Monday December 11

At the entrance to our El-Al flight in Miami on Thursday stood an electric menorah with the first candle lit, marking the first evening of Hanukkah. The flight was full and passengers were varied, of all ages except there were very few elderly people. A lot of families and people in their 30s and 40s, as well as some unaccompanied teenagers -- I heard one of them explaining to an older seatmate that their father lived in the US and they were returning home to Israel for Hanukkah after a visit. It seemed that everyone on the flight was returning home; as far as we could tell, we were the only tourists, except for one American woman we chatted with who was on a mission from her church to do some filming in the northern border communities (which she admitted would likely be cancelled because of news as we were boarding that bombs from Syria were landing in the area she was supposed to visit). Although in-flight announcements were made in both Hebrew and English, as always, we noticed that the English ones were much shorter, less conversational and more to the point; this underscored the fact that the flight attendants themselves spoke Hebrew to everyone, assuming that anyone flying to Israel in this moment had to be Israeli. And even when we responded to them in our broken Hebrew, they persisted in Hebrew instead of automatically switching to English. When the plane landed in Tel Aviv on Friday, everyone applauded; I remember this happening on long flights when I was a kid, but hadn't experienced it for decades. I wondered if it was a spontaneous expression of relief that we hadn't been fired on during our final approach. (I read later that a domestic flight from Eilat landed in Tel Aviv amid rocket fire an hour or two after our flight.)

The airport scene presented a stark contrast to our arrival back in September. Instead of chaotic hordes of people jostling through the arrivals hall toward Customs, we were a small and subdued group; the hallway seemed larger and longer than I remembered it. The airport was a bit busier than it had been when we left at the end of October, but not much. The hall itself was lined with posters of those who had been kidnapped and were still being held hostage in Gaza; a graphic reminder that not everyone was coming home for the holiday.

The posters followed us everywhere. They were on the sides of buildings and overpasses as we drove from Tel Aviv to Haifa, interspersed with menorahs and wishes for a happy Hanukkah in a weird juxtaposition of joy and grief. I wasn't sure what to expect, arriving in the middle of Hanukkah during wartime. The signs in Hebrew saying "together we will win" next to the "happy Hanukkah" signs, menorahs, and "bring them home" posters pretty much capture the strangeness of the season here. While the holiday is being celebrated and we've seen some messaging conflating the battles in Gaza with the Maccabees' fight against the Greeks, the overwhelming theme has been about those who are not home with their families for Hanukkah, and who may never come home.

I had been looking forward to being here for Haifa's famous "Holiday of Holidays" celebration, a month-long festival in December that celebrates Jewish, Christian, and Muslim holidays with food fairs, pop-up markets, street parties with music and circus acts. It has been cancelled this year. When A. called yesterday to welcome us back, I asked how they were celebrating Hanukkah against the backdrop of war. He said, "Of course, we make sufganiyot, the children are eating them and there is chocolate and lighting candles together, but we are not having any parties. We are every day after work watching the news, seeing what is happening, staying close to our homes and to our families." 

There is an old joke that all Jewish holidays can be summed up as: "they tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat." Hanukkah is actually the only Jewish holiday that celebrates a military victory instead of mere survival. And the connection between the present moment in Jewish history and the ancient Maccabean one has not been lost on Israelis or the media here, although the meaning of the connection can vary radically. But the history of Hanukkah and its meaning has always been a complicated one. Like every other historical event, the stories we tell about it reflect what is important to us in our present at least as much as they reflect what actually happened in the past.

Twelve years ago I wrote a piece for the Huffington Post about how the truths about Hanukkah changed for me over the course of my life. It was interesting to look back on that and see the same themes I've been thinking about these past two months, of how history is written to serve the needs of the present, and of how competing historical narratives often reflect different political (personal/identity or communal) perspectives. 

The books of the Maccabees are not included in the Jewish biblical canon, but the first two of them tell the story of Hanukkah. Or rather, they tell two stories of Hanukkah, providing details of the 2nd century BCE Maccabean revolt through two different political lenses. The author of 1 Maccabees presents a revolution of pious Jews against the violent oppression of the Seleucid king Antiochus, a righteous uprising of the Jewish minority against the might of the Greek empire intent on annihilating them. The author of 2 Maccabees portrays the same events of the Maccabean revolt as a civil war among Jews, some of whom sought to culturally assimilate to the Hellenistic majority, and others -- the Maccabees -- who brutally and violently opposed assimilation, massacring the assimilationists along with the Seleucids they supported. Both stories point to a military victory and culminate in the cleansing and re-dedication of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, which gives the holiday its name ("Hanukkah" means "dedication"). But the part of the story that's most celebrated today, with the rituals of lighting the Hanukkiah (a menorah styled like the Temple menorahs mentioned in the Bible, but with two more branches) and eating greasy latkes and sufganiyot, doesn't appear in either version. 

