Between Commentary And Tikkun
PERSPECTIVE Between Commentary And Tikkun The March issue of Commentary includes a pretentious essay by editor Norman Podhoretz, entitled "Israel: A Lamentation from the Future," that in effect...
...Here, we are led to believe, is another...
...PERSPECTIVE Between Commentary And Tikkun The March issue of Commentary includes a pretentious essay by editor Norman Podhoretz, entitled "Israel: A Lamentation from the Future," that in effect accuses Jews who do not slavishly support Israel's hardliners of contributing to Israel's destruction...
...Presumably these are seminal articles...
...We are never really told, however...
...The dangers of Scylla are no less than those of Charybdis...
...The dilemma of many Jews—both in Israel and in this country—arises precisely because we can't make or accept Podhoretz's assumption...
...Only the trumpets are missing to proclaim that here is an IMPORTANT article...
...It is our complicity—the Jews themselves, and especially American Jews—that led to the PLO state that concerns Podhoretz: "The most determined resistance by the Jews of Israel, backed with equal determination by the Jews of America" might have prevented the establishment of the PLO state that led to Israel's destruction, he writes...
...Unfortunately, history does not reveal its alternatives, and we must sit here without the benefit of 21st century hindsight and decide how best to preserve and protect the Israel we love...
...This year the Jewish people itself has become the symbol of oppression to another people: the Palestinians...
...This provides an occasion for the author to recite familiar history from the Holocaust to the present...
...If the Arab states believed they could win such a war—or that they would be able to win it without paying a wholly unacceptable price—they would surely embark on such an adventure even now, regardless of the scents picked up from their sniffings...
...People are indeed suffering—Israelis, as well as Palestinians—but the moral posturing and hair-shirt breast-beating displayed in Tikkun only degrades us in our own eyes.—h.s...
...The problems facing the Israelis and the Palestinians are complex and in some ways intractable...
...Looking back from the 21st century, Podhoretz is tormented at "the blood of complicity on our own Jewish hands...
...If responsibility is to be assigned, the Arabs and specifically the Palestinians are far more responsible for their own conditions on the West Bank and in Gaza than are the Israelis...
...We are asked to assume Israel's destruction: Then we will feel "shame and self-disgust...
...At another point in the service, Tikkun tells us to refer to the land of Israel as "a land of affliction" so long as "one people grasps at the whole land...
...In .our seder tonight we will joyfully celebrate our own liberation—but, at the same time, we will remember the status of the Palestinian people and pray that their liberation be achieved without harm to the safety, security, and freedom of the Jewish people living in the State of Israel...
...After the kiddush, we are told by Tikkun to declare that "Many of-us celebrate this Passover with a heavy heart...
...Actually sitting here at the end of the 20th century, however, many responsible observers— and ordinary troubled people—believe that Israel is more likely to be destroyed if her government remains inflexible than if a Palestinian state is created on the West Bank with appropriate arrangements to protect Israel's security...
...Oh Lord, is there nothing between Commentary and Tikkun...
...Israel has been destroyed...
...The article is doubly disappointing because, promising so much, it delivers so little...
...The article speaks from the 21st century...
...Writing from the perspective of the 21st century, Podhoretz ' 'knows" that Israel has been destroyed...
...If only we knew, Mr...
...By this time, considerable suspense has built up: How will Israel be destroyed...
...Too many Jews "encouraged the process...
...Indeed, they may be more likely to resort to a desperate adventure in response to continued Israeli inflexibility than in the scenario Podhoretz assumes...
...In the parallel issue of Tikkun (the March/April issue), we are told, by contrast, to modify our seder service on Passover in order to consider the Palestinians...
...But that is not really Pod-horetz's point...
...Podhoretz tells us that the Arab armies ganged up on Israel and won the war, encouraged by "the scent of Israeli weakness...
...The writer of the article is identified not simply as the editor of Commentary, but as the author of three specific articles—among "many"—which appeared in 1976,1982 and 1983...
...Israel is no Pharaoh and it is disgusting to suggest that she is...
...All Podhoretz says is that ' 'a combination of Arab armies brought together by the scent of Israeli weakness and undeterred by any international promises and guarantees" defeated Israel in "a war" that ended her "national existence...
...too few "resisted it...
...Podhoretz, what would lead to peace and what would lead to Israel's destruction, then we would know which path to take...
...Then, peering into the future, he records the establishment of a "PLO state...
...From the current perspective, he "knows" that it will be—or very well may be—destroyed unless we rally behind the hardliners...
Vol. 14 • June 1989 • No. 4
