Rabbi's Reflections ~ יוֹם הָעַצְמָאוּת ~ Yom Ha'atzmaut ~ Tuesday, May 14
Rabbi Dan Levin's powerful letter to student protestors is below. Edited for length. The full letter can be found at: Open Letter to Student Protestors
Dear Student Protesters:
We raised you to be feeling, caring, compassionate. We raised you to love your neighbor and to love the stranger. We raised you to never be silent while your neighbor bleeds. You see the suffering of the Palestinian people, and your heart breaks for their plight. Mine too.
I understand the allure of the power of protest.
But I am writing today because we act rashly without thinking, without understand the nuance, the details, without thinking it all the way through.
“From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!” That chant comes from a radical ideology based on a fundamentalist Islamic ideal articulated by the Muslim Brotherhood – that it is incumbent on all Muslims to wage war to bring the entirety of the Arab world under Muslim rule, governed by Sharia law.
“From the River to the Sea…” you, yourself, may not be calling for the genocide of the 7.2 million Jews who call the land of Israel their home, but you are aligning yourself and spouting the ideology of a group who very much believes in the legitimacy of mass murder.
“By Any Means Necessary” you are endorsing violent attack on civilian populations as a way to achieve Hamas’ aims of eradicating Jews.
When you chant for a return to Intifadeh, you are calling for the return of suicide attacks on young people at dance clubs, families at pizza restaurants, and bombing wedding celebrations as the means to achieve Palestinian liberation.
But, you say, Israel is a Zionist colonial settler usurper of Palestinian land, with no legitimate right to exist.
Whether controlled by the Jewish people or by invading colonial armies from afar – Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, Arabia, Crusaders, or the Ottoman Turks, Israel was and remains the homeland of the Jewish people, who have lived in greater or lesser numbers there throughout the millennia.
We suffered discrimination, persecution, pogrom, and expulsion. And as peoples throughout the world in the nineteenth century organized around their national identities, so too did the Jewish people.
Zionism was born from the unending dreams of the Jewish people to return home to the land from which they were largely expelled, in which there has been a constant Jewish presence for more than 3,000 years.
Zionism is the political movement of an indigenous people seeking their rights to their original homeland.
The return of Jews to their homeland was met with rejectionism, and yet they persevered. They built farming collectives and small towns, growing new communities in the outskirts of ancient cities – Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Hebron, Haifa. And out of necessity, they learned to defend themselves.
In 1947 the United Nations voted to partition the land into two states.
Almost immediately, the Arab states began armed conflict, erupting into full-scale war by the middle of May 1948, when the State of Israel declared its independence.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs who fled or were forced from their homes found themselves as refugees. It is tragic, but those who wage war must be willing to accept the consequences when they attack and fail.
The ensuing years saw unrelenting war and terrorism visited on the Jewish state.
Fifty years ago, Israel held its breath when Egypt, Syria and Jordan attacked again. Israel was able to repel the attack. And then, the Egyptians did something extraordinary. They extended their hand in peace. Years later the Jordanians followed. Over the years, efforts to create a just and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians have tragically failed to take root.
Let’s imagine there were a ceasefire today. Would Hamas release the hostages it has held for more than 200 days? Would you build your home a few kilometers from the border with Gaza, knowing there was still a fighting force who had promised to rebuild its capacity to attack you again?
Would it be more just if Israel could no longer protect its citizens from the thousands of rockets and missiles fired on its cities and towns from Gaza and Lebanon?
Let’s imagine the barrier separating Gaza from Israel came down, and that Israel ceased its naval blockade of the Gaza Strip. Would Hamas not immediately attack Israel’s cities and towns and farming communities? Would they not murder innocent men, women, and children? Would they not kidnap as many people as they could find and hold them for ransom in tunnels of Gaza?
What should Israel do when an enemy who is sworn to your destruction carries off more than 250 people, including infants and small children, elderly men and women, and hundreds of other innocent people?
Every civilian death is a horrible tragedy. But if Hamas embeds itself in densely populated civilian cities, situates its headquarters underneath hospitals, uses schools and civilian homes to store its weapons, ferries its fighters inside ambulances, and fires its rockets from community centers and mosques, what is Israel to do?
So let’s talk about a protest that I would join.
Call for Hamas to surrender – to lay down its weapons and disarm, and return all the hostages to their homes.
Call for Iran to renounce its pursuit of nuclear weapons and to cease exporting war and terrorism to its proxies throughout the region.
It is time for leaders to rise to lead us forward – to embrace our shared humanity, to respect our religious and cultural differences, to relinquish bigotry, hatred, and violence, and use our collective creativity and ingenuity to fashion a future where we dwell together in peace.
~Rabbi Dan Levin
L'shalom,
Rabbi Susan
To those who missed the Yom HaShoah documentary or wish to share it with others: Violins of Hope
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