Friday, April 20, 2018

Flag-waving: is it Only for Certain Political Camps?

Earlier in the week, I came across a blog post on an Israeli English-language news site that got me to thinking about expressions of love of country.

Flag-waving:  it's for everybody!
As you may know, yesterday Israel celebrated Yom Atzmaut:  her Independence Day.  But this wasn't just any Yom Atzmaut; this was the celebration of 70 years of the State of Israel.  We love the symmetry of round numbers, so 70 Years seems much more impressive than 69, just as 100 Years (Halvai!) will seem far more impressive than 99.  So, while every Yom Atzmaut comes with a communal joy and celebration, this one in particular was pushed a particularly auspicious occasion.  Israel, like all other countries in the world, finds herself rent by deep divisions among her citizens, in matters related to political philosophy, religion, and ethnicity.  But Yom Atzmaut provides an occasion to transcend those divisions and celebrate together the enduring health and accomplishments of the Israeli nation.

Or, so I thought.

The blog post was by Zimra Vigoda, a Hungarian-born, New York-raised, olah to Israel of 24 years.  Left-of-center politically, Ms. Vigoda wrote about how she recently decided to reclaim the Israeli flag as the symbol of her version of the ideal Israel, rather than ceding it, as she had for some time, to the Right Wing as their symbol.  You can find her blog post here:  http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/reclaiming-the-flag/

I've never been much of a flag-waver - not of the Israeli flag nor of Old Glory, the US flag.  The latter might seem counter-intuitive regarding me, since I served 26 years on active duty in the armed forces of the USA.  Over the years, I took part in many patriotic ceremonies in my official capacity, and I never begrudged the time and energy devoted to such expressions.  But in my private life, I was never one to display the flag and make outward expressions of patriotism.  I don't really know why, although perhaps my having come of age in the 1960's and 70's, and being turned off by the 'love it or leave it' mentality of some self-styled flag-waving patriots, influenced me in this regard.  Besides, that, expressions like flag-waving seemed rather empty to me as they require almost no accompanying commitment.  

Later in life, after my retirement from the military, I began to see that for many of those with a distaste for waving the flag, at the root of that distaste is a deep ambivalence toward, rather than love of, their country.  In reaction to this, I did  begin to do some tentative flag-waving; I took the flag I'd been presented upon retiring from the US Air Force and posted it beside the front door to my home in Colorado, and I took to wearing, at times, an American flag pin.  I decided to dip my toe into the sea of patriotic expression, and try to drop my ambivalence over being publicly associated with the notion of unashamed, and unconditional, love of country.

The Hebrew translates as:  After 70 Years...There's What
to be Proud of.  
This was the official theme of the celebrations
of Israeli Independence Day this year.
As there, so too here.  In Israel, as in the USA, there seems to be an ambivalence toward waving the flag and other unbridled expressions of patriotism in certain ideological sectors.  Ms. Vigoda seems to think that this is the Right's fault, although I think that it's really her own - perhaps she thought that, if something is a cherished symbol of an ideological camp that she finds disagreeable, then she couldn't possibly embrace the same symbol.  But her blog post is about how, challenged inadvertently and innocently by her young daughter's eyes, she decided to embrace the flag by assigning her own meaning to the symbol.

This is not a criticism of Ms. Vigoda's post:  quite the opposite.  All parties who cherish what a symbol means - what if means for them - should embrace that symbol and not cede it to a camp, with which they disagree.  For that reason, I have sometimes displayed a US flag in recent years.  And for the same reason, the tears well up when I see the Israeli flag and sing Hatikva.

Happy Anniversary, State of Israel!

Thursday, April 12, 2018

Stopping - or not - Upon Hearing the Siren

For those who have never experienced it before, there is something almost blood-curdling about the way that all of Israel stops moving for two minutes on two annual occasions:  Holocaust Remembrance Day and Memorial Day.  One of those occasions was this morning, at ten AM, when the sirens sounded to remember the martyrs and rescuers of the Sho'ah.  This being my second year as an immigrant in Israel, in addition to the year I was here as a student a long time ago, I experienced it before.  But somehow one never quite gets used to it.

This YouTube clip shows what it's like on the streets of Netanya.


Next Tuesday it will happen again, then in remembrance of those who gave their lives for the establishment and safety of the Israeli state.

