Do Secular, Non-Jews Have a Responsibility towards Israel?

Hebrew version
I found myself one November afternoon, [2006] in Washington, D.C. with three hours to spare between meetings. That semester, I had begun teaching a new course at the University of North Texas, called "The History of Violence." Even though History is usually studied on the scale of a human lifetime or even that of centuries, this course allowed me to explore with my students whatever insights recorded history reveal in regards to whether ethnic cleansing and genocide might be preventable social phenomena.

That afternoon, I took a taxi to the National Mall and got out at the 14th Street entrance to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I can't say what I expected to see or feel or learn upon entering the building. But the exhibits transported me not just to the nightmare of World War II Europe, but also to an inner landscape of my being that I had never before explored. For what seemed like hours, I stood paralyzed before a mound of 4,000 shoes left behind by victims at the Majdanek camp in Poland. How could shoes, emptied of their human inhabitants and therefore nearly weightless, grind heel marks into my soul? But they did. I eventually moved on to other exhibits. I sat for what seemed like a fleeting infinity in the Hall of Remembrance, a hexagonal-shaped room, meditating on a mantra that kept intruding upon my thoughts. How could the world have ignored the signs and not seen the Holocaust or Shoah, which is the Hebrew word for this monstrous calamity, coming? At the close of the tour, I stepped back into the late afternoon chill, no closer to answering that question. But one thing I did know.


[I would say what I felt in my mind and heart to be true about Israel's future] no matter what. 

It may seem presumptuous to suggest what Israelis should do with their country. But I refuse to back away from the most pressing moral imperative of our times. . . Israel's future is not just about Palestinians, Jews, Israelis, Arabs and Muslims. It is about whether concerned Americans wish to have the horrors of a new Holocaust etched across our collective souls, when the signs of impending disaster are as clear as a mile-high billboard. And thus, I apologize in advance if I may have trampled on the unspoken etiquette surrounding discourse on Israel. For, I have refused to embed my message in complex prose and intellectualizations. If this book reads with a naked urgency, it is because I fear that time is of the essence.

I have neither family nor religious ties that bind me to the Middle East . . .Much of what I know about Semitic languages and History, I learned from a German Jew and Harvard lecturer, who narrowly escaped the Holocaust. During my college years, Professor Ilse Lichtenstadter, became more than a professor to me. This remarkable woman became a loving grandmother. In the presence of her goading intellect, emotional generosity and quiet woundedness, new insights seeped into my consciousness. One was the answer to a question that had often perplexed me as an American of African descent. Who but your own people really cares if you live or die? What I learned from my relationship with Ilse Lichtenstadter and now grasp at the deepest level of my being is that our true friends are not always the ones who tell us what we want to hear. This book is written in recognition of that fact.

[Excerpted from the Preface to my latest book: Does Israel Have a Future, Potomac Books, 2008]