Dear reading group friends

I left our meeting the other night with a feeling of unease which
has only increased in the days since.  So many of the comments seemed
anti-Israel, particularly the enthusiastic calls by some to boycott Israel,
not just businesses that operate in the settlement areas, but everything
Israeli, a call which echoes that of  some academics in respected
institutions of learning who should know better, still eat at me.  Well,
I’ve said some things over the years I wish I hadn’t so I bear no antipathy
toward anybody for what was said, but still  I’d like to get some things off
my mind.

First, I should declare myself.  My Zionist roots began before there
was a State of Israel. My aunt and uncle walked from Northern Ukraine to
Haifa after WWI. In Sunday School every week I put dimes and quarters into
blue tin Karen Ami boxes to purchase land in Palestine so Jews could
reforest the hills and make the barren desert productive.  The simple wisdom
passed on to us was that the indigenous Arabs had wasted the land whereas
the heroic Jewish pioneers, all of whom were kibbutzniks, were building
Ha’aretz through sweat and technology back to the wonderful land of biblical
times.

Today, that great generation of Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin,
Shimon Peres and their cohort is gone.  So, perhaps, is their idealism.
I’ve matured a bit and much has happened.  I still support Zionist ideals
and recognize the historical necessity of a national homeland for Jews.  I
believe that the Israelis have built an extraordinary nation from nothing,
but I do not necessarily support Israeli government policy.  Not all Jews
follow the AIPAC line. I agree totally with the book that coddling the
ultra-orthodox is foolhardy and that the occupation is cruel, wrong and
contrary to Jewish values.  Yet Israel would be foolish not to take strong
measures to protect its citizens at home and abroad.  I believe that the
highest priority goal for Israel should be a prosperous, well-governed
Palestine.  Yet Israeli political leaders pursue policies intended to defeat
that goal.  So, that’s me.

I was surprised that anybody would take the concept of a boycott seriously.
It smacked, truly or not, of latent anti-Israel bias which is incongruously
common among liberal thinkers.  It equates Israel with pre-Mandela South
Africa, a flawed analogy.

Boycotts are often non-productive.  Scholars of all nations should be
encouraged, not discouraged, to confer and interact with each other.  Oregon
State and the Technion have a lot to learn from each other.  There are more
companies from Israel traded on NASDAQ than any other nation in the world
but the US-is it in America’s interest or will to untangle such
international financial integration?  And finally, who among us is prepared
to persuade Washington County to boycott Intel which has an enormous
presence in Israel.  Bill can verify that Delta Airlines depends on the
patronage of Intel engineers flying between Lydda and PDX as an essential
element of revenue supporting its PDX/Amsterdam direct service which in turn
is important to we Portlanders who wish to fly non-stop to Europe.  Do we
really want to give up Delta along with our computers and smart phones with
their Israeli-engineered Intel chips.  We’d also have to give up many of our
generic drugs and start eating American hummus.  I think better approaches
can be found.

Much of our discussion (with the notable exception of Bob) was as if
history began in 1948 and My Promised Land was the only book written about
it, though of course we all know better.  I particularly like the recent,
revisionist histories of modern Israel by Tom Segev and Bennie Morris which
are much more complete, balanced and well sourced than earlier histories.
Our author did not pretend that his very personal cri de coeur was such a
history.  Nor should we take it as such.

Several things are clear from broader reading.  Lydda was appalling,
but exceptional, not typical.  There was not in 1948 a policy of removal of
Arabs (except for strategic areas like the Tel Aviv/Jerusalem Road), but
there was a practice of doing so to a degree which varied from one commander
to another and one place to another.  Some places were like Lydda, though
less prominent, and some were live and let live.  In the North, for example,
under my cousin Zvi, it was not practiced.

