As a teenager, I was perplexed by my father’s pride in the State of Israel. He’d never been there; he’d spent his entire life working at his store, Paul’s Paint and Wallpaper, to support himself and our family, only ever taking brief weekend vacations to Maine or to a little vacation shack we had on a lake in the woods. He didn’t particularly like religion, but still, he loved the Jewish state. I thought it was nice that a state for the Jewish people existed but didn’t think it mattered very much: it was just another country, far across the world, not much more interesting than any other state.
Further perplexing to me was his even greater pride in Israel’s military achievements. While he was a person who wouldn’t hesitate to defend someone or something he cared about, he generally let things roll off of his back. He knew the horrors of war: he lost friends in Vietnam, including his best friend, Danny Manzaro, whose name I bear. He was no pacifist; I recall him proudly hoisting the American flag when the U.S. led a world coalition to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi domination in 1991. He was annoyed that people would protest that war, since it was, as he characterized it, about justice for the underdog. Still, he wasn’t one of those people who loved military history, or learning about this type of tank or that type of missile. Wars were only to be fought for moral reasons – so why take pride simply in another country’s strength?
Still, he described to me Israel’s military exploits in detail. During the 1990s, the public school system I attended in Worcester, Mass., was a mess, and, even though I was in all honors classes, I didn’t learn anything about 20th century history past the first World War; the American Revolution and some stuff about Greece and Rome were about it. Nevertheless, from my father, I had in-depth knowledge of Israel’s battles: the amazing victory of the Six Day War, the bitter losses and eventual victory of the Yom Kippur War, the heroic triumph of the state’s establishment, the horrors of Yasser Arafat, and much more. Israel, he said, would take apart weapons America sent and make them work better.
As I grew older, and a bit rebellious, we got into many heated debates on the problem or plight of the Palestinians. Who doesn’t?
Now, looking back years later, it’s easy enough to see how my father, though always maintaining his American patriotism, could feel so connected to, and supportive of, a state he never had the opportunity to visit, located halfway around the world. For him, and now for me, and for millions around the world, the state represents the triumph of a people who were for 2,000 years history’s underdogs, frequently oppressed, dispossessed, and murdered.
If you look at a calendar of public observances in the State of Israel, you’ll see that, about this time of year (based on the Hebrew dating system), several fall close together, one after another: Yom HaShoah, Yom HaZikaron, and then Yom Ha’atzmaut. These are, respectively, the day of remembrance of the Holocaust, the day of remembrance of fallen Israeli soldiers and Israeli victims of terrorism, and Israeli independence day. So close together, in order, these observances tell a story.
The Holocaust, or Shoah, was Hitler’s attempt at a “final solution” to the “Jewish question.” There had been pogroms all over the world, including all over the Middle East, for millennia already, but Hitler hoped to finish the job that the wicked had been failing at for centuries. He nearly succeeded: one out of every three Jews in the world was killed in the Holocaust, and an astounding two out of every three Jews who lived in Europe were killed. Six million dead. Even now, after decades, when the population of the world has increased nearly 300 percent, from about 2.6 billion people in 1950, to around 7.6 billion currently, there are still well over a million less Jews alive than there were before the Holocaust.
But the Jews weren’t wiped out; Hitler was the one who ended up pathetically committing suicide in his underground bunker. And while the Jews weren’t ultimately the ones who overthrew the Nazi regime, they never stopped fighting.
While the Allied Powers, who eventually founded the United Nations, cheered themselves on their victory, things didn’t immediately become good for the Jewish people. I recall working in Iowa City and catering a dinner party for a man named Janusz Bardach. An exceedingly friendly person, he offered me and my coworker to join his dinner party, infusing us with multiple “shooters,” i.e. shots of vodka. He gave a brief description of the events of the autobiography he had just written, the publication of which the party was thrown to honor: Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag. Bardach had escaped the Third Reich, crossed the border, and joined the Red Army – and then found himself the victim of Stalin’s anti-Semitism, winding up in a gulag. Liberating the death camps didn’t end Soviet or other persecutions of the Jews.
The Jews continued to fight. They fought against the British colonizers, who who continued to restrict the immigration of Jews to Mandatory Palestine, continuing a policy in place throughout the Nazi period with the support of the region’s Arab leaders.
