Once, our enemies wore uniforms and met us on the field of battle. Instead, terrorists [now] shoot at our children while hiding behind their children, numbers of whom are tragically killed. And the battlefield is now on American campuses, in the media, even in supermarkets where Israeli products have been boycotted.
Where once we could see the Arab planes and tanks attacking us, now we cannot see the Iranian nuclear program designed to destroy us. In place of Middle Eastern dictators, there are rebellions that many Americans associated with Lexington and Concord but [which] for many Israelis evoked Mogadishu and Benghazi.
THE PEACE process has changed. In place of handshakes on the White House lawn, even moderate Palestinian leaders today glorify terrorists. They deny the Jewish connection to Jerusalem, and declare statehood without making peace. There is Hamas, which now rules Gaza and whose covenant calls not only for Israel's destruction but for the murder of Jews everywhere - a genocidal organization.
Twenty years ago, the Israeli government did not support the creation of a Palestinian state, though a majority of Israelis believed peace was possible.
Today, the official policy of the Netanyahu government is the two-state solution but the majority of Israelis doubt whether the Palestinians can achieve it. Still, rarely a day goes by without commentators - many of them American Jews - claiming that we're not doing enough for peace.
They focus on the settlements, which take up less than two percent of the West Bank. They seem to forget the 21 settlements we uprooted in Gaza in the hope of advancing peace, and the many thousands of rocket attacks we received instead.
They often forget the generous Israeli peace offers rejected by the Palestinians, or the thousand Israelis killed by suicide bombs. Of course, America is a democracy - like Israel - and everyone has the right to criticize. No, we're not perfect - just read the Israeli press. We're just startled, sometimes, when the criticism is ill-informed and overwhelming.
Israeli society is changing.
There are more religiously observant Israelis today, larger minority populations, and more young people who feel more Israeli than Jewish - who see themselves not as am yisrael but rather as ha'am hayisraeli.
Yes, Israel is the start-up nation, but the flip side of our technological success is a wider social gap between haves and haves-less. As the only industrialized country bordering Africa, Israel has also become deluged with illegal immigrants seeking work.We have many more problems, but we also sense that fewer people understand us, including some American Jews.
CHANGES, MEANWHILE, have also occurred among American Jews. The horror of 9/11, the trauma of two wars, the economic crisis - all have left deep scars. Politics have become polarized. I once tried to meet American Jewish Democrats and Republicans in the same room. Once.
Many Jews, like other Americans, want to focus on their domestic challenges before dealing with those elsewhere [in the] world. More and more, Israel is in danger of being seen not as a real country with real people confronting real-life problems, but as an issue; as a society either to be idealized or demonized or simply ignored.
These changes have impacted our relationship - I've witnessed it up close. The last thing I thought I'd ever have to do on this job was to try to change the minds of an incoming class of rabbinical students opposed spending their required year in Israel.
I never imagined that my request to display posters against the Iranian nuclear program outside of synagogues would go largely unheeded or, in the case of one rabbi, rejected as too risky for his congregation.
At the same time, I never pictured myself calling Israeli leaders in the middle of the night urging them to remove YouTube clips designed to convince Israelis living in this country to come home.
Those videos, I explained, however unintentionally, questioned whether Jews could remain Jewish in America.
