Israel is the land of the Jews
An excerpt from "Be Like The Moon: a Chassidic memoir", available on Amazon.com
Baruch Hashem, with what’s going on in Israel right now, I felt it’d be prudent to share with you this essay which I hope will empower you with what to say to all the haters out there.
This is especially relevant in light of the fact the the Jewish community all over the world will be reading the opening verses of Genesis in the Torah service this Saturday and the opening of the the very first Rashi commentary on the very first verse of Genesis states the following:
In the beginning: Said Rabbi Isaac: It was not necessary to begin the Torah except from “This month is to you,” (Exod. 12:2) which is the first commandment that the Israelites were commanded, (for the main purpose of the Torah is its commandments, and although several commandments are found in Genesis, e.g., circumcision and the prohibition of eating the thigh sinew, they could have been included together with the other commandments). Now for what reason did He commence with “In the beginning?”
Because of [the verse] “The strength of His works He related to His people, to give them the inheritance of the nations” (Ps. 111:6). For if the nations of the world should say to Israel, “You are robbers, for you conquered by force the lands of the seven nations [of Canaan],” they will reply, "The entire earth belongs to the Holy One, blessed be He; He created it and gave it to whomever He deemed proper When He wished, He gave it to them, and when He wished, He took it away from them and GAVE IT TO US.
Israel is the Land of the Jews
I stand with my motherland, the Holy Land of Israel. I am married to the United States who I love and have sworn allegiance to serve even, if need be, against the State of Israel. But never against her people. For Israel is the homeland of my ancient indigeneity and the eternal haven of the Jew. I’m Pro-Israel and proud.
Like Wonder Woman, Israel is a hero championing the never-ending battle for truth, justice, and freedom for her inhabitants, irrespective of religion or race. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1968, “I see Israel, and never mind saying it, as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy.” And she’s done it while having a landmass six times smaller than New York state, a population of only nine million, and a country beset on all sides by wolves who openly lust for her destruction.
Yet, that hasn’t stopped her from extending a helping hand to billions around the globe, sharing innovative technology, military intelligence, medical aid, and a sliver of democracy in the Middle East that benefits her allies (and enemies)! She’s the only country in history to take people out of Africa (Ethiopia), not to enslave them but to save them. And she’s the only motherland whose long-lost “children of Israel” have returned after three millennia in their diaspora. Her reward for all this is a bloody conflict for survival.
On May 15, 1948, the morning after she declared independence, my motherland was invaded by five Arab armies intent on “driving the Jews into the sea.” To this day, anti-Israel activists chant the 1964 terrorist slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Of what? The Jew? Make no mistake: Anti-Israel rhetoric is often a ruse to strip indigeneity from the Jew, which literally refers to the people who come from their ancestral lands of Judea and Samaria.
Judaism is Israel. Others came over the years, were nourished by our motherland, and settled there. But there has been an unbroken presence of Jews in my homeland since the Roman occupation of 63 BCE. Jews are the only people who can demonstrate indigeneity to Israel as the place where her culture, language, and civilization were formed. No other people speak or use Hebrew, pray thrice daily facing the direction of Jerusalem, or beg the Creator to “return us to Jerusalem, Your city.” In the Tanach (the 24 books of the Torah), the word “Zion” appears 154 times, “Jerusalem” 669 times, and “Israel” 2,319 times. The Koran does not mention them at all.
If you accuse me of being an Islamophobe, I’ll tell you I do have a phobia. I fear what will happen if radicalized religionists of any background control the narrative for peace in the Middle East. Hamas, which claims to represent the Palestinian people, openly calls for the genocide of the “Jew hiding behind the rock” (Hamas Charter, Article 7, Hadith). Yet, Muhammad warned, “Whoever harms a non-Muslim at peace with us will never smell the fragrance of paradise.”
With 98% of Palestinians identifying as Muslim, let us remember that Muslims and Jews have more in common than any other religion, that it was Muslim people who opened their shores to Jews during the Crusades, facilitated the flourishing of the Golden Era of Torah scholarship in Spain, and who even saved Jews during the Holocaust. Long before 1948, when “Palestinian” referred to Jews, Muslims called my people “Ahl al-kitab” – “People of the Book.”
So, on behalf of my people, I ask the world: If there are fifty Muslim countries on our planet, shouldn’t there at least be one country for the Jewish people? Why does the world gang up on Israel’s “Law of Return” and not Ireland’s? And out of the ninety-six democratic governments in the world, why can’t my motherland choose her version of democracy? As George Deek, Israel’s first Arab-Christian ambassador said, “A Middle East [with] no room for a Jewish state has no room for humanity.”
Massad Abu-Toameh, a respected public figure of the Arab community in Jerusalem, says, “Living in Israel is heaven compared to the conditions in the neighboring Arab states but that all changed when the Oslo Accords armed Arafat and unleashed him and his gangsters on his own people.” Arafat instigated years of repeated homicide bombings, multiple intifadas, and constant inhumanity against innocents. When Israel gave away Gaza for peace in 2005, Hamas tore down the peaceful greenhouse infrastructure, built an Iranian-backed hive of terrorists, and launched over 15,000 missile attacks against innocent Israeli civilians less than a mile away. To this day, Israel continues to provide Gazans with daily electricity, water, and humanitarian aid. Where’s the aid from Saudi Arabia? Malaysia? Iran? Yet, the United Nations, tasked with the mission of uniting us, rewarded the aggressions against Israel by granting the Palestinian Authority “non-member observer status.” That blatant bias directs, as Hillel Neuer of UNWatch.org reports, the recent disproportionate UN resolutions which demonize my motherland.
