Reading and Righting
I’m most of the way through Amir Tibon’s The Gates of Gaza. I’m reading it in preparation for a zoom talk between him and Yishay Ishi Ron, whose novel Dog will be the other book discussed during a moderated conversation hosted by the Jewish Book Council. I finished Dog a while ago, and have a review coming out of Yishay’s next novel, pending that book’s release in June.
Dog sat with me, and etched into me the pain of a former Israeli commando wrestling with the agony of PTSD, addiction, alienation, and homelessness following his service. In some ways, Tibon’s book is a kind of preamble to Dog. It is the book that helps unlock the Israeli history that got us to October 7th, a history rife with deceptions, half-truths, lies, stunningly wrong decision-making, and the seemingly endless sacrifices of Israelis on the altar of one man’s unbridled ego.
Reading The Gates of Gaza, I assumed I would be infuriated by what Netanyahu in particular did or failed to do. The farther I got into the book, and the more I read the stories of the families and individuals of Nahal Oz, the soldiers who defended it, and the people who settled there and saw it as a paradise for them and their children, the angrier I felt. But that anger tilted away from Israel and toward my home country, America. I had to unpack why, since that wasn’t what I expected. After all, Tibon’s book is a heartbreaking, infuriating, humbling read. It points to decisions that ranged from sensible to frankly indefensible, over a span of decades. And the consequences of those decisions boomeranged through the lives of real people within Israel and across its borders. As someone with deep family roots in Israel, I assumed the fullness of my anger and frustration would be directed toward those who put my loved ones in harm’s way over and over and over again. In spite of all that, however, my greatest rage was directed toward American Jewish “leaders” who purported to be Israel’s greatest friend and defender. But who somehow forgot what and who is actually worth befriending and defending. These “leaders” chose silence, complicity, junkets, fundraising, photo ops, etc, over unequivocal public condemnation of the man who fed Israel to Hamas. They chose access to power, AIPAC, and condemning everyone and everything but Bibi.
The monstrousness of that failure can never be atoned for. And the truth, also invisible to such “leaders,” is that they haven’t just lost young American Jews; they have lost Jews like me. I will remain a committed Jew and Zionist. But on my own terms. That means never attending an Israel parade in New York City in which the craven cabal that is Bibi’s governing coalition is in any way represented. It means never again contributing in any way to institutions or organizations complicit by their silence–or worse, by their active support of Bibi’s government–in drenching Israel in blood and conflict from within. This is my personal Never Again.
Perhaps my position seems childish, self-indulgent. I went to my now former rabbi some time ago about my pain over all this, over what he has not said from the pulpit or elsewhere. I genuinely like and respect him. He and I share a deep commitment to Israel and to Zionism. I acknowledged to him then that I do not have the responsibility of leading a synagogue community, and all that comes with that. I understand that he feels constrained by his position. But I came home and told my husband that I also don’t present myself as a community leader, and as a moral one at that. I refuse to accept the excuses, though I know where they come from: fear of alienating congregants, of losing them, of being fired, or sidelined, or otherwise made unwelcome in a community he has worked so hard to build. Those fears might be real, but they are still, in the end, excuses. Is the price the Jewish community writ large is paying for Bibi’s endless crimes and cruelty, his abuses toward Israelis, his undermining of the rule of law and of any semblance of social cohesion, worth it? Is the ostracizing of Jews anywhere and everywhere ok?
I can hear the counter-argument from some quarters: Jesus himself could rise from the dead again, become prime minister, and the “goyim” would still excoriate us. It is true that Israel was and never will be good enough for some–maybe most–but I’m talking about the accelerant Bibi’s tossed onto the fire he started among his own countrymen, by doing any number of grotesque and appalling things, from inciting violence against Rabin, to forming satanic alliances with Hamas and Qatar, to elevating the most heinous Israelis into public life, and on and on. To make matters infinitely worse, add in the gullible, cowardly crop of pro-Israeli sycophants in America, risking nothing to defend actual Jewish values and Zionism, but putting their rhetorical, fundraising, and political access weight behind a monster, a man as my Sabra cousin’s son once told her “who will burn the country down before ever accepting a plea deal for his crimes.” Reading Tibon is a devastating reminder of how prescient that prediction was. And how indescribably soul-searing.
I know I am a singularly unimportant person, or as my husband’s favorite t-shirt declares: Oh Yeah. Well I’m a Big Deal to My Dog. So be it. I don’t write Op-Eds for fancy publications, get invited to insider briefings, hobnob with the rich and powerful, or weigh in on national policy-making. But from my perch as a simple human being, I have seen all of this coming. Not October 7th per se, but the radical undoing of any version of decent, defensible bonds between Israel and America, between Israel and (non-right-wing) American Jews, dating back to Bibi’s obnoxious and wildly inappropriate dressing down of President Obama in the cradle of my nation’s government.
To see all that has unfolded since that moment, which seems a lifetime ago, and to be reminded over and over of how ill-equipped American Jewish “leaders” have been to meet the moment at every turn, has been deeply depressing. To watch them now swat at everything deemed anti-Semitic, which is a lot these days, but direct none of their own fury and fear at Bibi, is telling. Even more telling, but utterly predictable to anyone who has paid even the slightest attention to him, is how Bibi just doesn’t give a damn about American Jews. We were only ever his bankers, his boosters, his useful idiots. And all we have to show for it is an American Jewish community coming apart at the seams, with the bonds between Israel and American Jews frayed beyond repair, most likely. And anyone who thinks that writing off non-Orthodox American Jews is fine forgets two things: it was non-Orthodox Jews who founded the State of Israel. And they’re the majority who have fought and died for it since then.
My anger at all that has unfolded only meets its match in my staggering disappointment. I know my stand matters little, if at all. But for the sake of my children and my parents, z’l, I need to remind myself who I am, what I stand for, and what I will never, ever abet or condone. I hope that my worst fears for Israel, for America, and for all Jews on our shores far from one another, don’t come to pass. But hope, while essential, is never enough.
