Meir Y. Soloveichik: ‘I Will Not Fail Thee Nor Forsake Thee’
This central lesson of our civilization seems to have been forgotten—particularly by Reagan’s successor in the White House today. Joe Biden argued in late May that a death cult that burned families alive, raped women, beheaded babies, and continues to announce its intentions to seek Israel’s annihilation is capable of embracing peace:John Podhoretz: The Jewish Trump Vote
Indefinite war in pursuit of an unidentified notion of “total victory” will not bring Israel in—will not bring down—bog down—will only bog down Israel in Gaza, draining the economic, military, and human—and human resources, and furthering Israel’s isolation in the world. Hamas says it wants a cease-fire. This deal is an opportunity to prove whether they really mean it.
Whether they really mean it? It was seemingly in response to such thinking that Reagan at Arlington spoke:
Peace also fails when we forget to bring to the bargaining table God’s first gift to man: common sense. Common sense gives us a realistic knowledge of human beings and how they think, how they live in the world, what motivates them. Common sense tells us that man has magic in him, but also clay. Common sense can tell the difference between right and wrong. Common sense forgives error, but it always recognizes it to be error first.
“We endanger the peace,” Reagan reflected, “and confuse all issues when we obscure the truth; when we refuse to name an act for what it is.” Only after making this clear did Reagan refer to the American obligation to those who had died; only then did he invoke the Ridgeway story:
Peace fails when we forget to pray to the source of all peace and life and happiness. I think sometimes of General Matthew Ridgeway, who, the night before D-day, tossed sleepless on his cot and talked to the Lord and listened for the promise that God made to Joshua: “I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.”… Let us make a compact today with the dead, a promise in the words for which General Ridgeway listened, “I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.”
The point, then, is that neither to fail nor to forsake those who died is not merely to bear their memory, but to ensure that the earlier mistakes that necessitated their sacrifice not be repeated. It is this attitude, Reagan reflected, that must be made manifest in American leadership: “Peace fails when we forget what we stand for. It fails when we forget that our Republic is based on firm principles, principles that have real meaning, that with them, we are the last, best hope of man on Earth; without them, we’re little more than the crust of a continent.”
Eighty years after D-Day, we may well wonder how many leaders are still willing to give war a chance.
If this were to hold, Trump would receive the highest level of Jewish support of any Republican presidential candidate in modern history. Jonathan Sarna, the dean of American Jewish historians, notes that the Jewish vote in presidential elections became a Democratic possession as early as 1928, when Jews cast ballots overwhelmingly for their governor, Al Smith, against Herbert Hoover. Over the nine decades following, only Dwight Eisenhower (in 1956) and Ronald Reagan (in 1980) got as much as 40 percent of the Jewish vote.Haaretz: A Committed Zionist and a Lapsed Progressive
This potential sea-change will likely not hand Trump a victory in New York in November, but here’s the deal: The state that may decide the election is Pennsylvania. It just so happens Pennsylvania has nearly 300,000 Jewish adults. Jews are said to vote in huge numbers, somewhere around 80 percent.
That would mean 240,000 Jews voted in Pennsylvania in 2020. If 70 percent of them chose Biden, he received about 170,000 Jewish votes. If that were to drop to 50 percent in 2024, Biden would receive 120,000 Jewish votes—a decline of 50,000 from the previous election. Pennsylvania went for Biden by 80,000 votes in 2020 after going to Trump by 45,000 in 2016.
This could be the game right here. The decline in support for Biden among Jews is real, and if that decline is dramatic, it could make the difference in the key(stone) state. I leave it to you to figure out why Jews are deserting Biden. OK, I won’t leave it to you. Had he continued with the steadfast and unambigous support of Israel he showed in the first two months of the war in Gaza, Jews would likely be garlanding him today. Instead, he sent wild and confused signals about the morality of the conflict and stood mostly mute as campuses were lit aflame and anti-Semitism became a daily factor in Jewish lives across the country.
His people feared the wrath of Arabs in Michigan. They forgot Jews can get mad too. They forgot it because they took the Jewish vote for granted at a time of existential peril. And also because, if I’m right about all this and the Siena poll is accurate, they are just as boneheadedly stupid as they appear to have been when they decided it would be a good idea for Biden to debate. Or when Biden himself decided he needed to debate.
In many progressive circles, the only acceptable stance is to bash Israel and its citizens, regardless of whether those citizens are concerned for Palestinians.
There is little recognition that Hamas and its allies play any role in the conflict and are able to end the war now.
While progressive values are still my North Star, I no longer have a progressive community that shares my principles. I have become a "lapsed progressive."
The current state of the progressive community has left me no choice but to withdraw from it. These days one cannot be a committed Jew and Zionist and be welcomed in the progressive community.
I am no longer considered an ally, but rather an imperialist to be eradicated.
This evaporated for me on Oct. 7 and the resulting actions of the progressive community.
As has been well-documented, Hamas, a recognized terrorist organization committed in its charter to genocide of all Jews and the annihilation of Israel, rampaged through southern Israel, killing, raping and torturing Israeli and other nationals.
Yes, I support Israel's right to respond and defend itself. I also understand that Israelis are traumatized by Hamas's savagery on Oct. 7 and the world's fleeting memory of it.
I am appalled by progressive organizations, especially Jewish ones, who pressure Israel and the U.S. for a ceasefire, but make no demands of Hamas.
The progressive community should be pushing Hamas to release the hostages and better the lives of Palestinians by ending the war.
The progressive world is seemingly unwilling to hold Hamas accountable or put any onus on it to stop the death and destruction.