Every time Israel's interests are in conflict with America's, must
Israel capitulate to American dictates or risk compromising the two
countries' long alliance? A cursory look at recent history reveals that
Israel has consistently rebuffed American pressure when critical
interests were at stake, strengthening the relationship.
David Ben Gurion puts John Foster Dulles in his place
Received by email:
In 1954, when Ben Gurion was Prime Minister, he traveled to the USA to
meet with President Eisenhower to request his assistance and support in
the early and difficult days of the State of Israel.
John Foster Dulles, who was the then secretary of state, confronted Ben Gurion and challenged him as follows:
"Tell
me, Mr. Prime Minister - who do you and your state represent? Does it
represent the Jews of Poland, perhaps Yemen, Romania,Morocco, Iraq,
Russia or perhaps Brazil? After 2000 years of exile can you honestly
speak about a single nation, a single culture? Can you speak about a
single heritage or perhaps a single Jewish tradition?"
Ben Gurion answered him as follows:
"Look, Mr. Secretary of State - approximately 300 years ago the
Mayflower set sail from England and on it were the first settlers who
settled in what would become the largest demo-cratic superpower known as
the United States of America. Now, do me a favor - go out into the
streets and find 10 American children and ask them the following:
What was the name of the Captain of the Mayflower?
How long did the voyage take?
What did the people who were on the ship eat?
What were the conditions of sailing during the voyage?
I'm sure you would agree with me that there is a good chance that you won't get a good answer to these questions.
Now in contrast - not 300 but more than 3000 years ago, the Jews left the land of Egypt.
I
would kindly request from you Mr. Secretary that on one of your trips
around the world, try and meet 10 Jewish children in different
countries. And ask them:
'What was the name of the leader who took the Jews out of Egypt?'
'How long did it take them before they got to the land of Israel?
'What did they eat during the period when they were wandering in the desert?'
'And what happened to the sea when they encountered it?'
'Once you get the answers to these questions, please carefully reconsider the question that you have just asked me!"
Heh.
UPDATE MONDAY 7:49 PM
For those wondering about the authenticity of this story, the Ben Gurion quote is apparently accurate, the connection to Dulles is not.
Israel's first political assassination was not the murder of Yitzchak Rabin in 1995, nor was it the murder of British Count Bernadot by the Irgun in the 1940's. Israel's first political assassination was 89 years ago yesterday - June 30, 1924 - and it was carried out by the Hagana, the force that eventually became the IDF. The victim was a Dutch poet, journalist and legal scholar named Jacob Israel de Haan, and he was murdered because he was an anti-Zionist.
Let's go to the videotape.
Initially, de Haan was involved with Zionist circles in his new home. He
helped establish the Jerusalem Law Classes in 1919, where he lectured,
worked as a correspondent for a Dutch newspaper, and continued writing
poetry. Soon, he met and found a kindred spirit in Rabbi Yosef Chaim
Sonnenfeld, the founder of the ultra-Orthodox, anti-Zionist Edah Haredit
community, and became his political spokesman. He also is said to have
taken an interest in the young boys of Jerusalem, both Jewish and Arab.
Within a short time, de Haan became critical of the secular nature of
the Zionist movement and of its relationship with the Orthodox
community. He also became convinced that it was on a collision course
with the indigenous Arab population of the land.
In
1922, the same year that Jacob de Haan defended Agudath Israel, the
Haredi political movement, in a legal trial over its refusal to pay a
new excise tax levied by Zionist authorities on matzot before Passover,
he also met with Lord Northcliffe, founder of the Daily Mail newspaper
in London, when the latter visited the region. He shared his
anti-Zionist views with Northcliffe and those views were reported back
in the United Kingdom. Soon, de Haan was offered work as a correspondent
for the tabloid Daily Express. De Haan also met with Hashemite leader
Hussein bin Ali, the King of Hejaz, to discuss the establishment of a
Palestinian state.
