Reflections

Last week I was startled that several people in their fifties to seventies seemed unaware of anti-Semitism in the U.S.

One asked me why people used to dislike Jews.

Well, most folks were fond of Jesus Christ. Their churches taught that the Jews had killed Jesus. Jews driven from their original homeland long ago, were a minority everywhere. Because Christians couldn’t lend money at interest, and people needed loans, some Jews became the moneylenders. Like Shylock. Which did not endear them to everyone.

A serious golfer noted that although I play many sports, I don’t golf. I explained that while my father loved tennis, he’d never learned golf, because Jews weren’t allowed in most country clubs. My friend was shocked.

While Hitler’s Germany took anti-Semitism to an extreme, Jews faced discrimination and even pogroms (mobs beating and even killing Jews) in many countries. In the U.S., covenants prohibited selling homes to Blacks or Jews. In the excellent 1947 film, Gentlemen’s Agreement, Gregory Peck plays a reporter who, when moving to New York City to work for a magazine, tells people he’s Jewish, to see how people treat him. (Rather shabbily.) He writes an expose on widespread anti-Semitism.

Particularly during the current violence in the Middle East, we should recall that.

But I’ve never had a clue how we could solve the Middle-East problem, or how British and U.S. leaders should have proceeded in 1915 or 1947.

I used to wonder if folks in countries where U.S. oil companies ruined the land or where United Fruit and our CIA supported vicious dictators, might come here and start killing a bunch of us as a reprisal. That’d be both tragic and understandable. We are not our international corporations; but we suffer them, and belittle the damage they do elsewhere.

In the Middle East, both peoples, Jews and Palestinians, are legitimately aggrieved, and have histories of suffering, and have been dispossessed of their lands and homes and societies. (They also have competing religious idols telling them the land is theirs, which complicates matters.)

Nothing justifies attacking civilians, as Hamas did. Even in war, that’s theoretically a crime, although nightly bombings of London or German cities all happened, as did Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Just as we are not our international corporations, or our Ku Klux Klan, the average Palestinian is not Hamas. S/he might hate Israel, understandably; but most Palestinians are not part of Hamas. I understand Israel’s desire to destroy Hamas forever. I understand Palestinians resenting Israel, and the U.S. Palestinians were treated like our tribes. Palestine was a country on the map, that no longer exists; and the nation where Palestine was treats Palestinians as second-class citizens. Even now, what lands Palestinians still have, on the West Bank, are being quietly taken by “settlements” the Israeli government supports and we wink at.

Of course you’d want to wipe out the folks who massacred more than a thousand people to make a political statement!

But, equally of course, if you grew up in refugee camps hearing about the homes your parents or grandparents had, or had been driven out by “settlements,” you’d resent Israel. U.S. politicians and college professors who point this out should not be censured, or censored!

Meanwhile, Israel’s righteous anger has probably killed 8,000 Gaza civilians, and is still killing. Fellow human beings.

All, ultimately, because of England’s imperialism and the disregard of British and U.S. leaders for others.

                      – 30 – 

 

[The above column appeared Sunday, 5 November, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper's website, as well as on the KRWG website under Local Viewpoints.  A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/

[btw, this column appeared in Sunday’s paper; but one person who called said some friends were glad to see I was still writing these columns.  I do, every week.  However, the newspaper has made some changes in how the paper is made up: a group does it and the editorial pages are largely if not wholly identical for all regional papers.  That means sometimes my column doesn’t make it in the print edition; but it should be on-line at the Sun-News; most Sunday mornings, as today, I then reprint it on my blog, often adding comments; I then send the blog version to KRWG for its website.  I also record the radio commentary version and send it to KRWG and upload it to play Monday on KTAL-LP.  That means, if you don’t find it in the print edition of the Sunday Sun-News, feel free to check on-line, but it doesn’t reach my blog and KRWG ‘til later in the day.]

[I ran into a friend who is a rabbi.  After greetings and such, the first thing he said was, “I have no idea how anyone would solve this.”  I never have had.  I feel like lots of those responsible lived in the previous century: they were British or U.S. leaders without enough understanding of the people who lived in Palestine, or without enough concern to think things out, or passionate partisans for two opposed causes.  By now, both Jews and Palestinians have legitimate grievances; and, on both sides, leaders and others have acted badly.   Someone shared an amazing account (said to be true, perhaps apocryphal) of a Jewish woman who left Europe after the Holocaust.  Once in Israel, they kept promising her a house, for longer than they’d said it would take.  Finally they told her they had a house, and the next day took her and her modest set of belongings to it.  However, the table still bore the plates and cups and silverware of the Palestinian family who had lived in the house.  Much as she wanted a home, she asked them to return her to where she had been staying, saying that no matter how bad things got she wouldn’t do to others what had been done to her.

          There are also numerous internet memes on the theme of Israeli troops killing Palestinian civilians, and verbiage referring to the possibility of turning into what you hate.

          Those are not entirely fair.  They are also not anti-Semitism.  They, and much being said that folks want to expel students, fire professors, or censure politicians for, and political commentary.  As a general rule, they should not be censored or their authors punished.  I loathe Hamas, which kills innocent people and wishes to destroy Israel completely.  However, Hamas has no chance of doing that.  Rightly or wrongly, Israel came into existence and exists, with a population and unique culture. 

          But I loathe Netanyahu, too.  (He and Hamas depend upon each other.)  He too is dead set against partition, with two states side-by-side; he has helped support Hamas, knowing its extremism and the settlements would make a two-state solution unfeasible.  (Israel does a lot I dislike; but how do you agree to a separate state of which the likely leaders have sworn to extirpate you?)  Every time there is apparent progress toward peace, it is sabotaged by Hamas, Netanhyahu, or both.

          I don’t know precisely what we should be doing; but I’m pretty damned sure it doesn’t involve censoring other people. ]