I know I’ve been absent for longer than usual. Chalk it up to not feeling up to par, and there’s nothing worse for doing anything than feeling like crap. Before I fell ill, I was working on a couple of pieces. Unfortunately, the reasons for writing them haven’t gone away. So, hopefully, the next couple of pieces will largely be based on what I was writing before I stopped. You’ll know when I’ve caught up with myself when the pieces are entirely recent. In the meantime, I’ll finish what I was working on and simultaneously bring it up to date. So here goes:
“To be or not to be, that is the question.”
Of course, you recognize that line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. There may be no more famous line in all English literature. First declaimed on the stage in 1600 or 1601 by Richard Burbage, a famed Shakespearean actor, it has resonated from then until now — four hundred twenty-three years.
No matter what one thinks about the current war between Israel and Hamas, no matter what peripheral issues are assigned to the causes of the conflict, what issues are commonly described as the “root cause” of the fight, important as they may be, there really is only one root cause: The existence of Israel. And that question, “Shall Israel exist?” as an independent Jewish nation-state, is the only question on the table, as it has been since 1948. “To be or not to be.”
That question is simply part of a larger question that has plagued the world (or at least the Western world) for an even longer time, back at least to the Middle Ages. “What shall we do about the Jews.” Different nations, different rulers and religious sects have responded to that question differently at different times. Throughout history, Jews have sometimes been more or less accepted as a somewhat integral part of various societies but also not accepted at all; it’s been a constant see-saw. As a group, they have always been seen as something separate and apart from normal society. Chalk it up to one of Christianity’s gifts to world peace and harmony. Not.
Recently, I read David Nirenberg’s “Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today.” His book focuses on the relationships between these three communities in the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages. During much of the period, the three communities got along fairly well, although Christians were clearly the dominant faith with little separation between church and state. Apparently, genealogy played little role in how people’s religion was viewed. That seemingly began to change in the mid-14th century as the Black Death swept Europe. In its wake, during which Jews were often accused of causing the plague (naturally — when you can’t blame anyone else, blame the Jews), thousands of Jews were convinced (coerced?) to convert to Christianity. However, there were so many conversions that the Christian clergy began to doubt the sincerity of those conversions. Genealogy, the family history of religious faith, increasingly became important in determining who was a “true” Christian and a sort of “crypto” Christian. Jews who came from a long family tradition of Judaism were seen as a group separate from all other inhabitants of the region — an alien body within the body politic that had to be kept apart from others. Jews became seen as part of a separate, though stateless, nation. Part of the reason for the imposition of the Inquisition, begun in 1473, was to root out false Christian conversions among the Jews. Finally, in 1492, the same year that “Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” all Jews were expelled from the peninsula. A century later, Muslims were similarly expelled.
In case you’re interested in why Jews were less favored than Muslims, it was simply that Jews denied the divinity of Jesus and the virgin birth, whereas, in Islam, Jesus was seen as a prophet and messenger of God. But whatever favor Muslims received, they were soon relegated to the same treatment as the Jews: coerced conversion, the Inquisition, and expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula.
It may be that Christianity is responsible for much good in the world. It also is true that it is responsible for much historical evil in the world, including seeing Jews as a people apart from their fellow countrymen no matter what country they were in, people to be despised.
One of the great ironies of today’s leftist opposition to Israel and its war with Hamas in America is the accusation that they are just like other White people, guilty of all the typical sins of Whites, including colonialism.
The Balfour Declaration, signed in November 1917 during World War One, in which the British promised Jews a national homeland in Israel, was designed (at least in part) to encourage Jews in Britain (and other countries around the world, including America) to support the allies in the war against Germany and the Ottoman Empire (which included Israel and Palestine among its territories). If it was not the understanding that various Arab groups had of post-war territorial divisions, the British and French promised everything to everybody to gain support.
However, the Balfour Agreement (in my opinion) was designed not only to gain Jewish financial support for the war but also to encourage Jews to leave Britain (and perhaps the rest of Europe) after the war. Anti-Semitism was rampant in Britain, as it was in much of Europe. One solution to “the Jewish problem” would be to have the Jews voluntarily leave. And many Jews wanted to leave Europe. Eliakum Zunser, one of my great grandfathers, wanted to leave Russia long before Balfour and the war. Eventually, he emigrated to America in 1889, but only because he thought he was too old to go to Israel.
In America, Eliakum found a country and a city in particular — New York — that was relatively tolerant and accepting of Jews. Not that there was a lack of anti-Semitism, but it rarely reached the violence and blatant discrimination that was present in Russia and much of Europe. The lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia in 1915 was the single most extreme example of violence against Jews two years after Eliakum’s death. Frank’s lynching was accompanied by postcards picturing his death, which were sent to relatives and friends of Georgians delighting in his execution, the same kind of postcards that accompanied the lynching of Blacks in the South. And in America, anti-Semitism could sometimes take a similar form to bigotry against Blacks. I remember seeing an old photograph of a hotel entrance in Florida that proudly proclaimed, “No Jews allowed.” When I was growing up in the 1940s and 50s, the influence of Henry Ford’s virulent anti-Semitism could still be felt in the auto industry. On more than one occasion from 1950 – 52, I was accused of being a “Christ killer” by kids who went to the parochial school that was on the same block as my public school.
