Peter Kalis: A Lament for Israel
In the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia of my childhood, there were two major religious denominations: Roman Catholic and “Other.” “Other” included most Protestant churches, and that’s where the few Greek Orthodox kids like my brother and me were situated. Not that any of this mattered on the basketball courts and ball fields. I mention it here because I have no recollection of any Jewish students in my little high school.
As a senior, I worked as a night manager in a McDonald’s and reported to the day manager, an Army veteran named Don who dispensed wisdom while maneuvering a chaw of tobacco around his mouth. One day at the transition between shifts, Don asked me whether I had heard about the war that had just begun.
Don’t mess with Israel
I’m sure I said yes but I’m equally sure I had no awareness of any war except the Vietnam War, to which I suspected that my friends and I would soon be dispatched.
Don said Egypt made a big mistake. “Everyone knows you don’t mess with Israel.” He didn’t say “mess”.
Because I delivered the Wheeling Intelligencer, I made it a point to fill my information void the next morning before school and learned that there was a conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors. I wanted to impress Don with my knowledge, but he beat me to it. “Told ya.” It turns out that what came to be known as the Six Day War had already concluded with Israel as the victor.
Several years later I arrived in New Haven to study law just as the Munich Olympics began. Arab extremists launched their deadly assault on the Olympic Village and killed Israeli athletes, took others hostage, and killed them too.
A year later, just as I arrived in England for graduate school, a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur. This one took about three weeks to conclude with Israel once again the victor.
As I prepared to defend my dissertation a few years later, the Palestinian-led hijacking of an Air France flight from Tel Aviv led to a mass hostage situation at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. Israel rescued the hostages. The older brother of current Prime Minister Netanyahu led the rescue and lost his life.
The holy sites
I mention these milestones in my knowledge of Israel to illustrate how headline-driven my knowledge has been. I knew about the Holocaust, of course, and the need of the Jewish people to call their historical homeland as their own nation. It was both right and necessary. But you would think that a guy who had spent 22 years in formal education would know a little more about Israel and the Jewish tradition.
In 2018, my family and I decided to spend a few days in Israel as stops on an Eastern Mediterranean cruise. Our first Israeli docking was to be in Ashdod, but the ship captain awoke the passengers at 5 a.m. to inform us that there were incoming rockets from Gaza. We would need to move northward to Haifa. There, we met our Israeli guide, a gregarious guy who accompanied us to Jerusalem and Galilee. On that visit I experienced a spiritual awakening.
Over the years, I had developed the same relationship with church attendance as I now have with my business suits – weddings and funerals only. I’m still pretty much that way.
But the Christian in me — the spiritual one my mother hoped for — flickered to life in Jerusalem at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the site of Jesus’ empty tomb and where he was crucified, and in Galilee, the location of most of Jesus’ ministry. The memory of my adult children standing next to the Sea of Galilee is one of the lasting images etched in my memory.
Israel made it possible
Israel made this possible. Since the Six Day War when it assumed control of East Jerusalem, it has made the holiest sites of the Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — accessible to one and all, an openness that had not been enjoyed when Jordan controlled the location. The Western Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Dome of the Rock have moved tens of millions closer to their faiths.
Now we see Israel attacked by sadistic savages. And we see American college students — shallow children who couldn’t find the Middle East on a map — siding with genocidal maniacs. We are surely at an inflection point for the civilized world, and those kids aren’t the answer. Israel is, as it fights for our civilized future.
Peter Kalis was before his retirement chairman and global managing partner of K&L Gates LLP.