Saving Israel

There is a new book in the list of books under “Recommended Reading” in the column on the right of the blog:  Daniel Gordis’s “Saving Israel:  How the Jewish People Can Win a War that May Never End” (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).  My post at contentions on it is here.  The Amazon reader reviews are here. 

Here is an excerpt from the chapter entitled “The Wars That Must Be Waged:”

[Jews worldwide] have been taught, explicitly or not, that Judaism is a virtually pacifist tradition.  And they thus incorrectly believe that being required to use military force has pushed Israel into an “un-Jewish” posture.

Because many Jews today, particularly those who have been raised in the comfort and security of the
United States, see the world of physical might and military activity as inherently un-Jewish; more and more young Jews find themselves increasingly uncomfortable with Israel, even embarrassed by it.  Many of these young people, and some who are not so young, either have intuited and internalized a Western liberal commitment to pacifism . . . or have come to believe that there is ultimately nothing worth fighting or killing for.  To many of them, passivity is practically always preferable to violence, and they expect Israel – the world’s most visible locus of Jewish behavior – to live up to that standard.

. . . [The pacifist ethos] now thrives on U.S. college and university campuses, places that are inhabited almost exclusively by people who have never known real danger from genuine enemies, and who have never had to spend a single day defending their lives or their countries. . . .

Jews in general, and some Israelis in particular, will need to rethink their visceral sense that war is thoroughly “un-Jewish.”  And then they will have to make a decision:  they can choose to defend themselves even at the cost of occasionally using massive force, with the ambivalence that that inevitably arouses, or they can cease to exist.