Deir Yassin, on the other hand, was a shameful game changer.  It was the
Irgun’s My Lai.  Word of it spread rapidly among the Arab population.  As
the IDF approached, Arabs in great numbers fled with Deir Yassin on their
lips.  The Israeli historical mythology was that most of the Arabs left
voluntarily.  The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (Hitler’s ally, having returned
after the war from Berlin) urged Arabs to flee and return with the
conquering Arab armies to claim abandoned Jewish property as they drove the
Jews into the sea.  Many fled, but were not allowed to return.   After Deir
Yassin, however, fear was also a great motivator.  The IDF ethos revered
what they called the Honor of the Sword, but when you put weapons in young
men’s hands and teach them to kill, bad things happen whether they are Jews,
Arabs or Americans.

The US, having taken its territory from the Indians by, among other
methods, mass murder and territorial occupation, is particularly in no
position to condemn.  For that matter, it is hard to hold subsequent
generations of any nation (three in Israel by now) liable for the sins of
their fathers. (Actually, my forbearers didn’t have much to do with the
Indians.  They were busy trying to avoid being killed in Eastern Europe.
But I digress.)

Context has layers like an onion.  The immediate context of 1948 was
that the Jews had just lost 6 million.  There was little blood lust among
the European survivors but there had to be a place to put them.  Palestine
was handy, logical and already the site of the Zionists’ mass aliyah.  The
UN ordered partition.  Although the mandated Israeli boundaries were
essentially indefensible in modern warfare, Israel accepted the UN
partition.  Every Arab nation, including Transjordan to which the Arab
portion was to be conjoined, rejected it.

We all know that five modern, well-equipped armies invaded Israel.  Any
student of history knows that wars have consequences.  1871 made Germany;
Pearl Harbor led to the destruction of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity
Sphere, the Gulf of Tonkin and LBJ’s hubris took us into battle in Viet Nam,
etc.  When you start a war, you take the risk of losing it and living with
the consequences.  In 1948, Israel’s Arab neighbors started and lost a war
but let the roughly 400,000 refugees live with the consequences.  UNRRA, not
the warriors, set up temporary camps for the refugees.

At the second layer of the onion, in latter 1948 a parallel tectonic
change occurred in the Arab world.  The Arab nations of North Africa and
Asia Minor expelled most of their millennia-old Jewish populations and took
their property.  These Sephardic refugees numbered roughly 400,000.  Most
went to Israel which was already exhausted from absorbing almost a million
European refugees.

Regardless of the right and wrong of any party, this was a
population exchange pure and simple.  The big difference was that the Jews
absorbed their immigrant refugees, whereas the Arab nations deliberately
perpetuated the suffering of Arab refugees.  It’s not often written about,
but at huge sacrifice (and with support from American Jewry), Israel took in
its Sephardic Jewish refugees (and later their Ethiopian cousins) and shared
whatever emergency housing, food, education, medical attention, etc. if
could scrape up.  It was tough on the Israelis and on the immigrants-my
kibbutznik cousins were extremely impoverished in this period and one
suffered so in the difficult conditions that she took her life-but slowly
over the next several years Israel absorbed them into the general society.
In contrast, the Arab League with untold billions of oil wealth, decided
cynically that the Arab refugees were of more symbolic political value
confined to horrid UNRRA camps and they refused to absorb their kinsmen.  So
the next question is: why should we not boycott Saudi Arabia, the Emirates,
Syria and the rest?

Finally, the outer ring of context, pre-1948.  Personally, I am not
persuaded that God’s promises to any one people trump his promises to any
other people.  The descendants of the Hebrews, the Philistines, the
Hittites, the Syrians, the Bedouins and any other group that occupied the
region we call Palestine at any given time, all have arguable historical
claims to the area.  Realistically the contemporary question of national
definition is one of political power and international recognition whether
they flow from the Congress of Vienna, the Versailles Treaty, a UN
resolution, Yalta, a British colonial map or a Declaration of Independence.

