Will the Plant be Uprooted?
Shabbat Aharei Mot – Kedoshim (Post Yom HaAtzmaut)
April 20, 2002 
 
This past Tuesday evening, there was a quiet transition in the modern Jewish calendar: At sunset, one rather solemn day came to a close and another, usually joyous one began. Tuesday was Yom HaZikkaron l’Hal’lei Tsahal – Memorial Day for Israel’s Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism, whereas Tuesday night and Wednesday was Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel Independence Day. Generally, the transition is dramatic: Yom HaZikkaron is solemn and sad, and Yom HaAtzmaut is joyous and happy. This year, the transition was hardly that dramatic. On Yom HaAtzmaut, the country was in a heightened state of alert, fearing suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks. It was truly a Yom HaAtzmaut befitting the week in which we read the parashah Aharei Mot – “After the death.” It was hardly the riotously celebratory day that it's been on each of the previous fifty-three years that it's been observed.

On Yom HaAtzmaut, we in the Conservative movement recite a special prayer that was composed for the occasion. It’s a version of the Al HaNissim prayer, thanking God for God’s miraculous deliverance, recited on Hanukkah and Purim, and its words are similar. On Hanukkah, for example, we thank God for:

Delivering the strong into the hands of the weak;
The many into the hands of the few,
The corrupt into the hands of the pure in heart,
The wicked into the hands of the innocent,
The arrogant into the hand of those faithful to your Torah

On Yom HaAtzmaut, too, we thank God for delivering “the many into the hands of the few.” 
This is the way we’ve long understood the struggle to create a haven for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. Yet that is not how many, many observers of the scene see it today. On the contrary, to the average journalist covering the Middle East today, the situation is the opposite. It is the Palestinians who are the few, the weak, the pure ones who are being martyred. Consider, for example, Max Rodenbeck, a Middle East correspondent for The Economist, who wrote an op-ed article in the New York Times this past Wednesday. After detailing many examples of bias on the part of the new Arab media outlets, such as Al Jazeera, that are broadcasting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into millions of Arab homes, he concludes by saying, “Nonetheless, it does not really require subtle manipulation to frame the ongoing tragedy as an epic struggle of the weak against the strong.” 
Is one of these two versions more accurate? Or is it the case that the story depends on which side you’re on?

Let us consider three examples of interpretations of the current conflict that have been put forth during the past several weeks:

l. First, there was a claim, about a week ago, by the Prime Minister of Turkey. He described Israeli military operations in the West Bank as “genocide.” Is that accurate?
 
In order to answer the question, we have to know what the word means. “Genocide” is “the systematic killing of, or a program of action intended to destroy, a whole national or ethnic group.” Is that what has been going on in the West Bank? There's no evidence of that whatsoever. As we all know, Israel endured wave after wave of terrorist attacks before finally, following the attack in Netanya on the eve of the first day of Pesach, it entered certain West Bank towns and villages to capture terrorists and to destroy bomb factories. Yes, battles with armed combatants occurred, and some civilians were undoubtedly inadvertently injured or killed, but there has been no effort to slaughter civilians (even though that is the stated goal of the groups Israel is targeting) much less an effort to wipe the Palestinian people off the face of the globe. There has been no rhetoric to that effect, and certainly no actions that would justify that accusation. So there’s no genocide going on.

But why use a word like that if it isn't happening? You don't have to look too hard to find out. “Genocide” is a word associated with the Holocaust. In fact, it didn’t exist until the 1940's. It was coined, by a Jew, to describe what Hitler was trying to accomplish. By accusing Israel of genocide, the Turkish prime minister was, in essence, suggesting that it was behaving no better than the Nazis.  One can hardly imagine a more offensive comparison, yet it is being made by many today—not only in the Arab world but in Europe as well. For example, Norbert Bluem, a former labor minister from Helmut Koh’'s government, accused Mr. Sharon’s national unity government of a “Vernichtungskrieg,” a war of annihilation—an statement that had been previously reserved for Hitler’s crimes. Similarly, Jose Saramago, a Nobel prize winning author from Portugal, suggested that Yasir Arafat’s siege in Ramallah reminded him of Auschwitz. It took an Israeli reporter, who asked him where the gas chambers were, to extract a bit of a retraction.

Incidentally, there’s a shameful irony in the use of the term “genocide” by the Turkish Prime Minister. Turkey has long refused to recognize that the atrocities that the Turkish government committed against the Armenians between 1915 and 1923 constituted genocide. Yet the Turkish Prime Minister had no similar hesitation in this  instance. (To be fair, I should say that, after a bit of an uproar, Mr. Ecevit apologized for his comments, saying that he wished he “hadn’t used the upsetting statement.”

