Bradley Burston :This Year for Rosh Hashanah, I'm Divorcing Netanyahu's Israel. Settlements Included
Maybe you know someone like me.
I
love this place. I love the continually astounding souls of ordinary
people in Israel, of every background and shade, whose human decency has
survived terrible challenge. I love the look and the scent of this
place, the rudeness, the pain even, of its physical beauty. I have no
regrets about moving here, living here, falling in love here, raising my
family here, serving the country, speaking an ancient language – my
language, the one I hated in Hebrew school, the one which has been here
for thousands of years – understanding and speaking it with hardship and
also savored wonder.
But something has changed.
Look back to last Rosh Hashanah,
and tell me that this is the same world, the same Israel, the same
America. Tell me that in the age of the Trump and Bibi show, the sewers
have not opened full.
Most
years, I come up with a whole slew of resolutions. This year I have
just one. This year, for Rosh Hashanah, I'm divorcing Netanyahu's
Israel.
Yes, the sewers were always there. But this was not just any year. For starters, this was Israel's Year of the Blacklist.
This was a year in which we learned that official Israel, in the form of its Chief Rabbinate, compiled a blacklist
of scores of rabbis – some of them Orthodox – in 22 countries
overseas, scholars and spiritual leaders whose opinions on the question
of who is Jewish a Rabbinate official decided should be disregarded.
This was a year in which we learned that a Chief Rabbinate blacklist of
Israelis rendered "unmarriageable" – some of them "Un-Jewed" – has grown explosively to nearly 900 individuals since 2015 alone.
This was a year in which we learned that Netanyahu's Interior Ministry had with neither explanation nor cause revoked the citizenship
of hundreds of Bedouin citizens of Israel – some of whom had served in
the army and regularly paid taxes – leaving them stateless.
And
the blacklists just kept on coming. This was a year in which the
government decided that too-strongly leftist opinions or a demonstrated
commitment to human rights – or simply rumors from some right-winger
abroad – should be enough to deny you entry into Israel. Jewish or not. Law abiding or not.
This was a year in which an ardent lover of Israel and former CEO of the San Francisco Jewish Federation was detained for multiple interrogations on
her entry to Israel's Ben-Gurion Airport, because of her current work
as a vice-president of the New Israel Fund – about which Netanyahu's
government lies with impunity and slanders as if it were the Nazi Party,
or Iran.
But
none of this should have come as a surprise. This was the year when,
without a second thought and with one cowardly stroke, Netanyahu
divorced the entire non-Orthodox Jewish world. Without so much as a
whimper, he caved in to ultra-Orthodox political pressure by reneging on
key agreements on egalitarian prayer and conversions in Israel.
A
lot has broken this year, and it's not going to be fixed anytime soon,
if ever. Of all people, the chair of the pro-Israel stalwart Jewish
Agency, Michael Siegal, said
after Netanyahu's unprecedented kick in the teeth of world Jewry, “The
government of Israel has taken certain actions that threaten the Jewish
people, and we want our communities back home to understand that support
for Israel does not necessarily mean support for the government of
Israel.”
This
is the Israel Benjamin Netanyahu has spent two decades bringing to
fruition. This is the Israel he has ruined. This was the year Netanyahu
proved that, not only is this not a state of all its citizens, it is
also not a welcoming homeland nor a defensive shield for the world's
Jews.
To
drive the point home, the prime minister also served notice that if
Trump-base social media warriors launch anti-Semitic attacks against
liberal Jews in the United States – as in last week's trending twitter hashtag #GasTheSynagogue – he'll let it pass without comment.
So
this is my resolution this year. To paraphrase the prime minister's
dear friend Donald Trump, I am divorcing the Israel of pro-active
nastiness. The Israel which sees as traitors, Kapos, Nazis, those who
love this place but who believe it's being governed literally to death.
The
government which this year realized that it could annex the West Bank,
all of its settlers and all of its Palestinians, not by law but by
lying. Ariel? It's Israel, period. Hebron? Also. Eli? Shilo? Yizhar?
Itamar? Israel. As Israeli as it gets.
For an encore, Netanyahu just went a step further. Last week, he lent his tacit support to a new plan
– the ultra-right National Union faction's vision of annexing the
territories as a means of pushing Palestinians to leave the West Bank.
I'm done. I'm divorcing the official Israel which defines democracy as "we get to do whatever the hell we want."
Fair
enough. After all these years of irreconcilable differences and mental
cruelty, I've finally got the government's message. So I'm not asking
for a divorce. I'm going to go out and get one.
No
one from the government ever asked me or anyone I know if it was fair
to take government assistance away from Holocaust survivors and Israeli
Bedouin and needy development towns within Israel, and spend that money
on new and bigger houses in new and bigger illegal-for-now settlements.
No
one from the government ever asked me if I thought any of it was fair.
That same government that takes water away from Palestinians and routes
it to illegal-for-now settlements. That same government which demands
with righteous outrage that the EU mark the subsidized products of
illegal-for-now or once-illegal-but-now-magically-legal settlements as
"Made in Israel."
This year, for Rosh Hashanah, in divorcing Netanyahu's Israel, I'm also divorcing the settlements.
From
this Rosh Hashanah on, I'm checking labels much more closely. From this
Rosh Hashanah on, I'm going to be much more careful about what we bring
into our kosher home.
Just
as, without asking any of us, the government unilaterally gives
settlements, their institutions and their businesses every unfair
advantage, this year I will make every effort to support businesses only
within the Green Line, and Palestinian businesses on both sides of the
Line. A form of affirmative action.
It's only fair.
Bradley Burston
Commenti
Posta un commento