In modern times, the Arabs have suffered from terrible governance
and leadership aggravated by tribalism and religious intolerance.  There was
no Enlightenment, no Bill of Rights, no democracy, no separation of powers
in the Arab world.  In Palestine, the inter-war period of the British
Mandate was critical and telling.  Zionist immigration started in the 1880’s
and by the time of the mandate some, not all, Arabs became concerned about
the changing demographics and economy.  Many enjoyed the greater prosperity
brought by Zionist economic activity.  Particularly during the mandate, the
political approaches of the Jews and the Arabs were fundamentally different.
The Jews essentially built a shadow government, the Jewish Agency.   Indeed,
the British relied upon the Jewish Agency for many governmental functions as
they affected the Jews.  This was the Jewish strategy anticipating the end
of the Mandate.

The Arabs’ strategy, such as it was, was different.  The Arab world was
largely colonial.  A small Arab middle class had developed, but never became
a political force.  There was some fretting, but no pan-Arabic political
strategy comparable to the Jewish Agency.  The only strategy then or ever
since for Arabs who resented the Jewish presence, not by any means a
majority, was not political; it was violence and terrorism.

From early in the last century, Arab individuals and gangs randomly
shot up kibbutzim and the kibbutzim formed home guards for defense.  As Bob
mentioned, 1926 was a pivotal year.  It was then that isolated violence
became concerted and a massive pogrom drove the Jewish population from
Hebron, now regarded as an Arab city.  From 1936 through 1939 there was an
epidemic of Arab pogroms.  The British could not control Arab violence.
That is when and why the Haganah was formed as an underground army.  Indeed,
the Jewish detectives of the Mandate police force by day were essentially
the officer corps of the Haganah by night.  (Later they were the Jewish
Brigade of the British Army in WWII where they studied military tactics.
The Arabs sat it out, the Grand Mufti in Berlin.)

When the UN Partition Plan issued, the Arabs still had no strategy
except “Kill The Jews-Drive Them Into The Sea.”  Egypt and other Arab
nations initiated or caused three existential wars: 1948, 1967 and 1973, all
intended to destroy the new nation.  Were it not for Nixon’s last minute
re-supply (ironically, over Kissinger’s reservations), the Egyptian and
Syrian invasions in 1973 would unquestionably have succeeded in destroying
Israel.  (In fairness, Israel was once the aggressor.  I refer to the 1956
Suez misadventure when Israel hubristically colluded with England and
France.)  They have consistently refused to negotiate peaceful terms with
“the Zionist entity” until Sadat, and that peace seems currently be eroding.
Terrorist groups joined into the PLO which sponsored terrorist attacks.
Israel’s retaliations tended to be counter-productive.  Israel’s Olympic
team was murdered in Munich.  Airplanes were hijacked (remember Entebbe
where the Israeli commander, Yonatan Netanyahu, died?), a Jew in a
wheelchair was rolled off the deck of a high-jacked cruise ship and the El
Al desk at the Athens airport was bombed. Two murderous intifadas  followed.
Suicide bombers killed Israelis at markets, a pizza joint, a wedding and
other civilian haunts.  Public buses were fired on and bombed.  Israel built
a wall to block bullets fired westward from high places near Jerusalem.
When Israel withdrew from Gaza (which Egypt claimed in 1948, but not now),
Hamas intensified cross-border rocket attacks just as Hezbollah sent rockets
from Lebanon where the PLO settled after Jordan ejected them.  This rocketry
was the coup de grace for the Israeli peace movement.  There is much more,
but except for Sadat and, implicitly, Jordan, the only Arab strategy has
been Kill The Jews.  (Still, business is still business–they still sell oil
to Israel.)  Golda Meir famously said that the one thing she cannot forgive
is that “the Arabs taught the Jews to hate.”

In this larger context as well, while Israel cannot be proud of everything
it has done, there are better qualified boycott candidates in the
neighborhood.  I hope this broader context re-orders some of the thinking I
heard last week.

Jake