This post is in response to all those people who saw WZ in a yarmulke and DC wearing a Magen David on the telly the other night and saying over & over that we support the genocide of Arabs in Gaza, specifically the slaughter of children.
Many social media words have been spilt since October 7th, arguments hashed and rehashed, eloquence squandered in vituperative heat, sides drawn, wagons circled, shutters down. We don’t believe we can change anyone’s mind, there’s always a comeback from all sides. Whataboutthis?! Whataboutthat?! But we feel the need to address our social media attackers’ charges.
Whether it makes you happy or miserable, diaspora Jews are hurting. Not hurting like Israelis and Arabs, & we don’t wish to make any comparison as to what they are enduring, but hurting in ways that most, as far as we can tell, are finding unexpected, ways in which people Jews thought were allies are not even their friends. The local community is in shock.
We wore what we wore as an act of solidarity, of defiance, of kinship. To say in public, we are who we are, you might hate us but - we are who we are. And we wanted to say we are in it together.
Everything that touches Jews is shrouded in nefariousness, untrustworthiness, subterfuge, innuendo, horror, hate, pestilence, othering. Jews poison wells, use the blood of Christian babies in their matzoh, control banks, swindle, manipulate, made up the Holocaust, brought down the World Trade Centre, Capitalists, controlling the Media, Communists, Jews will replace us, Jews are Chosen, Zionism is Racism, Epstein Island, it was the IDF who shot their own citizens on October 7, Covid was designed to not affect Jewish DNA in the same way as others!! (RFK Jnr said that one). The list is fucking endless.
Are YOU prey to those mind viruses? “How dare you?! I’m not antisemitic, I’m anti-Zionist, you’re trying to deflect from the genocide the Zionists are committing and plenty of Jews are anti-Zionist, semites are Arabs as well, how could I be antisemitic!?!”
It’s amazing and mysterious to us that the history of our people is a story somewhat defined by this kind of conspiratorial relationship to the rest of the world. Was it something we did? Haha. The simplest explanation, of course, is that it’s us. It’s what we do or say, or don’t do or don’t say. The overt antisemite believes this, that the Jews have brought this on ourselves and the closet antisemite also believes this but is too polite to express it. There is no comprehensive answer of course, the processes of history are too big to understand, the swirling malevolence that exists in the human psyche too mysterious to fathom (though that Jew Freud tried to make a dent). Maybe the easiest explanation is that there is a G-d and the cosmic plan for the world is beyond our ken. (We feel like that’s the most likely but wish we believed it!)
What we do know is that the Jew is over represented in too many places. For such a ridiculously small number of people the Jew keeps making an overt appearance, and people, plenty of people, regard that with suspicion. As to why Jews are over represented we will have to let you be the judge with either your charitable or envious reasoning. But we are a people bonded with the weight of a tragic history (as well as incredible positives but that’s not what this post is about). So we wore what we wore to say, “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.” (It was embarrassingly easy for us, those words were the last words spoken by Daniel Pearl, if you don’t know, Google him)
“So what the fuck?”, you say, “Why are you blathering on? For sympathy? For what? I told you I’m not an antisemite.”
There is a view that Jews hold themselves apart. That Israel is a monstrous unnecessary sin. Jews are the whitest of the white and Israel is white privilege writ large. It’s impossible to go into that here. (We’re not intending to write a book about this but we have to touch on this to answer your question). Willy’s white privilege was growing up without any grandparents, uncles and aunts, all murdered in the Holocaust. Parents traumatised etc. In a milieu where there were no old people. He’s not complaining, it just was; it just is. That was his privilege. But plenty of people in Australia have grown up with this sort of trauma, Indigenous, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Syrians, Lebanese, even some Brits! It’s not a trauma Olympics, just a background hum to his life. Deborah doesn’t have this immediate background but like all Jews knows viscerally the weight of our history.
Still according to you we “support” the murder of children, the “genocide” of Arabs. This time the Jews are Nazis. “See”, you say, “you are no different.”
But we think most Jews wish it were different & that this had been settled justly in 1948, with the Arabs accepting the UN call for an Arab State next to a Jewish State. We have already written a post about re-litigating the ’48 war, please read our earlier post.
A lot of words went back and forth around that post but none really addressed what we said in it. The gist is if you are still fighting the war of ’48 ie the establishment of Israel (which you might believe was unjust but nonetheless exists), then all you want is permanent war, for Arab & Jew.
So, finally, to address your question:
We believe Hamas started this war on October 7 (we don’t need to hear your anger at that statement or your justifications, we know them already, so don’t bother unless you have something truly unique to say). We believe that Israel had no choice but to respond. We believe that Hamas has to go. We believe Israel has tried to minimise civilian casualties by waiting for 2 weeks before going in and in that time repeatedly asking civilians to move south (10 miles down the road). We believe that Hamas is responsible for asking civilians not to move, we understand that in the world view of Hamas & the people who support them, resistance is holy. But we believe that is a tragic view. We understand then that the deaths are inevitable because this is the war that Hamas wanted. We believe it will end when Hamas, & those who support their ideology, are gone from power. We believe that Israelis from the Far Right to the Far Left know that the status quo of October 6 was upended on October 7. We know the only way forward is for the Palestinian Arabs to fully accept Israel as many of their brethren in the Middle East have done. We believe that framing this awful history as a Left/Right issue is a terrible mistake and conflating it with other issues (Colonialism! Global warming! Trans Rights! Blak Power!) is compounding other mistakes and again will lead to endless war.
We believe war is awful, suffering is universal but if you don’t stand up to fight, the consequences will be bloodier. עם ישראל חי
We believe there is a path forward, we just have to find it.