A few weeks ago, Bernie Sanders came under a forceful attack by the American Jewish Congress for his allegedly “anti-Israel” stance including his statement that “Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian territories is contrary to fundamental American values.”
What many concerned members of the Jewish community fail to understand is that the growing “values gap” between Israel and the United States is real, and if it continues to widen, it will become a major threat to one of the central pillars of Israeli national security, Israel’s unique alliance with the United States.
Nothing can illustrate this gap more strikingly than the recent announcement by Israel’s minister of transportation, Yisrael Katz, that not only is Israel planning to open a train station inside the historic Old City of Jerusalem, but that the station will be named the Donald John Trump Station.
Where does one start in explaining what is wrong with this? First, there is the astonishing idea of digging a tunnel under the Old City’s walls so that the railroad line carrying visitors from Tel Aviv might be provided an opportunity to arrive in the Old City without going through its historic gates.
Not only does this violate all emotional and aesthetic sensibilities, not only will it endanger the archeological remains of the Jewish historical experience, it contravenes any reasonable interpretation of the Oslo Agreement signed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat, in which it was agreed that the status of Jerusalem would be resolved only through negotiations.
It was bad enough that the U.S. government recently contravened that understanding by recognizing some unspecified part of Jerusalem as sovereign Israeli territory when it recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. But now, the Old City, the beating heart of what Muslims worldwide refer to as Al-Quds, is to be connected to Tel Aviv by rails of steel.
In anticipation of the argument that the train station will only be in the Jewish Quarter, and “in any conceivable peace agreement, the Jewish Quarter will be under Israeli sovereignty,” it should be noted that in some of the wisest proposed solutions with respect to the status of the Old City, it is divorced from state sovereignty.For instance, in the proposal by the late King Hussein of Jordan, it would be agreed that the Old City is under the Sovereignty of God, and jointly administered.
And then there is question of spirituality and desecration. In the Torah, the importance of maintaining a distance between the holy and the mundane is made clear. Thus, only the High Priest can enter the Holy of Holies. The train station is to be located right by the Kotel, the Western Wall. How are we to reconcile the sanctity of the Wall with the spectacle of Tel Avivians, some perhaps in beach garb, pouring out of the teeming trains? And this decision comes from the same Israeli government that denies Jewish women equal opportunity to worship at the Kotel, viewing such as a desecration of its Holiness.
But beyond all comprehension is the decision to name the station after Trump. The critique is not about the president’s divisive and questionable policies. But Trump the man, Trump the human being, is without question one of the most unfit of human beings to be celebrated at the Kotel. That Katz, a shrewd politician, believes this will play well with Israelis, illustrates the yawning chasm between Israel, where Trump is quite popular, and most American Jews, for whom he is a disgrace and a threat.
I expect, and fervently hope, that so resounding will be the outcry of “Never” from Jewry worldwide, that this project and surely its station-naming will be reversed. But whatever the outcome, much has been revealed about the values gap. And something more fundamental as well — that we Jews are, regrettably, no better than any other people. That we too are subject to Lord Acton’s law of human nature: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Jerome M. Segal is a research scholar at the University of Maryland and president of the Jewish Peace Lobby.