I do not know of anywhere else in the world where there is such an observance, such a show of national solidarity.  That said, it is not universally honored, even here in Israel.  The Haredi (sometimes called 'Ultra-Orthodox') community does not participate.  A Haredi journalist named Yisrael Cohen recently explained why:

"The haredim do not identify with Zionist ideology.  We do not celebrate the independence of the State of Israel, nor mourn for the soldiers who fell on its behalf.  We believe that observing the Torah is what safeguards the Jewish People."

This doesn't exactly explain the failure to stand still on Yom Hashoah, but I'm guessing that the Haredi community sees it as a quasi-religious observance not rooted in halacha (Jewish law).

As much as every fiber in my mind and body disagrees with this stance, I can grudgingly accept the Haredi refusal to stand still during the sirens as an expression of a deeply-held ideology albeit in contrast to my own.  But what I have a bigger problem with is the non-compliant who simply cannot take two minutes from their rushing about, to show respect.  That's what I witnessed this morning.  Clara and I were out on Highway 4, driving from Tel Aviv to Ashqelon, when the siren sounded.  Although I might have missed the sound because we were travelling with the windows closed, it would have been impossible to miss the sight of other motorists pulling off the road, stopping, and standing next to their vehicles.  Of course we followed suit, but during the two minutes of the observance, a number of others just kept driving - and they weren't all dressed as Haredim.

This was more than a little disturbing.  We talk a lot about how the pace of life has changed for the worse in Israel in recent years, about how impatient people have become especially when behind the wheel of a vehicle.  But to be so focused on getting somewhere, that one cannot participate in a brief national expression of solidarity, is to be focused on the wrong things...in my humble opinion.

Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Back from an Absence, and All About Borders

Please forgive my silence over the past month or so.  I was on holiday, first for two weeks in Greece, and then here in Israel, guiding friends visiting from Australia around.  About the latter, I have to say:  having friends visit you, and relying on them to need you to show them around, and having the time and energy to do so...is a sublime gift!  I find that when I show others sights that I've already seen - in some cases, multiple times - I always benefit from their different perspective, from what they take away from the trip.  So, if you find visitors from abroad or from far away to be burdensome, make sure you go out of your way to really show them around...you will be the beneficiary!

Now, about borders.  Sometimes, it's uncanny - perhaps even a little creepy - how certain controversies rock both the USA and Israel at the same time.  Iran's leaders used to refer to America as The Great Satan and Israel as The Little Satan.  I don't think there's anything essentially satanic about either country, but it does boggle the mind that both countries seem to face the same issues concurrently, again and again.

Last Friday, on the eve of Passover, our neighbors in Gaza - I'm talking about Hamas, who rule the Gaza Strip with an iron fist - organized a violent demonstration to expose the vulnerability of Israel's border.  


Israeli soldiers fire tear gas on 'Protesters' massed on the
Israel-Gaza border, Friday 30 March 2018
Let's back up for a second.  Hamas has been testing Israel's resolve to defend her border with Gaza since then-Prime Minister, the late Ariel Sharon's unilateral pull-out from Gaza in 2005.  Sharon's assumption was that, with no Israeli citizens living in the Strip, and with no Israeli forces deployed there, the Gazans would focus inward to build a civil society and address their own problems.  Of course, that's not exactly what happened.  Hamas, and their sometimes-unwitting allies of the Israel is Always in the Wrong Crowd, has asserted that despite the absence of any Israelis in their territory, Israel is still The Occupier, and has somehow turned the Gaza Strip into the world's biggest concentration camp with a cordon sanitaire to keep the inmates in and in privation.  Having made the assertion that it is the closure of Gaza's border with Israel - and not Israel's now-defunct presence on the Strip - that is the First Cause of Gaza's problems, Hamas has spent the 13 years since that pullout, trying to nullify that border.  First, with rocket and mortar attacks on Israeli towns close - and not-so-close - to Gaza.  When Israel developed the Iron Dome to shoot down those rockets, and also displayed a penchant for responding to rocket and mortar attacks with air and artillery strikes, Hamas turned to their allies in the 'International Peace Camp' to stage a 'Humanitarian Flotilla' of ships staging from Turkey, to test Israel's will to intercept the ships.  Of course Israel did, leading to the Mavi Marmara crisis in 2010.  The incident succeeded in causing a diplomatic parting of the ways between Israel and Turkey - although perhaps by 2010 that was already a fete accompli - but did not get the ships into Gaza.  Finally, Hamas has been constructing 'Terror Tunnels' under the border, in order to insert armed squads into Israeli territory and terrorize the residents of kibbutzim and towns close to the border.  Found in several of the tunnels that were breached by Israeli Defense Forces, were huge caches of stolen IDF uniforms and weapons of the types the IDF uses, for the presumed purpose of terror squads fanning out over the countryside in the guise of being IDF patrols.  Fortunately, the IDF quickly brought online technological means of detecting and destroying these tunnels, and they seem to have nullified, for now, this attempt to break through the border.

