My father and mother emigrated from Russia and Lithuania respectively during the first decade of the twentieth century. Economic opportunity certainly had a role in their abandonment of their respective homelands. But there were other reasons.
Not unlike many if not most young Jewish men in czarist Russia, my father was determined to avoid military conscription which he described as "a life sentence -- once you were in it, you were in it forever." Furthermore, to discourage desertion, he told me, pains were taken to post soldiers as distant from their home villages as possible.
A cousin from my father's village I first met when I was a teenager supplied me with a detail that my father had until then never bothered to share about his earlier life. As a very young man, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Russian revolutionary leader Alexander Kerensky, who following the 1917 revolution, some eight years after my father arrived in the United States, served as provisional prime minister prior to Lenin's election.
My father recalled that he was initially attracted to Kerensky based on the then young lawyer's brilliant defense of political prisoners in the czar's courts, and, later, because of his vision to recreate Russia in the image of America. Glowing letters from relatives in the United States caused Kerensky's promise to resonate with my father. But, as more and more Jews were conscripted into the Russian army, my father would not be around for the revolution in his homeland
Meanwhile, my mother, then only nine years old, accompanied her aunt and uncle to America to escape the more and more frequent pogroms in Lithuania in which Jewish villages were routinely pillaged, Jewish men routinely beaten or slaughtered and Jewish women and girls routinely raped.
Interminable persecution and brutalization was the plight of Eastern European Jews well before the rise of Hitler. After my father and mother emigrated to the United States, the families they left behind, other than his brother and two sisters he was able, after years of hard work, to bring to the U.S., were wiped out in the World War II Nazi Holocaust.
Hamas, the Palestinian fundamentalist organization which has controlled the Gaza Strip since the 2006 legislative elections, has never accepted the Jewish state. They have called for a hudna or truce with Israel, based on the Prophet Mohammed's similar respite with Jews some 1,400 years ago. Hamas's entrenched refusal to fully accept Israel is construed by Israelis to mean that when the Palestinians gain sufficient strength their intention is to overtake Israel.
While Hamas operates mosques, schools, clinics and social programs, its military wing has carried out numerous terrorist acts, including suicide bombings and rocket attacks. Hamas opposed the 1993 accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Authority and its charter dating back to 1988 continues to call for replacement of Israel and the Palestinian Territories with an Islamic Palestinian state.
Mahmoud Al-Zahar, a co-founder of Hamas, said following the April 2006 elections, that he dreamed of "hanging a huge map of the world on the wall at my Gaza home which does not show Israel. . .there is no place for the state of Israel in this land."
In my travels over the years, I've visited Turkey twice. I clearly remember a huge banner strung across a main thoroughfare in Istanbul in 1992, proclaiming 500 years of Turkish and Jewish friendship. I recall wondering how many other countries could make a similar claim, much less a predominately Islamic country.
If any country needs every friend it can get, it is Israel. But the commando raid on the Turkish ship has seriously strained relations between the two countries. World opinion, mostly favoring Israel since 1948 when it was reborn as a nation, today favors Palestinians more than it does Israel .
The raid on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara has engendered a reevaluation of the country's relationship with Israel. Ironically, the fact that Turkey is an Islamic country with a long-term reputation of friendship with Israel would seem to make it an ideal honest broker in negotiations leading to a two-state solution to the region's most vexing problem.
Liberals are preternaturally disposed to supporting the oppressed and dispossessed. When they see Palestinians in displaced persons' camps, they instinctively know what side they are on.
My friend Ted sees video footage of Israeli tanks rolling over Palestinian shelters in the refugee camps where there are women and children, contrasts it with home-made rockets from the Palestinian territories landing harmlessly in fields inside of Israel.
What Ted and many liberals see is Palestinians in ghettoes at the mercy of Jews, and they wonder how this is different from Nazi oppression of Jews sixty-five to seventy years ago. We do not hear Israeli hard-liners calling for mass extermination of Palestinians; in fact, when considering fundamentalist organizations like Hamas, it is just the opposite. But fundamentalist Arabs and reactionary Israelis are motivated by the same emotion: boundless, unswerving distrust.
My only visit to Israel was more than 40 years ago. As a secular Jew, proud of my heritage, I am both wary and weary of the intolerance organized religion, for all of its well-intentioned advocacy of peace, goodwill and harmony, almost invariably fosters.
I came away from that one trip to Israel with the hope that the Jewish state would one day set a positive example for the entire Middle East -- not because it had a surfeit of bullets and bombs, but that the Jewish experience in the diaspora, so much of its population having lived among people of different religious, ethnic and political backgrounds, might serve as a beacon for showing the way toward regional if not global peace. It bode well that Jews, wherever they have lived, have demonstrated leadership in the arts, sciences and culture disproportionate to their numbers. But four decades later that hope remains on tenuous hold.
Meanwhile, Palestinian frustration over being subjected to generations of refugee status is more than understandable; so too is the liberal identification with the suppressed. This time Israel appears to be the aggressor, if for no other reason than it is the Israelis wearing the boots and the uniforms and who are supported by an arsenal of sophisticated weaponry. And the stateless Palestinians are cast as freedom fighters. If one picture is worth a thousand words, what is the worth of one video of a family's home crushed by a tank?
Nor is the retribution ideology of both the Torah and the Quran helpful in the effort to bring about peace. Both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King observed that an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.
History is not without precedence in which hardline leaders have succeeded in advancing a progressive agenda where more moderate ones might not have. There is strong doubt that had liberal Hubert Humphrey won the 1968 United States presidential election, he could have achieved U.S. recognition of the People's Republic of China that came about through the unlikely Nixon-Kissinger diplomacy.
Is it too much to hope that Netanyahu can lead his country to the two-state solution -- the only possibility, fraught with risk though it may be, for creating an environment conducive to peace and prosperity. "From this nettle danger, we pluck this flower safety," Shakespeare wrote. The time for lip service to a Palestinian state has long passed.
It should be evident to Israel that the blockade strengthens rather than weakens Hamas, and that it has now jeopardized more than five centuries of friendship with an Islamic nation. Moreover, the only result that can possibly come from the blockade is not a bridge to a more harmonious future but a treadmill of dismal stagnation.
Israel's continuing blockade of Gaza ensures the status quo. But what nation in a similar position would risk the mass importation of arms to a country controlled by an organization whose founder wants it to vanish from his map? There is an opportunity for the United Nations to repair its own diminished image as a peacekeeping force by assuming security responsibilities and ensuring against weapons pouring into Gaza to be used against Israel.
Considering their long, heartbreaking history of bitterness, animosity and violence, it is long overdue for Arabs and Jews to live side by side, not as suspicious and fearful neighbors but as the brothers they were always meant to be. The risks of the two-state solution may be immense, but no greater than those of the the perpetual standoff that serves only to compound mutual resentment and hostility, and which has proved nothing other than that it is unworkable, untenable and unjustifiable.
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