Letter to Valley Reporter June 5, 2002
As the community violence between Israelis and Palestinians continues
unabated, so do the comments on this page sent in by observers of the
bitter struggle.
I, too, feel compelled to pitch into the discussion.
I want to begin by taking up a comment of Al Raphael of Waitsfield, who
said in his letter of May 23 that the views on the Palestinian-Israeli
crisis voiced by Anne Bordonaro, also of Waitsfield, "may be colored by
the fact that her husband is an Arab."
Exactly. How could it be otherwise? And it’s similarly
inescapable that the views I will express here, on the same crisis, will
be colored too: in my case by my identity as an American Jew who was born
with a plain Yiddish spoon in his mouth.
The coloration of my particular Jewish identity has
prompted me from early boyhood -- too precociously, perhaps -- always
to sympathize first with the victims of social injustice. My parents came
of age in Czarist Russia in the century before last, where Jews were subjected
to periodic pogroms, to discrimination in every aspect of civic life,
and to widespread despisal. My father walked all though his life, even
here in America, like a man who knew those things; and I inherited from
him some of that sad and sorry knowledge of the man who has been stepped
on, and has had to apologize for it.
Today, when I see the word "Palestinian," I more and
more think the word "Jew." The similarities and symmetries between the
Jews of the past – of my father’s and my time – and the Palestinians of
today are multiple and astonishing. One people, Jewish, was persecuted
savagely, especially in the 1930's and ‘40's, and now, today, the other
people, Palestinian, is experiencing a parallel disaster, including fierce
and comprehensive assaults on its physical and civic life. One people
sought sanctuary and security through the achievement for itself of a
homeland and sovereign nationhood, and now the other seeks the same. Each
people, in its time and with its troubles, has represented to the rest
of the world an annoyance, an impediment. Roosevelt’s America turned away
a shipload of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany and was otherwise ungenerous with
visas for Jewish refugees fleeing for their lives. The Arab nations today,
correspondingly, appear to wish that their Palestinian brethren would
just get lost, and not be the occasion, even innocently, of sensational
events that might unsettle their authoritarian regimes.
It is a human fact that when your views are "colored,"
as mine and Anne Bordonaro’s are, you may hear loudly the tolling of bells
that other people don’t hear at all, or hear only faintly. Like most other
Americans, I heard the "bells toll," fittingly, on NPR every hour and
half hour, and in all other news media, on the day recently that a Jewish
grandmother and her baby granddaughter were killed, simultaneously and
atrociously, by a Palestinian suicide bomber. But when a Palestinian mother
and her two small children were killed on almost the same day by an Israeli
tank as they walked in a field near their home, the bells of our news
media tolled only faintly.
We are penetrated every day by this lesson from our
media, that the indiscriminate murders of Israelis are not only dreadful
events, but are heart-rending and personal to us, as well. At the same
time, the deaths of Palestinians, which now number three or four times
more than the deaths of Israelis, are glossed over as though Palestinians
were a lesser kind of being, belonging to the category "them," not "us."
The numerical disparity between Palestinian wounded and Israeli wounded,
it should be added, is far greater than the disparity between their respective
deaths, on the order of 12 or 15 Palestinians for every Israeli; while
the disparity in property damage, to the disadvantage of Palestinians,
is incalculably large. Since the beginning of the current Intifada, 20
months ago, suicide bombings on Israeli soil have on the average occurred
once a week, with the destruction of a bus here, a cafe there ... each
one a unique horror. But the really heavy destruction of war, the kind
wrought by massive fire from tanks, helicopters, and planes in assaults
that run for hours and sometimes days, falls entirely on Palestinian soil
and communities.
Are Palestinians somehow deserving of what they get
from the muzzles of tanks and airships because their leader is reputed
to be a fool? Or because they have the temerity to protest that the 22%
of the original territory of Mandate Palestine that has been left to them
by the all-powerful Israelis is daily encroached on by more and more Israeli
settlers who are making themselves masters of the land and its water and
roads, in flagrant violation of all international law? Or because, in
this most absurd phrase of our era, some of them happen to be "in the
wrong place at the wrong time" -- as though a bomb or shell or bullet
had a superior claim to a given space than the humans who had lived and
roamed there all their lives? Or do Palestinians deserve what they get
because, simply by virtue of being Palestinians, they are in some way
and by some reckoning either outright criminals or suspects, all three
million of them?
Having confined and controlled and administratively
criminalized the Palestinian people, the Israeli armed forces have popped
smartly into the corresponding role of a relentless police force, systematically
containing and policing and punishing the inmates of what has become surely
the world’s largest prison camp.
Looking at this state of affairs -- a Palestinian
ghetto surrounded by soldiers of the world's sixth most poweful army,
who have the license to shoot and kill at small provocations -- am I correct
in finding in this ghetto yet another expression of the Judaization of
the Palestinian people at the hands of the Israeli state?
************************
When Rabbi Hillel was asked two thousand years ago
if he could recite the whole wisdom of the Torah while standing on one
foot, he replied, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.
That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary."
Among the commentaries of this century, will there
be any that take up the stark question of how the Jews of Israel, nominal
descendants of the Hillel of blessed memory, could do today to their neighbors
even one of the awful things that were done to their forbears a short
half-century ago? If the Tenth and Unmentionable Thing has not been done
and never will be done, does that make tolerable the two or three or four
things, awful in the collective memory of Jews, that Jews themselves are
now inflicting on their fellow Semites in the hacked up Palestinian territories
where even the olive trees are being murdered? Has Israeli statecraft,
finally, become so sealed up and armored in its proficiency and has the
nation of Israel become so self-intoxicated, that memory of the events
of the 1930's and ‘40's that scored our Jewish flesh unforgettably can
have no place whatsoever in controlling our Jewish thoughts and actions
today? .
Jules Rabin
|
