Anyone here who is signed up to our Community e-mail list will know that a very difficult debate was happening there, between a couple of people, just over a week ago. One writer wrote in to the list asking people to sign a letter saying that they could not celebrate Israel?s 60th anniversary. This writer included a number of statements about some of the historical events that happened in 1948, in the run up to the declaration of Israel?s independence. A second writer, and then still more, wrote in to say that they never wanted to receive these kinds of messages. They were angry at the content; they saw no place for such a discussion on our community email list.

The problem with these short exchanges by e-mail is that they escalate very quickly, and it seems almost impossible to avoid an exchange of insults. So that is what happened. Soon enough the Community?s Management Committee had to take action. More and more people were writing in to say, ?take me off this list, I don?t want to get these kinds of messages!? It ended with the list being closed to any further discussion. Which is right, in a way, and also a shame, because one or two really good replies came in, which we really wanted to circulate. But sending out any more messages would re-ignite the argument.

So, where do we go with this? Israel is indeed 60, with the anniversary of the Hebrew date of the Declaration of Independence, this week, on Thursday the 8th of May. Israel will enter this sixtieth year as a country riven with divisions. With precious little unity. A country that continues to face its fear of annihilation. A country with roots that are both incredibly deep, perhaps as long as four thousand years, and at the same time precariously shallow.

And we, in the Diaspora, are just as divided, just as conflicted. Our own roots here are just a few generations deep, but our human talent for adaptation and forgetting allows us to feel that we may be here forever.

We look at Israel, at her history and at her politics, and we take up one of the positions available to us. Sometimes we move to a position of defence, ?my country right or wrong?. Others will identify completely with a critical narrative, attacking both Israel and anyone who defends her. Most of us find ourselves somewhere in the middle, without the language or the confidence to differentiate between our shared sense of destiny and a balanced view on Israel?s policies. Yet we are in a very odd position. Most of us do not know enough. We have had little enough real experience and we have too little learning about Israeli and Palestinian history. We read a selective summary of current events through the lens of the press, but many of us have never felt the urgency or the fear that both sides live under, or, the absolutely desperate sense of hopelessness for a realistic solution. Easier, then, to think we hold the solutions. Ignorance is a very great tool in the building of stories that help us to make sense of the world.

Yet all of us have a responsibility. Not only to get to grips with Israel?s complicated reality, but also to try to learn about that history. And here I mean history and not ideology. Because both sides in the conflict have a very strong interest in painting a particular historical picture, a picture that fuels and justifies their current political aims. During part of my rabbinical studies I chose to focus on some of the events of the 1948 Arab Israeli War. I explored the work of the so-called Revisionist, now called the New Israeli historians, as well as the very new writings of the first Palestinian Historians. I would therefore take issue with almost every single statement made on the original e-mail that sparked the debate within our community. Real history in a time of conflict is not straightforward. And the important thing to remember is that historical events get turned into symbols, by both sides in the battle, to prove whatever piece of ideology that they want to prove. The trouble is that we always read history through the lens of the present. We will meet next Tuesday night at 9pm to examine a few of the paragraphs of Israel?s declaration of Independence, but we will do that through the eyes of a study pack devised by Rabbis for Human Rights. So, right from the outset, we will be reading with a bias.

We are living in difficult times. From month to month the tantalising prospect of a solution is dangled into sight. Political intervention by one or other individual politician, by other Arab states, or even in the last few days, by the Quartet. And then, another terrorist attack, another military retaliation, and the deal is off. But we must not lose hope. We must challenge our selves to get to grips with Israel and her history. We must find constructive ways of talking to each other about her politics and the future. And we must do this not as strangers, but as people united by a powerful sense of one, shared destiny. A destiny I hope, of peace, justice, and tolerance, where none of her peoples Jewish or not, is pushed aside from the promise of a more hopeful future.

Rabbi Shulamit Ambalu