Reflections on Israel

Written by Barry Armour for the 2023 Dec/Jan Jewish Voice

As an American and as a Jew, I, like many people across the United States and around the world, both Jews and Gentiles alike, have spent a lot of time the last several weeks watching the news coverage of the events in Israel and the Middle East following the massacre of approximately 1400 men, women, and children on Oct. 7, 2023. Like many Jews, the events of Oct. 7 have been challenging to process, and, at times, it has been hard to know how to feel.  There have been feelings of anger as well as feelings of helplessness.  There have also been feelings of dismay and incredulity as I have seen the response to the massacre, especially in the United States and around the world.  College students across campuses from Harvard, Columbia, and Yale all the way across the country to UCLA and Berkeley have marched in support of the ”Palestinian resistance” while, at the same time, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Center on Extremism has reported a nearly 400% increase in anti-Semitic incidents, such as harassment, vandalism, and assaults, since the Oct. 7 massacre. Throughout the United States, swastikas have been placed on Jewish businesses, community centers, and synagogues.  Jewish students have been harassed just trying to get to class.  At Cornell University, a student posted online and threatened to shoot up the Jewish dining hall and called for people to slit the throats of Jewish students.  In Vienna, Austria, swastikas defaced a Jewish cemetery, and a ceremonial building in the Jewish part of the cemetery that housed sacred artifacts was burned down for the first time since it was destroyed in Nov. 1938 during Kristallnacht. 

Over the course of the first month, I saw the outrage people exhibited in response to the greatest loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust with shock and horror, but I also heard about the college professor who proudly said that they were exhilarated by the Oct. 7 attacks. Why is it that I can feel heartbroken when Palestinian civilians are killed, but there are others who, when Jewish men, women, and children are murdered, tortured, beheaded, raped, and the subject of acts that would, or should, be thought of as unthinkable, celebrate the deaths, while, at the same time, the people who are responsible for the murder of Jewish civilians with barbarity and a wanton bloodlust are referred to by certain politicians and college students as freedom fighters while some in those same groups call for a genocide against the people who were subjected to the beheadings and rapes?  Why is it that some people are quick to blame Israel for an attack on a hospital yet are slow to walk back their blame, if they do it at all, with the same quickness and vociferousness?  Even when presented with evidence to the contrary, why is it that they still cannot come out and blame those who are actually responsible with the same force with which they condemned Israel? 

There are people around the world who say that they stand with Israel, but there are also people condemning Israel as war criminals and claiming that they are engaging in genocide and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people now that Israel has responded to the Oct. 7 attack militarily.  People who celebrated the murder of Jews on Oct. 7 or who tepidly mourned the loss of Jewish lives now call for a cease-fire now that Palestinian civilians are being killed in Gaza.  It is an unfortunate rule of war that people, often innocent civilians, die, even when care is taken to ensure their safety or to minimize the number of civilian casualties, something I truly believe that the Israeli military is trying to do.  I am heartbroken at the idea of non-combatants being killed regardless of whether they are Israeli or Palestinian because it is possible, at least I believe it is, to mourn the loss of life no matter who it is. However, I do not see that sentiment expressed universally.  Rather, there seem to be a great number of college students in the United States who believe that the Israeli citizens had it coming but that the suffering endured by the people of Gaza is a war crime and an attempt at ethnic cleansing or genocide.  The divide between support for Israel and Palestine is definitely generational, which is partly why I cannot understand the response to the events of Oct. 7 on college campuses across the United States.  It does seem to me, however, that facts seem to have little to no place on these campuses insofar as they relate to the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  I do not know if it is because of a lack of Holocaust education or a failure to understand the impetus that led to the Zionist movement in the late 19th century, namely the fact that all the pogroms against the Jews of Europe caused a desire to have a country where they could be free from anti-Semitism, or if it is due to getting their news from social media, but whether stemming from indifference or ignorance, there is a definite lack of facts.

For example, I recently saw a news story that contained clips of interviews given by various Hamas spokespeople.  In one, the spokesperson was asked about the hundreds of kilometers of tunnels underneath Gaza and why Hamas did not construct bomb shelters for the residents of Gaza.  The spokesperson’s response said a lot about what Hamas views as its priority.  They said that the tunnels are for fighting and that it is the responsibility of the United Nations to protect the people of Gaza.  In another interview, a Hamas spokesperson spoke about the millions of Soviet lives lost in defense of the Soviet Union during World War II as well as the number of deaths endured by the people of Vietnam and Afghanistan during the Vietnam War and after the Soviet invasion, the point being that achieving their goal requires sacrifice on the part of the people of Gaza.  Mind you, Hamas has been the elected government of Gaza since 2006-2007, so this is not only the government saying that it is not their responsibility to protect their own citizens, but that their deaths are needed to achieve their ultimate goal.  And yet, this is the same government entity that prevents its citizens from leaving the area when prompted to do so by Israel and then uses civilian deaths as propaganda to decry the horror of the Israeli response to Oct. 7.  On the one hand, it is emblematic of the double standard that only seems to be applied to Israel.  The deaths of Israelis are celebrated, but when they respond, people call on them to agree to a cease-fire.

