Keep the Guards at the Door, and Well-Armed

JERUSALEM —  My neighbor’s reaction to the shooting rampage inside the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills was uniquely Israeli. Where was the guard when the attack happened? In a country where kindergartens and supermarkets and shopping malls routinely place armed guards at the entrance and search all who enter for weapons, it was the obvious question. A public building, a summer camp, left unprotected? For Israelis, that is the definition of criminal irresponsibility.

It is strange for Israelis to watch American Jews experience something of the terrorist assault we here have long taken for granted. America is the fantasy haven to which many Israelis imagine fleeing from the violence that has defined our national existence from the moment we became a state. Eskimos have snow, Israelis used to say, and we have terrorism. The very day of the Los Angeles incident, 10 Israelis were struck by a terrorist hit-and-run driver.

At a rock concert in the Israeli coastal town of Ashkelon the night of the Los Angeles attack, a performer called out from the stage, “When are all the Jews going to finally come home?” He meant home to Israel. There was something touching about his concern for the safety of American Jews but also something a little ludicrous. Most Israelis understand that American Jews aren’t going to flee their homes because of a few violent anti-Semitic attacks. And they will certainly not seek safety among us here in the Middle East.

If we want to attract American Jewish immigrants, we’ve got to come up with more convincing incentives, like participating in the adventure of recreating Jewish civilization.

One sign of the maturing of the Israeli-American Jewish relationship is how few Israelis in the wake of the Los Angeles shooting resorted to the old Zionist cliche that Jews can ultimately be safe only in a Jewish state. Zionism’s gift to the Jews wasn’t physical safety but the ability to defend ourselves, to post our own guards outside our schools and community centers. But Israelis watching the televised scenes of Los Angeles policemen tracking down the gunman and bringing the children at the community center to safety understood that America has given its Jews a different kind of gift: the full protection of the law. Paradoxically, it was precisely those violent images that reminded Israelis that American Jews aren’t an endangered minority but equal citizens in a democracy.

Especially now, when Jews are tempted again by pessimism about their place in the world, we should recall how far we have come as a people in the mere five decades since the Holocaust. Thanks largely to the mass immigration to Israel of Jews from endangered communities in Eastern Europe and the Muslim world, nearly all of the world’s estimated 13 million Jews now live under benign regimes. Only one Jewish community can still be called oppressed: the 15,000 Jews of Iran, 13 of whom have been jailed on trumped-up espionage charges and await possible hanging.

Still, for Israelis, the anti-Semitic violence against our prosperous cousins in America is an uneasy reminder that the dangers we face here don’t come from isolated and ultimately powerless madmen like Buford O. Furrow but from lunatics like Saddam Hussein who control entire countries, including missiles and chemical weapons.

The message from Los Angeles for us has a Middle Eastern twist, which is implied in my neighbor’s reaction to the shooting: Keep the guards at the door and keep them well-armed, because not everyone who approaches comes in the name of peace.