There are many dates that are seared into our memory. President Roosevelt, responding to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, called December 7th, 1941,” a date which will live in infamy” and demanded a declaration of war against Japan. December 7th,1941, resonates with me because that was that was the day my Dad proposed to my Mom in Central Park. Four days later Hitler asked for and received a declaration of war from the Reichstag against the United States. Sitting in the audience cheering him on was Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Yes, the antagonism between Jews and Palestinians predates 1948 and 1967. Indeed, well before 1941.
On September 11th,
2001, Al-Qaeda crashed two airplanes into the World Trade Center towers and one
plane into the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people. I witnessed the attack on
the towers from across the street.
Today, we memorialize
another date, October 7th, 2023, Israel’s, and World Jewry’s day of
infamy. On that day 1200 hundred people in Israel’s Gaza envelope died and 240
were kidnapped by the Hamas terrorists. To put this event into perspective 1200
dead in Israel is equivalent to 40,000 dead in the United States.
Now, a year later, a
war rages on in Gaza and Lebanon testing whether Israel, a light unto the
nations, can remain true to its founding as a democratic home to the Jewish
people. It is a war where about 725 soldiers, who in the words of Abraham
Lincoln “gave the last full measure of devotion.”
It is my hope that
“these dead have not died in vain.” (Again, from Lincoln) Just as our Civil War
can be viewed as the second American revolution, so too can Israel’s war in
Gaza and Lebanon be viewed as its second war of independence. And it is my hope
the war will midwife a new generation of Israeli leadership that will have the
wisdom to rise above the country’s divisive internal politics and find a path to
seek peace with its neighbors.
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