Many things befuddled me about living here, being a citizen of this country. I have asked myself: Given some sort of celestial choice, would I have chosen the United States to be a citizen of? One, where the forces of energy formed me to be male and White?
My son told me when he was little — just beginning his language skills — that he looked "down" and saw whom his parents would be. I don't know if he had a choice, but I would contend if it was just random, he wouldn't have mentioned it. Beyond that fundamental volition, the rest of what adheres to that personality depends upon what is learned, discarded, and learned again. Such expanding and contracting reservoirs of adaptability can bump up against fear and maintaining a nucleus of survivability.
Inoculation against surrendering to the irrational (believing one can cheat death or being controlled by the domain of a hidden force) is a self-agitating endeavor. One has got to unbuckle curiosity and want to change — if allowed. That warrant to evolve is generally pushed along by a minority of personalities. Luck would have it that they are in some sort of leadership or influential position, otherwise, beholders of the absurd would seek to disentangle the weight of mistakes from responsibility and make the blame a simple matter. Anti-Semitism falls into such a category making it one of the most dangerous tenets in human history, making facts disappear under a group psychosis.
Notions of anti-Semitism lingered with my parents in their lives. My mother's Catholic upbringing in Poland may have had her embrace anti-Jewish tropes, especially during hard economic times. Blacks were invisible Americans for a good part of her life except when she mentioned her World War II liberation in Europe by a Black tank battalion. My father's Southern sway via birth lend him more to have more of a bias against Blacks than Jews. After his military service one of my father's best friends was a Jewish businessman who made his business way through dealing with Army surplus. He also gave me one of my first jobs after high school.
With both of my parents they would qualify whom they were talking about, especially if there was some importance or even solicitousness attached to that person, as "a Jew" or Jewish. For my mother I thought it was some sort of religious demarcation. For my father it seemed a finitude to his relationship with that person. Neither of them would designate someone a Lutheran or Greek Orthodox as a way of introduction to me. Using it as a qualifier was something I had to wean myself away from as I went into the world. It seemed backward-looking and superfluous against the youthful idealism I carried.
The Yom Kippur War of 1973, between Israel and Egypt and Syria, bought my attention back to trying to understand what being a Jew meant. Its ignominious start happened as the same year of the Paris Peace Accords and the last miliary unit left Vietnam. To my surprise it was the fourth Arab and Israeli war. Now the world watches and cries as the seventh war obliterates Gaza and (to date) 30,000 people have been killed in a vengeance-madness against the Hamas' slaughter of 1,200 innocents on October 7 of last year.
Even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu aims to destroy Hamas, awareness of the world’s struggles says Israel cannot. The Palestinian mantel of liberation extends across the Middle East. Leaders of other countries will use Palestinian aspirations for their political and strategic gain. Correspondingly, the mandate — historically and modern — for Israel in having and keeping their homeland remains. As it is so common in humanity's penchant for war, the question is about territory and how much.
As this seventh war between neighbors who share a common heritage rage, the ramifications seem wider and more dire than previous Arab and Israeli wars. U.S. soldiers have been killed, international shipping disrupted and the shadow of Iranian involvement loams. President Biden slow-walks pressure to secure a ceasefire. Pro-Palestinian sentiment rises in the public sphere leading to a Harvard president being forced out. Nazi sympathizers march in Nashville and threaten journalists. Women and children continue to die in Gaza. Nihilists and Christian nationalists in command of the Republican Party tear at American institutions.
Anti-Semitism is called the most ancient of hatreds. Add to that it permeates throughout the so-called civilized world regardless of the century. Dan Stone, a British historian, in his horrific, depressing and excellent book, "The Holocaust: An Unfinished History," documents how the murder of the Jews was continent-wide in Europe beginning in the 1930s, eventually even spreading to North Africa; how the killing was not just a murderous "industrialization" of death camps but more so was diffused through villages, small towns and farm fields where the recognition of Jews — even previously as neighbors for hundreds of years — was degraded to the lowest form of vermin; and where every level of German society that stayed after Hitler took power, from the police force to ordinary army soldiers (the Wehrmacht), not just the SS, to government bureaucrats lost their morality. Complicity drapes over greater Europe on those never held accountable. Is there any doubt as to why Jews in Israel react to their latest atrocity?
Morality is about the principles of right and wrong. Jews are morally right in seeking security. Arabs are morally right in reclaiming a statehood. Does that mean the deaths of Arabs and Jews are moral?
Stone notes in his book that fear and contempt drove the Nazi ideology. Both the Hamas Palestinians and the Israeli Jewish political leaders make the world suffer again under the same sentiment.
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Agreed. But what is the logical & honorable stand to take? Genocide is happening all over the world. Antisemitism has been at work since biblical times. Germany was certainly not the only state to make scapegoats of the Jews. Even Americans are not innocent of the atrocities of the 30s & 40s. Didn't we do the same (in principle - if certainly not in an extermination of lives!) to Japanese Americans? Isn't the Israeli/ Palestinian issue somewhat similar to the Islamic issues of their branches of their religions? (i.e.: Shiites vs [sorry my mind is blank] )
AND, I don't know if I am a rambling idiot & don't know if my thoughts have any validity or not.
It all seems such an important & vital situation with no easy answer. But I do think that history does show us that war is not the answer.