Video Of The Week – Israel at 70 - https://tinyurl.com/y9p33qwy
Adam
Armoush is a 21-year-old Israeli Arab who, on a recent outing in Berlin, donned
a yarmulke to test a friend’s contention that it was unsafe to do so in
Germany. On Tuesday he was assaulted in broad daylight by a Syrian
asylum-seeker who whipped him with a belt for being “yahudi” — Arabic for Jew.
The
episode was caught on video and has caused a national uproar. Heiko Maas, the
foreign minister, tweeted, “Jews shall never again feel threatened here.”
It’s a
vow not likely to be fulfilled. There were nearly 1,000 reported anti-Semitic
incidents in Berlin alone last year. A neo-fascist party, Alternative for
Germany, has 94 seats in the Bundestag. Last Thursday, a pair of German rappers
won a prestigious music award, given largely on the basis of sales, for an album
in which they boast of having bodies “more defined than Auschwitz prisoners.”
The award ceremony coincided with Holocaust Remembrance Day.
To be
Jewish — at least visibly Jewish — in Europe is to live on borrowed time.
That’s not to doubt the sincerity and good will of Maas or other European
leaders who recommit to combating anti-Semitism every time a European Jew is
murdered or a Jewish institution attacked. It’s only to doubt their capacity.
There’s a
limit to how many armed guards can be deployed indefinitely to protect
synagogues or stop Holocaust memorials from being vandalized. There’s a limit,
also, to trying to cure bigotry with earnest appeals to tolerance. The German
government is mulling a proposal to require recent arrivals in the country to
tour Nazi concentration camps as a way of engendering a feeling of empathy for
Jews. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that, to the virulent anti-Semite,
Buchenwald is a source of inspiration, not shame.
All this
comes to mind as Israel this week marks (in the Hebrew calendar) the 70th
anniversary of its independence. There are many reasons to celebrate the date,
many of them lofty: a renaissance for Jewish civilization; the creation of a
feisty liberal democracy in a despotic neighborhood; the ecological rescue of a
once-barren land; the end of 1,878 years of exile.
But
there’s a more basic reason. Jews cannot rely for their safety on the kindness
of strangers, least of all French or German politicians. Theodor Herzl saw this
with the Dreyfus Affair and founded modern Zionism. Post-Hitler Europe still
has far to fall when it comes to its attitudes toward Jews, but the trend is
clear. The question is the pace.
Hence
Israel: its army, bomb, and robust willingness to use force to defend itself.
Israel did not come into existence to serve as another showcase of the
victimization of Jews. It exists to end the victimization of Jews.
That’s a
point that Israel’s restless critics could stand to learn. On Friday,
Palestinians in Gaza returned for the fourth time to the border fence with
Israel, in protests promoted by Hamas. The explicit purpose of Hamas leaders is
to breach the fence and march on Jerusalem. Israel cannot possibly allow this —
doing so would create a precedent that would encourage similar protests, and
more death, along all of Israel’s borders — and has repeatedly used deadly
force to counter it.
The
armchair corporals of Western punditry think this is excessive. It would be
helpful if they could suggest alternative military tactics to an Israeli
government dealing with an urgent crisis against an adversary sworn to its
destruction. They don’t.
It would
also be helpful if they could explain how they can insist on Israel’s retreat
to the 1967 borders and then scold Israel when it defends those borders. They
can’t. If the armchair corporals want to persist in demands for withdrawals
that for 25 years have led to more Palestinian violence, not less, the least
they can do is be ferocious in defense of Israel’s inarguable sovereignty.
Somehow they almost never are.
Israel’s
70th anniversary has occasioned a fresh round of anxious, if not exactly new,
commentary about the rifts between Israeli and Diaspora Jewry. Some Diaspora
complaints, especially with respect to religion and refugees, are valid and
should be heeded by Jerusalem.
But to
the extent that the Diaspora’s objections are prompted by the nonchalance of
the supposedly non-vulnerable when it comes to Israel’s security choices, then
the complaints are worse than feckless. They provide moral sustenance for Hamas
in its efforts to win sympathy for its strategy of wanton aggression and
reckless endangerment. And they foster the illusion that there’s some easy and
morally stainless way by which Jews can exercise the responsibilities of
political power.
Though
not Jewish, Adam Armoush was once one of the nonchalant when it came to what it
means to be Jewish in the 21st century. Presumably no longer. For Jews, it’s a
painful, useful reminder that Israel is not their vanity. It’s their safeguard.
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