With all other means to date having failed, the latest tactic by Hamas was to 'encourage' thousands of civilians to participate in demonstrations at the border fence, demonstrations filled with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other organizations' operatives, for the purpose of breaching the fence in front of IDF units which would supposedly be hog-tied by Israel's distaste for inflicting civilian casualties, then sending waves of humanity, including terrorists, into the Israeli countryside.  This, too did not succeed, because Israel recognized the nature of the threat and set Rules of Engagement that would allow units on the border to respond with sufficient force to prevent the breakthrough.

Much of the world has reacted by criticizing Israel for responding to 'peaceful' demonstrations with 'excessive' force.  For Israel's part, any civilian casualties in an encounter with the IDF are to be regretted and will be thoroughly investigated internally.  Any noted breaches of strict protocols regarding use of lethal force, will no doubt be dealt with, as such breaches have been dealt with in the past.

But the reality is that there is a globalist ideology at work in much of the world, that says that borders are in and of themselves evil, so any enforcement of borders is, from the get-go, excessive and unnecessary.  We see the same ideology at work in the reactions to President Trump's determination to enforce and defend the US's southern border from illegal infiltration.

US-bound "Protest Caravan' of Hondurans, hops a Northbound
Freight Train with Mexican Complicity
A 'protest caravan' of 'refugees' from Honduras, has been making its way north through Mexico, with the intention of breaching the US southern border and inserting hundreds of individuals onto US soil.  It is claimed that these people are refugees from severe political oppression in Honduras, that they are valid refugees by the accepted definition, and for the US to refuse them entrance would be a breach of accepted international protocols as well as humanitarian needs.

President Trump has responded that he will prevent this group from crossing into the US, and that he will hold Mexico accountable if they reach our border.  The latter, because the international protocols require that, once those claiming refugee status have escaped the country of their oppression, it is the responsibility of the country to which they'd already fled, to detain them in their safe haven until their refugee status can be vetted.  Only then, does it become any country's responsibility to consider whether they would accept these refugees.  Mexico and presumably, Guatemala through which 'refugees' from Honduras would have had to pass en route to the US, are not behaving according to accepted protocols in allowing these people free transit to the US.  It's akin to Indonesia's complicity in allowing Australia-bound refugees from Central Asia to pass through and stage for boat trips across the Indian Ocean and Timor Sea to their intended destination.  Since those refugees are no longer in danger upon reaching Indonesia, it is that country's government's responsibility to shelter them until they can be vetted.

But Trump has an incentive for the Mexican government to stop the group from reaching the US.  In addition to announcing that he would enforce the border, he also announced that, should the group reach the border, he would consider suspending NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has been in effect for some 24 years.  Although candidates in the upcoming presidential election in Mexico have scored points with the electorate by declaring NAFTA unfair to Mexico, the reigning government clearly doesn't agree with that premise as it has, reportedly, stopped the US-bound caravan in its tracks.  Clearly, some 14 months into Trump's presidency, he has shown himself to be sufficiently firm and decisive in his dealing with other governments that Mexico is taking him seriously.

The lesson from this, I believe, is that borders matter.  Without defensible borders - and the will to defend them - a country loses its sovereignty.  And an additional similarity between the current administrations in the USA and Israel - apart from what I pointed out in my last post on this blog - is that both governments are determined to defend their borders...by military means, if that's what it takes.

The voices that are currently criticizing the governments of both the US and Israel - in a most shrill manner - for taking this responsibility seriously, apart from their prejudicial proclivities to criticize the two countries no matter what they do or don't do, clearly represent an ideological position that borders, and their enforcement, are wrong from the get-go.  At least, when that enforcement is done by certain countries...but that's another blog post, for another day...