By Reuven Koret
May 9, 2005
As I write there are horns honking, people shouting, and scenes of jubilations in the streets of Tel Aviv. Maccabi, our basketball club, has for the second year in a row won the Euroleague championship. Far be it from my intention to be a spoilsport, but I got a lot more pleasure from the Red Sox mythic "reverse the curse" comeback.
Maccabi Tel Aviv is, after all, a club -- a commercial enterprise which rents players from all over the world. They do it well, and there is some pride in little Israeli kicking the stuffing out of Greeks, Spaniards, Russians, and of course Frenchmen. But most of our players are Americans or Europeans. We're happy to have them, but they're not ours.
"Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing." The immortal words of Vince Lombardi don't really apply to the Jewish people. Since expulsion from our homeland, we have been history's greatest losers, the shlemihls and shlemazels, who have suffered at the hands of every tinhorn dictators and religious bigot for a few thousand years. That is in no way to diminish the heroism and grandeur of our rabbis and poets, our philosophers and authors, scientists and statesmen, and all the men and women who carried on our tradition and survived the miserable two-thousand-year exile. Despite our survival and successes, we were a pitiful refugee nation, Wandering Jews all.
Just sixty-plus years ago we lost six million of our people in the Shoah. Last week the Jewish people remembered. This week the world will celebrate the Allied victory over the Germans. For us the victory came late. I am reading Phillip Roth's book The Plot against America, which speculates what would happen if the anti-Semitic Charles "Lucky" Lindbergh would have beaten FDR in the 1940 election. But students of history also knew that FDR was far from helpful in stopping the German extermination campaign against the Jews.
This weekend was the anniversary of the "liberation" of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. I visited the place twenty years ago, taking the train from Vienna and hitchhiking back. I will never forget the site of the dissection tables and the ovens used for ad hoc cremation. On the way back, on a rainy spring days, I was picked up by a kindly middle aged Austrian couple in a plush Mercedes. I remember leaving caked mud on their back-seat carpeting. Sorry.
The world will celebrate the "victory" over Germany and the "liberation" of the death. We will mourn our dead.
The whole world is expecting, and cheering, Israel's planned withdrawal from Gaza and Samaria.
But a weekend poll showed a steep drop in support for Sharon's expulsion plan, with just a bare majority of Israelis (including "Palestinian Arab" citizens of Israel) now supporting it. The "Disengagement Authority" is reportedly in disarray. The faithful residents of Gaza and Samaria are not giving up, and not signing up, for the government's attempts to buy them off. More than 15,000 Israeli soldiers have said they won't participate in the expulsion. Zaka refuses to unearth graves or assist the police. Sharon has been forced to delay the expulsion by three weeks.
Despite our many losses, the story of Jewish history has its share of winners, among them the "Maccabis" of Hannuka fame and so many other examples of the determined few outlasting and outsmarting the well-equipped many. This week we mark Yom Hazikaron, Memorial Day for the fallen heroes of the Israel Defense Forces and -- the following day -- Yom Ha'atzmaut, our Independence Day -- celebrating the remarkable victory of just 600,000 Jews in 1948.
This Independence Day is saddened by the realization that the nation that we love plans, for no discernible reason and against all common sense and logic, to hand the Arabs their greatest victory since our nation was born, and in the process expel 10,000 men, women and children from their homes and destroy their entire communities by force.
When Maccabi won its first Euroleague championship against the Russian Red Army team in 1977, an American-born star player, Jewish immigrant Tal Brody shouted: "We're on the map. We are staying on the map, not only in sports, but in everything." The TV announcer -- and many others no doubt -- shouted "Yesh Elohim!" -- There is a G-d!
(The victory can be perhaps compared to the American amateur hockey team upsetting the Russians in the 1980 Olympic medal round before going on to take the Gold.)
These days Maccabi doesn't need Him, just a few more bucks for tall American imports.
But Israel does. If sports fans talk about money time, Israelis who care about their country should think about miracle time.
We are taught not to wait for miracles, or depend on them, but to create with our minds, hands and feet the conditions in which they can happen.
Against all odds, I believe that the opponents of expulsion may yet succeed, by massive popular protest, in stopping the "bulldozer" with all the might of the world behind him.
They are the true inheritors of the tradition of the heroes and the partisans, the idealists and the moralists, indeed the Biblical heroes and prophets who never hesitated to speak truth to power, even at the price of their own freedom and, all too often, their own lives.
Ariel Sharon, congratulating Maccabi coach Pini Gershon on his victory, said he hoped he would be able to repeat the call for a third consecutive championship next year -- on the condition that both of them would still have their jobs.
Here's hoping that Pini Gershon can three-peat!
Shavua tov, Happy Victory over Germany Day, and Happy 57th Independence Day, Israel!
Reuven Koret
Publisher
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