The idea of celebrating a hard-fought and violent military victory -- whether over Hellenizing Seleucids or fellow Jews or both -- made the later Rabbis uncomfortable. The holiday wasn't biblical, but the people persisted in commemorating the bloody re-dedication of the Temple long after it was destroyed. So about 600 years after the events took place, the Talmud first records a legend about that re-dedication. This is the story of the miraculous oil: when the Maccabees entered the Temple to cleanse it and re-light the (7 branched) menorah that stood in it, there was only enough oil left to light it for one day. But it would take at least eight days to make new oil. They lit it anyway, and lo and behold, the single-day's worth of oil burned for eight days. And so, to commemorate the miracle, the Rabbis proclaimed an eight-day festival that included lighting a 9-branched menorah called a Hanukkiah. And now, instead of celebrating a military victory of human zealotry, the focus could be shifted to the celebration of God's miraculous power that was behind the Maccabees' ability to re-dedicate the Temple.

The fact that the majority of our holidays commemorate the survival of the Jewish people (and are thus a cause for feasting) against the odds and in defiance of those who have tried to annihilate us, from the Egyptians (Passover) to the Persians (Purim), certainly identifies a main theme of Jewish identity. Surviving as a minority for the past two thousand years without sovereignty in our own land has defined us and has helped to shape our ethics in profound ways. It's not a coincidence that Jews have always marched at the forefront of social justice causes, identifying with the underdogs and seeking equality for all. 

But never becoming a majority in a way that would allow us to exercise power over others rather than defining ourselves in terms of our own oppression has meant that at Hanukkah we could continue to celebrate the miracle of the oil, eat latkes and sufganiyot and give chocolate coins to our children, instead of focusing on the military victory and slaughter of those who oppose us. Not so this year.

Although for most of our history, celebrating the triumph of zealous warriors over those who would annihilate us has been mitigated by a focus on the power of divine miracles, Jews are now in possession of an army. We don't have to look to God for our survival. The modern state of Israel has fought multiple wars for its existence; this is not the first time it has faced the possibility of destruction. But October 7th was the first time that even with an army, Israeli people were subjected to mass slaughter and the very real and continued threat of annihilation if those who perpetrated it are allowed to survive. 

And then there is the ongoing possibility of civil war. On October 6th, this was the existential threat facing Israel. When we arrived in September, the country was torn apart by protests and counter-protests over Netanyahu's proposed judicial reforms. Hundreds of thousands filled the streets every week, and the signs hanging from overpasses proclaimed slogans of one faction or the other -- or both, as was often the case. Now the signs are all variations of the same two themes: "together we will win" and "bring them home." And yet the move by the far right a few days ago to storm the Temple Mount -- which thankfully was stopped before it could wreak further havoc on the delicate balance that is co-existence in Jerusalem and the West Bank right now -- demonstrates that at least as long as Netanyahu is in charge, the moment the war is over, the fierce but fragile unity of citizens is in danger of cracking apart once more.

Netanyahu's focus on staying in power at all costs, on weakening the Palestinian hold on the West Bank and appeasing Hamas toward that end, culminated in judicial reforms that pushed internal divisions to their breaking point. The far right agenda and the raging debates, rallies, and open hostilities engaged all of Israel to the total negligence of the dangers lurking at the borders. 

As I've written before, October 7th erased the schisms, at least temporarily, uniting right and left together in the common cause of survival. Rally organizers pivoted within 24 hours to becoming volunteer organizers, and as reservists reported for duty in record numbers, at least half of all civilians dropped everything they were doing in order to help supply them, and to find and fundraise for housing options for the 250,000 who were displaced from border communities in the north and south, and basically to remember why Israel was created in the first place. Those who spent most of last year marching against each other are working side by side to help the country survive. And there is much more unified and widespread resentment now against the government; I'll post a photo I took on my walk this afternoon of a couple of stickers on a pole that seems representative of everything I'm hearing.

And yet, that rupture between left and right is still very much present. Although the government and the people for the most part are focused on the war going on in real time, on the hostages who are still missing, on the mounting death toll of Israeli soldiers, and on the continuing threats from the borders with Lebanon and the West Bank, the question of what happens next lurks around every corner. Despite a huge drop in the polls, everyone knows Netanyahu will do whatever he can to cling to power. And what of Gaza? 