By
now, de Haan had become a liability to the Zionist movement, and
especially dangerous because of the platform he now had for spreading
his views in London, where critical decisions about Palestine were
made. In Jerusalem, he became persona non grata among Zionists,
including his law students. One anecdote has him walking with a Dutch
visitor, who observed that as people passed them into the street, they
were spitting on the sidewalk. The visitor thought this was a sign of
disrespect, to which de Haan responded, according to Dutch historian
Ludy Giebels: “"Oh no, they spit on the street out of respect for you,
your presence. Otherwise they would have spit in my face."
Early
on the morning of June 30, 1924, as he left the synagogue in Shaare
Zedek hospital, on Jaffa Road, de Haan was shot three times. He died
immediately.
The
British authorities offered a reward for information that would lead to
his killer, but no one was ever tried for the crime. The killing was
thought to have been ordered by the Haganah, but it was only in the
1980s that two Israeli journalists, Shlomo Nakdimon and Shaul Mayzlish,
received an admission of guilt from Israeli businessman Avraham Tehomi,
who was then living in Hong Kong.
Tehomi
told the journalists that he had been acting on orders of the Haganah,
specifically of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, an officer in the militia and a
political activist, later the second president of the State of Israel:
"I have done what the Haganah decided had to be done. And nothing was
done without the order of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi ... I have no regrets because he [de Haan] wanted to destroy our whole idea of Zionism."
Although Neturei Karta are considered very much a fringe group even among Haredim today, the influence of the de Haan assassination continues. More here.
The Haredi draft controversy is just another round in a very old battle
34 years ago, when I was a bochur (unmarried man) in a religious Zionist yeshiva, Golda Meir passed away. As is often the case when someone of her political stature passes away, Meir's funeral was delayed for foreign dignitaries to arrive. Our rebbe (rabbi), who shall remain nameless, got up in front of our shiur (class) the next morning, and gave us a lesson in Zionist history that I have never forgotten.
"It's good for her to suffer," he told us. "She deserves to suffer," he emphasized. "And suffer she will because the hardest time for a person's soul is the time between death and burial," he assured us.
The group of 25-30 boys, mostly from religious Zionist homes in the US and UK, looked at him in shock. "Rabbi," we asked, "how can you say such things about Golda, who is a folk hero among Jews abroad?"
He then proceeded to tell us why 'Golda' deserved to suffer. 'Golda' had been in charge of youth immigration in the 1950's. It was she who was personally responsible for the 'reeducation' of so many Jews of Sephardic extraction to become 'Hebrews' and 'Israelis' rather than Jews. For that, he told us, she deserved to suffer.
(As an aside, please allow me to add, as I told my rebbe when he came to visit me during my father's shiva, that I learned another lesson from that particular morning's harangue: When someone dies, if you are concerned for them, you should try to bury them as soon as possible. Both of my parents passed away in the early hours of Friday mornings seven years apart. Both funerals took place on Friday afternoons, despite the fact that my parents are buried in the US where it is rare to have a funeral so quickly).
I am about to link to an article that I consider important to understanding the current controversy about drafting Haredim. It is very long (and most of the commenters on the original article obviously did not read the entire article). But it teaches important context about why many Haredim don't serve in the army and the real goals behind the drive to draft them. I am going to quote a small part of the article, and urge you to read the whole thing. I will add more at the end, so don't just click through from here(Hat Tip: Aryeh Z).
The secular/political Zionist dream was to create – along with a Jewish
homeland – a completely new definition of the Jew and the Jewish People;
a Jewishness that unambiguously excluded the concept of a covenantal
people loyal to the Torah and the commandments. In other words, the
Judaism that had sustained the Nation of Israel for the previous 3,400
years was to be discarded and replaced with a modernistic amalgamation
of nationalism, socialism, enlightened western culture, and ethnic
Jewish identity.
...
