With American election season marching on, there isn’t a Jew in the American Exile who isn’t worried sick over who to vote for. There has been a lot of uptalk about McCain, and for Obama, downtalk. One friend, a generally liberal, socially conscious Jewish girl, told me blunt, “A vote for McCain is a vote against Israel.” Another friend, generally more conservative, helped me come to the following thoughts:

On domestic issues, Obama is much more in tune than McCain with Jewish values. Obama will act with compassion to help the downtrodden in America, through universal health insurance and poverty programs. He will also do far more than McCain to combat problems that cross national boundaries, such as hunger and AIDS. He is better for the Earth. Most importantly, Obama will put good judges on the Supreme Court. A vote for McCain is a vote against freedom of speech, freedom of the press, sexual freedom, reproductive freedom, and freedom of religion; a vote for corporate freedom at the expense of the individual. Even for the Supreme Court alone I would feel morally at fault should I vote for McCain. Ah, but what of Israel? If Obama is bad for Israel, I would feel equally irresponsible voting for him. So I’ve been schpitzing a lot over who to vote for in the general election.

Both McCain and Obama will encourage the tired, failed land for “peace” approach and support an Arab state in Judea and Samaria. He may be more anti-Israel in his sentiments, but if he is elected, Obama will focus on domestic policy and Iraq, leaving Israel largely alone. If McCain were president, he would make Israel a priority. McCain wants “victory” in the Middle East, which means he wants Israel to essentially act as a representative of American-style capitalist democracy against the evil Muslim/Arab nations. Polarizing and secularizing Israel against the Arabs, all while legitimizing Palestinian nationalism is a recipe for unending war, not peace. I’d rather have an anti-Israel president who lets Israel be, than have a supposedly pro-Israel president who pushes Israel into disaster.

That still leaves the issue of Iran. I was very disturbed by Obama’s appeasing tone towards Iran. If Israel expects to survive Achmadinejad, we need the threat that, should Iran attack Israel with a nuclear bomb, Iran would be, to steal Hillary’s phrasing, obliterated. Fortunately, though it is impossible to know for sure, based on news reports it seems very probable that Israel has nuclear missile submarines. Having those would give Israel the unassailable ability to respond in kind to a nuclear attack. If you think Israel presents a clear second strike threat to Iran, then Israel does not need the US to threaten Iran, and in that case Israel is better off having the US talk to Iran. Iran polarizes the Muslim world against Israel, because a common enemy allows the Arab nations to set aside their differences and accept Iran. By talking to Iran, the US could weaken Iran’s diplomatic position among the Muslim countries, which is to Israel’s advantage. If you think Israel does not present a credible second strike threat, maybe Israel needs McCain. I think the chances are better than even that Israel does present Iran with mutually assured destruction.

So, Jerusalem, Tehran, and domestic justice considered, though I worry about his heightened interest in Israel since the AIPAC speech, I currently plan in November to vote for Obama.

Nicholas Kristof wrote the following in a New York Times editorial a few days ago:

Yet it is also here [in Judea and Samaria] that you see the very best side of Israel. Israeli human rights groups relentlessly stand up for Palestinians. Israeli women volunteer at checkpoints to help Palestinians through. Israeli courts periodically rule in favor of Palestinians. Israeli scholars have published research that undermines their own nation’s mythologies. Many Israeli journalists have been fair-minded toward Palestinians in a way that Arab journalists have rarely reciprocated.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, raq rega! The best side of Israel is when “Israeli courts periodically rule in favor of Palestinians”? That doesn’t make any sense: the rulings of a court say nothing about its country, and everything about the merits of its cases. Why is basic legal fairness one of Israel’s best points? Why is Israel only good when it takes sides against itself? Kristof’s subtext seems to insinuate, “Israel is immoral except when it is helping Arabs”.

