Photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Leon Vonguyen, Defense Visual Information Distribution Service
Military parades in Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang evoke a range of negative emotions to many Americans, and rightfully so. Dismay, fear, despair, disgust. But we also celebrate our military prowess, right here in this most liberal city, San Francisco. As I was writing this short essay, high-power jet engines approaching the speed of sound thundered above. The decibels didn’t reach the level of a sonic boom, but close enough. I walked out of my office to join others looking up at the show: four Blue Angels in formation cutting loud trails across the cloudless sky, flying in geometric patterns at astonishing speeds, circling above us.
At sunset this evening, Jews around the world gather for Erev Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Once a year, standing before the bimah, we recite the Kol Nidre prayer together as a community, a moment in the cycle of time that happens. Once a year, we find ourselves immersed in uncanny emotions evoked by the haunting music and the voice of the cantor or chazzan, and we begin a 25-hour period of fasting, prayer and repentance for ourselves, our people, the multiple communities in which we live, and for the world.
The Hebrew word for “repentance” is teshuvah (תשובה) literally means turning, or returning. We are called to be aware of the ways we have veered off the just path, the path of the heart — as individuals, in our communities, and in the actions of the states taken in our name — and we are called to realign our actions to our moral and ethical obligations as human beings, to return to the way of truth, goodness and health.
When I stepped outside, my shoulders tensed up with the booming sounds as the planes shot across the sky. The people who gathered to stare at the extraordinary aerial feats were not in danger.
The Blue Angels posed no threat to our lives.
We would not be killed or wounded by a bomb. Nor would our families, friends and neighbors.
The buildings where we live and work would not be smashed. We would not be crushed by debris or penetrated by shrapnel.
We would not be bombed like the Syrian civilians attacked by Russian bombers in Aleppo and Idlib (2019-2020), or the people in Ukrainian cities bombed by Russia (2022-today) or the Yemeni civilians bombed by U.S.-supplied Saudi fighter jets (2015-2019).
We are not vulnerable to rocket attacks from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah or Iran targeting Israeli civilian villages and urban neighborhoods.
We are not like the people of Gaza City, Khan Yunis, Rafah and other cities in Gaza trying to stay alive under relentless mass bombardment from Israeli jet fighters supplied by the United States.
Under the U.N. Charter, Israel had the right to defend itself militarily following the horrific atrocities of the Hamas October 7 attack. It had the right to erode Hamas’s military capabilities, even to destroy them if that was possible. But Israel did not and does not have the right to disregard and systematically violate the obligations of international humanitarian law in the way it exercised self-defense. Israel did not have the right to flatten Gaza, bomb its civilian neighborhoods smithereens, displace all of people who live there, and block food and humanitarian assistance from reaching the displaced people.
I am old enough to remember Yom Kippur in 1973, when Israel was attacked by Egypt and a coalition of Arab states including Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Libya and Saudi Arabia. I remember the fear and terror of being invaded on this holy day, and the relief that Israel had defeated its attackers.
Today there is again war on Yom Kippur. As reported in today’s New York Times, this morning he Israeli military reiterated its order for mass evacuations in Northern Gaza where 400,000 people are still living, even if barely surviving there. Today’s announcement said that the military was “operating with great force” against Hamas and other allied groups, “and will continue to do so for a long period of time.” Aid workers have told journalists that the evacuation orders cannot be carried out safely. “Nobody is allowed to get in or out,” Sarah Vuylsteke, a project coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, said in the group’s statement. “Anyone who tries is getting shot.” Meanwhile, at least 20 more people died in the past 24 hours from bombing in Northern Gaza. According to the New York Times, “Israel has routinely struck areas of Gaza that it has described as safe humanitarian zones, and buildings that house displaced civilians, including schools being used as shelters.” Even if Israel has intelligence that indicates that Hamas fighters might be in the area, it is a war crime to conduct massive bombardments there.
These pictures from Northern Gaza were published in today’s New York Times. (I share these with gratitude to the sources identified below).
Mourning on Saturday over the bodies of Palestinian relatives killed overnight in the Jabaliya area of the northern Gaza Strip.
Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Palestinians fleeing areas north of Gaza City on Saturday.Credit…Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Looking up at the Blue Angels, our neighborhood in San Francisco was protected from attack, unlike like the Ras el-Nabaa and Basta neighborhoods of Central Beirut, bombed by Israeli fighter planes over the past 48 hours in an effort to root out Hezbollah fighters who had taken refuge among civilians there.
Today I feel the echoes of the Yom Kippur War of 1972, and the siege of Beirut in 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon to root out PLO fighters, and the entire PLO organization, from the haven they had established there.