In the interview I mentioned, the Hamas spokesperson went on to say that the events of Oct. 7 were just the first wave, that there would be a second and a third, even a fourth, wave, yet I have not heard any of the college students or progressive politicians calling for Hamas to stop what they are doing, only Israel.  And it seems to beg the question: What did Hamas think that Israel was going to do in response to such an attack as that of the one perpetrated on Oct. 7? 

I do not hear any condemnation of Hamas for the conditions within Gaza, yet I have heard Israel labeled as colonizers.  However, if you read about the Nov. 1947 vote in the United Nations, it proposed a two-state solution, one that the Jews accepted, which is why they declared Israel’s independence in May 1948.  It was the Palestinians and other Arab nations that rejected the proposal, which is why they declared war against Israel shortly after the declaration of independence.  As a result of the fighting, Israel captured 78% of the land that was to have comprised Palestine, the other 22% consisting of Gaza and the West Bank, which is where most Palestinians fled.  Israel was attacked, yet they are called colonizers for occupying the land they won as a result of the war.  How is that Israel’s fault?  How does that make them colonizers?

Several days after Oct. 7, I had my weekly meeting with my manager at work, and she asked me how I was doing.  She asked me if I had any family in Israel and initially, I said no since my family does not have any direct family in Israel. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the people of Israel, and all Jews around the world, are mishpocha. They are family. They are my brothers and sisters.  Earlier this year, back at the end of June, Mom and I took what Mom calls the trip of a lifetime as we joined the group from Congregation B’nai Zion and Temple Mt. Sinai on a tour of Poland and Israel. We visited Jewish cemeteries in Krakow and Warsaw and museums dedicated to the history of the Jewish people in Warsaw and Tel Aviv.  We visited several kibbutzim, although we did not visit any of the ones near Gaza that have been in the news. Rather, we visited kibbutzim in the Galilee region, including the Ghetto Fighter’s kibbutz, which was founded by survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and is home to the world’s oldest Holocaust museum, the Ghetto Fighter’s House, as well as the northernmost kibbutz,  which lies along the border with Lebanon.

While touring the kibbutz, we were told that Hezbollah was watching us from the heights across the border in Lebanon. Standing there gives you a newfound perspective.  Imagine living along the border with people who have thousands of rockets aimed your way and who want nothing more than to wipe you off the face of the Earth.  When you drive along the road in that part of Israel, the Lebanese side of the border has Hezbollah flags waving, while the Israeli side is lined with trees, not for their beauty but because they act as a means to protect vehicles on the road from sniper bullets.  It is a perspective that I could only gain by actually being there and experiencing it firsthand. 

Interestingly, one of the things I learned on my visit to the Kibbutzim is that the majority of the agricultural products grown are not consumed by Israelis but are sent to countries in Europe and throughout the Middle East. However, they are sent in plain white boxes without anything to indicate that they originated in Israel so that the Arab nations that receive them can pretend that it is not coming from Israel.  Yet, somehow, Israel is the villain in the minds of these many college students.

To walk down the stairs into a bunker at the kibbutz, a place they use when rockets are fired at them is an interesting experience.  It is hard to fathom having to run to your designated bomb shelter when the rockets start flying. The alarms go off, especially to think back on it now, given that similar bunkers were the site of death and destruction on Oct. 7.  People who ran into the bunkers for safety were killed by grenades thrown down the stairs or by bullets fired from machine guns into the crowds of people huddled inside for safety.  People were burned to death when their houses were set on fire and burned down around their safe rooms.  Since I am blind, I have not seen the images that have been shown on the news, so I have been insulated in a way from the atrocities.  Try as I might, I am not sure that what I can imagine and conceive of in my mind comes anywhere close to the reality of what happened.

As a student of history, I have read about and studied anti-Semitism.  In college, I took an entire course on the history of the Holocaust, so I have read the debunked “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and the transcript of the Wannsee Conference.  I can tell you the name of the person who coined the term “anti-Semitic” and talk about how anti-Semitism has morphed from blaming Jews collectively for the death of Jesus to the idea of the Jewish race that the Nazis used to the modern-day blurring of the lines between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.  Despite all the study and learning, I still cannot understand why it is that there are people who want my existence eliminated simply because of the religion I practice.  Why is it that people believe that the attack against Israel is justified or that people who engage in wanton bloodlust, people who rape women and kill babies and behead people are freedom fighters?

As a Jew, it is difficult for me to understand the notion that Jews had what happened on Oct. 7 coming to them.  Why is it that Jews seem to be the only minority group that is attacked from both sides, from the right and the left, from conservatives and liberals alike?  Jews have people marching to unite the right and chanting “Jews will not replace us” and Jews have people marching in support of the so-called Palestinian resistance and chanting “From the river to the sea,” but how is it resistance when you burn people alive?