This obsession with creating a “new Jew” even trumped the basic
values of Jewish brotherhood, the imperative that all Jews are
responsible for one another, and that nothing takes precedence over saving lives. David Ben-Gurion shockingly wrote the following in 1938, one month after Kristellnacht:
“If I knew it was possible to save all [Jewish] children of
Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by
transferring them to Eretz-Yisrael, I would choose the latter—-because
we are faced not only with the accounting of these [Jewish] children but
also with the historical accounting of the Jewish People.”
...
It is against this backdrop that the conflict arose over mandatory
army service. Under no circumstances was the orthodox community prepared
to put their young sons – during the most impressionable years of their
lives (18-21 years of age) – in the hands of a government that looked
at their way of life with disdain, contempt, and outright hatred; a
government that was even prepared to murder other Jews to achieve their
goals.
David Ben-Gurion realized that any attempt to force the issue would
result, literally, in civil war. The government reluctantly amended the
draft law to exclude orthodox men who were learning full time in
Yeshivot (rabbinical seminaries). However, none of these men would be
permitted to work legally unless they did Army service. This act of
spiteful cruelty was a typical outgrowth of the unbridled arrogance of
Ben-Gurion and his ilk. The message to the Hareidi community was the
following:
If you don’t do it our way, we will strip you of your
basic human dignity; that is to say, the ability to work and support
oneself and one’s family. If you want to live your way of life you will
be forced to live on either government handouts or charity.
In other words, the Hareidim effectively became 2nd
class citizens in the new State of Israel. After forcing the Hareidi
community into this situation and forbidding them to work unless they
toed the secular-Zionist line, they then accused them of being
“parasites” because they didn’t work!
The “parasite” canard along with the accusation that the Hareidim
refuse to “share the burden” of serving in the army, has been used as a
stick with which to beat the Hareidi community since the founding of the
State of Israel. It has also been effectively used by secular
ideologues to demonize Hareidim among non-observant Israelis. Imagine
how different it would have been if instead of doing everything in his
power to marginalize the Hareidi community Ben-Gurion had held out his
hand in brotherly love and said the following:
“We are brothers, the sons of one man” (Gen. 42:13) All of us are
here because we are Jews. We all love the land of Israel and we all
agree that a Jew must serve the needs of the Jewish people. Our sons
will serve by joining the army, your sons will serve by keeping alive
our moral and spiritual legacy by studying Torah. After both complete
their years of service they are free to work and become productive
members of our society.
How different it could have been indeed.
The one fact that the author, Rabbi Moshe Averick, left out is that the Chazon Ish (Rabbi Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz), who made the deal with Ben Gurion over the Haredi draft 60 years or so ago, offered to send all the yeshiva boys to the army if the army would not have women. Since the goal was and is, as Rabbi Averick states, to create a 'new kind of Jew,' Ben Gurion turned him down.
As many of you know (because some of you have even met me there), I attend a weekly Torah class in Jerusalem. The rabbi who gives the class once told us that he met a man who knew someone who had asked David Ben Gurion why he allowed a religious education system to be created in the new state at all. Ben Gurion responded that he figured that within a generation, all attachment to traditional Judaism would die out anyway, so why fight with them. On this, as on many other matters, Ben Gurion was clearly wrong.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Here are 1956 interviews with Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, Jordanian King Hussein and Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
MJ Rosenberg claims Israelis are 'invented people'
Writing in al-Jazeera (because no one else would publish such anti-Semitic drivel?), the insufferable MJ Rosenberg claims that 'Israelis' are as much an 'invented people' as 'Palestinians.'
The singular triumph of the Zionist movement is that it invented a state and a people - Israel and the Israelis - from scratch. The first Hebrew-speaking child in 1900 years, Ittamar Ben-Avi,was not born until 1882. His father, the brilliant linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, created a modern language for him to speak by improvising from the language of the Bible.