Don’t get me wrong, human rights volunteers and fair minded journalism are wonderful things; I’m not saying Jews should practice brutality against the Arabs. But I can think of a few things better about Israel than “Israeli scholars…undermin[ing] their own nation’s mythologies”. What about Magen David Adom? What about Technion? What about the way the IDF kept Israeli casualties miraculously low during the 2006 Lebanon war? What about the groundbreaking environmental and social work being done at places like Kibbutz Lotan, or the Temple Institute’s inspiring fusion of science and faith? I think the symbiotic (though not without conflict – we are Jews after all) coexistence of Haredim and secular Jews certainly qualifies as a demonstration of Israel’s best face.

I am sick and tired of anti-Zionist rhetoric masquerading as sensitivity to human rights. I, and I hope every Zionist, takes Jewish morality a little more seriously than to coopt the language of compassion for bigotry. Helping Arabs does not make you a good Israeli; helping people makes you a good person, helping Israel makes you a good Israeli.

Oh, and speaking of the best side of Israel, let’s not forget falafel.

When someone asks about or mentions Israel, I always feel a rush of emotions. There are triggers that make me giddy with excitement, triggers that give me goosebumps, triggers that make me sad. I have been fortunate enough to visit Israel 7 times. One of the first things I always mention is the energy of Israel. There’s just something in the air that is evident as soon as one steps off the plane, almost a spiritual caffeine. In some ways, my identification with Israel shapes my identity as an American. My father often tells stories of high holiday services where the rabbi would not continue with the service until enough money had been raised for Israel. He understood that without Israel, American Jewry, and more importantly all Jews could not survive.

In some ways, Israel is a new chance for the “American Dream.” Though the phrase has rarely been used, I would call it the “Israeli Dream.” The ideas are very similar: people traveling from various lands to live free from religious persecution, to thrive economically, and to provide better lives for their children. For me, this is the most beautiful thing about Israel. Israel is one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world and it is the only democracy in the middle east. These and many other accomplishments are testament to the success of this dream.

I care about Israel because I am Jewish, because my mother is Israeli, because my family lives there, because I am American, and because I should. My hope is that for whatever reason, others realize the importance of Israel.

When I saw PA leader Abbas’ claim last week that Israel and Hamas were holding secret negotiations, which both Israel and Hamas immediately denied, I couldn’t help being amused. The only possible benefit of Abbas making such a claim is that he might be taken more seriously as a leader if he decided to tell the truth while Israel and Hamas continued to lie to the public.

Truth is, I expected such negotiations might be going on (as did many other writers) but when Israel explicitly denied such talks, one of two outcomes were possible. Either Israel was in fact not negotiating with Hamas, or the government was so politically inept as to believe that it could actually stop people from finding out the truth.

So, when I read this morning in the JPost that negotiations are in fact taking place, and that “Israel is demanding that a formal calm with Hamas be preceded by a 30-day “feeling the pulse” period,” I couldn’t help but smile a little.

Now, I disagree strongly with Israel holding such negotiations without the presence of Fatah and the Egyptians. True peace needs to be done as a package deal, and Fatah is still a political factor in Gaza and true peace cannot exist without Egypt taking an active role in the process.

Secret negotiations serve only to make Israeli leaders look like they’re trying to appease terrorists. We will never be able to convince Hamas to stop the attacks in the long run without true negotiations, and until that point Israel is just making itself look weaker, Hamas look stronger, and Abbas look more honest than anyone else involved.

—

An update to my earlier post regarding Abbas’ comments about a proposed cease-fire. It looks like he wasn’t lying after all…

An Egyptian-brokered truce has been reached between Israel and Hamas, a senior Israeli security official said Tuesday.

The official told AFP that Hamas agreed to stop firing rockets as long as Israel ceases its military operations in the Gaza Strip.

According to the unnamed official, Cairo played an active role in the deal, in an effort to reach a ceasefire which would eventually lead to the removal of the Israeli blockade imposed on the Strip.

—

More details here at Haaretz:

A deal being formulated between Israel, Egypt and Hamas involves deploying Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ troops at the crossings with the Gaza Strip, Palestinian sources told Haaretz Tuesday.

According to the sources, Israel and Hamas have agreed to the Egyptian proposal to deploy Palestinian Authority Presidential Guard members along the Karni, Sufa and Kerem Shalom crossings, where cargo is transferred between Israel and Gaza, as well as at the Erez crossing, a passageway for people and goods.