While Israel has declared that it has no desire to re-occupy Gaza after the war, Netanyahu has also stated that the IDF will maintain a security presence there indefinitely. There has also been talk of establishing a buffer zone between the borders, although the US has opposed any reduction of Gaza territory. So in light of all of this, photos of IDF soldiers setting up a massive hanukkiah in the heart of Gaza made me a bit uneasy, though I could excuse it in my mind as a temporary sign of victory and a way to boost the morale of the troops fighting through the holiday. But the establishment of "the first Chabad house in Gaza" leaves me feeling decidedly uncomfortable about the direction that the Israeli right is leaning for postwar arrangements. At the same time, the US's insistence that the Palestinian Authority be central to future plans for Gaza has me equally uncomfortable (stay tuned for a future post on the PA).

In a poll taken at the end of October, Israeli support for negotiations with the Palestinian Authority toward a 2-state solution dropped 23%. And as I've written before, even in my pre-October 7th conversations with younger Israeli friends, interest in working to establish a Palestinian state has waned considerably since my similar conversations with their parents 30 years ago. Growing up through the intifadas, when bombs and people exploded in marketplaces and on buses all over Israel, watching every overture for peace rejected while serving in the army for 2-3 years as young adults and then reporting annually for Reserve duty, the country has grown weary of the Palestinian issue. And now, the widespread support for Hamas and their calls for Jewish genocide can no longer be ignored. There are still peace activists, but their calls have been drowned out in favor of bolstering security on the borders. This promise of security has kept Netanyahu in power all these years; his failure to live up to the hype will hopefully bring about his downfall.

The general mood seems to be a strong drive to eradicate Hamas alongside a sense of helplessness about the ensuing civilian deaths in Gaza -- if we need to kill them before they can kill us again, and they hide behind civilians and fire from schools, mosques, and hospitals, the high death toll appears unavoidable. Although some peace activists have been calling for a ceasefire, most have turned their attention to maintaining solidarity with Arab-Israelis and focusing on peaceful co-existence within Israel.

But it's not just a handful of peace activists (and the UN... but I'm saving that vitriol for another post) who are calling for a ceasefire in Israel. The families of the hostages, whose children, spouses, and parents are all missing and presumed to be enduring the most horrific forms of abuse and torture -- if they're still alive -- also want the war to stop. And understandably so. Hamas announced today that this is the only way the hostages will be returned alive. So while most Israelis support the war effort, understanding that a ceasefire at this point will only empower Hamas (as the "humanitarian pause" clearly did, judging from the renewed rocket launches that continue to strike as far as Tel Aviv daily), their hearts are torn by knowledge of the ongoing suffering of the hostages and our inability to do anything about it without compromising national defense.

And there is the fear that the far-right, themselves empowered by the free reign they enjoy under Netanyahu's coalition, continues to push all of the wrong buttons. As I mentioned earlier, for the first day of Hanukkah last Thursday, they planned "the March of the Maccabees," a rally intended to culminate on the Temple Mount in defiance of the governing Jordanian waqf and to push for Israeli control there (check out the article that describes their ambitions to destroy the Dome & Al-Aqsa and build a Third Temple -- they are as scary as Hamas in their own way). While the Jerusalem police initially granted them permits and the people gathered for their March, their signs were so inflammatory that the police blocked the rally and dispersed the crowds. (Note: it is entirely possible that they granted the permits knowing full well that they would have cause to call it off once it started. At least, that's what I'd like to think.)

So the story of Hanukkah this year is a story of survival, and what that looks like when you have an army. Like the Maccabees, Israel built their army for the purpose of Jewish survival and maintained it toward the continued defense of hard-won sovereignty. But "Jewish survival" meant different things to the ancient writers of the books of Maccabees, and it means different things to Israeli factions today. For the left, it means finding our way toward co-existence with Arab Israelis and Palestinians. For the right, it means weakening the enemy and exercising power by seeking to take back the Temple Mount, as well as Judea & Samaria (the West Bank). For the left, it means pushing back on external oppression and threats, even at great cost. For the right, it means utter destruction of the enemy. In 1 Maccabees, the heroes fight a war of defense, overthrowing their enemies and securing self-rule in their ancestral land. In 2 Maccabees, the heroes are praised for their zealous elimination of all who represented the dangers of assimilation and the threat of oppression, even their fellow Jews. And in 2 Maccabees, the evil of tyranny rears an ugly head, and the right-wing March of the Maccabees, along with the erection of a hanukkiah and a Chabad house in Gaza are uncomfortably reminiscent of this narrative. I'd like to think that most Israelis have in mind the heroes of 1 Maccabees instead, and that in the longer term will be mindful of the need to balance our survival against our ability to exercise military power.

And there are always other ways to look at the Hanukkah story for meaning. The Second Gentleman of the United States offered one: "Even as we face darkness today, I am hopeful," Emhoff said. "The story of Hanukkah and the story of the Jewish people has always been one of hope and resilience."

Image below from today's walk: lefthand (blue) sticker says "nation 1 vs government 0" and the righthand (red) sticker is a photo of Netanyahu with the word "he abandoned us" (one word in Hebrew) across his face.