The founder of the Israeli state was Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), an assimilated Viennese writer who was convinced by the Dreyfus trial in France - and the horrendous right-wing anti-Semitism that resulted from it - that Jews had to get out of Europe.
In 1897, he wrote the book that would essentially inaugurate the Zionist movement. It was called Der Judenstaat(meaning "the Jews' state" or "the Jewish State"), which was his proposal for moving the Jews out of Europe and into their own country.
He didn't specify where the Jewish homeland should be. He was more concerned about quickly obtaining territory anywhere for Jews to seek refuge.
Later, he decided that Palestine made the most sense because that was where the Jewish people both began and exercised self-determination in ancient times, and where there already was a small minority of Jews. But he also spoke of finding a place in Africa or the Americas if Palestine was unavailable.
The reaction to Herzl's idea was primarily that he was a bit crazy. Jews committed to assimilation insisted that Jews were not a nation, but a religious faith. Their nationalities were French, German, Polish, Iraqi or American - not some imaginary Jewish nationality that had not existed for 1900 years.
Rosenberg is mistaken. Zionism without Judaism is like a body without a soul.
In the first 100 pages or so of his book, The Jewish State (yes, the same title as Herzl's), Yoram Hazony demonstrates conclusively that Israel is the Jewish state and is grounded in Jewish customs, history, values and lore. Hazony shows that David Ben Gurion himself was a key proponent of making our country a Jewish state and not an 'Israeli state' despite the fact that Ben Gurion was - for the most part - not a practicing Jew.
Over the past 60 years, there have been many attempts to substitute 'Israeliness' for Judaism, just like Rosenberg is trying to convince us was done. They have all failed because not only is Israel not an 'Israeli state,' there is no such thing as 'Israeliness.' If we are Israelis and not Jews, then we are doomed to failure.
And where does that leave the non-Jewish residents of the State of Israel? As non-Jews living in a Jewish country, but without the persecution that goes with being - for example - non-Muslims in a Muslim country. Israel is not a 'state of all its citizens' - as much as the Left has tried to make it into one. It is a Jewish state with a Jewish calendar and Jewish traditions. For example, the kids are all on vacation this week because it's Chanuka.
Oh and by the way, Herzl's idea to put the Jewish state in Africa (specifically in Uganda) was rejected by the rest of the Zionist leadership. That's because they knew that the land to which the Jewish people is connected, the land whose deed belongs to the Jewish people per the Bible, is the Land of Israel.
One of the reasons that many American Jews do not make effective advocates for Israel, argues Matthew Ackerman, is that they are still stuck in a pre-World War II concept that Israel must be presented as a refuge for persecuted Jews, and not as the Jewish homeland. Presenting Israel as the Jewish homeland, these Jews fear, would undermine their standing in the United States and raise charges of dual loyalty.
This problem was evident in the career of Louis Brandeis, the first prominent American Jewish advocate for Zionism. Already a famous lawyer when he assumed leadership of the Zionist movement in the United States in 1914 (a reputation that would bring him to the Supreme Court in 1916), he gave the movement a tremendous boost in American renown and credibility.
But Brandeis brought with him an insistence that Zionism had nothing to say for American Jews. The establishment of a Jewish state would for him be a refuge for Jews lacking the means or ability to get to a place like the United States where their rights would be assured. So it was that principally along these lines – Zionism as a refuge for the persecuted and impoverished Jews of Europe and elsewhere and little else besides – that the Zionist case was made by American Jews before World War II.
The Holocaust only strengthened this line of argument, making the rhetoric of security and refuge irresistible. The same kind of thinking behind Brandeis’ Zionism remained evident in the important exchange of letters between the American Jewish Committee leader Jacob Blaustein and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in 1950. In them, Blaustein underlined the view that Israel was a “home” for “hundreds of thousands” of Jews from “Europe, Africa, and the Middle East,” but that “home” for American Jewry was the United States, and it was there that they found “freedom” and “security,” not a continuation of “exile.”
