A Time for Choosing

Pure ice-cold antisemitism is guiding a lot of what you're reading and seeing in the last week. It's a crude hatred of Jews for being Jews, and it is as old as the hills.

When I was a young reporter in the Bronx, I often interviewed survivors of The Shoah - the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany, an ordered and relentless human extermination program that shipped Jews of all ages to vast death camps, where they were gassed or otherwise murdered. The men and women I interviewed had been mostly children or young adults at the time (this was the late 80s and early 90s) and the camp survivors among them bore Nazi tattoos on their wrists. Numbers, like tags on livestock.

These people emigrated to the United States and made their way to the northwest Bronx. Some were observant Jews of one denomination or another; many were not. I interviewed them in either late middle age or their dotages, and they’d all mostly had full lives - teachers, business people, professionals, involved community members. I was amazed at how soft-spoken and matter of fact these interviews were. The Kristallnacht happened, and then my neighbors turned me in, and then my entire family died, and then I came to America and went to school and got married. And so on. There was an underlying intensity like a large rubber band whose vibration you could sometimes feel when you asked a difficult question but always sensed was there. Today, they’d call that emotional trauma. But at that time, I sensed both a willingness to discuss the past tangled tightly with the human desire to move forward. Which I could understand: the people I was interviewing had (by luck or intervention) received a second chance that six million did not.

And of course, the overall abiding theme of all of these interviews (indeed the special annual Holocaust Remembrance issue of The Riverdale Press in those days) was Never Again.

Well, we have arrived at Again.

The barbarous murders last weekend of more than 1,300 Israelis by the highly organized and ruthless death squads of Hamas killers bear the stamp of institutional Jew hatred on a vast scale. The 200 concert goers, the 40 babies, the entire families in their homes, the grandmothers were all murdered because they were Jews. The sheer gore and brutality of the murder was designed - yes, drawn up in detail as a special operation - to instill fear and horror and pain.

It’s pretty easy for this Irish Catholic kid from Yonkers to mutter “not my fight” and slide out of the mentions in the endless battles over Israel, Palestine, religion, politics and the Middle East. You can’t win any argument in blood feuds, and there are only so many hours in the day. It’s easy to walk away. Not going there, can’t win, don’t understand every nuance and argument, too complex. Move on. Change the subject. Click elsewhere.

No more.

Pure ice-cold antisemitism is guiding a lot of what you're reading and seeing in the last week. It's a crude hatred of Jews for being Jews, and it is as old as the hills. It is the motivation for butchery and child murder by death squads. It’s a sick blood lust for hating and killing Jews, the likes of which the world hasn’t seen since the gates opened to the camps in 1945. It has nothing to do with Palestinian nationalism or liberation. I refuse to be silent about it within the word fog of geopolitical discussions and protest slogans.

Sign found in Vermont, USA - 2019

The progressive pro-Israel and pro-peace organization J Street (whose political views most closely align with my own) was direct and exceptionally clear after the massacre:

Hamas’ heinous, murderous attack is a gross violation of international law and constitutes an abhorrent crime against humanity. This is one of the most shocking massacres in the history of Israel, and indeed in the entire history of this century. The horror and pain is difficult to process and comprehend.

We are appalled to have seen some organizations, commentators and politicians find ways to excuse, justify or even celebrate these horrific crimes against Israelis. And we are appalled to see others use these events as an excuse to make hateful, racist generalizations against and about the entire Palestinian people, or to promote wanton, retaliatory violence against civilians.

On the left side of American politics, where I reside, there has been far too much ambivalence or worse in the week since the killings. Some merely check the rhetorical box - yes, the massacre was horrifying - before proceeding rapidly to defending the broad Palestinian cause and declaring solidarity with anti-Zionist political goals. Others march with terror supporters showing swastikas on their phones or Hamas paraglider stickers on their jackets, a grotesque fetish that celebrates death and wallows in bloodshed. “From the river to the sea” they chant, shorthand for the extermination of the State of Israel. 

Columnist Michele Goldberg well captures the fear and horror felt by Jews on the broad U.S. left - Democrats, liberals, progressives, and socialists - in reaction to these rallies and horrific statements.

