How Come Trump’s Quiet About Gaza?

I went to Israel for the first time in 1967. At some point during that trip, I took a brief walk along the boardwalk in Tel Aviv or maybe it was Jaffa, I don’t recall which was which. But as I walked along looking out at the Mediterranean, I thought I was walking on the boardwalk in Rockaway, Queens or the boardwalk which ran alongside Collins Avenue in Miami Beach.

Why did I think that Israel in those days was just like the United States? Because both Rockaway and Miami Beach were locations that attracted large numbers of older, often retired Jews, many of whom had come to the United States from Eastern Europe as refugees before and after World War II, and they still preferred to communicate with one another in Yiddish, which had been their native tongue.

In 1967, a majority of the Jewish residents in Israel were cut from the same stripe — older immigrants from Eastern Europe who had somehow survived the Holocaust and had emigrated to more secure locations by leaving their country of origin and going East instead of West.

Both the American and Israeli Jewish communities had one other thing in common — they were mostly Jewish in a cultural but not religious sense, which meant they were secular in outlook and belief. For the most part they were also politically liberal with a political outlook which reflected its Socialist, East…