RUTHFULLY YOURS

On October 3, 2015, Muhannad Halabi, a 19-year-old Palestinian, perpetrated a stabbing and shooting attack on Israelis in the Old City of Jerusalem. He killed two men—Nehemiah Levi, 41, and Aharon Banita, 22. Banita’s wife was also seriously wounded, and their two-year-old child was lightly wounded. The attack ended with Halabi being shot dead by policemen.

When the wife, Adele Banita, injured and bleeding, begged for help [1] from surrounding Palestinian shopkeepers, they “just spat at me…laughed and cursed…and told [me] to ‘drop dead.’…”

Since that time, the memory of Muhannad Halabi, the attacker, has undergone a process not far from the beatification of a saint:

Just hours after the attack, the first Palestinian baby was named after [2] Halabi. The mother of the newborn Muhannad Halabi called the mother of the deceased Muhannad Halabi, and “the two mothers cried from joy….” Palestinian news outlets dubbed Halabi a “hero of our people” who was “murdered by the occupation army.”

http://david-collier.com/?p=1336

It is 27/10/2015 and I am at 1 Parliament St for a ’roundtable event’ organised by the Palestine Return Council and hosted by Gerald Kaufman. I had not been to one of these before and therefore had no idea what to expect, but as all the names on the invitation were hostile to Israel, I was hoping for a little excitement. However, even I did not expect to be taken down the route of global Jewish conspiracy theories.

The room was small, but it was packed full. The table was not round but rectangle and Kaufman was very late (this not the first time the Palestinians have said one thing and done another, nor that their friends make them promises of support and fail to deliver). The subject was to be British Foreign Policy towards Palestine since 2010, so it came as no surprise when the early attacks were directed towards the Conservatives; I need not have worried though, this room contained people with far greater hatreds.

Before Kaufman belatedly arrived and spoke, there were those such as Martin Linton, who used the time to speak. A red light was flashed to all those who support partial boycott and are unaware of classic PLO strategy. Back in 1974 the PLO changed strategy and rather than reject all compromise, stood behind a new ‘Ten Point Program’ that would see them accept any part of ‘Palestine’ Israel was willing to cede through negotiation. Their goal was still the same, and they would not deliver peace at any point, but felt the only way they would defeat Israel would be by using what Sir Humphrey Appleby referred to as salami tactics (slice by slice). In 2015, BDS is hiding behind the same strategy. Promises that call only to boycott settlement products are merely a ‘first step’ with what they refer to now as the ‘stepladder approach’ outlined in stark detail by one of the speakers. I wonder if those aligning with ‘boycott lite’ are aware the cynical goal is to use those waving a banner of ‘ethical shopping’ to eliminate Israel from the map.

Seventy leaders, thinkers, and clergy respond: What will be the condition of the Jewish community fifty years from now?

1. Optimism

The exercise of imagining the Jewish future is, of course, more precisely an effort to understand the Jewish present by thinking through what the consequences of our actions and beliefs might be. There is no way to envision how we Jews can and will react to real-world events, calamities, and scientific advances. After all, as Dennis Prager writes, in 2065 “there may well be a Chabad House on the moon.” Prager says this not in a tone of triumphalism, by the way; he is the gloomiest of Commentary’s 69 symposiasts. And certainly the Jewish past gives us no reason to believe the Jewish future will be a sunny one.

And yet optimism, of a kind, informs most of the contributions to “The Jewish Future.” There will, practically everyone agrees, be a Jewish future. And that is a triumph. It might not seem like much of one, since the Jewish people have survived for more than three millennia—against which the next 50 years can be seen as nothing more than a blip in time. But considering the many reasons we have been given in the past few years to doubt the Jewish future, the general spirit of optimism expressed in these musings should not be taken lightly.

The 60,000 words that compose “The Jewish Future” were written under twin shadows, one hovering over each of the world’s most important communities of Jews—ours in the United States, and the one in Israel.

In 2013, the Pew survey of American Jewry painted nothing less than a portrait of a people drifting toward nonexistence. The findings documented an American Jewish community largely ignorant about the fundaments of their faith and their history, largely indifferent to their ignorance, and possibly on the verge of seeing its middle ground—the grand compromise between modernity and tradition known as the Conservative movement—vanish almost entirely. Intermarriage and out-marriage have become the norm, not the exception, and the record of the past century suggests that descendents of these couplings will not be Jews by their own reckoning in relatively short order.