The Israel You Knew at Twenty-Five

In November 1995, Sarah Watson, a chemical engineering senior at Johns Hopkins, helped organize a candlelight vigil for Yitzhak Rabin. She expected perhaps fifty to a hundred people. More than two hundred came. They said Kaddish, sang Hatikvah and read a poem for peace. Even after an Israeli Jew had assassinated the prime minister who had shaken Yasser Arafat’s hand, Watson believed the peace process would continue. “There’s just too much momentum,” she told the Johns Hopkins Gazette. Johns Hopkins Gazette, November 13, 1995. pages.jh.edu

I keep coming back to that word, momentum. More than thirty years later, it takes an effort to remember that a young American Jew once had good reason to use it. Watson had seen an Israeli prime minister recognize the Palestinian national movement and stake his political future, and consequently his own life, on the prospect of peace.

An American Jew turning twenty-five today was born six years after Rabin’s assasination. When we Israelis ask why younger liberal Jews in America see our country differently, we ought to consider which Israel each generation actually knew at twenty-five.

Go back a few years before Oslo, and the picture complicates our memories. In February 1988, during the first intifada, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported on conversations at more than fifteen American universities. Public demonstrations were rare, but inside Hillels students were questioning Israel’s use of force against Palestinians. At the University of Illinois, sophomore Aaron Becker recalled hearing his peers ask, “Should we talk against our own in public?” The revealing word is our. The students Becker described took their kinship with Israelis for granted. Their uncertainty concerned what they owed people they regarded as family when they believed those people might be doing wrong. Jewish Telegraphic Agency, February 9, 1988. www.jta.org

Oslo gave young liberal Jews a way to answer that question. They could support an Israeli government, advocate for an end to the confilict between Israelis and Palesinians, and understand both issues as part of the same political project. That helps explain why a student in Baltimore could sing Israel’s national anthem at a peace vigil and expect everyone present to understand why those things belonged together. We know what became of the hopes invested in Oslo. Watson, standing on the steps at Johns Hopkins, did not.

A liberal American Jew who was twenty-five in 1995 and one who is twenty-five today might agree on many issues. Both might believe that Jews need a country in which their safety is in their own hands.  The difference begins when you ask each of them for evidence that those convictions can coexist. The first could point to the prime minister of Israel shaking hands with the leader of the Palestinian national movement. The second has to reach back to an event that took place eight years before they were born.

What happened in between looks different from Haifa than it does from America. Israelis who lived through the suicide bombings of the second intifada remember the fear that accompanied an ordinary bus ride, or for that matter even driving your car near a bus. When they speak about the risks of another peace initiative, that experience enters the conversation whether or not they mention it. A young American Jew today has no adult memory of those bombings. What falls within their own political memory is the endurance of what they percieve as occupation and the fading prospect of Palestinian statehood. One generation asks what would protect Israelis if another attempt at peace failed. The other asks what future Palestinians can have if nobody tries again. Each question arises from a real experience that the person across the table may know principally as history.

By October 7, these generations were bringing different questions to the same catastrophe. For an Israeli who remembered the suicide bombings, the massacre gave terrible new force to a fear they had carried for decades. For a young American Jew already worried about Israel’s direction, the massacre could awaken a profound sense of kinship while leaving their political judgment unresolved. Both could light a candle for the same family, but the disagreement came when someone asked what holding that candle committed them to support the following morning.

Following October 7 came a question that still troubles many of us in Israel. If the assassination of one Israeli prime minister could bring young liberal Jews together, why didn’t the massacre of Jews in their homes and at a music festival produce an even deeper and more enduring solidarity?

The deeper difference lies in what we could agree to do the next morning. Rabin’s assassin wanted to stop the peace process. For a young liberal Jew who believed in Oslo, that gave grief a political direction and deny the murderer the outcome he sought. Watson could say what she hoped Israel would do next, and she knew that an elected Israeli prime minister had wanted it too.

October 7 left no such agreement about the next morning. Two young Jews could grieve for the same murdered family, want the same hostages brought home and reach opposing conclusions about what solidarity required. One could see in the massacre the clearest possible case for Jewish sovereignty and for military action to prevent Hamas from doing it again. Another could conclude that a ceasefire offered the best hope for the captives and for Palestinian living in Gaza. A third, already doubtful about Zionism, could feel genuine horror over the images they were seeing coming out of Gaza.

From where I sit, I understand why some of what followed felt to many Israelis like abandonment. When a conversation moved straight from the murder of Jews to an indictment of Israel, it was fair to ask whether our dead could be granted a moment of grief on their own terms and the future of the survival of our country would be put in its proper context.

So what can we Israelis do to rectify this problem? First, we can say plainly what we hope these young people will support Israel. I want them to believe that Jews have a right to a national home here, to care whether the people who live here are safe, and to feel they have a place in the argument over our future. That last commitment costs us something. It means hearing criticism we may not like to hear, and by the same token, these people need to hear us out too.

We should also think harder about which Israelis young American Jews need to get to know.  I would like a young American interested in medicine to have the chance to sit with an Arab physician and a Jewish colleague and ask what happened between them when the war entered their hospital through a patient or a worried relative. That is how a relationship begins to acquire a history of its own.

There are equally good reasons to let people outside of Israel to tell part of the story. If an Israeli organization helps a community abroad improve its water supply, the most interesting witness may be a local person responsible for keeping the water running. What did the Israelis contribute? What broke, and who came back to fix it? A young Jew who cares about the environment and clean water has an honest way to dive into that story and see Israel from an entirely new perspective.

What I envy about Sarah Watson’s generation is that, at a terrible moment, she could point to something an Israeli leader had actually done and say she wanted that work to continue.

October 7 gave young American Jews every reason to grieve with us, however, it could never decide for them what they should believe about the war that followed. The responsibility we carry as Israelis is to give them a stake in what follows now. We can start by letting them know us once again.

Someday a young American Jew will be asked what Israel meant to them at twenty-five. I hope they will remember an Israeli who listened, a piece of work they shared and a decision this country made that gave them grounds for hope of their own.