Writing intelligently and dispassionately about the Israel-Hamas war is virtually impossible. Perhaps the extremity of what Hamas did on October 7th makes dispassion almost impossible, and I won’t pretend that I’m a dispassionate observer. Perhaps that was one of Hamas’s goals — to drive people to extreme sides — but I have no way of knowing that. What I do know is that extremity tends to breed extremity.
But here’s what I also know: Once again, we’ve been reminded that the problems in the Middle East are not simply whether Israel is actually an “apartheid” state or how Israel treats Palestinians, which is how some people (including Human Rights Watch) described the root cause of Hamas attack on October 7th in its immediate aftermath. But that really isn’t true. Nor is it true that Palestinian resistance to the idea of a Palestinian state separate and apart from Israel is the root cause of anything. And, yes, if you can manage to stand far enough from the conflict as former president Obama has done, it is certainly true that no one’s hands are completely clean when it comes to Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.
But the current war between Israel and Hamas is not the same as the general discussions about who is or isn’t more at fault and over what. It isn’t seen that way by Hamas or by Israel. But what is most disappointing to me is the way the conflict is being seen by what I think of as the radical Left in this country and by all too many college students and their teachers. What’s become evident through many of the anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian protests is much more basic than the question of whether Israel is an “apartheid” state or mistreats Palestinians, the “root” cause of Hamas’s October 7th attacks that, as I noted earlier, was generally and sort of benignly ascribed as the cause of the events that day. If Israeli treatment of Palestinians (either in the West Bank or Gaza) was not the root cause, what is?
The root cause of October 7th was simply the very existence of Israel. Hamas’s clearly stated intention is the elimination of the state of Israel. Or to be more clear, the Jewish state of Israel. There’s no mistaking that since it’s in their charter, along with every anti-Semitic/anti-Jewish accusation and libel you can think of. It embraces all the garbage in the long-discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The intention of Iran, the main state supporter of Hamas, is the same. So, too, with Hezbollah. And Islamic Jihad and whatever other extremist Palestinian groups there are. And so, too, with the American (and European) radical leftists and student organizations and academics who carry signs and chant variants of “Palestine will be free, from the river to sea.” Whether everyone who engages in that chant truly understands or believes in what they are saying is irrelevant. But it says what it says and means what it says. But it’s a catch rhyme, don’t you think?
That’s not to mention those who say that whatever Hamas did on October 7th was “justified” because it was “resistance,” and anything done in the name of resistance is justified. That is always the excuse for terrorism. The ends always justify the means. If that means suicide bombers in crowded cafes and busses, fine. If that means blowing up airplanes, fine. If that means raping women, fine. If that means decapitating babies, have at it.
When one hears of Americans, Black or White, talk of decolonization, what do we think they mean? It’s simply that Israel, the Jewish state of Israel, should disappear. That 1948 should never have happened and must be reversed.
It is a minor inconvenience that there was no Palestinian state before 1948. You don’t need me to tell you the region's history. Look it up for yourself. But in its broadest strokes, just dealing with the past 400 years, the area was part of the Ottoman Empire from 1517 until 1918. The Ottomans sided with the Germans during World War One, and, not surprisingly, their defeat at the hands of the Allies resulted in the dismembering of the Empire. During the war, the British promised all sorts of things to various Arab leaders to gain their support against the Germans. While making promises, they were simultaneously breaking those same promises with the secretly negotiated Sykes-Picot Agreement 1916, in which Britain and France agreed (with the concurrence of Russia and Italy) on their respective spheres of influence in the post-war/post-Ottoman Middle East should they win the war.
And, just by the way, during World War Two, most of the Arab world sided with the Nazis. Given how the Middle East was divvied up after World War One between Britain and France, who could blame them? The enemy of my enemy is my friend. In so doing, it embraced the Nazi view of Jews. I am reminded of the view ascribed to British historian Isiah Berlin that anti-Semitism is hating Jews just a little more than necessary. It sounds like such a British upper-class construction, doesn’t it?
Following the war, Jews living in the British Mandate in Palestine fought the British (not Muslims), trying to create a state in which they could be safe and not the victim of the vicissitudes of wavering attitudes of Christians towards Jews. After all, if the Holocaust had taught them anything, it wasn’t simply that the Holocaust was a purely German enterprise. Virtually every country in continental Europe participated in it. Poland, Hungary, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Ukraine, and France are just a few. And let’s not forget the Catholic Church, that shining example of religious tolerance — Not. Yes, there were individual Europeans who refused to participate, who hid Jews, who helped to smuggle them out, but given the scope of the horror, hardly enough to make much of a dent in the German killing machine. Is it any wonder that so many surviving Jews wanted to flee Europe to Israel after the war?
