What is Right and Just
American Jews fear the Golden Age of American Jewry is over. Bret Stephens of The New York Times has been saying this for years. Maybe they are right. There is ample evidence supporting them. Only time will tell. A snapshot is only true the moment it is taken.
It is commonplace for Jews like me to think of traditional antisemitism as coming from the right side of the political spectrum. Examples abound—not just Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy—but also the political Right in the United States with the America Firsters and the white supremacists. Now we hear loud and clear anti-Jewish rhetoric from the Progressive wing in the Democratic party, usually voiced in terms of supporting the Palestinians’ cause against Israel. In a word, it is primarily Israel-related.
This is a problem that is not going to go away. Throughout history, two people in one land has led to conflict, with one dominating the other. This was as true for medieval England as it was for the Americas—our own country included. This is not an excuse for acts of brutality by Jewish settlers of the West Bank or for excessive and largely ineffective bombing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
At the same time, it is wrong to think of Palestinians as natives and Jews as invaders. It depends on at what point in history you look. For Jews, whose history and faith are inseparable from geography, Israel has always been “the Holy Land.” For two thousand years, Jews prayed “for God to lift the yoke from off our necks and lead us upright to our land.”
Long before the State of Israel came into being in 1948, a majority of the population in Jerusalem was Jewish, not Arab. This was true even though the Arab population in the British Mandate of Palestine outnumbered Jews by more than three to one.
As Israel’s late Prime Minister Golda Meir once quipped, “We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs—we have no place to go.” This was two generations after the Balfour Declaration in 1916 that favored “a Jewish homeland in Palestine” and spurred the return of Jewish people to their ancestral homeland. The Holocaust, the expulsion of Jews from Arab lands and the disintegration of the Soviet Union did the rest.
Much depends on Israel’s political future. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition is beset with problems and is no longer favored to survive elections in October of this year. A centrist coalition in Israel, should it assume power, may well revive the prospect of a two-state solution, so as long as it does not threaten Israel’s security.
We cannot change the past. We Jews are commanded by scripture to do “what is right and just.” This standard can be hard to apply. It will always depend on the circumstances. While it is true that a political solution ceding a large portion of the West Bank to the Palestinians would pose a security challenge for Israel, doing nothing to resolve this conflict–or exacerbating it through further settlement expansion–is a greater long-term threat.