In a New York Times op-ed (“Gains from the War in Lebanon“) published August 29, 1982, then Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon raised questions about the Israeli invasion and its results. “What did Israel gain from the military campaign it undertook in Lebanon? How are the United States and the rest of the free world affected? What do the results of Operation Peace for Galilee portend?” For Sharon, “the crushing defeat of the P.L.O” would restore peace and safety for Israeli citizens who lived near the Lebanese border. “No longer will Soviet Katyusha rockets rain down on Israeli villages from terrorist sanctuaries in Lebanon. Israeli children who spent night after night, month after month, in bomb shelters are free at last from attack.” From a regional and global perspective, “the expulsion of the P.L.O. means that international terrorism has been dealt a mortal blow,” he argued. “The arms, training, supplies, intelligence – the whole infrastructure of violence and revolution has been broken. The end of the P.L.O. in Lebanon is a victory for peace and freedom everywhere.”
But peace and safety did not come for civilians living in Northern Israel as Sharon had claimed.
In retrospect, the most transformative result of Israel’s 1982 invasion in Lebanon was the birth of Hezbollah as a non-state military force within Lebanon.
Hezbollah gained power with the smashing of the PLO infrastructure and the discrediting of the Lebanese Army as a fighting force capable of repelling an Israeli invasion. Over the subsequent years Hezbollah’s influence in the region — along with that of its primary benefactor, Iran — became more and more destabilizing, in southern Lebanon and throughout the country and region. Eventually, Hezbollah’s threat to Israel had become far graver than that of the PLO in 1982. Israel’s “Operation Peace for Galilee” has returned as the Israel-Hezbollah war of 2024. Once again regular people, in Israel and Lebanon, pay the highest price.
As a young man, my most influential mentor was Leonard Beerman, rabbi of Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles, the synagogue my family attended when I was growing up. On September 26, 1982, Rabbi Beerman delivered a sermon following the Kol Nidre prayer on Erev Yom Kippur. He spoke little more than a week after the massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese Shia civilians by Christian militias in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, a horrific crime that occurred in the context of the Israeli war against the PLO in Lebanon, and the siege of Beirut during which Israel had cut off access to food, water and electricity to the people who lived there.
At this auspicious moment, as I rush off to make it on time to hear the Chazzan sing Kol Nidre on Yom Kippur 2024, I share with you a few paragraph’s from Rabbi Beerman’s Yom Kippur sermon of 1982:
“I confess to you: I am one of that minority of rabbis, and that minority of Jews here and in Israel who believed, from the first day, that the war in Lebanon, the war of Begin and Sharon, was doomed to be a moral and political failure. I confess to you, I was full of shame and horror and despair from the very first moment of the Israeli invasion of the Lebanese border…
“The purpose of the war: To destroy the PLO; but in truth, if anything may have been destroyed it is the moral stature of the State of Israel. The massive use of military force, including the total destruction of refugee camps, not only caused death and destruction for the civilian population; it also supplied credibility to the hostile propaganda that presents Israel as an aggressive state bent on expansion and annexation, while trampling on the rights of the Palestinian people. It permits every closet anti-Semite to come out into the open.
“The purpose of the war: To destroy the PLO. It may have been destroyed as a military force, but the war of Begin and Sharon achieved the very opposite of destroying the PLO: It has raised the PLO to a more important factor in international relations and has made the Palestinian issue the decisive one….
“To ‘crush’ the PLO, to ‘eradicate,’ to ‘liquidate,’ to ‘fumigate,’ to ‘wipe out,’ this was the new Jewish lexicon of Menachem Begin…
“The war has been fought. The dead have died, and the latest massacre adds to the toll. The Israeli radio report of the provisional estimate of the losses: 340 Israeli soldiers dead; 2,078 wounded. 17,000 Lebanese Palestinians killed; 30,000 wounded. About 50,000 people altogether, not to mention the 100,000? 200,000? 300,000? homeless. What kind of Jews are these who kill and injure so many thousands and cause such massive destruction as a reasonable technique for carrying out policy? As the defeated Palestinians strengthen their national will by weaving heroic tales and creating a new martyrology…
“The Israeli government cannot end the Palestinian will for nationhood. Will the world permit another wandering people to be driven forth with no place to go? We Jews are the one people of the world who should have known what it was like to be unwanted, to be homeless. No one wanted Jews — not America, not Britain, not Europe — there was only one place to go, and that was home, and Israel came into being for that purpose. There is one, one place for the Palestinians to go — home — and it is time long overdue for Israel to declare that it does not wish to rule over the Palestinian people and to annex their territories, that it is ready to negotiate with them on their right to self-determination and independence, if they in turn will give up the option of military struggle…”
U.S. Air Force F-35A Lightning IIs & Israeli Air Force F-35I Adirs fly in formation during exercise Enduring Lightning III over Israel, Oct. 12, 2020.
U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Duncan C. Bevan)
Watching the Blue Angels perform with my neighbors, I felt an unspoken anxiety and unease, in myself and among those around me, even as we admired the amazing display of speed and coordination above us.
After the show, we smiled to each other, wished each other a nice day, and moved on to continue our lives.
The prophet Isaiah envisioned a day when “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” We must not give up the struggle to make this day come.
And then, following the admonition of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, we must go even farther.
Don’t stop after beating the swords
into plowshares, don’t stop! Go on beating
and make musical instruments out of them.
Whoever wants to make war again
will have to turn them into plowshares first.
With prayers for peace in this new year,
Jonathan