This thinking, whether from Brandeis, Blaustein, or the many other Jews they and other American Jewish leaders have represented, seems determined by the fear that defining Israel as the Jewish homeland puts into question their standing in their country of citizenship. Effective American Jewish Israel advocacy has largely been built in the last 50 years on the avoidance of this fear. It was and is far easier to invoke the Holocaust, to claim no more than “Israel is our insurance policy,” as the protagonist in the 2010 movie “Barney’s Version” learns.
Ackerman argues that it's time for American Jews to get over it, a position with which I heartily agree.
IDF commanders not concerned about 'religious radicalism'
We've heard a lot of stories lately about how the IDF is having 'problems' with religious soldiers because of an incident involving women singing. In fact, on Monday, Haaretz (probably the most anti-religious newspaper among the dailies in Israel) reported that 19 commanders had sent a letter to the IDF warning of 'religious radicalism.' But JPost reports that those 19 are unusual and most IDF commanders don't see a problem.
The growing media focus on the story has forced Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz to order the Manpower Directorate to conduct a thorough review of the integration of women in the IDF.
“This is an issue that needs clarification, and until Gantz sets new guidelines the situation will likely get worse,” one officer explained.
The prominence of Orthodox officers in the army has been growing in recent years. In the Golani Brigade, for example, the brigade commander, a colonel, is religious, and out of the seven lieutenant-colonels, all but one are religious.
In the Paratroop Brigade, the situation is vastly different. There, the brigade commander and all but one of the lieutenant-colonels are secular, although all of the deputy battalion commanders – who can be called “battalion commanders to be” – are mostly Orthodox.
Nevertheless, brigade commanders in the IDF are generally dismissive of the claims that the army is undergoing religious radicalization.
Two brigade commanders, in conversations with The Jerusalem Post, said that they believed the phenomenon was marginal and was not indicative of the general religious population in the IDF.
“These appear to be isolated cases,” one brigade commander said last week. “People have to be smart, and that includes rabbis who are educating these soldiers, and commanders who are in charge of them. We have to know what we can do and what we can’t do.”
Another brigade commander said that he did not look under the helmets of his subordinates when considering them for promotions and appointments.
“Soldiers need to be judged according to the way they fight and how they are as leaders,” the brigade commander said.
And the IDF is looking to recruit more ultra-Orthodox soldiers for whom mixing with women is not an issue: There are no women in or near their units.
While the relationship between Orthodox and female soldiers will continue to be examined, the IDF is looking to increase the number of ultra-Orthodox soldiers it recruits. There are currently about 2,000 ultra-Orthodox soldiers in the army, in the Netzah Yehuda Battalion – also known as Nahal Haredi – and in technical positions in the air force, the C4I (command, control, communications, computers, and (military) intelligence) Directorate and Military Intelligence.
That number is expected to grow over the coming year, with plans by Military Intelligence, for example, to reach 1,000 ultra- Orthodox recruits as programmers and computer specialists. The funding for the enlistment of ultra-Orthodox soldiers is provided by the Treasury and is independent of the IDF’s budget.
Shortly after the State was established, its first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, met with Rabbi Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz, popularly known as the Chazon Ish, who was the leader of the ultra-Orthodox community of the time. Karelitz made Ben Gurion a simple offer: If Ben Gurion made the army all male, Rabbi Karelitz would order all the yeshiva boys to serve in the army. Ben Gurion refused, and the rest is history.
Yoram Ettinger writes that saying 'no' - even to the United States - need not be the end of the World for Israel. In fact, Ettinger claims that saying no has worked out quite well.