There are a couple of interesting articles this morning I’d like to write about, but this one was by far the most outrageous. For the last few years there have been various efforts in Britain to attack Israel politically, the most recent being an academic boycott. Yet just as it seemed the redcoats had finally given up picking fights Israel, the British government announced yesterday that Likud leader Moshe Feiglin was banned from entering the U.K. on the grounds that his actions

foment or justify terrorist violence in furtherance of particular beliefs; seek to provoke others to terrorist acts; foment other serious criminal activity or seek to provoke others to serious criminal acts and foster hatred which might lead to inter-community violence in the UK.

What continues to confound me about stories like this is that Britain is supposed to be a world leader in academics. The Ivy Leagues in the US all imitate the academic style of Cambridge and Oxford.

It is worth mentioning that I am to the left of most Zionists on this issue, as I always supported allowing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia, something that was heavily protested by many right-wing Jews.
The fact that the British government is fighting an ideological battle through the restriction of free speech and education is sickening. No government should be in the business of deciding whose viewpoints are “harmful” enough that they should be banned from expressing them at all. That being said, I have no problems with academic institutions themselves from banning speakers for the same reason.

While I may strongly disagree with such action, universities define themselves politically by the curriculum they teach, and there is a difference between allowing for differing points of view and endorsing speech with no academic value at all. That being said, I think it is very hard to justify taking such action, and I have yet to see a case where an individual has been banned as a speaker and I have agreed with the decision.

The most ridiculous part of all this is that Britain’s ban comes out of nowhere. Feiglin has not been planning a speaking tour or promoting a new book which the British found offensive. It seems the British Immigration Agency just woke up one morning and thought to themselves, “How can we best insult Israel today?”

This action is a new kind of low for British politicians, and it sickens me to think that Gordon Brown, who I respect(ed) to some degree in his political integrity would condone something like this. I still hold out hope that some British free speech advocates will condemn this action enough that the government will change its mind. I sincerely hope Israel doesn’t sink to the level of such insults and respond in kind. We have far more critical battles to fight.

Since this is a Zionist blog, I thought I would make my first post about why I am a Zionist. Much of what I have to say, and will be saying on this blog, may seem on its face radical; out of context my points can be grievously misconstrued. For this reason I want to start out by emphasizing that I was not always a Zionist, that I understand from personal experience the logic of anti-Zionism, that my Zionism is a carefully considered conclusion. The following essay, which I wrote after returning from my first trip to Israel two summers ago, does not detail my logic and views – you’ll get plenty of that in the future – instead hoping to give an emotional glimpse of the moment I became a Zionist.

Two millennia ago, the Second Temple’s razing fresh, Jewish zealots, called by the Romans sicarii, daggers, silently scaled Masada’s shear cliffs. Ambushing the fortress, for three years they defied Rome’s legions; a citadel of resistance lodged in the tiger’s throat. As the Judean ramparts finally fell, Elazar ben Ya’ir instructed the Zealots, taking the sin of suicide on himself, to in turn slay each other, rather than surrender the Sabbath to slavery. Zionism resurrects the flag of Judaism synonymous with sovereignty. Israel’s soldiers, as a final step before activation, often scaled the sicarii cliff, yelling in unison atop the mesa’s south face, “Mitzada! Sheni! Lo! Tipol!” – Masada will not fall again.

Finite clay composes a cereal bowl, but the bowl contains infinite space and possibilities for contents. Maimonides taught that Torah, like a cereal bowl, delineates what God is not, leaving infinite room for what God is. God is an ocean, waves His attributes. In an unbounded ocean, all waves resonate equally: flat water. The cereal bowl produces standing waves, however, according to its shape, the crests of which reach sublime heights, the troughs profound depths. Thus by restricting behavior, Torah enables ecstatic spiritual fulfillment. The human soul is a microcosm of God within the Divine sea.

My parents raised me by the cereal bowl, unconcerned about my brand of Judaism as long as I was decisively Jewish. I became Bar Mitzvah with passionate spirituality, but shallow understanding. Adopting the philosophy of my parents and my community, I explained the Torah as purely metaphorical, neglecting piety for social action. I felt zero connection to Israel.