Many progressive Jews have been profoundly shaken by the way some on the left are treating the terrorist mass murder of civilians as noble acts of anticolonial resistance. These are Jews who share the left’s abhorrence of the occupation of Gaza and of the enormities inflicted on it, which are only going to get worse if and when Israel invades. But the way keyboard radicals have condoned war crimes against Israelis has left many progressive Jews alienated from political communities they thought were their own.

The left has always attracted certain people who relish the struggle against oppression primarily for the way it licenses their own cruelty; they are one reason movements on the left so reliably produce embittered apostates. Plenty of leftists have long fetishized revolutionary violence in poor countries, perhaps as a way of coping with their own ineffectuality.

Gal Beckerman, senior editor of The Atlantic, eloquently captured the pain I’m hearing from my Jewish friends and colleagues in New York, so many involved in progressive causes and liberal politics on a daily basis.

The people on “my side” are supposed to care about human suffering, whether it’s in the detention camps of Xinjiang or in Darfur. They are supposed to recognize the common humanity of people in need, that a child in distress is first a child in distress regardless of country or background. But I quickly saw that many of those on the left who I thought shared these values with me could see what had happened only through established categories of colonized and colonizer, evil Israeli and righteous Palestinian—templates made of concrete. The break was caused by this enormous disconnect. I was in a world of Jewish suffering that they couldn’t see because Jewish suffering simply didn’t fit anywhere for them.

I am also taken with the sheer hopelessness of it all. Anti-semitism is a global phenomenon and has certainly poisoned the west for centuries. It gets knocked down on occasion, but like a particularly noxious and invasive weed finds a way to sprout from the cracks in the pavement and invade the gardens of liberal democracies. Today, we see the spray painting of Stars of David in Germany, cruelly mocking the identification of the homes of Jews in the same place where they were once rounded up for the death camps. That’s not a Palestinian liberation movement. That’s not protesting against Israel’s terrible human rights record, and the incompetent crook who is its execrable Prime Minister. That’s hatred of Jews for being Jews.

Just say it.

I feel I’ve been quiet about this too long. I was raised on images of World War Two. One of my uncles rode in Patton’s army. The political legitimacy of Israel certainly leans on the legacy of the six million. And we were brought up to recognize that horror - with a highly-rated television mini-series, the required reading of Night in Catholic school, Schindler’s List, the popularity of Maus. The evil of organized and genocidal anti-Semitism - so easy to condemn - was generally a settled matter. Now, I don’t think so.

We have arrived at Again. And Never is far less certain.

My friend Ami Dar, an Israeli Jew and brilliant socialist and technologist (and also, an empathetic human) has been open about sharing his pain this last week on Twitter (or X, as the anti-Semite who owns it now demands we call it). One of his latest tweets (I will always call them that) might almost be labeled naive or simplistic. But it really hit home for me:

Like most kids, I was taught to see the world in terms of "them" and "us," Arabs and Jews. I'm so done with that. My people, my real people, are all those between the river and the sea who want to build a future together. For the others, on both sides, I have no patience left.

This is the liberal view, in many ways the institutionalist and incrementalist view. It’s the optimist’s view, but leavened with an important sprinkling of cynicism as well. Ami and I are not young. We’ve seen so many failures, and war itself is the ultimate failure. We do not want any massacres at all. But we also have no magic pixie dust. No genies. There are intractable problems on all sides, on every side (“both sides” is such a weak construction, especially in the Middle East). I’m going to hold onto Ami’s tweet. And hope that by the time that we’re both really old men, there will be progress.

Toward what, you may ask?

Well, how about this - a livable two state solution that guarantees security and peace for both indigenous peoples involved in this conflict, and encourages prosperity and common economic and social purpose for this incredibly diverse region.

This may sound quaint one week after the massacres, as Israel invades a portion of Gaza and holds Hamas to account. Most commentators say there’s no longer any hope. They may be right.

Elie Wiesel once said that “to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” So I don’t think we should easily dismiss this vast crime against humanity, even as we hope for peace, and ask for reasonable measures by Israel to protect civilians as it defends its right to exist. As J Street said this week, “We must recognize that the interests, safety and basic rights of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples are intertwined, and struggle for a solution that guarantees true freedom and self-determination for both peoples.”

But we cannot excuse terrorist barbarity or hide from the reality of anti-Semitism in the world. We can’t be silent. It’s a time for choosing.