Here’s more on the battle inside American Jewry over support for the colonization of the West Bank. The Forward has good coverage of a memorial service in New York yesterday, attended by more than 1000, for the family of five Jewish settlers killed in the occupied West Bank last week.
Polls have shown that more than half of American Jews support the colonization project, and you can understand the collective religious guilt-laden force behind it in Maia Efrem’s reporting from the memorial: the settlers carried the weight of our people that we should share but don’t. (And this is why I say that David Remnick and J Street should have turned to realists like Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer years ago, to take these forces on; but they didn’t, out of a defensive, collective instinct):
“They were treated as criminals for settling and building beautiful lives in the heartland of our ancestral holy land,” said Rabbi Yaakov Kermaier, president of the New York Board of Rabbis. “Did we protest loud enough? Did we fight strongly enough on their behalf? Did we share with them at the most minimal level that is expected of us who choose to live in the Diaspora the burden and the responsibility to keep them safe and demand that they be treated by the world with dignity?”
Kermaier asked for “mechila,” forgiveness, from the Fogels as a somber audience stood hushed. “They have carried the weight of our people and shouldered responsibility that we should share, but which we don’t,” he said.
On stage photos of Udi and Ruth Fogel, and their young children Elad, Yoav and three-month-old Hadas were projected on a large screen as speaker after speaker stressed that the murders were a crime and attack against all Jewish people.
“It is not where they lived that brought this about,” said Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, recalling earlier terrorist attacks in cities such as Tel Aviv, Haifa and Kiryat Shemona. “It is because they were Jews living in Israel.”
