Why Does Israel Have So Many Enemies? - By Rabbi Charlie Savenor

“Why Does Israel Have So Many Enemies?”

July 2014
By Rabbi Charlie Savenor

For the past week and a half Julie and I have been in Israel leading United Synagogue’s Family Israel Experience. Since there is too much to see, taste and digest in just 10 days, this type of first-timers program inevitably skims the surface of the country.

While our itinerary may have focused on the tip of the iceberg, ironically we spent much time beneath the surface. We marched through King Hezkeyahu’s water tunnels dating back to the Bible, helped excavate the Bar Kochba caves in Tel Morisha from the time of Maccabees, and were captivated by the underground “Bullet Factory” from the 1940’s.  In addition, today Israeli hospitals build their emergency rooms underground to safeguard against aerial attacks.

These subterranean hollows represent not only archaeological layers of civilization in Israel, but also the relentless pursuit of Jews to live in the Land. Understandably part of the story at these sites deals with our enemy at the time – Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, British and Arabs - and the outcome of that moment’s conflict.

On top of Masada, my nine year old son, Joseph, asked a question that had been clearly percolating in his mind during the trip: “Why does Israel have so many enemies?”

Our historical tours provided us with the what’s, when’s and who’s of Israeli history, yet Joseph’s seemingly naive question probed what lies beneath the surface. Why all these wars? Why do we keep hearing stories of expulsion and death? Why did we interrupt our regularly scheduled program for a memorial service for three Israeli teens?
 
His question may have also emerged from his awareness that while all of the children were shuttled to the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo, the adults went to a place that seemed to be off limits to children, namely Yad Vashem. The hushed conversations on the bus from moved parents and grandparents only made my nine year old - and I imagine many others - more curious about what happened during the Holocaust.

Every visit to Israel is special because there is always something “historic” going on. This time was no different. When we landed in Israel, the country still desperately hoped that the three kidnapped teens would return home safely. The very next day these hopes were extinguished like a candle in a desert wind. To make matters worse, a Palestinian teen was then abducted and killed.

Soon after the rhetorical escalation on both sides, missiles began to fly from Gaza into the State of Israel. Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Ben Gurion Airport and even the nuclear facility in Dimona are under attack as I type these words.

Our family’s first exposure to the missile attacks took place in a cab on the streets of Tel Aviv. As soon as the driver heard the siren, he pulled the cab over and told us to get out and find cover. We ran quickly to a shelter and waited. Waiting for normalcy to return, I looked around at the assortment of strangers huddled together. Some were religious capped with kippot, others secular covered with tattoos. Some were old, others young. At that moment what united us was that we were all Jews, which, according to Hamas, makes us all targets.

When we got back in the cab, our driver casually explained with a shrug that these sirens are part of daily life, especially in Ashdod and Beersheba. In other words, this is normal life in Israel.

The next morning I sat on the balcony of our Tel Aviv hotel room enjoying the morning air gazing onto the beautiful blue Mediterranean. Julie was out running and the boys were inside watching Phineas and Ferb in Hebrew.

Then a siren suddenly disrupted the calm. Still in our pajamas, I rushed the boys into the closest stairwell being used as a shelter.

So many thoughts flooded my mind as my heart raced: Would this experience scar our boys’ view of Israel? Where would Julie find shelter running on the beach?  How could this regular race to shelter ever be described as normal?

As I held my sons tight during the siren, I was reminded of Joseph’s innocent, yet poignant question about the underpinnings of the hardships the Jewish people have faced throughout the generations. I thought about the conversations we needed to have when he and his baby brother would be ready - not just mature enough but also ready to embrace their place in the chain of Jewish history and the Jewish future.

With missiles flying towards us, my heart plunged to uncharted subterranean levels as I imagined that one day his children may ask him the same traumatizing question: “Why does Israel have so many enemies?”