Israel at age 67: Slammed if you do, dead if you don't

In the fine movie Witness, an Amish child at a Pennsylvania railroad station at first thinks a bearded old Hassidic Jew in a dark, full-length coat is one of his own people. He quickly realizes his mistake, but many journalists slam Israelis for not acting like the peaceful Amish. Of course, if the Israelis did, they wouldn’t last long. Given their media and Muslim foes, Israelis don’t have great choices as to fighting back or not: They’re slammed if they do, dead if they don’t.

This Thursday brings Israel’s independence day, and here’s one tribute to the 67-year-old country. Israel has been a much-needed haven for Jews from all over the world but especially from eastern Europe. Nazis in 1941 probably machine-gunned my Jewish great-grandparents in the western part of Ukraine. I don’t know for sure: If my father ever knew, he didn’t say. But if my great-grandparents were still living at age 70, they would have been marched two miles out of Olyevsk, ordered to take off all their clothes, and shot along with hundreds of others.

The Holocaust’s 6 million murders led to the creation of the Israeli state in 1948 and the willingness of Jews to fight for it against enormous odds. Two years ago I visited the spot where my grandparents probably died: They may have been feeble then, but many younger Jews joined them in going sheep-like to the slaughter. The hardened men and women who founded the state of Israel and fought to defend it in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, became known for saying, “Never again.” Never again would they make it easy for mass killers. Never again would they go down without a fight.

For several decades, non-Jewish Americans and Europeans understood that resolve. Many Europeans had reasons to feel guilty. Many Americans knew our country could have done more before and during World War II, but we had locked the immigration door in the 1930s and ignored pleas during the war to bomb the railroads transporting Jews to the gas chambers. The guilty told the survivors: Do whatever you feel you need to do. Many took satisfaction in seeing how Jews fought and won.

But then a generation grew up that did not know Adolf. Those without a visceral awareness of the background saw Israelis not as victims trying to survive but as overlords acting unjustly to poor Palestinians. Manipulators took the opportunity to re-package the old anti-Semitism as sympathy for an oppressed third-world population. Others sought scapegoats, and the odd people who seemed a little too clever, too successful, too assertive once again were perfect for the role. Still others simply went with an anti-Semitic flow. That’s how it was in Germany. That’s how it is in some places now.