Commentaries

L.A. Jewish Journal

November 2, 2007

link to this article published in the

Los Angeles Jewish Journal

 

We Have the Right to an

Indivisible Jerusalem

Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky invites a forthright open dialogue, a conversation about Jerusalem. Contemplating Israeli talks with those governing the autonomous Arab enclaves of Judea and Samaria -- Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestine Authority -- Rabbi Kanefsky writes that it is time for us to be honest about the story of Jerusalem. Employing the pages of The Jewish Journal, he particularly challenges those in the Orthodox Zionist community to converse, to be honest about Jerusalem.

I accept his invitation in these pages for this dialogue, for this discussion, for this honest telling of our claim to an eternally undivided capital city of Jerusalem.

Ever since I learned to pray, I learned about Jerusalem. In time as a boy, I learned to pray three times every day in my "Sh'moneh Esrai" prayer for the return to and the rebuilding of united Jerusalem. Since childhood, every time I have eaten a meal with bread, I have recited prayers of thanks for the food -- and for the rebuilding of united Jerusalem. If I eat a cookie, I follow with a prayer of thanks -- and for the rebuilding of Jerusalem.

I am not unique. For 2,000 years and more, my people have cried for Jerusalem and laughed for her. As much as I have come to love America in my lifetime -- because this country has been so good to me and my people -- I have no clue what day on the calendar the British burned the White House during the War of 1812. But I know that it was on the ninth of Av that the Babylonians burned the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. And it was the same day that Rome burned the rebuilt Temple.

This is where honesty begins in my dialogue with Rabbi Kanefsky. It may sound militaristic to him or strangely uncompromising. But my claim to Jerusalem is eternal and unyielding to a Jerusalem indivisible and united, because no one in my family line, going back to the beginning of the exile, ever yielded our claim to Jerusalem.

We were driven out by Babylonians, and we outlasted them and returned. We were exiled by Romans, and we outlasted them and returned. They built an Arch of Titus in Italy to glorify in taking down our Jerusalem, and we have outlived them and their empire, and we have returned.

We got married, and we broke a glass under the chuppah to remember a Jerusalem that had fallen, even as we recited the blessing moments earlier under that same canopy that the day will come when, once again, the sounds of joy and gladness, the celebrations of the groom and bride, will be heard in Jerusalem and her outskirts.

No one compromises on capital cities. America moved her capital around -- from Philadelphia to New York to Washington, D.C. -- but she never offered to split it with the British or Jefferson Davis. No one offers to split Damascus or Beirut or Cairo or Baghdad for peace. No one offers to split Paris or London or Madrid or Prague.

Even the experience with Berlin is instructive. The world forced onto the Germans -- veritably shoved it right down their throats -- the division of Berlin. It barely lasted half a century before the wall came down and the city was reunited.

We owe no apologies, no explanations. From 1948 to 1967, King Hussein of Jordan wrongfully was regnant over East Jerusalem. He made no effort to treat it as New Amman. Nor did any Arab ruler in all of history before him ever act to make Jerusalem a capital.

Jerusalem simply was not and never has been all that central to Arabia or Islam. Muslim prayers are directed toward Mecca and Medina. By contrast, praying from my locus in Southern California, I face east toward Jerusalem.

There is a corruption in the dialogue when I am challenged to speak "honestly" in defense of my right to see Jerusalem remain the eternally indivisible capital of Israel and the Jewish People. The Jews came back to Jerusalem with no less right than did America march to Washington, D.C.

If there is something wrong with entering a city by liberating it in battle, then it was equally wrong for any Arab conqueror before Israel to have entered the same city. But if a military victory places Arab negotiators at the table and drives out the British, who drove out the Ottomans, then a Jewish army's successful victory in a war of self-defense trumps all other secular-based claims to "right over might."

Because, despite any revisionist attempt to rewrite what happened in 1967, the fact remains that Israel was not looking to expand her borders but to live. And in 1948, she compromised so much more than any other nation has compromised, just to gain the ratification of a U.N. body that never has been in Israel's pocket.

Rabbi Kanefsky's call for honest conversation, for honesty from Orthodox Zionists, is an invitation to recall how the dialogue even came to begin. It began because Jews and our institutions and landmarks were driven out by marauders. And the Arab world, primarily the Jordanians, aimed to eradicate what was left.

There were synagogues in Jerusalem -- the Ramban Synagogue, the Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai, shuls all over East Jerusalem -- that Jordan razed to the ground. They converted one venerable shul to a cheese factory, another to a stall for goats. They uprooted tombstones from the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives and used them for pavement, for construction, even for latrines. They banned us from the Western Wall.

Jerusalem belonged to my ancestors. It belonged to my grandparents in Poland and Russia. It belongs to me. That's the honest story.


 

The Jewish Forward  

April 19, 2002

We're Right, the Whole World's Wrong

By DOV FISCHER

"The whole world is demanding that Israel withdraw. I don't think the whole world, including the friends of the Israeli people and government, can be wrong."

— Kofi Annan, United Nations Secretary- General, speaking in Madrid, Spain

At this moment in time, many Jews who love and support Israel hear the soft voice within, asking the question to which Kofi Annan recently alluded in Madrid: Can we alone be right, while the whole world around is wrong?