In 1981, Prime Minister Menachem Begin ordered the bombing of Iraq's nuclear reactor. In 1982, he launched a comprehensive war on the Palestinian Liberation Organization's terrorist headquarters in Lebanon. Both operations were executed irrespective of bullying and pressure from the U.S. and notwithstanding the fragile 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty. Begin realized that failing to eradicate these threats would imperil Israel's survival, erode its power of deterrence and thus undermine Israel's deterrence-driven peace with Egypt and its strategic cooperation with the U.S.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Israel-Egypt peace treaty did not collapse. Once again, Arab leaders did not rush to rescue the PLO, demonstrating that the Palestinian issue was not a crown jewel of Arab policymaking. Moreover, Egypt – just like all other Arab countries – would not sacrifice its own national interests on the altar of the Palestinian issue.
While the U.S. Administration condemned Israel for the large scale military operations, and imposed a brief military embargo, these operations resulted in the 1981 and 1983 strategic Memoranda of Understanding between the U.S. and Israel, which enhanced joint national security projects, upgrading Israel's long-term strategic posture.
From 1983 to 1992, during his two terms as prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir was severely criticized by U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush for crushing Palestinian terrorism during the First Intifada and expanding Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem. At the same time, however, U.S.-Israel strategic cooperation was bolstered at an unprecedented level while he was in power. Washington recognized that U.S.-Israel cooperation never revolved around the Arab-Israeli conflict. Mutually-beneficial U.S.-Israel ties were based upon shared values, common threats such as Islamic terrorism, ballistic missiles and rogue regimes, and joint interests such as research and development and job creation in the high-tech market and in the defense industries.
In August 1948, U.S. Ambassador to Israel James McDonald recorded Prime Minister David Ben Gurion's response to the American demand (accompanied by a regional military embargo) to end the "occupation" of Arab land or agree to a land swap, to accept the internationalization of Jerusalem and to allow the return of the Arab refugees: "Speaking with solemn emphasis, [Ben Gurion] added that as much as Israel desired friendship with the U.S. and full cooperation with it and the U.N., there were limits beyond which it could go. Israel cannot yield to anything which, in its judgment, would threaten its independence or its security. The very fact that Israel is a small state makes more necessary the scrupulous defense of its own interests; otherwise it would be lost … Ben Gurion warned President [Harry S.] Truman and the State Department that they would be gravely mistaken if they assumed that the threat or even the use of U.N. sanctions would force Israel to yield on issues considered vital to its independence and security. [He] left no doubt that he was determined to resist, at whatever cost, 'unjust and impossible demands.' On these he could not compromise ["My Mission," 1951, pp. 49-50]."
Ben Gurion's defiance transformed Washington's image of the Jewish state from a strategic liability to a potential strategic asset.
The Menachem Begin Heritage Center is beginning an effort this week to raise the sunken ship Altalena. The Altalena was an arms ship brought to Israel by the Irgun Tzvai Leumi (National Military Organization), which was then commanded by Menachem Begin. In June 1948, while the War of Independence raged, the ship was sunk by the Palmach unit (the precursor of the IDF) led by Yitzchak Rabin on the orders of David Ben Gurion.
The salvage operation should take about two weeks.
The Altalena was a ship carrying Irgun weapons and fighters, many of whom were Holocaust survivors, to Israel in June 1948. Former prime minister Menachem Begin, then the Irgun's commander, boarded the ship as it approached Israel, and the Altalena was fired upon by Yitzhak Rabin's Palmach unit near Tel Aviv's shore and later sunk on a command from David Ben-Gurion.
...
The ship is seen by many Israelis as a symbol of the dangers of violence between Jews in Israel.
A representative of the Menachem Begin Heritage Center said that the search for the ship would begin this week, and that remains are expected to be found within two weeks.
MK Ya'acov Katz (National Union), who attended the meeting said that "lifting the ship and making it a memorial is important in order to perpetuate the national consensus that a Jew will never lift a hand against his brother."
"There will never be a civil war," Katz exclaimed, repeating a well-known Begin quote from after the Altalena affair.
This would never have happened with Labor in power.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
