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Flaws not grounds for withholding love
By CLIFF SAVREN
Israel Commentator
“It is with the sadness,” Jay Michaelson wrote in the Forward weekly, “that accompanies the end of any (love) affair. I notice my love (of Israel) is starting to wane.”
His Zionist love affair, he explains, is waning in part because Israel is not the idealized place that American Jews think it is. He says he feels “personally implicated by its injustices.” If I were to address him directly, I would say:
OK, Jay, first of all, I admire your candor. I also realize that Israel still holds its spell on you, because if it didn’t, you wouldn’t even feel implicated by its injustices. There are glaring imperfections in Israeli society, but every society has its imperfections.
You talk about how you feel ill at ease in an Israel in which you might be relaxing on a lounge chair with a glass of mint lemonade in hand when five miles away a mother is being harassed at a West Bank checkpoint. Israel’s policy on the West Bank is no simple matter. That checkpoint is there to keep me safe, but I acknowledge that it hinders freedom of movement for Palestinians. If an Israeli soldier acts with disrespect toward a Palestinian at a checkpoint, he should be reprimanded.
Injustice and inequality is a worldwide phenomenon, however, not an Israeli invention. If my lounge chair were in the Cleveland suburb of Pepper Pike rather than Petach Tikvah, how mindful would I be that there is grinding poverty just ten miles to the west in the city of Cleveland?
Or could I really feel at ease to the very bottom of the glass of lemonade with the knowledge that tens of millions of Americans will be going to sleep that night without health coverage and many of them without adequate healthcare?
Jay, I don’t stop loving the United States because of its flaws, and any Jew with any sense of historical perspective could only be in awe of the very existence of a Jewish state after so many centuries of Jewish exile.
I would hope that you would regain your enthusiasm for Israel despite its flaws. Perhaps then your love of the country will be more well-grounded in reality and more stable in the long term.
Israel is the last and best hope for the future of the Jewish people. For all its flaws, it has accomplished a tremendous amount. I hope someday you see that about Israel. It deserves your support.
His Zionist love affair, he explains, is waning in part because Israel is not the idealized place that American Jews think it is. He says he feels “personally implicated by its injustices.” If I were to address him directly, I would say:
OK, Jay, first of all, I admire your candor. I also realize that Israel still holds its spell on you, because if it didn’t, you wouldn’t even feel implicated by its injustices. There are glaring imperfections in Israeli society, but every society has its imperfections.
You talk about how you feel ill at ease in an Israel in which you might be relaxing on a lounge chair with a glass of mint lemonade in hand when five miles away a mother is being harassed at a West Bank checkpoint. Israel’s policy on the West Bank is no simple matter. That checkpoint is there to keep me safe, but I acknowledge that it hinders freedom of movement for Palestinians. If an Israeli soldier acts with disrespect toward a Palestinian at a checkpoint, he should be reprimanded.
Injustice and inequality is a worldwide phenomenon, however, not an Israeli invention. If my lounge chair were in the Cleveland suburb of Pepper Pike rather than Petach Tikvah, how mindful would I be that there is grinding poverty just ten miles to the west in the city of Cleveland?
Or could I really feel at ease to the very bottom of the glass of lemonade with the knowledge that tens of millions of Americans will be going to sleep that night without health coverage and many of them without adequate healthcare?
Jay, I don’t stop loving the United States because of its flaws, and any Jew with any sense of historical perspective could only be in awe of the very existence of a Jewish state after so many centuries of Jewish exile.
I would hope that you would regain your enthusiasm for Israel despite its flaws. Perhaps then your love of the country will be more well-grounded in reality and more stable in the long term.
Israel is the last and best hope for the future of the Jewish people. For all its flaws, it has accomplished a tremendous amount. I hope someday you see that about Israel. It deserves your support.
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| When national myth supplants reality |
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