True confession: earlier tonight I wound-up into a righteous rant about Israel, the Rafah sister city project, Israel’s atomic bomb, the murders of NGO volunteers and journalists, and the Sharon regime’s disrespect for human life. I waxed hyperbolic. Not everything I said was factual, but all of it was true. And then I unplugged the post. I watered it down. I was afraid and I edited out the juice because I was afraid.
Maybe I was afraid because I’ve been attacked lately by a fictive red-neck. Maybe I was afraid because my tendency to see a different political reality from my neighbors has blossomed into a full blown case of paranoid delusion. But what I was really afraid of in my heart was Israel.
I’m afraid of lawless people who know no bounds. And when they came for Eichmann I applauded them. I’m afraid of lawless people who know no bounds, and when the Mossad was forming in the Uris novel, I understood them.
It wasn’t the athletes from Finland who were murdered at Munich in 1972. It wasn’t the people of Tenerife who had their middle class fantasy life cut short by suicide bombers from across the border. It wasn’t six million Jainists who died in Germany’s camps. It was Jewish athletes. It was the people of Jerusalem. It was Jewish people from all over Europe in those death camps.
And admissions quotas in American universities were a 20th century problem. When they couldn’t be mandated, they gerrymandered. And the right wing Republican elitists in America have been among the worst kind of holocaust deniers, certainly Reagan’s visit to Bitburg proved that. The situation in Israel and Palestine has roots in the Renaissance. The Pope put the Jews in Rome in a Ghetto in 1555. They were still there in the 19th century. The Ghetto in Frankfurt was established in 1462.
Few groups in history have encountered more prejudice than the Jews. In Europe, the hatred of Jews has its origins in Christianity, a religion rooted in Judaism. For centuries, the Jews were the only religious minority in Christian Europe, often misunderstood and eyed with suspicion by the population, suppressed by the Church and exploited by the rulers. Religious intolerance led to discrimination and isolation. A climate developed in which many legends and myths about Jews and Judaism seemed credible. Some are still believed today. But despite of persecution and discrimination, Jewish communities kept their religious, their social and cultural traditions alive.
I understand the pressures on the people and the state of Israel, but I’m not Jewish. I can’t experience that depth of feeling that has so hardened hearts against the people of Palestine. But tonight, when I wrote a post that was over the top – to make a point – about the state of Israel, I was afraid. I was afraid to speak out against the evil of the wall, afraid to speak up about the state terrorism, the oppression in Rafah, afraid of the Mossad and the JDL and ADL.
And why should I be afraid? Who’s going “to disappear” me? I’m nothing… gar nichts… gornish… What do I have to fear, me, a lowly blogger? I think I’d have less to fear if Israel had less to fear. I think Israel will have less to fear when Palestine has less to fear.
FEAR. Fuck Everything And Run.
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