July 12th: Chukat
THIS WEEK IN THE TORAH
Rabbi David E. Ostrich
This is the week that Moses loses it. He and Aaron lose their sister Miriam (Numbers 20.1ff). and then he loses his temper, composure, and future in the Promised Land. The Israelites are typically obnoxious—criticizing him for a water shortage, but God is typically responsive with a miraculous plan to provide all the water they need. Moses is instructed to go to a rock and speak to it, “Order the rock to yield its water,” but Moses’ composure and patience are at their end. “Moses and Aaron assembled the congregation in front of the rock, and he said to them: ‘Listen, you rebels, shall we get water for you out of this rock?’ And Moses raised his hand and struck the rock twice with his rod.” What may seem like an understandable and unusual outburst is too much for the Lord Who has higher standards. “Because you did not trust Me enough to affirm My sanctity in the sight of the Israelite people, therefore you shall not lead this congregation unto the land that I have given them.”
Sometimes, the pressures of the world can be too much, and we can lose our bearings. Such a time is now for Jews around the world. The unrelenting pressure of misinformation and hostility is taking a toll on most of us. We do not want to “lose it” as did Moses, but we need the relief of clarity and truth. Clarity will not solve all of Israel’s or Jewry’s problems, but it can help us remember than we are neither immoral nor crazy. The Israeli-Arab conflict needs to be discussed with understanding and compassion and fairness, but too often this is not the case.
So we comb the internet and news sources, taking each anti-Israel punch and nonetheless searching for something not hateful, not anti-Semitic, not a repetition of Hamas propaganda—something that clearly discusses the conflict in which our Zionist dream is continually mired. When we find such an essay or interview or news report, we bookmark it and distribute it to our friends and relatives—and former friends. Such pieces are like life rafts in a sea of infuriating and overwhelming bad thinking.
It is in such a spirit that a friend sent me this piece from the Wall Street Journal. It is by Elliot Kaufman, a staff writer and letters editor. Written from Jerusalem, it covers a lot of ground, but it is full of compassion and wisdom and good thinking. This essay helped me with my moral composure and equanimity. I hope it can be helpful to you.
“We pray that one day there will be peace,” says Nina Tokayer, half of the Israeli musical duo Yonina, after a candle is extinguished to bring the Sabbath to a close. “Sometimes that means eliminating our enemies, who hate peace and want to destroy us. For some reason, a lot of people around the world don’t understand that.”
Israelis don’t understand what the world doesn’t understand about Oct. 7. Hamas is the Palestinian majority party, and Oct. 7 was its apotheosis. It will try it again if Israel quits Gaza too early, and it will do worse if Israel surrenders the West Bank. Yet the world demands both, leaving Israelis to conclude that the world has little problem subjecting them to more massacres. Israelis feel as if a mandatory form of amnesia is being imposed on them: Thou shalt not remember what actual Palestinian nationalism looks like.
The struggle for memory has strategic significance. Micah Goodman, a leading intellectual of the Israeli center, says the first lesson of Oct. 7 is: “When we leave territory, we’re not protected from that territory.” This has become a national consensus.
“We had Oct. 7 before—in 1929,” Mr. Goodman says. Then, Arab mobs massacred more than 100 Jews across Hebron, Safed, Jerusalem and Jaffa and left more than 300 wounded. “Jews were attacked in the streets, in their homes, with all the terrible atrocities that we saw on Oct. 7. This was before the nakba of 1948, before the occupation of 1967.”
I thought of the struggle for memory on a visit to an Israeli military base, home to an elite combat unit whose members’ full identities are kept secret. “The world doesn’t understand the pain,” says Maxim, a young soldier, “and I don’t think it cares.” He allows that people may have forgotten Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. Roi, his comrade, doesn’t buy it: “They know what happened, but they don’t give a s—. Or they support it and call it ‘resistance.’” Asaf, a 21-year-old fighter, says, “The Arabs win because they are patient. We can defeat Hamas, but if we leave, they’ll rebuild it all and in 10 years they will attack again.” In his view, as one soldier, “the only way we win is if we take the land.”
He shouldn’t say that. What could be more repulsive to foreign ears than an Israeli reoccupation of Gaza? Much less repulsive to the world is Asaf’s other scenario: Hamas keeps Gaza and plots the next Oct. 7.
