Rob Browne’s piece this morning [top of page] moves me to gather my own thoughts and personal experiences in the same connection. Where to begin?
I went to Israel with my mother shortly before my Bar Mitzvah (July ’98) at a time in my life I felt very good about being Jewish, but it never occurred to me then that I should feel any differently about this place than, say, a Christian who visits out of religious feeling, Christian Zionism notwithstanding.
My mother lived there for a couple of years in the 70s, she says she never really thought about it intellectually. Today she’s no more than a couple shades to the right of J Street but still gets very emotional in any kind of substantive conversation. But I understand that in human terms and I say judge not lest ye be judged.
My father experienced the euphoria of 1967 just as he was graduating high school and recently revealed to me that he actually was thinking during his first year of college that he’d move to Israel after he graduated but soon enough started running with the Young People’s Socialist League instead. He’s far more the intellectual, to his undoing in many areas, and when I was younger he would repeat all the usual Laborite talking points to me but could still have an honest exchange about the fundamentals of Zionism itself. He, too, I can tell, is quite tortured over recent events, and understandably so in human terms.
The bottom line is that I just never got what I was supposed to believe about Israel and Jewish identity until I was an adult and started reading Commentary. I remember at my Bar Mitzvah I gave a speech that made several blasts at the religious school but also had a paragraph about my recent trip to Israel which, as I recall, merely stated that being there made me think seriously for the first time about the conflict. I was quite surprised when the rabbi gave his responsa of sorts and the only specific point he called me on was about Israel and not any of the rest of it. That afternoon when a friend who had to work that day just dropped by on his lunch break someone described the speech to him as "defending Palestine", and I just thought "whoa I didn’t think I said anything like that!". I was just a kid, but this was the first stirring of my thinking what the hell is going on here.
Back then to the substance of this discussion about who the hell is making "aliyah" in this day and age. Of that same circle of friends growing up I became aware through the magic of Facebook of one who moved to Israel immediately after finishing college and cast his lot totally with Kahane/Lieberman. Only then on reflection did I realize that of all the friends I had growing up I knew him the longest – from the time I was seven to the time I was fourteen. In trying to probe what so moved him I remembered suddenly that his father, who was a real character to put it mildly, had spent much of his childhood in Israel, and there was definitely tension between father and son – the kid was a bit of a nerd – so with the same impulse that led George W. Bush into Iraq my friend joined the Beiteinu vanguard to prove once and for all he was more manly than his father.
Before I get accused of gratuitous psychoanalysis, there was another kid I knew only slightly who I discovered on Facebook went to Brandeis and went totally Chabad-fellow-traveling-neocon, and my memory of him just screamed "its so about your masculinity!"
It was from a formal discussion group at my shul, which Phil once covered on the blog, that I really became exposed for the first time to the anguished hand-wringing of those who grew up with the ’67 euphoria and the sale of Israel Bonds at High Holiday services, to say nothing of the more insular conservadoxish version of those closer to my own age. I just never got it with my marginally Conservative Jewish upbringing that was at best nominally observant.
One other point I feel I should make is that Rob really seems to let the summer camps off the hook. My God, with a name like "Young Judea" that hearkens back to classical fascism! The rise of those camps was among the most alarming developments to the old Reform anti-Zionists about whom I’ve just finished a book, at a time when the memory of the notorious Long Island summer camp of the German-American Bund was still fresh. A couple months ago I saw parts of that documentary "Jesus Camp" on TV, and I thought to myself about that history and that it would be a great post for the site, but ultimately came away with the idea that nothing so outlandish as telling eight-year-olds they were a part of the Army of The Lord occurred at the Israeli flag-saluting summer camps. If someone like Rob’s cousin is what comes out of Young Judea, I stand corrected.
Let me conclude with the anecdote of a friend, who working in Washington in the 80s once had lunch with the professional anti-Communist Herb Rommerstein and was awestruck by how deeply tortured he was by the perfectly understandable if regrettable act of belonging to the Young Communist League in New York in the late 40s and early 50s. At the same time this friend also knew a couple then active with the Democratic Socialists of America which in the late 90s were conivcted of espionage for East Germany after they themselves offered their services to the South Africans who proceeded to turn them in.
The point of this contrast being the difference between being a true-believing Communist in the 50s and being one in the 80s. Thus with Zionism – to make aliyah in the post-67 euphoria is perfectly understandable if regrettable, but today, in the era of Walt/Mearsheimer, Netanyahu/Lieberman, and J Street, it is baffling and appalling.
