David Elcott, author and teacher, led a progressive pro-Israel advocacy organization and represented the AJC in its interfaith work.

I was fourteen. 1964. Israel was very young and I went with a small group of kids from LA to live for ten weeks on a Youth Aliyah agricultural school near Rehovot. I was Israel infatuated, my mother wanted to go to Palestine from Germany. She settled for saving her life by getting to England and then the U.S. Israel was homecoming and life transforming. I woke up mornings and cleaned the chicken coops. There is nothing pretty about shoveling chicken shit, but I felt that my hands were the hands of God, redeeming the soil and the soul of my people, a Fackenheimian re-entry into history, completing the unfinished work of the exodus, Mt. Sinai and desert wanderings. The land was the promise and I its faithful lover. The song was true, “we came to this land to construct and be reconstructed by it.” My experience was salvational.

By 1968 when I returned to live and study, I was torn between the ecstasy of victory and the dawning awareness of oppression. I began meeting Arabs who called themselves Palestinians. I heard an Israeli Arab poet talk about the soul wrenching identity issues he faced, and I visited impoverished and angry Arab villages. During the War of Attrition in the 70s, I spent time on a kibbutz on the Jordan River experiencing nightly bombings and running for cover when machine-gunned from the Jordanian side. It was there that I, along with my Israeli kibbutz buddies, began thinking about a Palestinian state and the treatment of all those who do not buy absolutely the policies of the State of Israel. As a Zionist committed to justice for my people in our own land, I sought a righteous Israel that would be a “light unto nations.

I suppose as with all passionate love affairs, the poles are extreme, infuriating, tragic, pain knotting, filled with rage and disappointment and then renewed love and exaltation. The same prophet Jeremiah who in his fury declares the utter destruction and desolation of Jerusalem and its people turns to adoringly tells how a young bride Israel lovingly and faithfully joined God in the untiled hot desert. Israel today is the miracle of rebirth, a spiritual, material and cultural oasis of my people’s renaissance, thrilling me to tears in its beauty, its creativity and commitment to justice and compassion. Israel today is a relentless occupier, taking land from the poor, “othering” those it has conquered, oppressing the chained widow and the impoverished orphan while thrusting away Jews and Gentiles whom its rabbis deem not kosher.

I am in love. The joys and the unbearable pains, the hope and the fear all core to the relationship. The slightly altered blessing I recite, “May the merciful bless the State of Israel, that it can become the flowering of our redemption.”