In the border kibbutz of Kfar Aza, Chen Kotler works to prevent Oct. 7 from being forgotten. She tells of terrorists on her roof and in her sister’s house. “Along this pavement, eight people were murdered,” she says at one spot. Hamas still holds hostage five of her neighbors: Gali and Ziv Berman, Emily Damari, Doron Steinbrecher and Keith Siegel, a 65-year-old U.S. citizen. Buildings have been wrecked, and the community will have to fight to survive.
But aren’t more people dying in Gaza? The media is happy to obscure the relevant distinctions. Activists promoted the “genocide” lie even before the war. Eylon Levy, until recently Israel’s government spokesman, explains, “The slanders of Israel today are preparing the response to the next Oct. 7: ‘The Jews had it coming.’”
Perhaps Israel can’t satisfy the Western gaze. A sign on one destroyed home in Kfar Aza reads: “Aviad Edri was brutally murdered in this house.” But the West wants to see the body left out on the ground. Israelis won’t—and shouldn’t—cooperate. Some of Ms. Kotler’s surviving neighbors even oppose the tours and don’t allow photos. “This will soon be history,” she says. “The tractors will come to repair. So, you’ll have to carry it for your whole life.”
The world is unwilling to bear the weight for long. While President Biden made clear after Oct. 7 that Hamas must not remain in power, by February he wasn’t so sure. He called Israel’s counterattack “over the top.” At a Holocaust remembrance event in May, he urged the world to “never forget” Oct. 7 while withholding arms from Israel to prevent an attack on Hamas’s stronghold.
Thomas Friedman now writes what is implicit in Biden policy: It’s OK to leave Hamas in power. Maybe there will be a power-sharing agreement. Maybe the people of Gaza will restrain Hamas. Or maybe the West has learned nothing from Oct. 7.
There’s a story the West tells itself: After the massacre, Israel had the world’s sympathy and support. But Israel went too far, and the world turned against it. Right-thinking Westerners like this story because right-thinking Westerners are its stars. They are moved by the plight of Kfar Aza and the Nova festivalgoers to denounce Hamas, but not so much that, like those vengeful Israelis, they lose their impartiality and humanitarian instinct.
The truth is darker. Much, perhaps most, of the world didn’t condemn Oct. 7 or repudiate Hamas. Qatar and Egypt, the mediators, both blamed Israel on Oct. 7. On Oct. 8, China called on Israel to “immediately end the hostilities.” Russia still hosts Hamas delegations. None of Hamas’s patrons have abandoned it or been seriously pressured to do so. The big human-rights groups equivocated on Oct. 7 about “civilians on both sides.” Ever since, they have pretended the war began on Oct. 8, representing the Israeli effort as pure malevolence. The campus left cheered the attack. The United Nations General Assembly still hasn’t condemned it.
U.S. support for Israel has been essential, but it has strings attached. “If the United States experienced what Israel is experiencing, our response would be swift, decisive and overwhelming,” Mr. Biden said on Oct. 10. But at every stage of the war, he has worked to slow and scale down Israel’s military response. U.S. generals advised Israel not to invade Gaza, senior Israeli officials say. The Americans insisted that raids from the perimeter would defeat Hamas.
By January the Biden administration was pressing hard for a Palestinian state, which it described as the only real solution, just as it had thought on Oct. 6. Never mind that polls show two-thirds of Palestinians support the Oct. 7 attack.
Over hummus in Tel Aviv, the right-wing intellectual Gadi Taub puts it provocatively: “Biden’s plan to end the war is for Netanyahu to fall and Sinwar to stay.” The U.S. president has spent months pushing a deal to end the war, and his deputies insist Israeli troops leave Gaza afterward. Since no one else but Israelis will fight and die to keep Hamas down, Hamas rule would quickly be restored.
“Oct. 7 killed not only the dream of peace,” says Mr. Levy, the former Israeli spokesman. “It killed the dreamers” of the border kibbutzim. But Mr. Biden and his team, the none-too-quiet Americans, are still dreaming. They call it a peace process, but an Israeli withdrawal that returns Gaza to Hamas is the first step to the next massacre, the next war.
Eran Massas, an Israeli lieutenant colonel in the reserves, says, “Hamas are not people, they are animals.” In response, the liberal Western instinct is to worry about dehumanization. When Mr. Massas tells of how he rescued civilians on Oct. 7, and how he remains haunted by one woman he found, her green clothing left beside her butchered corpse, the same Western instinct is to look away—anywhere but his eyes.