Israel Is Fighting Back Like Its Namesake (Jacob As Underrated Biblical Character Alert)

The Israeli decision to respond forcefully to Hezbollah's assault on its soldiers and its citizens has been met with near-universal condemnation. The world is a lot more comfortable with an Israel that does not fight back. And so are a lot of Jews. Steven Spielberg's movie "Munich" made the argument that when Israel kills terrorists it risks becoming like the terrorists.

But it is a specious argument that suggests that a country is more moral when it allows evil to triumph. Would Israel be doing the right thing by allowing murderers to get away with murder?

The Jewish state is named after the patriarch Jacob, whom the Bible renamed "Israel." The similarities between country and namesake are instructive, for each has traditionally been criticized for precisely the same thing.

Jacob has never been very popular among non-Jews. Christians and Muslims identify with Abraham rather than Jacob, for he appears be the better man. Abraham discovers God under the starlit heavens of Mesopotamia and thereafter largely keeps to himself, which is why he is called "HaIvri," a man set apart. When his nephew Lot argues with him over disputed land, Abraham immediately gives in and offers to move away. Abraham does not like to argue.

Jacob, by contrast, fights back. Rather than be dominated by his hunter brother Esau, he tricks him into selling his birthright in exchange for a bowl of soup. He even goes so far as to trick his father, who mistakenly believes that Esau is the virtuous one, into giving him Esau's firstborn blessing rather than allow his bullying brother to assume the mantle of leadership that the blessing would have conferred upon him. Compared to the wholesome Abraham, Jacob comes across as a schemer and a conniver. Is this the stuff of which righteous men are made?

But the greatness of Jacob, which by far transcended that of Abraham and Isaac, was that he was the first personality in the Bible prepared to resist evil, even if it tarnished him. And by fighting evil, Jacob set a precedent that the righteous, rather than the cold and the heartless, would inherit the earth. Jacob knows that Esau is a bad man, and he will do everything in his power to remove from him the blessings of dominion. Likewise, Jacob will not allow his father-in-law Laban, a psychopathic liar, to take advantage of him, because someone has to stand up to a bully.

Stated in other words, Jacob is the first biblical personality forced to translate a passion for goodness into a world where goodness is seen as weakness. Abraham is the righteous loner who separates himself from the corrupt vices of his neighbors. He will pray for Sodom and Gomorrah, but he will not live among them. Abraham did not seek to salvage a world that was beyond redemption. But Jacob was not prepared to forfeit the earth to criminals. He would stand up for himself, even though doing so made him enter the gray areas that his grandfather avoided like the plague. While Abraham is more angel than man, Jacob is forever and vicariously perched between heaven and earth, struggling to do the right thing in a world of wickedness and evil.

His will forever be a life of struggle, forced to fight for his ideals of justice and righteousness in a cold and cruel world where the weak are oppressed. It would be nice to have the life of the tent-bound academic. But that would mean ceding the world to people like his megalomaniacal brother and parasitical father-in-law.

Those who, in the name of their own moral standing, retreat from the fight with evil are guilty of false piety and moral cowardice. Saving your soul while everyone else perishes is the rectitude of scoundrels.

But this is exactly the posture of those critics of the state of Israel who say that Jacob's descendants, the Jewish people, are compromising their morality by fighting Hezbollah terrorists. To be sure, Jews around the world mourn whenever Israel unintentionally takes innocent lives as it struggles to defend its citizens against murderous assault. But would Israel's critics have its citizens pack their bags and put out a press release proclaiming that living in so violent a neighborhood is too injurious to their moral virtue? Should they allow terror organization like Hamas and Hezbollah to take over the entire Middle East? The righteous man and woman does not shirk from their responsibility to protect life and uphold justice, even if doing so makes them live in a zone of moral uncertainty. They struggle to do the right thing, even when doing so shrouds them in an ethical fog.

Throughout his existence, Jacob will struggle. He will be given a new name, "Israel," which translates as "he who wrestles with God." He will forever wrestle with his Godly spirit and human conscience. He will question himself constantly and wonder whether he is doing the right thing. He will seek to root out killers in Qana and accidentally bomb children. He will loathe his own soul that he is forced to fight inhuman criminals who launch rockets from preschools. But even then he will not give up the struggle. For he is charged with preserving life and upholding justice. He will never surrender the earth, or the Middle East, to killers and criminals. He will not retreat to the isolated life of Abraham. He is not about to move to Scandinavia.

As Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, herself a tireless fighter against tyranny observes, "The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit. It is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracy and human rights. There has to be a united determination to persevere in the struggle, to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths." And as Thomas Jefferson said, "The tree of liberty must forever be nourished by the blood of patriots."

