder if all of our work is threatened with being undone.  Today, videos produced by Israel's Ministry of Immigrant Absorption and distributed in key American cities have gone viral.  The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg has blogged about them (you can read his post and watch the videos here: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/11/netanyahu-government-suggests-israelis-avoid-marrying-american-jews/249166/and they are all over social media forums like facebook. The t.v. spots are aimed at Israelis who live here in America.  If you listen to the dialogue and watch the body language of the actors it's quite clear that the ads present a negative critique of the Jewish American experience. The Israeli Jew is imperiled by the non-Jewish religious and cultural milieu that surrounds American Jews who are seemingly either incapable or uninterested in responding to those influences. The message is quite clear:  if you're an Israeli living in America your Jewishness (and that of your children) is endangered.  

Other innuendos abound.  Israeli Jewishness is apparently richer, more profound and more pure that that of American Jewry.  That critique is an unfair, untrue and myopic description of American Jewish life.  The fact is, Israeli culture, both social and religious, is and continues to be deeply enriched by our Jewish culture here in America.   Just as we American Jews can learn much from our Israeli brothers and sisters - the importance of the Hebrew language and literature to Jewish life - is but one example that comes to mind, Israelis can learn much from us American Jews about religious pluralism and the paradigms we've developed for living a meaningful Jewish life in the face of modernity.  

Instead of validating the Judaism of Jerusalem and New York, Tel Aviv and Chicago, Haifa and Los Angeles, these cynical ads pit one against the other.  Most damaging and troubling they demean and devalue the American Jewish community.  They throw up one more impediment to American Jews reconnecting and engaging with Israel.  And speaking tahlis, they make my job and Rabbi Cohen's job that much more difficult.

No Tom, Palestinians Will Determine Salam Fayyad's Success, Not Israelis

Tom Friedman needs to visit Gaza and the west Bank, and soon.  In his most recent New York Times column (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/opinion/israel-and-the-arab-awakening.html?_r=1&ref=opinion) Friedman argues that Israel holds the key - the only key it seems - to peace with the Palestinians.  That key is visionary support for Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Authority's Prime Minister.  "He's [Fayyad] been the most radical Arab leader of all," Friedman writes,  "He is the first Palestinian leader to say: judge me on my performance in improving my peoples' lives, not on my rhetoric.  His focus has been on building institutions - including what Israelis admit is a security force that has helped to keep Israel peaceful  - so Palestinans will be ready for a two-state solution."  While I would claim that Israel's security from terrorist attacks is due in large part to the unfortunate exitsence of the security barrier, it's hard to argue with Friedman's assertion that the Palestinians' success is tied inextricably with Fayyad's.  He is a serious leader who - unlike other Palestinian leaders before him as well as contemporaries like Mahmoud Abbas - has quietly gone about building the infrastutre necessary for a future Palestinian state.  As Tal Becker, a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, once told me and my Hartman RLI colleagues, "I never before met a Palestinian leader who gets excited about budgets until I met Salam Fayyad."  Plain and simple, Fayad is a technocrat and a state builder.  Revolutionary leaders like Yassar Arafat have gotten the Palestinans nothing.  They need more leaders like Salaym Fayyad who build schools, hospitals, museums, etc.; all of the necessary institutions that will make a future Palestinian viable, while at the same time eschewing terrorism as a moral and effective form of resistance.

But here's where Friedman is wrong.  Israel will not determine whether Fayyad succeeds.  The Palestinian people will.  Yes, Israel can and certainly should help Fayyad, not out of some altruistic reason, but for its own sake, for the sake of its own security and desire to achieve a lasting peace.  But if the Palestinian people don't support Fayyad, if other Palestinian leaders don't support Fayyad, his future and that of the Palestinian people will be imperiled.  Isn't that what the "Arab Spring" was supposedly all about, the people throwing out tryrants and oppressors and supporting instead leaders who had their interests at heart?  The fact is, Fayyad is reviled and hated by Hamas and by Mahmoud Abbas in large part because of his success in rooting out graft and corruption, and because they view him as serious political threat.  He can't even enter the Gaza Strip for fear of being assassinated by his Hamas rivals. Friedman criticizes the Israelis for withholding $100 million in in Palestinian tax revenues and argues that they should reward Fayyad by giving him the money he needs.  Prime Minister Netanyahu has indeed agreed to release the $100 million to the P.A..  But if Fayyad is under threat from his own Palestinian interlocutors what difference would it make if Israel showers him with hunderds of millions of shekels? Yes, Israel should wisely leverage its power and make its political calculations for the sake of supporting true agents of peace.  But in the end, those who will determine the success of their leaders are the people, and in this case the Palestinian people.  Perhaps if Tom Friedman visited Gaza and Ramallah he would see things a bit more clearly.