In 1948, after the UN created the state of Israel, there was the opportunity to create a Palestinian state on what is basically the West Bank. Still, it was rejected by the Arab states, preferring to try to eliminate the new state by force. I wish I could say that the Israelis were purely virtuous and the Arabs purely evil in the war that followed. Much as my view of the events in those few short years was created by the romance of Leon Uris’s novel “Exodus,” which I read more than once, and the oratory of Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador to the US in the 1950s, it was disheartening to learn years later that war is war and bad things happen by otherwise well-intentioned people. So, yes, there was ethnic cleansing on the part of the Israelis, although hardly all Arabs were expelled from Israel during the war.
One of the things that has always created a problem for some agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians has been the so-called “right of return,” the right of Palestinians who forcibly or voluntarily left Israel to return to their original homes. It has been a convenient excuse for both sides to be a barrier to a Palestinian state. But it should always be remembered that the Arab states didn’t want to absorb the fleeing Palestinians into their countries. Thus, the refugee camps have existed from that time until today as a constant running sore in the body politic.
While there is much fuss made about the Palestinians who were evicted or left Israel, just about as many Jews were forced out of Arab countries, and most went to Israel. They are hardly mentioned at all, and no one, including the Israelis, is claiming that they should be allowed to return to their homes and businesses. But is it any surprise that many of those Jews and their descendants don’t look kindly upon their Arab neighbors and have little to no interest in the creation of a Palestinian state?
Do you really need to read this much of the history of the Jews? You would think that all those university students and far too many of their teachers know all of this. After all, they go to or have graduated from some of the most prestigious schools in the world. Did they ever take a history class? Well, to be fair, I took lots of history classes in my college days, and anti-Semitism in the life of Europe (or America) was barely, if ever, mentioned. And young people, who tend to be filled with moral certainty, also have a wonderful capacity to be willfully ignorant about the things they have the greatest moral certainty about. They like a world of black and white with no shades of gray, and history is almost entirely filled with shades of gray. Their professors have no such excuses.
Let me briefly touch on the heads of Harvard, M.I.T, and Penn, who were eviscerated during their congressional testimony, and rightfully so. I don’t know what they thought going into a political arena where no one is inclined to put up with carefully nuanced academic arguments. Whoever prepared them for combat in a hostile environment should be fired. It is striking, however, that academics who can make the most carefully reasoned arguments about permitted speech on their campuses, who are concerned about such things as microaggressions, triggering words, and safe spaces, should have failed so utterly when it came to actual verbal aggression when it came to Jews. Clearly, the sensitivities of Jews seemed to be of a different category than the sensitivities of Blacks, Latinos, and the LGBTQIA+ community. After all, the Jews of Israel are White and are merely colonialist settlers and, in the current mindset of a certain segment of the Left, just another bunch of White people who are all the same, all equally guilty of everything. Collective guilt is the name of the game.
It turns out the “free speech” for the Left means the same thing as “free speech” means for the Right: Free Speech is approved of speech, what you’re allowed to say, allowed to think. If it all sounds a bit Orwellian, well, so be it.
Let me make something else clear: I think Bibi Netanyahu and his right-wing government are an abomination. Their sins are many: the movement to increase political control of the judicial system, the increasing inclination to authoritarianism, the increasing influence of the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox over the economy, education, and even the definition of who is actually a Jew and who is allowed to become a Jew and under whose auspices. Bibi and his crowd obviously don’t want to see a Palestinian state and would prefer that Israel annex the West Bank, the “river to the sea” in reverse. Over the past seven or eight months, it’s been my impression that the government has wanted to use the West Bank settlers to push the Palestinians and provoke them into starting a third Intifada. One can’t help but wonder if the supposed intelligence failures weren’t in large measure a reflection of the panoply of issues on which the Netanyahu administration had its attention focused, including its fights with the Defense and Intelligence establishment and the ongoing street demonstrations opposing the proposed revisions to the justice system. It’s not that the intelligence didn’t exist but, apparently, that no one wanted to hear it. The Hamas attack of October 7th prevented the West Bank Intifada from happening in the short run. But the settlers continue to provoke, and it could yet happen despite the efforts of the Biden administration and others to get the government to rein the settlers in.
I have little to say about the conduct of the current war. The number of Gazans who have been killed is dreadful, particularly most of the women and all the children. I have no idea how many of the men have been a part of Hamas. Nor do I have any idea what a more reasonable way for Israel to conduct its war would be if its goal is the decimation of Hamas and the elimination of its leadership. What additional risks should Israeli soldiers be asked to take to save more Palestinian lives? I don’t know how to answer the question. And just to add one more sin to Bibi’s already full basket: His refusal to meet with the families of the hostages taken by Hamas. It is unfathomable to me.
But let’s return to the original question: Should Israel exist or not? To be or not to be. Let’s say that Israel should no longer exist and that the Israelis agreed to dissolve their state. What should happen to them? It’s the age-old question, isn’t it? What should we do about the Jews? For those Jews living in Israel, either they should voluntarily accept a role as an unwanted minority in a country that, like other Arab countries, is hostile (at best) to their interests, or they should leave. Who cares which it is? After all, they are Jews, and, as has been demonstrated through the centuries, Jews apparently don’t belong anywhere.
Hello Michael,
Glad you're feeling better - Thanks so much for putting into concise and coherent verse the thoughts I've held for a very long time.
Joe