Finally, a pushke with my vision of Israel

Living in America, I was starting to feel like a doctor (not of education, which I am.) Every time I would push my check into the blue pushke, I would take the Hippocratic oath, “do no harm,” and write in the memo line, “Not for use over the Green Line.” Now I am asking myself, what was I thinking all those years.
This past Sunday, I went on a rabbinic tour of Tel Aviv with the New Israel Fund. It accomplished exactly what it had intended. It showed us how the money donated to this alternative vision of Israel is spent. I am reluctant to say “new” because the NIF vision is the one I was raised on as a child in Habonim. If only I wrote my checks to NIF all these years, I would have been able to feel like I was part of the solution, not the problem, and I would have been a participant in forging the vision of Israel I was supporting.

Our Sunday NIF trip through Tel Aviv started, of all places, in the NIF offices in Jerusalem at a breakfast with former member of Knesset, Avrum Burg. What a delight! Avrum came in to the room and shamed me. How can I take of the leisure of being pessimistic about Israel when he is such an optimist, especially Avrum Burg, the man maligned for expressing the evil (sarcasm intended) opinion that we need to come out from the ashes of the Holocaust and start thinking about what kind of society we want. Avrum told us about the work of the New Israel Fund in Israel and the meager beginnings of the organization which started 30 years ago in the Bay Area with a mere $80,000. This was clearly a Herzlian story of “if you will it, it is no dream.” The lions share of his talk was not about the external threats. It was about what Israel could be. Ironically, or maybe intentionally, days before Tisha B’Av, Avrum also discussed Sinat Chinam, infighting, and looking for a way to end this 2000 year old Jewish virus.

Our next stop was Tel Aviv. We met at one of the beneficiary organizations of the NIF, the Hotline for Foreign Workers. This was truly amazing. Hotline for Foreign Workers is an open society organization started by volunteers who were concerned with a prevalent problem is Israeli society which was not address by its creators, the government. Israel, since the first Intifada, has been trying to wean itself of Palestinian labor. This is not an new story in the land of our forebears. I have a poster in my kitchen that says, “Hebrew watermelon,” which was the early Zionist call to support Jewish labor over Arab. Today things are worse. We have not managed to do what Ber Borochov and Nachman Syrkin prescribed for us, to flip the social/economic pyramid of the Jews who were excluded from European society for so long. In Israel we maintain the pyramid but change its base. To replace Palestinian labor, we bring outsiders to do our dirty work. This wouldn’t be a problem if, as our hosts explained, they didn’t behave like human beings and fall in love, hope to be treated with dignity and need the basics of human sustenance. In Israel, we seem to want laborers who were not made in the same image of God as we were.
The Hotline for Foreign Workers is a magnificent organization on the meta level because it is the fulfillment of Hillel’s teaching, “If I am only for myself, what am I?” The nuance is also superlative. They address the real problems of affordable housing, labor justice, the absurd Knesset attacks on the children of these foreign workers and now they have entered the new realm of dealing with foreign workers who didn’t come here by choice. They were chased away from their home countries. Yes, it is beautiful that the Moslem Sudanese man who now runs a computer center in South Tel Aviv decided that Israel was the best country to turn to of all the neighborhood, but it would be better if we welcomed him with the same Hachnasat Orchim, welcoming of guests, demonstrated by Abraham.

After lunch at Dr. Shukshuka in Yafo, we went to see how the other half lives. No, not the Israeli Jewish downtrodden, of which there are many, we went to the cousins in Yafo. Before I describe the visit further, I must disclose a terrible fact from my marriage. My wife, who is also not a fan of this, comes from a family that moved into a house in Yafo where dinner was still cooking on the stove when they arrived. Now, in all fairness to them, they had just arrived from Algiers, had no money and were confronting an Ashkenazi bureaucracy in Israel that was anything but sympathetic, but this is not the fault of the Arab family that fled their home trying to either escape Jewish attackers or fleeing with the hope of getting more when their brothers in Egypt got rid of the Jewish menace in Palestine. I am not planning to judge here the ethics of people who had to deal with existential questions in times of war. As a peace educator, I can only hope to prepare others for making better decisions in the future.

In Yafo with NIF, I learned about the close interconnection of economics and ideology. My impression is that Judaicizing Israel is exploited for the economic gain of the few. It is no wonder that the building contractors in the West Bank settlements are the biggest supporters of the right wing ideologues. In Yafo, the situation is very complicated. Arabs who left their dwellings and moved south but stayed in the general vicinity of their homes, those who didn’t get the luxury tents in Gaza, are now being forced to move again. This time the pressure is not military, it’s economic and legal.

From his Birmingham, Mississippi jail cell, Martin Luther King once wrote,

One may ask: ‘How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?’ The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all.

I have difficulty understanding how anyone in Israel can see fairness in a law that forces Israeli citizens to leave their homes because of convoluted statutes that benefit the upper echelon of society. Maybe the Jewish state doesn’t always intend to live by the spirit of the Biblical call for equal justice between ourselves and the strangers amongst us. Are we just a state of Jews or do we want something Jewish about our character? Maybe if those affected by this miscarriage of justice were Jewish, people would be up in arms. This is why we need the New Israel Fund.
Remember when President Obama said, “There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America.” Something of this spirit has to be part of the Israeli vision for itself. Jews have always lived with strangers among ourselves, otherwise God, the master of tzimtzum, sparing use of words, would not waste ink inscribing for us the command to have equal justice for the stranger. Ironically, it takes an American founded, Israeli non-governmental organization to remind us that the Jewish state, before all else, must maintain some of its Jewish character. And by this, I don’t mean forced orthodox weddings, but this is an issue for another blog post.

I am so glad to have been part of this NIF trip and thrilled not to have to write in the memo line of my checks, “not to be used over the Green Line.” Tzedaka given without fear of its misuse is much nicer than the experience with my blue pushke. The only problem now is that switching to the “dark side,” as NIF is often portrayed by the McCarthyistic right in Israel, will mean having to bring my brain. As an NIF donor, I will have to be cognizant of the fact that my shekels affect change and I will need to have a vision for that change. I will have to be a literate civilian in the Jewish nation, and I will have to maintain vigilance in the face of the fury of right wing attacks. I guess this is a small price to pay for a openly Jewish, Israeli society. Who know, maybe one day there wont be a difference between a Jewish state, a State of Jews and a modern democracy.