Drawing the Line

Friends of Israel who recognize its shortcomings believe it poses for contemporary Jews an ethical challenge we haven’t had to face for two thousand years. Jews were stateless, therefore politically powerless, but once again have a state and power that sovereignty confers.

This renewed ability to shape our national destiny saddles us with responsibilities we didn’t have during the centuries of exile and social disenfranchisement. Among those responsibilities of statehood: to deal equitably with non-Jews in our midst, most obviously, Palestinians.

We were strangers, a minority dependent upon the benevolence of societies within whose borders we lived as guests, but now the script is flipped: We are the majority in charge, capable of helping or harming vulnerable persons and groups (Palestinians) over whom we rule and who rely on our good graces… So the argument goes.

I don’t buy it; not in this case.

Scripture does emphasize God’s commandment to treat with respect disadvantaged folk. There’s compassionate wisdom here: Jews, formerly and still victims of prejudice and oppression, empathize with neighbors who’ve experienced the same. We see the human tendency to mistreat, in every society, strangers and others who don’t “fit in.”

To reduce such abuse, Torah emphasizes, we must go out of our way to treat them with respect as long as they obey our laws. This accords with Judaism’s broader social ethic of moral reciprocity. Rabbi Hillel put it this way in boiling down our religion to its essence: “That which is hateful to you do not do to others…” (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Shabbat 31a).

Israel’s Arab citizens face discrimination, have a lower standard of living and higher crime rate and receive less government support than do the country’s Jewish citizens. Yet, in Hillel’s spirit Israel affords a relatively decent life for its Arab citizens; their social well-being is greater than that of most residents of neighboring Arab countries (see last paragraph of this article: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/israeli-arab-statistics).

I am not dismissing the seriousness of Israeli Arabs’ difficulties but am offering perspective about a big difference, one often ignored or unacknowledged: Their circumstances are unlike those of Palestinians living as “refugees” in areas under Israeli military control as well as in Hamas-run Gaza. Here’s where sympathy meets resistance.

Jews’ position in Christian and Muslim “host” countries of years gone by hardly resembled that of these Palestinians. Nowhere did we have a world body like the U.N. backing us. Prelates and princes, imams and sultans made laws and offered gestures to protect Jewish people, who were at risk of attack from restive, hostile populations although those same leaders – especially in Christian Europe – often sided with our enemies. Moreover, Palestinians today, unlike Jews displaced by the Roman empire in ancient times, do not willingly and peaceably submit to the authority of the government holding power over them.

Jews in medieval Spain, France, Germany, and England did not challenge or question a Christian overlord’s right to rule over that land and over themselves. The same was true of Jewish communities in Muslim lands. Those Jews were typically obedient and resigned to their circumstances. This was so even when these countries and their rulers treated us with disrespect and malice.

Palestinians, to the contrary, generally see themselves as the Holy Land’s sole rightful inhabitants and view Jews as colonialist interlopers (our presence there stretches back to Biblical times). The Palestinian Authority’s official educational curriculum – which young students in Gaza as well as Judaea and Samaria are taught – takes this false position, inculcating children with lies and encouraging them to hate Israel and Jews. The United Nations facilitates this propagandistic incitement through UNRWA’s collaboration with Hamas and the PA. (See https://www.timesofisrael.com/as-gazans-return-to-school-study-finds-their-pa-textbooks-still-rife-with-incitement/.)

To call Palestinians dependent on Israel’s good graces overlooks the billions of dollars in foreign aid and adulation of nations they receive. To call them willing to obey Israel’s laws and thus, in the Torah’s spirit, deserving of support and encouragement from the Israeli government and people overlooks the fact that Palestinians’ national identity took shape as violent opposition – continuing to this day – to a Jewish state founded in accordance with U.N. protocol (during its early period before corruption and anti-Jewish vitriol set in).

Zionist founders endorsed that plan, which also allowed for a Palestinian state. It never came about because Palestinians and all Arab nations militantly rejected it.

Newly vested with authority over its own destiny, the Jewish nation is indeed duty-bound to treat equitably those over whom it exercises power. But the obligation does not apply to those who reject Israel’s right to exist. In its day-to-day struggle for survival and revival, Israel should not be overly cordial with hostile neighbors sworn to its destruction.