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Tag Archives: Zionism

Yoni

20 Saturday May 2017

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

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Tags

Herman Wouk, Israel, Jonathan Netanyahu, The Letters of Jonathan Netanyahu, War, Yoni Netanyahu, Zionism

“Yoni loathed war and fighting. To kill horrified him… Because he had to fight to save his nation’s life, he made himself into a great fighting man. But he knew, as all men of sense know, that war today is an empty and dangerous lunacy, not a practical political technique. He was philosopher enough to understand this truth… and he was man enough to know… that if he had to, he would die fighting for the Return and for peace. So consecrated, he flew off to Entebbe, and to his great hour.

Like one of Michelangelo’s unfinished sketches in stone, his letters are a work of rough suggestive art. The mysterious figure only half-emerges from the native rock. And yet the figure is there. When we close the book, we know nothing of Yoni’s secret exploits, little of his magic with women, little of his terrific labors in his army assignments, little of his intense family relationships. Yet we know the man; all we have to know, and all we will know. He inspires and ennobles us, and he gives us hope. That is enough. That is the best art can do.

Shelley wrote of the dead Keats that his soul

… like a star
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

I wanted to close this introduction by applying those words to Yoni. But I cannot. I see him in my mind’s eye shaking his head, with a grin and a deprecatory farewell wave. And I hear his last words, like a distant marching song on the wind, יהיה בסדר — ‘It’ll be okay.'”

__________

The closing to Herman Wouk’s introduction to The Letters of Jonathan Netanyahu.

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Frank Sinatra in Israel

09 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

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Tags

ad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, Frank Sinatra, George Jacobs, Golan Heights, Israel, Jerusalem, Jimmy Van Heusen, Judaism, Sammy Davis, Sea of Galilee, Zionism

Frank Sinatra in Israel“After our week in Hong Kong we flew on to Israel. Mr. S adored Israel, and Israel adored him right back. Here was a whole country of underdogs and survivors, the people Sinatra respected most, people like himself who had beaten the odds… Israel was the only place on the whole tour where Mr. S took a real interest in the country as anything other than a concert stop. He wanted to see everything, and Israel rolled out the red carpet. When he wanted to cross the Sea of Galilee and see the Golan Heights, the Israelis contacted the Syrians to tell them that our long convoy was not a troop movement and to hold fire. The sundown on the Sea of Galilee was beautiful. ‘Another few days and I could become a believer,’ Mr. S half-joked. […]

Most moving for both Mr. S and me and was The Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial on the Hill of Memory, where all the trees had been planted in memory of the victims. This was stunning and solemn place. The external beauty of the land of milk and honey contrasted with the horrors shown within, particularly the underground Children’s Museum, where each of the more than one million tiny lights represented the life of a child that had been snuffed out. Afterward Mr. S said the visit had made him feel rotten about not fighting in World War II and that Israel was ‘a wonderful country worth dying for.’

We often returned to Israel, which Mr. S decided was his favorite country. Mr. S often boasted he was ‘King of the Jews.’ He donated big money to Zionist causes, and would plug the place every time he had a chance… I liked Israel, too, so much that on one trip to the Promised Land I let Sinatra and [American composer Jimmy] Van Heusen talk me into rediscovering my ‘Jewish roots.’ Why, they insisted, should Sammy Davis be the only black Jew? They pointed to the Falashas, the black Jews of Ethiopia, who were a sect in Israel… So I let them find me a rabbi in Jerusalem, and after a three-day crash course, they got me a quickie bar mitzvah at a beautiful temple overlooking the ancient walls of the City of David. Afterward, to celebrate my being a man… we went to a fancy restaurant and I got so drunk on kosher wine I passed out.”

__________

Selections from George Jacobs’s tell-all memoir Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra. Jacobs, an African-American, was Ol’ Blue Eyes’s right hand man from 1953 to 1968.

More on the topic:

  • J.R.R. Tolkien tells off the Nazis
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  • A lost letter from 1919 shows what could have been between Arabs and Jews

Frank Sinatra in Israel

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What Could’ve Been among Jews and Arabs

03 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ Comments Off on What Could’ve Been among Jews and Arabs

Tags

Arabia, Arabs, Chaim Weizmann, conflict, Felix Frankfurter, Hamas, history, Homeland, Iraq, Israel, Israel-Palestine, Jews, letter, middle east, Middle East History, Palestine, peace, Prince Feisal Husseini, Syria, Zionism, Zionist Organisation to Peace Conference

King Faisal of Iraq

Paris, March 3, 1919.
DEAR MR. FRANKFURTER:

I want to take this opportunity of my first contact with American Zionists to tell you what I have often been able to say to Dr. Weizmann in Arabia and Europe.

