I generally prefer to select my own sermon topics from the myriad of interesting possibilities in the weekly parsha. But alas, this week is not one of those weeks, because you all know that the president made a policy statement this week in a joint press conference with Bibi Netanyahu about the future of Gaza. And so we have to talk about it.
I don’t think you missed it, because how could you, but if you missed the announcement, President Trump said several things. First, that Palestinians should be relocated to Egypt and Jordan. Second, that the United States will come in and take over Gaza. Third, that we will QUOTE “own it”, and fourth that Gaza would be redeveloped into the Riviera of the Mediterranean.
The reaction was swift and unforgiving. Most people saw it either as magical thinking, or wildly impractical, or blatantly against international law, or wholly unjust and immoral. I will say one nice thing about the plan, which is that it is an actual plan. Before President Trump proposed his idea, nobody really had a plan for who would oversee Gaza in the near term, or who would rebuild it. So at least it’s a plan.
The proposal is part of what we have come to see as the Trumpian world view, and that is land is a valuable asset, while people, particularly foreign people, are a liability. Gaza is simply 141 square miles of empty potential, waiting to be transformed into golf courses and Mar a Lago - Rafah. To further this idea, Trump believes that peoples compete for resources. That every dollar sent to Mexico for avocados comes out of the pockets of California avocado growers, that every undocumented immigrant in the US is taking a job away from an unemployed American.
Trump is, in this respect, a man who had a very successful theory on one aspect of the economy, and now applies that theory to everything in a very ‘if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ approach to the universe. Trump knows how to develop hundreds of acres of bare land into a golf course. But golf courses are a very specific type of investment - there’s a lot of empty land, some very rich men wandering around paying lots of money to chase a little dimpled ball, and relatively few employees needed to keep the thing going. Trump sees rubble and imagines a golf course. Only, golf courses have no people on them, except the very rich. So Trump says ‘ok, everybody who isn’t very rich can go to Jordan or Egypt. Only, of course, Jordan and Egypt didn’t agree to that. This is the one part of Trump’s calculus I don’t really understand. Here’s a man who doesn’t like foreign nationals who are applying for residency in this country and wants to use the US Army to detain and deport 2 million of them, but he looks at the heads of state of Jordan and Egypt and says to them ‘you should take 2 million foreign nationals into your countries permanently.’ I don’t really follow the logic, other than Trump believing that its totally reasonable to decide to uproot and relocate people anywhere in the world, as long as that place isn’t the United States of America. I also don’t really even follow the logic of redeveloping Gaza, which is 9,000 miles away, when Haiti, a tropical nation only 150 miles away, is in desperate need of aid and redevelopment.
The reason the world, including much of the American Jewish community, reacted so negatively to this proposal is the first step in the effort to redevelop Gaza is the removal of all the residents. I think Trump thinks that the Palestinians will all take a second passport in Jordan and Egypt, and live there for a few years until his contractors have finished building the each resorts and the golf courses, and then they’ll come back to Gaza and work as waiters and line chefs and Middle East peace will flourish.
The problem with the thinking is that the two people most involved in this situation, the Israelis and the Palestinians, both have deep histories with displacement and relocation, and neither of them have any good memories of it. For Palestinians, many of them were displaced to Gaza and the West Bank in 1948, and many have been hoping to return for 77 years now. For Israelis, they were a stateless people for 2000 years, and at the conclusion of the Holocaust in Europe in 1945, they were unable to return home. My own grandmother left her home town of Rakov in 1943, never to return again. Not only that, but her bitterness and anguish over the pain of the injustices done to her and her whole family were so deep that she has told her children and her grandchildren to never return to Poland again as long as we live. And none of us ever has. That’s three generations of intergenerational bitterness in my family towards people in a country that I’ve never even been to.
Every one of us in this room and on zoom has Jewish relatives who came to this country on a boat or a plane because they were unwelcome or cast out of some other place, and so they created a new home for themselves here in this country. Most people that leave home do so because they have little or no other options.
This is the part of the Gaza redevelopment plan that Trump, and some Israelis, are missing. And by the way, the Israeli newspaper Maariv did a survey and found this week that 78% of Israelis polled backed the plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza. What they forget is that the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is about the feeling of being forced off your land to begin with. I’m not even sure its about one specific Palestinian families desire to return to one specific house in Jaffa or Netzeret, but rather the knowledge that they were forced to leave a place and now have no right to choose where or whether they can return. People want the free agency to go places and live their lives with dignity and respect. They do not want another people to decide what is best for them.
And of course we know this lesson all too well as Jews, because it is the essence of the story of the Exodus. Pharaoh wanted to control all the Israelites - to determine their fates, to rule over them and deny them the free will of free people. It is a frequent misconception that the original demand of the Israelites was to go out from slavery and leave Egypt and travel to Israel and be a free people. That is, actually, not at all what the Israelites asked for. Two weeks ago, in Parshat Shemot, chapter 5, we read the following:
וְאַחַר בָּאוּ מֹשֶׁה וְאַהֲרֹן וַיֹּאמְרוּ אֶל־פַּרְעֹה כֹּה־אָמַר יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל שַׁלַּח אֶת־עַמִּי וְיָחֹגּוּ לִי בַּמִּדְבָּר׃
Afterward Moses and Aaron went and said to Pharaoh, “Thus says יהוה, the God of Israel: Let My people go that they may celebrate a festival for Me in the wilderness.”
