Tuesday, January 23, 2024
From Ian:
Seth Mandel: Israeli Patriotism in Full Bloom
Seth Mandel: Israeli Patriotism in Full Bloom
Why, besides for the rally-round-the-flag effect of the attacks and their response, has Hamas’s slaughter made those in the line of fire more eager to stay put? The answer is one the Jewish community already knows too well but the rest of the world struggles to understand.Matti Friedman: Readjusting Sights
Ben-Haim told the Post that when he saw a Black Lives Matter account praise the Hamas attacks, he thought of the BLM shirt that hangs in his closet and the marches he wore it to.
Another Israeli liberal the Post spoke to, Shai Rapoport, learned that his fellow Londoners might have joined him in protesting the Israeli government’s judicial reform for reasons that differed quite a bit from Rapoport’s. “After Oct. 7, he said, he felt a chill from his liberal and Muslim friends. Then outright hostility. Now he’s moving back to Israel, wars and all.”
Still in London at the time of the interview, he told the Post: “I felt that people who were once my friends have become my aggressors. Here, I feel terribly alone.”
After Oct. 7, nobody fooled themselves into thinking that they were safer in the long run outside of Israel. Safer or even welcome, that is. Notice that Rapoport didn’t “feel a chill from his liberal and Muslim friends” after, say, Oct. 27, when Israel launched its ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. He felt that chill “after Oct. 7.” As soon as Jews in one place were victimized, Jews everywhere became targets of suspicion, or worse. Same thing happened in America, where pro-Hamas protests began immediately after the massacre of innocent Israelis in their homes. The BLM tweet that Ben-Haim saw was posted on Oct. 10.
Everywhere in the world, consciously or subconsciously, the Jews are considered guests. Everywhere except for one country. The unspeakable horrors of Oct. 7 didn’t convince Jews they were unsafe in Israel; they reminded Jews of Israel’s necessity.
Tomer read Adjusting Sights a few years ago, when he was in tenth grade. The intimate relationship among very different men was familiar to him now, he said. He mentioned a tank in his unit with a Russian-speaking gunner, a stringently observant loader-radioman, an officer who grew up religious but isn’t serious about it, and a Druze driver. “In the beginning everything was a mess,” he said of the beginning of the war, “but then the muscle memory and the Armored Corps discipline kicked in.” This, too, reminded him of the book. When his brigade went into Gaza City, he and his crewmates were in the tank for fifty hours straight. As I write these lines, they’re back there, facing Hamas fighters armed with RPGs and magnetic bombs they try to stick to the sides of the Israeli tanks.Jews Are Indigenous to Israel; They Are Not Colonizers
In quiet moments, Tomer said, the men talk about why Israel must fight and about the need to retaliate for October 7. They differ about politics but not about that. There isn’t much talk about faith in God, he said, nothing like “Gunner, pray!” If the men share a belief in anything, he said, it’s the tank. He spoke about the Merkava IV like young men from other countries might describe their first cars. The armor plates are angled just so to deflect rockets; every detail in the turret is engineered for the safety and convenience of the crew; navigation and communication are at your fingertips on screens. “There were minutes when I was dying to get out, of course,” he said. “But it’s truly a wonder of creation. We have faith in the machine.”
When I met Sabato, I asked if he’d change anything if he wrote the book now. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s an artistic book, not a newspaper article. It was written about experiences that ripened after decades and expresses an internal truth that doesn’t change with time.”
Since this war began, we’ve heard stories that might have been drawn from pogroms or medieval persecutions. We’ve seen images of cruelty, suffering, and heroism that seem biblical. In Adjusting Sights, the Amshinover Rebbe blesses the young soldier leaving for the war with a passage from the book of Exodus: “May dread and fear befall them,” the rabbi says, and adds, “Them and not you.”
Gunsights won’t be enough, the book tells us, and neither will the ideas of the modern world. It’s 2023 and 1973 and 70 CE. Gunner, pray.
The remains of at least 80 synagogues, built after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE have been identified, and while most are in Galilee, others have been discovered throughout the land.
I had initially been under the impression that Jewish life in the Holy Land more or less ceased after the fall of Masada in 70 CE. I knew the 70 CE date was not a sharp demarcation. After all, the Bar Kokhba revolt, an even greater challenge to Roman rule than the one that ended at Masada, occurred 70 years later, and the meeting of rabbis in Bnei Brak portrayed in the Passover Haggadah must have taken place around the year 100. Yet, the ruins I’ve described indicate that a large and prosperous Jewish community persisted for hundreds of years after the destruction of the Temple.
I was not the only one blown away by the Bar’am ruins. Edward Robinson, one of the first to identify the Bar’am ruins as synagogues (there were two), who was an important Bible archeologist of the 1800s, made the same point in a book (written with Eli Smith) called Biblical Researches in Palestine (1856).
Encountering the synagogues at Bar’am (Kafr Bir’im), they wrote, “The size, the elaborate sculptured ornament, and the splendour of these edifices do not belong to a scattered and down-trodden people.” They add, “All these circumstances would seem to mark a condition of prosperity and wealth and influence among the Jews of Galilee in that age, of which neither their own historians, nor any other, have given us any account.”
The comment about the lack of attention to this period of Jewish life is still true today, 168 years later. One of the only news articles about the history of the Bar’am synagogues that I could find was one by Joe Yudin (“Baram’s Ancient Synagogue,” The Jerusalem Post, 2012).
In fact, Jews formed a majority of the population of Palestine until at least the 5th century. An autonomous Jewish Patriarchate existed until the year 425, and the Jerusalem Talmud was written there (mostly in Galilee) during the early centuries of the Common Era. Two additional Jewish revolts, against Byzantine rule in the 4th and 7th centuries, also indicate that a substantial Jewish population lived in Palestine.
While it is true that from the sixth or seventh century until modern times, Jews formed a minority of the population of Palestine, periodic immigration (aliyah) ensured that their numbers were appreciable throughout the years. Besides, indigeneity is not dependent on numbers, and Palestinian indigenous status does not invalidate the Jewish one.
Palestine is the name given Judea by the Romans in 136 CE, as punishment after the failed Bar Kokhba revolt. The Arab conquest of Palestine took place in 637 CE, when Umar Al Khattab captured Jerusalem from the Byzantine Empire. Now, in a deliberate inversion of the truth, the indigenous homeland of the Jews is “occupied” when Jews live there.
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