When I was 7, my dad decided we would read the Bible aloud at the dinner table — two pages each night after supper. My parents took turns, then the three older boys pitched in. My three younger brothers joined the rotation later. Over the years, we made our way through the Old Testament and most of the New Testament. It knitted us closely.
Yes, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy were a bore. Yahweh laying down the law through Moses, including strange dietary restrictions like not mixing dairy and meat. We drank milk and ate meat at every nightly meal (except Fridays).
But the stories were captivating, telling the history of a troubled, chosen people. The era of Judges gave way to Kings with all the attendant corruption and abuses of power (just like today!), prophets haranguing the wayward Israelites for pissing off Yahweh, who kept punishing them with exile (not again!), then returning home chastened, but never entirely mending their ways. I kept rooting for these underdogs nonetheless, and finally, finally the Maccabees won a glorious victory over their oppressor!
As the story slowly unfolded at our kitchen table, modern-day Israelis were busy building a nation, making the desert bloom. They were the good guys, the underdogs. We watched the 1967 and 1973 wars on TV, which they won against all odds. I was too young to realize that we supplied their military materiel.
My disenchantment began with the rise of the right following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, when power shifted decidedly in favor of hard-liners like Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Ultra-Orthodox coalition.
Israel was no longer the underdog. They had power and weren’t shy about using (and sometimes misusing) it. When I traveled to the Holy Land in 2006 and saw that hideous wall surrounding Bethlehem, I realized Israelis had made a Faustian bargain — seeking safety and security through segregation, turning the country into a fortress.
Something was amiss at the heart of Israel’s complicated society. I wondered how the government and military could act like oppressors in order to protect a people who had been oppressed for so long themselves. Then came the awful Hamas assault in 2023. Initially, Israel’s retaliation seemed justified, but rapidly became wildly disproportionate.
Since then, Israel lost support in the court of public opinion and the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank gained sympathy, while many Americans have grown increasingly uneasy about the fact that our tax dollars are paying for so much death and destruction.
Which brings us to the recent Oak Park Township ballot initiative. Some say the Mideast is too far away and nonbinding referenda should only be about local issues. But if it’s much on the minds of local residents, then it’s a local issue. A lot of people in this town care about Israel and/or Palestine. How many? How much? We don’t know because people are afraid to talk openly about it. The Jewish community understandably fears that such a discussion will awaken the sleeping demon of antisemitism, the default setting just below the surface of the American psyche, giving those looking for someone to hate a convenient scapegoat.
The proposed advisory referendum targeting an obscure state law — in which Illinois essentially blacklists companies that boycott Israel — may have been an effort to gauge voter sentiment about the Israel-Gaza conflict. And the group that organized the turnout that voted down the initiative, and prevented it from being placed on the ballot, successfully avoided an airing of that issue.
But if Israel maintains its military superiority in the Mideast because of our funding, shouldn’t taxpayers have a say about it? Maybe that should have been the question submitted for the ballot initiative. Or maybe they could have simply asked whether Oak Parkers support a two-state solution that would make Israelis and Palestinians peaceful, independent co-equals — no matter how difficult and complicated that might be to pull off.
What I do know is a lot of people here — even some supporters of Israel like myself — are upset about the humanitarian disaster in Gaza and the West Bank.
Recently, this paper printed an angry letter about the defeated ballot initiative, which upset some readers. But I didn’t hear hate in that letter. I heard pain. I hear pain on both sides of this issue, but the pain about Gaza is more intense.
When I ran into former village president Anan Abu-Taleb recently, he showed me photos of the ruins of his family’s home in Gaza, where he grew up. He is deep in grief. Gaza is immediate for him. It’s also immediate for those who knew people killed or taken hostage during the vicious assault by Hamas on Israel three years ago.
Pain deserves a voice and we need to listen.
I mourn the idealism that Israel once embodied, however illusory, and I dearly wish they could feel like the good guys again, but that can happen only if Israelis reach out to Palestinians and if both treat each other like brothers and sisters — closely knit.
These days, a referendum on resolving this age-old dispute sounds hopelessly naïve.
But I would vote for it.