As a rabbi, you may claim I’m brainwashed, but Baruch Hashem, facts can’t be brainwashed. The fact is, the Al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Sunni Islam, was purposely built on the ruins of the Holy Temple, the number one holiest site for my people. The fact is that the government of Israel allows apartheid against Jews praying atop our own Temple Mount. Jews never sold or gave away their right to the land. On the contrary, whether it was the Maccabean freedom fighters or the Jewish Revolt against the first-century Roman occupation, Jewish people always clung to the hope that we would one day reclaim our homeland.
The peace-loving singer Shlomo Carlebach once argued that if you believe Mother Earth can be conquered through the legitimacy of war, then Israel has a right to this land after fending off eight recognized wars, two intifadas, and constant genocidal terrorism within her borders for at least 100 years. In his words, “If you believe that war cannot take away, then it still belongs to us from the Holy Temple [circa 70 CE].” In other words, if the Arabs who lived on the land for hundreds of years are called “Palestinians,” then the Jews who have lived on the land for thousands of years would aptly be called “Native Palestinians.”
Anti-Israel activists think that the vileness of their rhetoric proves the veracity of their argument. Only truth doesn’t require bravado. Truth demands action, and the truth is that Israel has proven she can create a safe space for all her minorities and the millions who visit her every year.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian leadership has given up the pretense of calling for a two-state solution. The Palestinian Authority uses international humanitarian aid to reward the families of terrorists. They complain about Israel’s “war crimes” but praise Palestinian terrorists as “freedom fighters.” Instead of categorizing Israeli policies they disagree with as “discriminatory,” they call my motherland an “apartheid state” because that implies the need not to work with but to demolish the Jewish state. Do you really think they’re the ones who should be the custodian of the Holy Land?
Israel’s democratic culture is inherently self-critical. Minorities, who comprise approximately 20 percent of the population and are predominantly Arab, hold full political rights in Israel, have a higher representation in parliament than they do in the US Congress, and sit on Israel’s Supreme Court. Those boycotting Israel today follow in the perverse footsteps of the 1945 Arab League (who still haven’t accepted Israel as a member). Why don’t they boycott the contemporary dhimmitude and genocide of Yazidis, Christians, Baaha’i, and other religious minorities in the Middle East? Why don’t they boycott Jordan, which currently occupies 78 percent of the original Palestine Mandate and whose population is 70 percent Palestinian?
As Mudar Zahran, a Jordanian Palestinian journalist whose life was threatened by the Jordanian military for speaking truth to power, once said, “[King Abdullah is] merely using them as pawns in his game against Israel by threatening to make Jerusalem responsible for Jordanians of Palestinian descent.” Dr. Ruth Wisse, a “gevaldikeh Yid” and founder of Harvard University’s Yiddish program, said, “Jews are not responsible for the misery of the Palestinians any more than they were responsible for the misery of the Germans, Russians, the French, the Poles, and the list goes on.”
I believe both sides are responsible for the evil done in the past and present of this conflict. Der Yassin in 1948. The Chevron massacre of 1929. The execution of Abdel Fattah al-Sharif in 2016. The rape and murder of Ori Ansbacher in 2019. And the list goes on. Guilt may lie on both sides. But Israel has offered peace in 1949, 1967, 1978, 1994, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2008, 2009, and 2014. Each time, Israel’s olive branch of peace was met with the fiery evil of terrorism. As a result, almost 50 percent of Israeli Jews want Arabs kicked out of the land altogether — not out of blind hate but out of fear for their lives.
It is the preservation of life itself that caused the Lubavitcher Rebbe to hold that it was Halachically forbidden to give away any land for peace. Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef held it was permitted. Both used the Talmudic principle that “saving [even] one life is akin to saving an entire world.”94 The road to peace may lie through the creation of a Palestinian state in Jordan, with reparations for both the 700,000 Arab refugees of the 1940s and the 850,000 Jewish refugees of the 1950s Or perhaps the Alternative Peace activists, like Yehudah HaKohen, have the right idea when they organize grassroots dialogue sessions for Palestinians and Israelis seeking to transcend competing one-sided narratives in favor of a more scientific analysis of the factors forcing both peoples into conflict.
Or perhaps I, as an American, need to listen to the Palestinians and Israelis themselves instead of imposing my Western views on what they should be thinking, feeling, and doing. Indeed, my father taught me that the Hebrew word “Shalom” can mean “peace,” “hello,” or “complete.” This teaches us that peace will come when every hello makes the other feel complete.
As a Jew with a birthright to the Promised Land, I promise to never stop fighting for peace. As an American, I am proud of the United States because of the American dream to freely write one’s destiny. As an American Jew, I dream of the day when little Palestinian and Israeli boys and girls can coexist, not despite their differences but because of them.
To the anti-Israel activist, I say this: I am fighting for my homeland because she is my mother. Perhaps, one day, we can love each other as a brother from another mother.