“Fighting” isn’t symbolic: the Jews fought a guerrilla war against the British colonialists. They were organized in different factions and guerrilla armies: there was the establishment Haganah, the more revolutionary Irgun, and the Lehi. After intense fighting, and intense negotiations that involved Britain, the Soviet Union, the UN, and other powers, as well as large compromises made only by the Jews, the Jewish guerrilla forces won, and out of that victory was formed the State of Israel. The three guerrilla armies were all unified into the Israel Defense Force, or IDF.
The State of Israel was proclaimed by Haganah leader David ben Gurion on May 14, 1948.
It was a miracle. A people that seemed on the verge of being wiped out in the Holocaust (commemorated by Yom HaShoah) continued to fight, and, in many instances, gave up their lives (these sacrifices commemorated on Yom HaZikaron), and won, for the first time in nearly 2,000 years, their own state (celebrated on Yom Ha’atzmaut).
There were terrible things that happened on all sides of the revolutionary war for independence, perpetuated by all sides, as happens in all wars and revolutions. Many people, Jews and Arabs, were dispossessed from their homes. When Jordan took control of the “West Bank,” it ethnically cleansed Jews from areas they’d lived in since the 1800s (as in Sheikh Jarrah) or even centuries longer. There continue to be problems. Israel is even now unsure of how to securely and justly handle the areas it came into possession of during the 1960s wars of defense, how to balance justice and security generally, and how to eradicate discrimination against minority groups. These problems have to be solved. If history is any guide, they surely will be.
Still, who wouldn’t be proud? For the first time in history, when my father was just about to turn three, Jews had a state they could go to in their indigenous land if things became unbearable where they were living. And they did go: as pogroms occurred in various Middle Eastern countries, more and more Jews left the lands they’d been in for generations and moved to Israel. Waves of Jews fled the Soviet Union and its satellite states. Many even emigrated from America, where Jews have fared better than anywhere else in diaspora, to Israel.
Over the past seven decades, the state has moved forward: it made the “desert bloom,” invented new technologies, welcomed Jews fleeing the Communist states, became an economic powerhouse, developed culturally, and has maintained a vibrant, cosmopolitan democracy with many (perhaps too many) parties. History’s victim became a powerful force.
With power, as it is said, comes great responsibility. I recently listened to an Israeli rabbi speak (on Zoom, of course), and he restated what the prophet Isaiah intimated: the historic role of the Jewish people and the Jewish state is to act as אור לגויים, a light to the nations. This means, the rabbi said, while fighting for the security of the Jewish people, to fight for justice, for safety and security, and for the wellbeing and freedom of all peoples. As the gains of 1948 are solidified and a viable peace is eventually achieved, this will become even more the goal of the Jewish state. This is something Israel’s been engaged in all along, even under adverse conditions. (For a brief list, see here.) And despite many terrible things in the press, the IDF has some very strong, humanitarian practices that are unlike those of other states’ armies.
Many Israelis demonstrated beautifully their understanding of the needs of other peoples, still without a state, by demanding that more be done for the Kurds. More than 150 IDF reservists wrote a letter asking Prime Minister Netanyahu to send them to fight for the Kurds.
According to the petition, “We, as Israelis and Jews, must not stand by when we see another nation abandoned by its allies and left defenseless. We remember very well the blood of our people, what happens when the nations of the world abandon the fate of a people.”
Now, years later, I understand why my father was proud of this small, upstart nation (now the “Startup Nation,” for its technology companies), why he felt so connected to it, as I now do. The thing about the world pre-state Israel is that Jews weren’t safe anywhere, at least not for long. They might settle here or there and live for a few generations unmolested, but, at some point, in each country, whether in a figurative Persian kingdom during the time of Esther, or in Minsk, where my father’s grandparents came from in 1905, some kind of pogrom always broke out. Even now, in America, where Jews have had it better than anywhere else outside of Israel, there’s been a rise in antisemitic violence. Now, there’s somewhere to go if things turn bad. As for turning bad, even now, the mayor of New York City, Bill DeBlasio, has tweeted what appears to be a modern-day version of the blame that Jews felt in Europe for the plague.
Nor is Israel mainly an escape from violence. While many of its citizens came escaping violence in Europe or Middle Eastern countries, it is the only Jewish state in the world, the only place where the Jewish culture, traditions, and religion can thrive and be the dominant public culture (all while respecting minority groups), something the Jews had lacked for nearly two millennia.
Since it’s now Yom Ha’atzmaut, I’ll close by wishing Israel a happy 72nd anniversary.