by, UCLA and Daniel Pearl Foundation

http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=18673

I spent the last week of November in Israel,and watched the Annapolis show unfold through the lens of Israeli TV.As expected, everyone in Israel watched that show with both nervous curiosity and cynical dismissal. But the event that truly captured the public imagination and managed to elevate people’s spirit above the mundane was one that occurred 200 miles away from Annapolis,in a place called Lake Success,and it took place 60 years ago, November 29, 1947.

This year, Israel celebrated with royal fanfare the historical UN partition vote that paved the way for her creation. Ambassadors of the 33 countries that voted in favor of the 1947 partition were invited to a widely televised event in Rishon LeTzion, as were family members of the ambassadors to the UN from those nations, and the country immersed itself in a sober, yet inspiring historic reflection of its past,present and future.

As one who was privileged to personally experience the outburst of joy that seized world Jewry on Nov 29, 1947,I was somewhat dismayed to discover, upon returning to Los Angeles last week, that this event passed virtually unnoticed in our community, including in the pages of this paper. Laboring to understand, I realized that another historical event, perhaps of no less impact, was also forgotten by the pages of this journal — the Balfour declaration, whose 90-year anniversary fell on November 2, 2007.

World Jewry, so I concluded, must be splitting before our own eyes into two camps, the history-minded and the history-mindless and, for some strange reason the former tends to concentrate in Israel, the latter in the US. Thank God, I consoled myself, that we still have Hanukkah to unite us — how forward-thinking it was for those Rabbis who canonized a chunk of Jewish history as a religious holiday,and thus protected it from our collective amnesia.

But upon reading the Journal’s Holiday issue (Nov 30)I realized that Hanukkah too was splitting before our eyes and, while Israelis were singing in one voice:”We fought the Greeks and the victory is ours,” and their kindergartens were re-enacting the re-establishment of Jewish

sovereignty, American Jews were agonizing over Christopher Hitchens’ discovery that the Maccabees were a gang of Jewish Taliban.One essay even suggested that Hanukkah should

be cleansed from its historical contaminants and focus on the spiritual, the miracle, the Temple, the candles, the latkes, the dreidel, anything but history, anything but freedom and sovereignty.

Indeed, history is ugly and dreidels are beautiful.

Continuing this sterilization of the Jewish experience one can further argue that the notion of

Jewish sovereignty, because it risks violence, civil wars and other public embarrassments, is foreign to the Jewish spirit, hence, the only true carriers of “Judaism spiritual values” are

Neturai Karta and Noam Chomsky’s followers, for they are the only Jews who openly object to the ugly notion of a Jewish State. All the rest of us, historical Jews, having been praying for 2000 years for regaining sovereignty in the birthplace of our history, are not really truthful to those immaculately conceived “Judaism spiritual values.”

I, for one, do not buy this sterile notion of Jewishness and of Hanukkah. True, history itself can be ugly, but historical narratives and holidays are defined not by their embryonic origins, but by what they mean to and how they motivate people at this day and age.

Regardless of whether Hanukkah started as a war of liberation against the Greek, a war of zeal

against the assimilated, or a supernatural miracle in the Temple, the meaning of Hanukkah lies in the new consciousness created when H.N. Bialik wrote (after the Kishinev pogrom, 1903) “Are these the sons of the Maccabees?.” It came in the energies inspired when the pre-1948 Zionist pioneers sang:

“A miracle did not happen to us
We have not found a vessel of oil
We carved the rock till we bled
And there was light!”

and it comes, of course, in the spirit of family warmth and people-hood that we Jews feel today when we light the candles and tell our children about that mischievous oil vessel.

Two weeks ago my wife Ruth and I were invited to the White House, where President Bush used our family menorah to usher in the holiday. I was relieved to discover that President Bush, had no problem whatsoever explaining to fellow Americans what the meaning of Hanukkah is all about.

“During Hanukkah,” he said “we remember an ancient struggle for freedom.” Plain and simple, free of Jewish hang-ups. He then narrated the story of the Maccabees: “A band of brothers came together to fight this oppression. And against incredible odds, they liberated the capital city of Jerusalem.” Again, Bush talked as if fighting oppression and liberating one’s capital is as natural as American apple pie and, more importantly, he took it as self-evident that people who call themselves “a people” would find pride and inspiration in celebrating pivotal events from their collective past; in other words, he took it as self-evident that Judaism and Jewish history and Jewish nationhood are inextricable.

This brings me back to the Annapolis Summit meeting. As President Bush was recounting the story

of the Maccabees struggle for freedom and self-determination, his words rang as faithful reminders of one delicate issue that was conspicuously missing from the Annapolis’ agenda but which nevertheless continues to hold the key to any progress toward a two-state solution:

Arabs denial of the indigenous historical connection between the Jewish people and the land of the Maccabees.

This historical connection, bluntly denied by Iranian President Ahmadinejad, adamantly refuted by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, uniformly ridiculed by Arab intellectuals, meticulously

purged from textbooks in the entire Muslim world, deceptively minimized by anti-co-existence

professors in the West, and skillfully avoided by post-Zionist Jewish writers in America, more than any other point of contention, has the power of unleashing the confidence-building energy

that the “peace process” requires to gain traction.

That is why I see Hanukkah as the pink elephant of Annapolis. The obvious historical connection

of Jews to the holy land, so clearly symbolized by Hanukkah and the president’s Hanukkah speech, was hush-hushed in Annapolis – while everyone knew that only by agreeing on this connection can the post-Annapolis process move toward a compromised two-state solution.

Everyone knows that nothing can move forward unless Israelis are convinced that a final-status agreement will be considered permanent by the Arab side, and not be used as a stepping stone for another armed struggle. Likewise, everyone knows that Palestinians would not consider an

agreement permanent that unjustly expropriates their land to a “colonial intruder” (i.e. Israel). Thus, the road to a permanency and commitment must go through a paradigm shift,

whereby the intruder becomes a legitimate, equally indigenous, co-owner-partner, one who returned from 2000 years of forced exile holding a wrinkled trust deed: Hanukkah.

Such a profound paradigm shift in the Arabs’ perception of the conflict would obviously be a slow and gradual process, but it is a process that must somehow be triggered, the first step of which is recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state” (more accurately, “a state of the Jewish

people”) as demanded by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert prior to the Annapolis meeting. Such a move would have sent an irreversible message of historical co-ownership to Arab school children and, thus, would havegiven Israelis the first ever proof of an Arab intention

to make the “final-status agreement” truly final.

It is no wonder that, when PA chief negotiator Saeb Erekat proclaimed “the PA would never acknowledge Israel’s Jewish identity,” Olmert reacted angrily with: “we won’t hold negotiations on our existence as a Jewish state… Whoever does not accept this cannot hold any negotiations with me.” Translated: “Whoever refuses to tell his children that Jews are here by moral and historical imperative has no intention of honoring his agreements in the long run, so why negotiate?”

Olmert’s subsequent retraction of this condition may mean one of two things.Either he believes that the needed recognition can be obtained in the course of further negotiations, or that he already wrote off the negotiations as a meaningless exercise and is now just waiting for an exit strategy.

In either case, since the final joint communique at Annapolis omitted any reference to a Jewish state, it seems apparent that both sides find it expedient to turn a blind eye to the pink elephant on their table, at least for the time being. The message of Hanukkah and of President Bush’s remarks merely reminds us that the elephant is still there and that it is getting harder and harder to pretend otherwise.

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Judea Pearl is a professor at UCLA and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, named after his son. He is a co-editor of “I am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl (Jewish Light, 2004).