TEN

ISRAEL ATTACKS GAZA

DECEMBER 2008

 

 

 

Jews, historically, have been irrationally feared, hated, and killed, and it’s not surprising that the irrationality that has surrounded them for so many centuries, the fire of irrationality in which they were almost extinguished, has jumped across from soul to soul, as if in a folktale or myth, and taken possession of many Jews, in Israel and in the United States.

Recent history shows that the Jews, as a people, have found few friends who are honest and true. During World War II, when Hitler’s anti-Semitism was murdering Jews by the million, the world’s nations expressed their own anti-Semitism by refusing to house and welcome the tortured people, preferring instead to let them be exterminated if need be. After the war, the world felt it owed the Jews something—but then showed its lack of true regard for the tormented group by “giving” them a piece of land already populated (and surrounded) by another people—an act of European imperialism carried out exactly at the moment when non-European peoples all over the world were finally concluding that European imperialism was completely unacceptable and had to be resisted. And now we have the spectacle of American politicians encouraging and financing Israeli policies which will ultimately lead to more disaster and destruction for Jews.

It is not rational to believe that the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories will be terrorized by force and violence, by cruelty, by starvation, or by slaughter into a docile acceptance of the Israeli occupation. There is no evidence that that could possibly happen, and there are mountains of evidence to the contrary.

Many Israelis and many American Jews clearly believe that the Jews have always had enemies and always will have enemies—and who can be shocked that certain Jews might think that? To some of these individuals, a Palestinian boy throwing stones at an Israeli soldier, even if the boy’s house has been destroyed by the Israeli army, even if his family has been killed by them, is simply one figure in an eternal mob of anti-Semites, a mob made up principally of people to whom the Jews have done no harm at all, as they did no harm to Hitler. The conclusion drawn by many who hold this view of the world is that in the face of such massive and eternal opposition, Jews are morally justified in taking any measures they can think of to protect themselves. They are involved in one long eternal war, and a few hundred Palestinians killed today must be measured against many millions of Jews who were killed in the past. The agony the Israelis might inflict on a Palestinian family today must be seen in the perspective of Jewish families in agony all over the world in the past.

It is irrational for the Israeli leaders to imagine that the Palestinians will understand this particular point of view—will understand why Jews might find it appropriate, let us say, to retaliate for the death of one Jew by killing a hundred Palestinians. If a Palestinian killed a hundred Jews to retaliate for the killing of one Palestinian—for that matter, if a Thai killed a hundred Cambodians to retaliate for the killing of one Thai—the Israeli leaders of course would agree that that would be unjust, that would be racist, as if one Palestinian or one Thai were worth a hundred Israelis or a hundred Cambodians. But if a Jew kills a hundred Palestinians to retaliate for the killing of one Jew, to many Israelis this does not seem unjust, because it’s part of an eternal struggle in which the Jews have lost and lost and lost—they’ve already lost more people than there are Palestinians. Well, it’s not surprising that certain Jews would feel this way, but no Palestinian will ever share that feeling or be willing to accept it. What the Palestinians see is an implacable and heartless enemy, one that considers itself unbound by any rules or principles—an enemy that can’t be reasoned with but can only be feared, hated, and if possible killed.

As the years go by, and the Holocaust fades farther into the past, in every country more and more people are born to whom the outrageous behavior of the Israelis seems simply hateful, and to whom justifications based in the past seem simply sophistical. In particular, poor and oppressed people around the world are very well aware of the events in the Occupied Territories. They know little about the history of the Jews, and they identify strongly with the Palestinian struggle and point of view. During the period of time in which these younger people have been alive, the Jews have not been, for the most part, persecuted victims. They’ve seemed like unusually self-righteous victimizers. In other words, Israeli policy is day by day stoking a rage against Israel that can only lead to a grim future for all Israelis and possibly for all Jews everywhere.

Consequently, it’s patronizing and disgraceful and no favor to the Jews for American politicians—for narrow, short-term political advantage, for narrow, short-term global/strategic reasons, or even because of a sense of guilt over past Jewish suffering—to pander to the irrationality of the most irrational Jews.