2. There’s a second accusation that has been made repeatedly, and that is that Israeli troops massacred innocent civilians in Jenin. Did this in fact happen?
 
What is a massacre? A massacre is the “indiscriminate, merciless killing of large numbers of people.” Did that happen in Jenin? The answer is—no. There was ferocious fighting in Jenin. Many people were killed. But was it indiscriminate? Was it merciless? Hardly. In the words of the independent Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, whose reporter spent several days in the camp, “no order from above was given, nor was a local initiative executed, to deliberately and systematically kill unarmed people.” Was the battlefield horrifying? Yes. But a massacre did not take place there. On the contrary, the battle of Jenin was a battle in which Israelis went to great lengths to minimize civilian casualties. It was a battle in which Israeli soldiers were killed—twenty three in total, almost half the number of confirmed Palestinian dead—because they tried to minimize civilian casualties. What makes it unlikely that a massacre took place? What makes us skeptical of the accusation? We need simply ask: Whose interests are served? Certainly not Israel’s. Not on a national level nor on the level of the platoon, nor on the individual level, is there any conceivable interest. Killing civilians is a court-martial offense. And to think that one could carry out a massacre in secret in the Israeli army today blinks reality. On the other hand, for there to be an accusation on the floor of the United Nations that Israel has committed a massacre—that’s a tremendous political victory for the Palestinians. 

Again, there is an irony here. There was at least one attack a few weeks ago that can accurately be described as a massacre. I’m referring to the attack on the group gathered to celebrate a seder at the Park Hotel in Netanya. But only in Israel is that attack referred to as the “Pesach massacre.” Nowhere else.  
 
3. The final claim—one that one wouldn’t think would be objectionable—is that both sides are really symmetrical with one another. Both peoples are, in this scenario, victims, who must continue to slug it out with one another until, exhausted, they learn to live together.
 
This seems reasonable enough, but it is false and it is pernicious.  The loss of a child, we might say, is a universal. It makes no difference under what circumstances one's child dies—the loss is the same. But I don’t think that’s true. The parent of the victim of a suicide bomber has had one kind of experience; the parent of a suicide bomber has had a very different one. A culture that grieves when children are killed is very different from one that celebrates it.  Recently, Jeff Jacoby wrote an article in The Boston Globe that highlighted some of these distinctions, distinctions that none of us should ignore.

One side in the current conflict, he writes, publishes maps showing how Israel and a Palestinian state can coexist. The other side publishes maps on which Israel doesn’t exist.

One side apologizes when its explosives kill the wives and children of the killers it targeted. The other side targets wives and children.  One side has never deployed a suicide bomber in its 54 years of existence. The other side has deployed more than 40 in the past 12 months alone. One side developed a mandatory peace curriculum to prepare its children to live in peace next to a Palestinian state. The other side steeps its children in hate extolling suicide bombers as “martyrs” they should emulate and operating summer camps to train them for jihad. “The distinction between Israel’s right of self-defense and the Palestinian Authority's orchestration of killing the innocent," writes Professor Stephen Whitfield, “should be an elemental one…. Any hope of ending the intifada will not be enhanced by wrapping the suffering of Palestinians—who overwhelmingly favor the terrorist attacks—in the same mantle of sympathy that belongs fully to an agonized Israel.” And so we see that the three interpretations we’ve examined don’t bear up under scrutiny. These interpretations to which, through the media, all of us have been exposed, reveal to us that there is a colossal failure in much of the world to understand and to appreciate the situation that the State of Israel finds itself in today. Recently, Koffi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations said, “Is it possible, that Israel is right and the whole world is wrong?” The answer is, apparently, Yes.

What then must we do? There is much we cannot do: We can’t defend the city of Haifa from attack. We can’t enter the kasbah hunting for terrorists. But there’s much we can do. 

Recently, Shlomo Avineri wrote “A Letter to an American Jewish Friend,” condemning our failure to speak out. We must speak out. We cannot allow Israel to be the scapegoat for the sins of the Arab world or the sins of Europe. As we learn in this week’s Torah portion, Lo ta’amod al dam reiyecha: we must not stand by while the blood of our fellow Jews is being shed. We must do what we can.  
 
 
The haftarah for today concludes:

Will this prophecy entirely come true? We’ve witnessed the restoration of the people to the land, but is it true that “never again will they be uprooted”?

To a certain extent, that is up to us. We must do all we can to strengthen and to nurture and to defend this precious planting, so that, God willing, it shall never again be uprooted.