It doesn't take a visit to bastions of British academia or the campus of Columbia University to know that America's relationship with Israel is, let's nebulously and comprehensively say, challenging. Is Israel a place that needs American support, and if so, is that support mostly emotional, financial
or political? If Israel needs America's support, does that make it subservient, or unhealthily dependent, like a child who hasn't graduated from college yet? Now that's an image that certainly wouldn't make Israel happy.
There are those people who will forever view Israel through a post-Holocaust lens, perhaps, one could say, through Ari Ben-Canaan's glasses. (Even that image is forever altered from reality by the film's casting the fairly-Aryan looking Paul Newman as its protagonist...) As moving and groundbreaking as that movie might have been in the 1950s, today's Israel promises more than the promised land ever has. Or perhaps it makes the same promises, but within a context that is uncompromisingly modern.
As Avi Hein writes in Ynet:
Despite the rhetoric of support for Israel, Americans are not looking at Israel on the verge of 5758 but rather imagining a mythic Third World country of the 1950s, a safe haven if ... no, when ... the Holocaust happens in the United States. The Israel of today is not a country dependent on American economic aid (in fact, at Israel's request Congress phased out economic aid) or charity. Israel is a high-tech powerhouse with a western European standard of living. It is in the top 25 world economies in terms of per-capita GDP, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Hein goes on to cite the presence of tech bigwigs Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM, and the fact that Israel "is not only technology but also Torah," and is a place where most Jews, whether they are religious or secular, marry other Jews, celebrate Jewish holidays, etc, and that people today choose Israel, instead of running away to Israel.
Despite Israel's tremendous success, my cousins in the Diaspora still don't see today's Israel. Viewing it as a place of refuge or a place to give a few pennies of pity charity (despite a record number of Israeli billionaires) in what journalist Matti Golan referred to as "blood for money" it's time for Americans to reevaluate their relationship with the Jewish homeland.
Hein notes that birth right is a good start, creating the foundation of a new generation's understanding of contemporary Israeli life. But it sounds like the pre-birthright generation also needs a re-education, a realignment of their understanding of and relationship to the Jewish state.
Hopefully future community and organizational trips from federations, synagogues and JCCs will look at Israel tourism with a fresh lens, more substantially acknowledging the contemporary -- from Torah to tech and beyond -- even if they still keep Ari Ben-Canaan and Newman's dreamy blue eyes -- in the backs of their minds.