Growing up along the Texas-Mexico border, in a city that is something like 85-90% Hispanic, not to mention 85-90% Catholic or some other Christian denomination, I always knew that as a Caucasian and a Jew, I was in the minority In El Paso, however, I rarely, if ever, gave it any thought.  My friends had Hispanic surnames and they celebrated Christmas and Easter while I celebrated Hanukkah and Passover, but it never mattered.  They came to my Bar Mitzvah and I attended their confirmation.  One of my friends even came to the house for one of our seders. When my family attended services at the synagogue, there was nothing unusual or out of the ordinary about it.  By comparison, in recent years, as the number of anti-Semitic incidents around the United States increased year after year, in the wake of individuals shooting up synagogues in other parts of the country, it stands out that, when I attend services now, the doors to the synagogue are locked and we need to be buzzed inside and that there are times when police are standing by the doors to the synagogue or sitting in a police cruiser in the parking lot. The fact that I attended an active shooter training at the synagogue and that, while not foremost in my thoughts, somewhere in the recesses of my mind is the fact that I am thinking of my surroundings, where the nearest exit is, where I could hide if I needed to, or how I might use my folded white cane as a weapon if it came to that.  For those of us in the United States, these are the thoughts we wrestle with when simply trying to practice our religion, but for the people of Israel, the thoughts are taken to another level.

Visiting Israel earlier this year was an amazing experience, especially after having come from Poland.  While in Poland, I had the opportunity to visit the concentration camps at Auschwitz and the subcamp at Birkenau.  It was a profound experience, to bear witness to man’s inhumanity to man.  One thought that struck me as I walked into Birkenau and stood where the selections were once held is that, as someone who is blind, had I been sent there I most likely would have been sent to the gas chamber, however, being an identical twin, I might have been spared just to be subjected to so-called scientific experiments  While in Poland, we also visited the town of Kielce, the site of a pogrom on July 4, 1946, 14 months after the war in Europe had ended, and yet, on that day, 42 Jewish men, women, and children, people who had survived the Holocaust, were murdered by their neighbors simply for being Jewish.  On Oct. 7, there were other Jewish men, women, and children, some of whom were Holocaust survivors, who were likewise killed for no reason other than that they are Jewish. 

While in Israel, I got to travel all over the country, all around Jerusalem and the surrounding area.  I visited Yad Vashem and got to walk along Masada and ride a camel. I was able to get my feet wet in the Dead Sea as well as the Mediterranean Sea and visit the Golan Heights and the grottoes at Rosh Hanikra.  However, one of the most meaningful experiences was our visit to the Druse community in Kisra Sameah.  Recently, we found out that one of the IDF soldiers killed in Gaza was a member of the Druse community.  The Druse are not Jewish, but they are Israeli, and they fight and die to defend their country because it is their country as well.

Another memorable experience was actually a trip to get ice cream.  The shop we stopped at was one recommended by our tour guide, a duel American and Israeli citizen named Talia.  Not only was the ice cream very good, but the shop itself was special because it is jointly owned by a Jew and a Muslim.  They work together, so it is possible to peacefully coexist, but it is a choice one has to make and, unfortunately, there are people, Palestinian and Israeli alike, who do not believe in that.  To be fair, these are the extremists, but just as Hamas should be condemned for their actions, so too should the Jewish extremists in the West Bank who kill Palestinians simply for being Palestinian.  In the United States, incidents of Islamophobia have increased 244% since Oct. 7.  Just like all Jews should not be held collectively responsible for the actions of Israel’s government, Arabs and Muslims should not be held collectively responsible for the actions of Hamas.

I have never labeled myself a Zionist, although I have always supported Israel’s right to exist.  After visiting Israel earlier this year, I still believe in Israel’s right to exist.  I did not know what, if anything, I would feel visiting Israel for the first time, but I did feel a connection to the land.  There is something about walking on the same ground as the people you read about in Sunday school.  I am not saying that my visit to Israel suddenly made me Orthodox, but there was a connection that is hard to find the words to explain.  The people of Israel, like the people of many countries, want to live in peace.  I truly believe that, however, they live in a neighborhood where they are surrounded by people who want to eradicate their existence.  Many of Israel’s neighbors have come to recognize their right to exist, and, whether it will happen in my lifetime or not I do not know, but maybe, at some point in the future, those countries who do not currently do so will also recognize Israel’s right to exist, so that the people of Israel and the Palestinians can live in peace, scratch out an existence like all of us fiddlers on the roof try to do day in and day out as we watch our children and grandchildren grow up.  But Israel cannot will such a future into existence on their own.  They need partners who are willing to coexist.  The current hostilities were not instigated by Israel but by Hamas, which is something that, even just a month after it happened, people seem to have forgotten.  Remember that it was Hamas that kicked the hornet’s nest and instigated all of this.  Israel is defending itself, as it has a right to do, and the degree to which they are defending themselves is so that Hamas cannot carry out another attack, the second, third, and fourth wave their own spokespeople have said is coming.  The people of Palestine will not be free until they are free from Hamas.  It is possible to both support the right of the Palestinians to have a country of their own, while still standing with Israel.  I stood with Israel on Oct. 7 and I still stand with them now.