The article below is about Israel's former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, but Shmuley Boteach's view that is time for Israel to do nothing is exactly what's needed in the light of current events in the Middle East:

It Takes Great Courage To Simply Do Nothing

Recent events in the Middle East have made it painfully obvious that Israel's withdrawal from Gaza last year and its dismantling of its communities there was yet another catastrophic mistake. Here we are, not even a year after the abandonment of Gaza, and all hell has broken loose. Israeli troops are making incursions back into Gaza to stop the rain of rockets being fired by terrorists at Israeli cities, and Hizbullah has joined the party with rockets raining down from Lebanon, killing citizens in northern Israel.

It does not take a military genius to discern a pattern. Every time Israel makes land concessions Arab groups read it not as a desire to make peace but as weakness and a sign of the impending collapse of the Zionist enterprise, and they dig in for the kill.

They say that the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. By this standard, a cynic might say that the Israeli political class is stark raving mad. Not that I or anyone else has a right to judge or blame the courageous leaders of the Jewish state, who are so desperate for even a modicum of peace that they will compromise the nation's security in order to achieve it.

Indeed, any country that has been subjected to the unmitigated hostility of an inhuman and implacable enemy for six decades would likewise go nuts, and Israel's leaders are merely trying their best to try to solve a problem that, let's face it, is insoluble.

THIS IS WHERE Israel has consistently got it wrong. With the exception of Yitzhak Shamir, every Israeli leader since Menachem Begin, who began the wholesale abandonment of strategically valuable territory, has been asking what Israel can do to try and bring peace.

If Israel gives away some cities, maybe then there will be peace. If Israel brings Arafat back to Gaza, perhaps then there will be peace. If Israel gives away all of the West Bank, surely there will be peace. Let us therefore state the obvious: The only thing Israel can do to bring peace is cease to exist. But short of folding up the country and moving the Jews back to Europe, as suggested by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, there is absolutely nothing Israel can do to bring peace.

To make this point emphatically clear, let us reiterate that if there is one lesson that has been learned in five decades of Israeli concessions, it is that there is absolutely nothing that Israel can do to bring peace. Zero. Efes. Gornisht. Israel faces an implacable enemy that seeks not coexistence, but Israel's destruction. And through every Israeli concession, its hostility increases rather than declines. Which leads to the following, self-evident conclusion. The only thing for Israel to do vis-a-vis‚ the Arabs, aside from militarily defending itself, is nothing.

Israel must hunker down and stall. It's the Arabs that have to change, not Israel. They have to democratize, fight their terrorists, curb state-sponsored anti-Semitism and cease teaching their children implacable hatred of the Jews.

That is the only thing that will bring peace.

THE ONLY Israeli prime minister to have understood that Israel's sole strategy was to try and deflect international pressure to commit suicide and grow stronger in the interim was Yitzhak Shamir. I was living in Israel as a yeshiva student during the Shamir years. The economy was lousy, but security was great. Israel was strong and terrorism incomparably low. We never feared walking the streets of Jerusalem or taking a bus in Tel Aviv.

Shamir was derided around the world as the do-nothing prime minister. But that was his genius. Give nothing away, make no concessions. Just keep on eating your Wheaties and grow tall and more established.

And if the world rewarded Shamir with derision rather than with a Nobel Peace Prize - well, at least Israel's citizens, in his time, were having dinner with their children in the kitchen rather than burying them in the cemetery. And that was reward enough.

About a year after he was defeated for the prime ministership by Yitzhak Rabin, I hosted Shamir at Oxford and spent a few days with him. He struck me as a quiet and serious man and I was impressed by his humility and down-to-earthness. He told me that had he remained in office he would not have ceded a single inch of land because it would have weakened Israel, conceding that "my views are not very popular right now."

This, of course, was true. Shamir, one of Israel's longest-serving prime ministers, was never really popular because the world loves being electrified by a man of action, and Shamir was a man of stony stubbornness. But an intractable situation calls for an intractable man who can simply stand his ground until such time as the winds of change blow over his enemy.

From Shamir Israel must learn that all it can do is lock its door at night because it has some really bad neighbors.

I AM A relationships counselor rather than a geopolitical expert. So let me relate this to the story of a battered wife I recently counseled. The wife argued that surely there was something she could do to stop her husband's abuse.

"Maybe if I supported him more, he would treat me better. Maybe if I exercised more, I would be more attractive to him and he would love me more."

I responded, "You are living with an abusive man. There is nothing you can do to stop his abuse except to show him that you will not tolerate it. The one who has to change is him, not you." Israel is living in an abusive relationship with abusive neighbors whose actions have slowly eroded their own humanity. The only thing it can do is strengthen itself and create in its enemies a sense of its permanence.

Sometimes it takes great courage to simply do nothing.

(Go Israel, Go! Slap 'Em Down Hezbullies.)

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