Hear O Israel

Controlled by a self-centered Prime Minister and an uncompromising religious minority, Israel finds itself at odds with the wider world.

“Hear O Israel” is part of a prayer from the synagogue of my youth. In the words of Don McClean, “They were not listening, they’re not listening now, perhaps they don’t know how.” The government there, run for the first time in the small country’s history by the hard-right and ultra-orthodox, has been rebuked over the years by scores of countries that decry the occupation of the West Bank, and now, again, the Gaza Strip. The rebuke has gone mainstream with Ireland, Norway, and Spain resetting the calculus of the European Union and its relations with Israel.

In response, the Netanyahu government has pulled its ambassadors, and the United States has registered its disagreement with those countries. Hungary and the Czech Republic remain staunchly in Israel’s corner, but the certain thing here is that Europe is having a first-of-its-kind discussion, and stalwarts like France and Germany are being forced to reconsider aspects of their support for Israel.

Stating support for a Palestinian state is anathema to PM Netanyahu and his cronies on the far-right, whose endgame now appears obvious. They have always been expansionists who allow settlers to rampage unchecked in the West Bank, and now, denouncing all cries for Palestinian self-rule, seem intent on making the decades old occupation a permanent, legal reality.

Incorporation of the West Bank and Gaza is opposed by the wider world, as well as many Israelis and American Jews. Hegemony is the fever-dream only of the far-right, or as Middle East expert, Thomas Friedman, himself a Jew, calls them, “Jewish Supremacists.” Everyone else would just like an end to the cycle of violence that begins with harsh treatment of Palestinians, evolves to  rock-throwing, escalates to occupation which engenders terroristic responses, and culminates in more war.

It gives me no pleasure to write like this about what has historically been the sole beacon of hope for democracy and modernity in the Middle East. I, like so many Jews around the world, watch in desperation as the few overwhelm the many. Isolation and castigation are the price for hegemony in Israel, a price the Netanyahu government is more than willing to pay in exchange for expansion.

Of course they call expansion a security measure, just as they refuse to see the long-sought two-state solution as a different, better way to lasting peace. Critics will say the Arabs don’t want peace, and that has been true enough over the years, such as when the Palestinian Liberation Organization under Yasir Arafat rejected the final stage of the Camp David Accords even after they had won everything they sought. Arafat simply would not give up his power, position, and the money that flowed to him.

But this is a very different moment. One in which the Sunni Arab world, led by Saudi Arabia, is finally ready to embrace the State of Israel, but only if Israel returns to the two-state path.

The Israel that so many of us have loved is in a self-induced, existential crisis. It’s all happening at a time when American Jews are appropriately concerned about Christian nationalism and its promise to create a theocracy out of our democracy. This is an especially fraught moment in which a resurgent antisemitism is undeniable, and all of American Jewry—religious and secular—feels threatened.

These are the racists who have never considered us White, and the Christian nationalists who promise to smite and remove us from the United States for the sin of not being Christian. They pretend that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation, but that is mere artifice. They know all about the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause that prohibits the government from "establishing" a religion, not to mention the Free Exercise Clause that protects citizens' rights to practice their religion as they please, so long as the practice does not run afoul of a "public morals" or a "compelling" governmental interest.

I am an admittedly lapsed, secular Jew. I haven’t gone to Temple since my kids were teenagers, and my spiritual beliefs eclipse those of Judaism. But to the haters—to the virulent antisemites—I  might as well be wearing a skullcap and shawl, for as our people learned long ago, observant or not, once a Jew, always a Jew. And to put a fine point on it, it is possible to oppose Israeli policy without being an antisemite or a self-hating Jew.

Staying quiet invokes thoughts of William Butler Yeats who observed that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” How long will the world allow that passionate intensity to cruelly ruin so many lives on both sides of the conflict?

It seems symmetrical, if a little depressing, to close as I opened, with Don McClean: “They were not listening, they’re not listening still. Perhaps they never will.”

©2024 Jon Sinton