David Suissa is Publisher & Editor-in-Chief of Tribe Media/Jewish Journal, where he has been writing a weekly column on the Jewish world since 2006. In 2015, he was awarded first prize for "Editorial Excellence" by the American Jewish Press Association. Prior to Tribe Media, David was founder and CEO of Suissa Miller Advertising, a marketing firm named “Agency of the Year” by USA Today. He sold his company in 2006 to devote himself full time to his first passion: Israel and the Jewish world. David was born in Casablanca, Morocco, grew up in Montreal, and now lives in Los Angeles with his five children.
As I was doing research last week for a column on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I stumbled on a story in The New Republic titled “Darfur Is Getting Worse: Why Aren’t the U.N. and U.S. Pressuring Khartoum to Reverse This Horrific Trend?”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his speech to the U.S. Congress on May 24, was like a battered fighter entering the final round of a championship bout. He knows his only chance to win is by a knockout. With nothing to lose, Bibi got up, and with the “Rocky” music blazing in his ears, fought the fight of his life.
During this latest episode of the long-running Israel-America reality show – which began Thursday with President Obama’s infamous “1967 lines” speech, followed by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s defiant response at the White House the next day, and, finally, Obama’s more conciliatory address at the AIPAC convention on Sunday– I vacillated between my emotional “Sephardi hothead” side and my calmer “Ashkenazi tachlis” side.
While the world media was buzzing on May 15 about the Arab demonstrations marking the “Nakba” (catastrophe) of 1948, I was listening to a commencement address by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu at Pomona College in which he lamented, among other things, America’s inability to reduce its addiction to oil. At one point, Chu spoke eloquently about a future in which electric cars would be mass-produced, and how this might ignite an environmental revolution that could “save the planet.”
“You must promise me that you will tell this story, what happened here,” the rabbi said to the bar mitzvah boy, Joachim “Yoya” Joseph. They had just finished the ceremony in a small barrack in Bergen-Belsen, where they covered the windows so the Nazi guards would not see them. The rabbi, Simon Dasberg, a community rabbi from Holland, pressed a little Torah scroll in the young boy’s hands as he spoke to him.
I’ll never forget sitting with a group of intellectuals several years ago, at the height of the messy war in Iraq, and discussing why President Bush and America had fallen so low in the esteem of the world. One great mind after another offered sophisticated analyses. My head was spinning.
One of the most ironic obstacles to peace in the Middle East is what I call the Jewish disease of “ifonlyitis.” This is the school of thought that says “if only” Israel would do this, or “if only” Israel would do that, then we finally might resolve the conflict. I suffer from the syndrome myself, and for that I blame my mother. She convinced me from a very young age that “if only” I put my mind to something, there’s nothing I can’t do.
I had a lively debate with the founder of J Street, Jeremy Ben-Ami, April 11 at Temple Israel of Hollywood, and as much as we disagreed sharply on many issues relative to Israel, there was one item on which we were in complete agreement: The Palestinians’ steady march toward unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state at the United Nations in September is a disaster-in-waiting for Israel.
You really screwed up. You screwed up so badly that Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic says you contributed, more than any other individual, to the delegitimization and demonization of the Jewish state.
