Sign in shop windows as seen in America
I have always been on team Israel. Ever since I was a teenager. I will remain on team Israel, too, even in the face of her recent psychotic episode. They are acting with ignorant malign vengeance, like most humans do, across the globe, when we think we are righteous. Persecuting and chastising the “other” is the current passion of the day. Of the nation. Hopefully, the fever will break soon.
The state of Israel is not helping herself with her allies by the way she prosecutes this war in Gaza. They are clearly guilty of collective punishment. A form of punishment anathema to Israel’s founding principles. This betrayal hands emotional and intellectual ammunition to her enemies on the whole spectrum of the political rainbow, left to right, across the planet. The outcome of this war may result in a generational shift away from allying with Israel, one that may even reduce support for the existence of the state of Israel and the Jewish people, by implication.
Like most Baby Boomers, I grew up on a steady diet of WWII movies and documentaries. The television show, Combat, staring Vic Morrow, was must-see TV. The Longest Day, a 1962 cast of thousands blockbuster, was about the allied landings on the Normandy beaches. It was an epic. I stood in line to watch the 1970 movie, Patton, with George C. Scott, during a solar eclipse. Not to mention all the re-runs of the old black and white movies made during the war that aired on television.
What I did not see on the silver screen, or on my television set, were movies about the holocaust. I saw photos in Life and Look magazines, but precious little, long-form film coverage. That changed in the months after I graduated from high school with the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Paul Newman's movie Exodus (1960) showed up on television. Back then, if you did not see a movie in the theater when it was released, you were not likely to see it until years later when it might show up on television, cut to pieces, to root out any perceived excess, and to make it fit the commercial breaks.
I have always had empathy for oppressed nations. My mom was an O’Leary. Early in my life my grandfather schooled me on the history of the Irish in the UK - and here in America. He claimed to have personally seen, as a young man, the signs proclaiming “No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs” hanging in shop windows. Other evidence from the turn of the century of the well-known and well documented anti-Irish movement in this country, was especially, the wide-spread resistance to employing the Irish: No Irish need apply.
Later, in high school, I was moved by Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, recommended to me by a classmate whose mom was Oglala Sioux. Until then, I was like any other white kid born in the 1950's. Cowboys were the good guys; and Indians were the bad guys. Purposefully giving smallpox infected blankets to freezing native peoples sure qualifies as evil in my book. What about, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." That book startled me. I rejected the whole myth on how the West was won. And I’ll just mention Alex Haley’s Roots. That was a paradigm shifter, too.
I have always abhorred the human proclivity to hate the ‘other.’ I understand it in a detached clinical way, like one understands how cancer ravages its host. But the human logic of it escapes me. When I was in college we saw Night in Fog, a thirty-minute short film created by a Frenchman covering the holocaust. We were all stunned. Students cried softly to themselves. When the lights went up, we silently filed out of the auditorium. We knew about camps, but we did not know about the process of filling the camps. None of us had seen anything like it before. It was horrific. How was it possible that this 1956 documentary exposing the horror, had not been seen by any of us.
As stated, I am a Baby Boomer who is on team Israel. That is not remarkable. Most Baby Boomers are, reflexively. Unlike most Boomers, however, I do not have any antipathy toward any group of humans that are perceived as "other.” When you think about it, we, in our constituent parts, are all “other,” too. That list is too long to start mentioning them now. Any MAGA supporter, mostly Boomers, can produce a list off the tips of their tongues. Just ask one.
The formal persecution of the Jews began in Spain in the late seventh century. By the end of the century all Jews in Visigothic Spain were reduced to slavery, in law and practice. The laws to persecute the Jews originated from the extant Roman legislation promulgated during the fourth century and written to persecute adherents of the various heresies against the state religion, the one and only true Christianity. It took until the high Middle Ages for the persecution to be ‘de riguer’ throughout Europe. I believe the antipathy of Europeans to the Jews exists to this day. Especially among the elite on the left.
Recently, I met an interesting man, a Romanian expatriate. A retired engineer who photographs landscapes with his SLR camera. He is a Baby Boomer, too. Except that he is a grandchild of the axis allied Nazi Romanian ruling class, supplanted by the Soviet communists after WWII. While he and I were talking about postwar Eastern European politics he suddenly volunteered, "And take the Jews, they are hated throughout Europe" He further expressed his own disdain, in accord with what he contends is a commonly held antisemitic conviction throughout Europe.
Without digressing, I took him to task and that was the end of our conversation.
There are two reasons that I bring my encounter with him up; ONE: the mood has shifted. Until the recent past, this man would not have ventured his abhorrent views to a stranger he just met on a Greenway. Unless he is crazy. And I don’t think he is crazy. Rather, he must feel that the current political atmosphere, created by MAGA and the war in Gaza itself, gives him cover and allows him to be forward with his antisemitism.
TWO: Christians have not changed. Orthodoxy among Christians holds that Jews are Christ killers. Not the Romans. Passion Plays are propagandistic; they portrayed Jews as despicable and evil to countless generations of Catholics throughout Europa, performed during Lent, in villages and urban centers everywhere. And the Europeans have believed it since the thirteenth century.
Some think that Protestants are different. Not so. They were Catholic before they became Protestant. Today in the bible pounding sects of the Protestant religion, the distinction lies in the use for Jews. They believe that a cataclysm in the middle east will bring about the end of days and the welcome second coming of Jesus Christ. It is prophesied. Go team.
The Chinese perceive all Jews, Christians, and Muslims as being on team Holy. The people of the book. From where they sit that makes total sense. They correctly opine that our differences are a merely a matter of doctrinal dispute. Which end of the egg to break, as it were. Essentially, there is not a hill of beans of difference between the three of us.
Nothing is more vicious than a family fight.
The feel-good era for the Jewish people is coming to an end. It was just a break in the action. An intermission after the recent dust up in Nazi Germany, notwithstanding. It only lasted this long because of the sheer barbarism played out across the European continent. Deep seated prejudice against the Jews (or the Roma) excuses confiscation, economic and social ostracism, and the occasion pogrom; but don't do it like Lizzy Borden,
"Lizzie Borden took an axe, And gave her mother forty whacks; When she saw what she had done, She gave her father forty-one."
The excess of the holocaust was disturbing, even to anti-Semites.
Meanwhile back in our current iteration of America, Generation X, to some degree, Millennials to a larger degree, and Generation Z, almost across the board, have no reason to favor the state of Israel. They will vociferously argue that they are not antisemitic, on the contrary, they are anti-Israel. I call Bullshit.
I fear for the state of Israel. Will it survive beyond my generation? Will it find succor from my government. Increasingly I think that will not be the case. For the Jews it will be samo-samo. As it has always been in the West, since the Visigoths in Spain confiscated their wealth and enslaved them in 694, Anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi. “In the year of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
I am still on team Israel. Steadfastly. I understand the difference between a government and a nation. I can hear the crowd saying, "Hey Boomer." To them I say, even from the grave, unabashedly and unequivocally: "Shame on you," for what may come to pass. I hope I am wrong. But betting against human nature is almost always a bad bet.
