Tough Breaks

Last week I covered the controversy over a column penned in a New Jersey Jewish paper by the psuedonymous SA Halevy. In one fell swoop Halevy managed to offend just about everyone that has anything to do with Israel, from the evacuated settlers of Gaza he says didn't fight hard enough to the Jewish organizations and rabbinic groups he believes rolled over to the dictatorial Sharon government.
There is much speculation that a particular rabbi in Teaneck known to express such sentiments was behind the article, but who wrote it is less interesting than what it represents. The very insightful sociologist Samuel D. Heilman told me how this is indicative of the crisis faced by many modern Orthodox, mostly young or middle aged Jews who are infatuated with the territory captured by Israel in 1967 and the people living there. That land seems to resonate for them so much more than the post-1948 boundaries, including Western Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, etc.
Professor Heilman is better qualified than me to say why this is, but it's easy to speculate. For one thing, the West Bank comprises much more of the territory discussed in the Bible. For another, the territory was seized by Israel in the Six-Day War, one of the biggest exercises of Jewish toughness since Joshua conquered Jericho. For so many people who were sick and tired of being sick and tired over the Holocaust, the lightning strikes that punished the Arab countries for planning to attack Israel represented a redemption, if not a seismic shift in the way Jews felt and were perceived.
Gaza has virtually no connection to Biblical Israel. But it is part and parcel of that victory of biblical proportions. Clearly that's why so many were heartsick about its surrender. The post-67 notion that Jews could live anywhere they damn well please was epitomized in Gaza, where 8,000 lived in the midst of more than a million Palestinians. Giving it back signalled a potential withdrawal from the biblical lands -- even Jerusalem -- but it also meant backing down from the posture that Jews are finished backing down.
More than anything else, baby boomer Orthodox Jews and their subsequent generations want to feel tough and in control, not placid and vulnerable like the ill-fated generations before them. That's what motivates an SA Halevy to lash out at everyone who implemented, supported or didn't sufficiently oppose the Gaza pullout. He sees that shell-shocked Israel has ceased providing the macho, vicarious thrills of the Six-Day War, the Lebanon invasion and the Osirak reactor bombing, yielding instead the wimpy Oslo peace process and settler disengagement. And it scares the daylights out of him.