Israel needs and deserves better leadership
I have always abhorred the right-wing political party Likud and its leader, Benjamin Netanyahu. I believe millions of Jews in Israel and the diaspora agree.
We christened our first child Rebecca, in honour of my maternal grandmother Maud Rebecca Smith, wife of William Smith. In the prolonged absence of my mother, my beloved grandparents raised me on their small farm.
But by giving my daughter the classical biblical name – that very Jewish name – of Rebecca, I perhaps unwittingly set something profound in motion.
Born at the outbreak of World War II, and a disbeliever from the age of five (ten years before I heard let alone understood the word “atheist”), I was still a child when I learned of the Holocaust, the greatest atrocity in human and inhuman history. It was perpetrated by the Nazis, whose swastika I saw as the Christian cross in jackboots. And I would go on to make pilgrimages to Dachau and the death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka.
Rebecca grew up in a home with a mezuzah (a small box containing a piece of rolled parchment with verses from the Torah, traditionally adorning Jewish homes) above the door – this was my feeble gesture to remember the millions of Jews exterminated by Hitler. And I became the opposite of an anti-Semite: a philo-Semite.
I have long marvelled at the disproportionate contribution of the Jewish people to science, music, literature and, yes, comedy. Thousands of years of pogroms have given the world the bleak irony of Jewish humour.
Ignoring the example of my own atheism (just as I’d ignored my own father’s profession as a Congregational cleric), my daughter found God. After graduating as a doctor, Rebecca headed for the US to become a psychiatrist, and at one point dreamed of becoming a psychoanalyst. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when she phoned to tell me of her conversion to Judaism. “How do you feel about that, Dad?” she asked nervously. To which my response was: “Better than if you told me you’d become a Baptist.”
Inspired by an American political activist and rabbi named Michael Lerner, editor of the progressive Jewish journal Tikkun, which is Hebrew for “healing the world”, Rebecca set about doing just that. She and Lerner were briefly arrested in Israel for holding private discussions with Palestinians, which was forbidden by authorities at the time.
I have always abhorred the right-wing political party Likud and its leader, Benjamin Netanyahu. I believe millions of Jews in Israel and the diaspora agree.
A few months ago Netanyahu’s policies seemed to be pushing Israel towards a civil war, with vast crowds of protesting Jews filling the streets of its cities as the most right-wing government in the nation’s history set out to destroy the independence of Israel’s judiciary.
Israel deserves and needs wiser leadership.
Provoked by the horrors of Hamas, by the obscenity of their attacks on October 7, the Israel-Hamas War is a humanitarian catastrophe. Hamas is a cancer that must be excised – but with surgical precision.
Shalom is the Hebrew word for hello or goodbye. It is also the word for peace. That’s what Israel, Gaza, and the entire world needs now. For pity’s sake. Peace.
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