The Israelites, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise

September 24, 2011 Martha Thomases 9 Comments

My dentist wanted to talk about Israel.  First, I wanted him to get his hands out of my mouth.

He says the whole world hates the Jews.  Unlike all the other oppressed group, he says, the Jews are despised by everyone.  Also, his daughters (and therefore his grandchildren) live in Israel.

My opinions about Israel change by the moment.  I’m to the right of my friends in the peace movement, but I’m to the left of everyone else I know.  And because I have trouble figuring out what I think, I’m going to use this column to try to pull apart the threads.

When I was a child, I heard all the Zionist propaganda that coincided with the release of the movie, Exodus.  The Jews needed a country so that there would never be another Holocaust.  That’s pretty much my dentist’s position.  It was also my mother’s, who remembered the German-American Bund goose-stepping drills in the small town where she grew up in the 1930s.  

When I was old enough to read history, I was charmed by the idealism of the original Zionists, from the early 1900s.  They were not necessarily observant Jews, but they shared a vision of a Socialist utopia.  Communal kibbutzes would work the land,and orange trees would bloom in the desert.  My friend, Barbara, spent some time on a kibbutz during college, and her experiences inspired me.

And because Israel was established as a Jewish state, I felt responsible.  I basked in how great we must be to have such a cool country.

My mother was still alive when the news of Palestinian resistance started to appear on American media (to the extent that my teenage self would notice).  When I asked her about it, she said that the Arab states, which were mostly dictatorships, told their people that everything was Israel’s fault.  By placing blame outside, these monarchs and militarists could keep their power.  

This is my background on the issue. Some of it stands the test of time.  Unfortunately, not all of it does.  

The way Israel has treated the Palestinians is abominable.  The fact that, sometimes, kids throw rocks at soldiers is no excuse (it should be noted that throwing rocks at soldiers – or anyone else with visible guns – is really stupid).  Just as Jews don’t like it when people make blanket assumptions about us as individuals, we should understand that Palestinians are not all terrorists, or part of Hamas, or Al Qaeda.

It doesn’t help that some ultra-Orthodox Jews deliberately provoke Palestinians by building  settlements in their territory, despite the Israeli government’s agreement to stop.  And it helps even less than Benjamin Netanyahu supports them.

Of course, the root problem is that the entire area was colonized by Europeans, and the borders to countries were drawn up with no regard to the ethnic and tribal affiliations of the people who lived their originally.  See also Africa, South America and Southeast Asia.

Israel is a democracy, not a monolith, and within its borders there are various factions, with various opinions about what should be done.  Like the United States, their electoral process has been exploited by fundamentalists with their own, extra-political interests.  However, even within the moderate center, there is disagreement, as this recent Op-Ed piece shows.  And there are many on the left who support the Palestinians in their struggle for human rights.

In this country, with our over-simplified world view, we conflate support of Israel with support of American Jews.  And then we assume that all American Jews share an opinion.  All of these assumptions are wrong.  One can support Israel’s right to exist while still condemning their hurtful and stupid actions.  One can support Israel’s right to exist and still support a Palestinian state.  And one can support Israel because one believes that the Second Coming is contingent on getting all the Jews over there.  I find that latter position to be deeply and hurtfully anti-Semitic.  

Our stupid discourse doesn’t help anything.  Facts don’t seem to make any difference.

I’m writing this on Thursday.  By the time it’s published, I expect to have changed my mind six or seven more times.  Stay tuned.

Media Goddess Martha Thomases thinks it is the Talmudic tradition that causes her to consider so many different perspectives.