I stumbled blind out of David Ben-Gurion Airport last June, hands outstretched, grasping for spiritual connection. Searching the horizon from my spiritual rowboat, I struggled to reconcile Moresha and the City of David with my moral and spiritual relativism. The Western Wall pitted my innate demand for philosophical consistency against my entrenched metaphorical theology.

I awoke with my fellow pilgrims at three A.M. to scale Masada. We climbed in pitch black, achieving the summit at five, sunrise. I was swimming in the Divine ocean, alert for a spiritual landmark. As the sun rose above the bifurcated Dead Sea, silhouetting the Israeli flag among the ruddy ruins, a sliver of land appeared on the horizon. On the same dust as stood Elazar ben Yair, we shouted, “Mitzada! Sheni! Lo! Tipol!” The wave of voices surged toward the distant island Zion, propelling me upward like a muscular hand. The sicarii’s voices echoed from the rock face, and stabbed me, daggers. Water surpassed me, engulfing me. The words became a mantra, an oath that I, personally, swore to defend Israel as a Jewish State. No religion without nation. I struggled for the surface. No nation without state. My parents were receding toward the ocean’s cereal bowl edge. No Jewish state without religion. I fought for flat water, relativism. Sunlight shone through the breaking waves. A light to the nations.

I breathed in desert air. I felt assailing an unaccustomed contentment, a sense of home, of true moral purpose. Israel filled my cereal bowl.

As of about two weeks ago I didn’t know the words to Hatikvah. I speak almost no Hebrew, but since I’ve been planning to spend this summer in Israel, I figured that even if I came in knowing nothing else, at least I could sing along with the crowd and not look like a fool.

It took me a while to learn the whole thing. The refrain was the easy part, but I still mix up Nefesh yehudi homiyah with Ayin letziyon tzofiyah when I’m thinking about it too much.

The interesting byproduct of this process has been my study of the meaning behind the words. The refrain is by far my favorite part of the song musically, but it’s the last phrase of the first stanza that I keep going back to when I forget Nefesh yehudi homiyah.

The English translation of those lines (for other Hebrew illiterate readers) is “A Jewish soul is yearning” (Nefesh yehudi homiyah), and “An eye gazes towards Zion” (Ayin letziyon tzofiyah). As I’m writing this, the question I keep asking myself is whether or not I remember the latter line because it has more meaning than the former, or because it better complements the sentiment in the first line (Kol od baleivav p’nimah) “As long as in the heart, within.”

There is a real disconnect among many jews I know between their identification with Israel and their Jewish identity more generally. I’ll get into a greater discussion of this later, but many of my pro-Israel friends find it almost impossible to imagine voting for Barack Obama, and yet one friend in particular is both a Zionist and a huge Obama fan.

I’ve yet to pry further into how he justifies holding both alliances simultaneously, but there must be some kind of disconnect, considering the many ways in which Barack Obama, who I also like, has demonstrated his lack of support for Israel.

I’m not sure why I tend to remember the line about keeping an eye toward Zion more than the one about a Jewish soul yearning. Maybe it’s a more concrete statement. Maybe it’s the completion of the thought rather than one piece of it. Or maybe it’s because, having grown up a very reform Jew, I feel a connection toward my homeland, toward Zion, that far outstrips my connection to a Jewish identity more broadly defined.

Mention the word “Zion” to five of your friends and you’re likely to get five different answers ranging from “you mean Israel?” to “Oh Shit, I loved the Matrix!” For those of us who have visited the true Zion, I think the feeling in many ways matches the sentiment expressed in the movie: “If the war was over tomorrow, Zion is where the party would be.”

That being said, the politically charged climate in which Israel exists as it approaches its 60th anniversary allows for a truly fantastic range of viewpoints on how Israel should make its way forward in the next sixty years. The goal of this blog is to be a sounding board for a panoply of viewpoints on the state of the State of Israel. It is an experiment, and hopefully, much like that of our subject, one which will grow and change over time while staying true to its most fundamental goals.