The evidence that we are standing on the other side of the "whole world" is manifest. The Arab League is united in condemnation, and Egyptian students march for an end to their country's diplomatic relations with Israel that were engraved at Camp David. The United Nations Security Council roundly condemns Israel several times in mere weeks, and its human rights commission again takes up the Durban chant against Zionism that was silenced by September 11. The European Union is rife with talk of boycotting the Jewish state. Synagogue attacks in France give vent to the feeling expressed with gentility by the French diplomat who termed Israel "that sh—-y little state." All three major political parties in Germany vie to lead their nation in condemning Israel. England accuses Israel of using British-made tanks illegally. Mobs attack Jews from Ukraine to Belgium to the Netherlands. The pope condemns Israel for its military presence outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, while armed Arab terrorists repose inside, holding monks and nuns as icons for terror.

We Jews are bemused. Are we the only ones who see the unrelenting suicide bombings of women and children at pizza stores, of teenagers at a discotheque, of families at a Seder celebration? After 19 months of slaughter at open-air fruit markets and bus stations and bat mitzvah parties, deadly shootings of motorists, stabbings of school children in caves, has no one seen this but us? Do we alone notice that the attacks target Jewish and Arab civilians alike throughout pre-June 1967 Israel, from Haifa to Hadera, West Jerusalem to Beersheba?

The whole world demands Israel take risks for peace with Yasser Arafat — again. Are we the only ones who perceive that, after he was conferred a Nobel peace prize and given authority to create a new polity and a new atmosphere for coexistence, he desecrated the next eight years by wielding television to inculcate grotesque images of murder, radio to disseminate a culture of hate, schools and summer camps to train young people to murder the Jews they were being taught to hate? Can no one but us decipher the receipts he signed, authorizing funds to purchase weapons of terror?

The whole world endorses President Bush's call for war against terrorists and those who harbor them. The United States invades Afghanistan to uproot the infrastructure of terror and hunkers down there for seven months, preparing to extend the incursion into Pakistan. Aerial bombs strafe cities. Thousands of civilian non-combatants are believed dead. The Taliban government crumbles, but the incursion continues. We must find Osama bin Laden. We must find Mullah Omar. We must reach Daniel Pearl's killers. And we yet shall begin the mother of all incursions into Iraq.

We Jews see this. We also see the same "whole world" roundly condemn Israel for its incursion into a jungle of terror. Israel will not drop incendiary payloads from the air on civilians, so Israeli reservists, husbands and fathers, die in house-to-house fighting in Jenin, where the terrorists booby-trap buildings, station snipers and outfit children as human bombs. Israel asks that Arafat turn over the assassins of an Israeli cabinet minister and the mastermind of the Karine-A affair that tried to smuggle 50 tons of explosives to his minions. But the whole world wants Israel instead to pull back while the bombers of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade and the Tanzim play for time. Doesn't the whole world see what we see? Can we alone be right?

Well, yes. If we Jews are anything, we are a people of history. From our first patriarch to Israel's precision-targeted destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, which laid the foundation for a successful Operation Desert Storm and the rescue of Kuwait, our history provides the strength to know that we can be right and the whole world wrong.

We have confronted the question many times. The whole world was polytheistic, and we alone preached belief in one God. We preached a Day of Rest, and the whole ancient world mocked us as lazy people. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. They said we crucified a Jew — as if the Romans would have allowed any of its subjects to do such a thing, as if Jews ever had such a punishment in our code — and we insisted such a thing was beyond impossible. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. In the Middle Ages, the whole world said that we use children's blood to make matzo; we denied it. They said that we poisoned the wells of Europe, and we denied it. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. The Crusades. The blood libels and Talmud burnings in England and France, leading those nations to expel Jews for centuries. The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition. The ghettoes and the Mortara case in Italy. Dreyfus in France. Beilis in Russia and a century's persecution of Soviet Jewry. The Holocaust. Kurt Waldheim in Austria. Each time, Europe stood by silently — or actively participated in murdering us — and we alone were right, and the whole world was wrong.

Today, once again, we alone are right and the whole world is wrong. The Arabs, the Russians, the Africans, the Vatican proffer their aggregated insights into and accumulated knowledge of the ethics of massacre. And the Europeans. Although we appreciate a half-century of West European democracy more than we appreciated the prior millennia of European brutality, we recognize who they are, what they have done — and what's what. We know, if they don't, that they need Arab oil more than they need Jewish philosophy and creativity. We remember that the food they eat is grown from soil fertilized by 2,000 years of Jewish blood they have sprinkled onto it. Atavistic Jew-hatred lingers in the air into which the ashes rose from the crematoria. Finally, the best of Europe truly are wracked by the burdened conscience of what they, their parents and their bubbes and zeides did, or failed to do, in the 1940s. So, instead of confronting a shameful past that belies their self-vaunted Romantic civilization, they seek now to assuage their consciences with the mendacity that Israel 2002 is no different from Europe 1942.

Yes, once again, we are right and the whole world is wrong. It doesn't change a thing, but after 25 centuries it's nice to know.

Rav Fischer's Bio

 

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