63 Years, And Here We Are –

May, with its commemorations of Yom HaShoah, Yom Ha Zicharon and finally Yom Ha’atzmaut always put me into a contemplative state of mind. Like other Israelis, I share a sense of grief for our tragic past. I am reminded of the terrible afflictions perpetrated against our people by the Germans and others. I think about our struggle to survive and advance and puzzle over the fact that our lives continue to be dominated by the machinations of those obsessed with annihilating us.

I find the centrality of Jews in the world’s imagination and the readiness of people to hate us and want to be rid of us, impossible to understand. Once it was their need for a scapegoat to blame for their economic and even bodily ills – recall the dark days when we were blamed for the black plague.

Yesterday it was because we ‘killed’ the Christian savior, and today the Islamists have decided it’s because we’re infidels who must be obliterated together with the Jewish State.

Anti-Semitism has as many rationalizations as there are people with hatred in their hearts: we’re hated because we’re too powerful … too rich … too noisy … too arrogant … too successful … too family oriented. We’re hated because of our noses … because some of us dress and speak differently . . . because we aspire to better ourselves and our children. In a world where the ‘other’ has always been a reason for being despised, we provide the perfect projection for every base motive that resides within the human imagination.

What upsets me most is our tendency to look within ourselves in an effort to understand the distorted psyche of the anti-Semite. Absorbing the prejudices of those around us, we are harsh self critics, blaming ourselves for the qualities for which we think we are hated: we are too loud… we are bad mannered … arrogant and love money like rogues, we are more corrupt than others, and so on.

Listen to a group of Jews in the Diaspora, and you will hear shameful criticisms against us Israelis. There is something in the Diaspora psyche that makes for self consciousness, causes us always to walk on eggs, not wanting to draw attention; cringing when a Jew is found to commit a crime. We are constantly fearful of raising the ire of our fellow citizens. We seem to think that if only we were nicer, quieter, less successful, less preoccupied with moral issues etc… if only we would blend into the background and took care not to stand out - we would be acceptable, if not loved!

In Israel we delude ourselves that we have rid ourselves of the self consciousness of what the world will say, and that we are free to be ‘normal’ – but, I wonder. Here too, we are preoccupied with not upsetting the world by asserting our very right to protect ourselves and continue to live in this land that is ours if for no other reason than we have made it so; we have fought for it, brought it to fruition, raised our children here and allowed some 20,000 of them to be sacrificed for it.

We flinch when we are accused of practicing apartheid by building structures to keep ourselves safe from those who consider us fair game for killing – when in fact the only meaningful apartheid practiced in the region is by Arab nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists who are determined to keep their territories Judenrein. We restrain ourselves from imposing sanctions or taking the radical actions that would stop the terror being waged on our people, permitting our own children to be raised in an atmosphere of chronic and intolerable insecurity and in many cases, ravaging trauma.

On this Yom Ha’atzmaut I am proud to be counted as pro-Jewish, pro-Israeli and pro-survival. I am not anti Arab – I am not anti anybody - but I do have a strong instinct to look after myself, my family and my community, when all we have worked for and won is threatened.

I look around and see the beautiful, vibrant, flourishing country we have built up while continuing threats of genocide hover over our heads. I am inspired by the vitality, initiative and resilience of our people. Unable to draw on a religious justification for my continued identification with Judaism, I proudly count myself as an Israeli - one of the noisy, argumentative, vibrant, purposeful people who make up our nation.

I choose to be actively engaged in a dialogue with our traditions and history. I have an ongoing argument with a creator who, if he exists, seems to have forsaken his special people when they were in greatest need. I strive to understand who we are and why we are here, yet am happy to be doing my humble share to live a life that is morally just in a land which is justly ours.

I am fired up by the words of the partizanim who all those years ago and against incredible odds, sewed the seeds that we, the children of Israel, have brought to fruition in the Jewish state - and am proud to remind those who would remove us from this earth, that - “Meir zynem nog dor – we are still here”.