But Pharaoh said, “Who is Adonai that I should heed him and let Israel go? I do not know Adonai, nor will I let Israel go.”
In other words, the Israelites weren’t demanding that they cease being slaves and be given total freedom. They were only asking for a couple days off in the desert. They wanted a modicum of control of their own lives, and Pharaoh said no. The problem here is not that the Israelites want total self determination. The problem is that denying them any semblance of control over their lives is intolerable. Ultimately, Pharaoh refuses to give them any self-determination, and so God, Moses, and Aaron begin asserting their demand for rights more and more, and finally it results in the people completely going free from under Pharaoh’s thumb.
‘Gee that’s interesting rabbi’, you may say to yourself. ‘But what does it mean going forward for Israel and the Jewish people?’ The answer is a resounding ‘I don’t know.’ At high holidays I gave a sermon about two soccer teams in which the thesis was ‘these two peoples are interdependent, and their futures are tied together.’ And I still believe that. In contrast, the proposal to simply remove Palestinians from Gaza as a solution is the opposite of interdependence - it is instead radical amputation - it proposes that Jews cannot live with Palestinians and therefore permanent relocation and racial and religious separation are the only solution. That would be a very dangerous suggestion because of what it would mean for the rest of Israeli society. If Israel can’t figure out a way to live alongside Palestinian society in Gaza, can it live alongside Palestinians in the West Bank, who enter and exit Israel for work every day? Can it live with the 21% of the population that are Israeli Arabs, who are clustered in predominantly Arab cities like Natzeret and Umm Al Fahm and Abu Snan and Sachnin.
One of the challenges of the Trump plan is that it feels like empty words. Israelis fought a war that demolished 70% of the buildings in Gaza, but now someone else claims they’re going to clean up the mess. To that end, I can see why so many Israelis like Trumps plan - because if it were to come to pass, Israelis don’t have to provide security , or provide food aid, or rebuild the mess. The Americans will do it. And that sounds fairly unlikely to me. I could see a way forward in which the US, the EU, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel all collaborate to rebuild Gaza together. Perhaps they could even placate Donald Trump by letting the Army Corps of Engineers build him a beachfront resort. Or maybe a coalition of states rebuilding together sounds just as improbable as Trump building golf courses in Rafah. I concede that maybe I’m too optimistic.
In our Torah, God tells the Israelites that God will split the sea and take them out of Egypt. But, famously, in a midrash in the Talmud, the rabbis tell us that none of the Israelites were brave enough to enter the water. And then Nachshon Ben Amminidav walked in, and the sea parted after him. In other words, yes God will help you cross the sea. But you have to walk into it. You have to put one foot in front of the other. There is no quick and easy solution after the war for Israel and Gaza. The solution for both will involve either increased cooperation and collaboration that will slowly, over a generation, lead to the first steps towards mutual trust, or just another generation in the wilderness of animosity.
The parsha this week, beshallach, includes the song of the seas, which appears in the morning shacharit prayer every single day of the year without fail. It has one sentence that always gives me pause - Adonai Ish Milchamah - Adonai Shemo - God is a man of war, Adonai is God’s name. The implication could be that God was with Israel in their battle with Pharaoh, although to be honest, there was no battle with Pharoah - the Israelites ran and God closed the sea on them. But in general, the sentiment is appreciated - when you find yourself in combat, when you are in a foxhole, God is with you.
After the battle, when it’s time to clean up, though, the responsibility to rebuild isn’t on God, but upon humans. In a section of our prayerbook we read on shabbat right after ein keloheinu, or realistically, a section we skip almost every week, it says the following:
אָמַר רַבִּי אֶלְעָזָר אָמַר רַבִּי חֲנִינָא: תַּלְמִידֵי חֲכָמִים מַרְבִּים שָׁלוֹם בָּעוֹלָם, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: ״וְכׇל בָּנַיִךְ לִמּוּדֵי ה׳ וְרַב שְׁלוֹם בָּנָיִךְ״.
Rabbi Elazar said that Rabbi Ḥanina said: Torah scholars increase peace in the world, as it is said: “And all your children [banayikh] shall be taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of your children” (Isaiah 54:13). If all the children of Israel are taught of the Lord, there will be peace for all.
אַל תִּקְרֵי ״בָּנָיִךְ״ אֶלָּא ״בּוֹנָיִךְ״.
The Sages interpreted this verse homiletically: Do not read your children [banayikh], but your builders [bonayikh]. Torah scholars are those who build peace for their generation.
God may be an ish milchamah, a man of war, but Torah scholars are the builders, or the rebuilders. We are called on to build literally, and by building literally, our tradition tells us ‘great will be the peace of your children.’ So I welcome the idea of turning Gaza into the riviera of the middle east. But you can’t solve past injustices by committing a host of brand new ones. It must be that the long, slow process of rebuilding be done by many people and together, and that the main goal of any construction projects be in solving a generational refugee problem rather than creating a brand new one yet again.