America and Israel

The Jewish Policy Center sponsored a forum on December 9 at Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco, entitled “American Foreign Policy in the Middle East: Dangerous Times in a Dangerous Neighborhood.” 

The panel featured Dennis Prager, John Podhoretz and Mona Charen, moderated by Michael Medved. The hour-and-a-half video is here (it takes about 30 seconds to load).  It is worth watching in its entirety.

Here is a colloquy occurring near the end of the program (starting at minute 99), as Medved repeats one of the final audience questions:

MEDVED:  What is the best response for people who say that there is a contradiction between American patriotism and love for Israel?

PODHORETZ:  American patriotism and love for Israel stem from the same root — which is a love of freedom, religious freedom, and the freedom that comes from the root and core and basis and fundament of Western Civilization — which is the notion that all men and women are equal in God’s eyes. 

That was the radical underpinning, the basis, the forefront, the animating purpose of Judaism; it is the lesson and the heart and soul of all of the best that the West has to offer.  It is what animates the United States.  It is what gives it a universalist message.

It is what has allowed us to achieve the bounty and the precious freedom that we have, and the wealth, and the free expression — and what has allowed the nation of Israel to take an arid desert and turn it into a lush greenery, with freedom, free expression, free practice of religion and a homeland for a people that, left to the world’s devices, would not be sitting anywhere on the face of the earth.

CHAREN: Can I say something on that? Around the world people are mystified by why it is that Americans are so pro-Israel. The Europeans certainly don’t have a positive view of Israel; the Arab countries uniformly despise and loathe Israel — in fact you can throw in the whole Islamic world — and they tend to analyze it this way:  they tend to say, “it’s very simple; the Jews are in control of the United States, and that’s why the American public is supportive of Israel.” 

Well, of course, the reality is that most American Christians are more avidly Zionist than most American Jews. [Applause].  And the reason they feel that way is that they recognize what John was saying; they recognize the identity of values; they recognize that Israel is a struggling democracy amid a sea of tyranny, and there is a feeling of kinship there, partly religious and most of it political.

Last Monday, President Bush presided over a Hanukkah celebration in the White House. The first four minutes of the nearly 18-minute video (click on the icon in the upper right hand corner of the link) are the President’s eloquent remarks; the next 14 minutes feature Judea and Ruth Pearl lighting a menorah belonging to Daniel Pearl’s great-grandfather and to a concert by Cantor Alberto Mizrahi from Chicago’s historic Anshe Emit Synagogue with the Zamir Chorale.  Earlier that afternoon, President Bush met with a group of Jewish leaders, and told them that:

[I]n the long term, the best way to defeat an ideology of hate is with an ideology of hope. An ideology of hope is one that says we value your religion, we honor the way you worship. And in our society, you can worship any way you so choose, and that’s the vision and dream for societies around the world.

Jeff Jacoby was at the Menorah lighting.  Yesterday, he published an article that should be read in its entirety, but that began and ended as follows:

ON THE 7th night of Hanukkah in 1944, my father was in Auschwitz.  He had been deported with his family to the Nazi extermination camp eight months earlier; by Hanukkah, only my father was still alive.  That year, he kindled no Hanukkah lights. In Auschwitz, where anything and everything was punishable by death, any Jew caught practicing his religion could expect to be sent to the gas chambers, or shot on the spot. . . .

So I strolled about the White House last week, gazing at the portraits of past presidents and first ladies and listening to the Marine Band play "I Have A Little Dreidel."  By the light of the White House menorah, I thought about my father, and about the unimaginable distance from the hell he knew in 1944 to the place of joy and warmth where I found myself standing in 2007.  I was overcome with a feeling of gratitude so intense that for a moment I was too choked up to speak. To be an American and a Jew is truly to be doubly blessed.

A Menorah belonging to the great-grandfather of Daniel Pearl is lit by Judea and Ruth Pearl, his parents, during festivities Monday, Dec. 10, 2007, in the Grand Foyer of the White House. Said the President of the slain journalist, "His only crime was being a Jewish American — something Daniel Pearl would never deny . . . Daniel’s memory remains close to our hearts. By honoring Daniel, we are given the opportunity to bring forth hope from the darkness of tragedy — and that is a miracle worth celebrating during the Festival of Lights." White House photo by Joyce N. Boghosian.

(Hat tips:  Anne Lieberman and Ed Lasky)