We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in having suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves, and by a happy coincidence have been able to take the first step towards the attainment of their national ideals together.

We Arabs, especially the educated among us look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organisation to Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate proper.

We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.

With the chiefs of your movement, especially with Dr. Weizmann, we have had and continue to have the closest relations. He has been a great helper of our cause, and I hope the Arabs may soon be in a position to make the Jews some return for their kindness. We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another.

The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist. Our movement is national and not imperialist, and there is room in Syria for us both. Indeed I think that neither can be a real success without the other…

I look forward, and my people with me look forward, to a future in which we will help you and you will help us, so that the countries in which we are mutually interested may once again take their places in the community of civilised peoples of the world.

Believe me,
Yours sincerely,
(Sgd.) Feisal. 3rd MARCH, 1919.

__________

A letter sent from Feisal Husseini (above, center), then King of Syria and later Iraq, to United States Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (pictured below).

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Felix Frankfurter

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Saul Bellow: To Jerusalem and Back

14 Friday Sep 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, History, Politics

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Israel, Jerusalem, Netanyahu, Obama, Saul Bellow, Terrorism, To Jerusalem and Back, Zionism

Jerusalem

“The subject of all this talk is, ultimately, survival – the survival of the decent society created miraculously in Israel within a mere few decades. At first this is hard to grasp because the setting is so civilized. You are in a city like many another – well, not quite, for Jerusalem is the only ancient city I’ve ever seen whose antiquities are not on display as relics but are in daily use. Still, the city is a modern city with modern utilities. You shop in supermarkets, you say good morning to friends on the telephone, you hear symphony orchestras on the radio. But suddenly the music stops and a terrorist bomb is reported. A new explosion outside a coffee shop on the Jaffa Road; six young people killed and thirty-eight more wounded. Pained, you put down your civilized drink. Uneasy, you go out to your civilized dinner. Bombs are exploding everywhere. Dynamite has just been thrown in London; the difference is that when a bomb goes off in a West End restaurant the fundamental right of England to exist is not in dispute.

Yet here you sit at dinner with charming people in a dining room like any other. You know that your hostess has lost a son; that her sister lost children in the 1973 war; that in this Jerusalem street, coolly sweet with night flowers and dark green under the lamps, many other families have lost children. And on the Jaffa Road, because of another bomb, six adolescents — two on a break from night school — stopping at a coffee shop to eat buns, have just died. But in the domestic ceremony of passed dishes and filled glasses thoughts of a destructive enemy are hard to grasp. What you do know is that there is one fact of Jewish life unchanged by the creation of a Jewish state: you cannot take your right to live for granted. Others can; you cannot. This is not to say that everyone else is living pleasantly and well under a decent regime. No, it means only that the Jews, because they are Jews, have never been able to take the right to live as a natural right.

To be sure, many Israelis refuse to admit that this historic uneasiness has not been eliminated. They seem to think of themselves as a fixed power, immovable. Their point has been made. They are a nation among nations and will always remain so. You must tear your mind away from this conviction, as you must tear it from ‘civilized’ appearances, in order to reach reality. The search for relief from the uneasiness is what is real in Israel. Nationalism has no comparable reality. To say, as George Steiner says, that Zionism was created by Jewish nationalists who drew their inspiration from Bismarck and followed a Prussian model can’t be right. The Jews did not become nationalistic because they drew strength from their worship of anything resembling Germanic Blut und Eisen but because they alone, amongst the people of the earth, had not established a natural right to exist unquestioned in the lands of their birth. This right is still clearly not granted them, not even in the liberal West.

At the same time Jews are called upon and call upon themselves to be more just and more moral than others.”

__________

From To Jerusalem and Backby Saul Bellow.

My aunt lives in Jerusalem, near the Jaffa road. Visiting her several years ago, I saw the surreal existence that she and other Israelis call “daily life,” where you walk through a metal detector and past a security check to get to the counter at your neighborhood coffee shop.

These paragraphs are a solid summary of the state of Israel and the style of survival for Israelis; the recent reported tensions between Netanyahu and Obama only confirm Bellow’s words: that the place of Israel seems forever in question.

The photograph was taken in Jerusalem.

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