My family was not religious, but we were always aware that we were Jews. Until I was 12, we were the only Jewish family in a Catholic neighborhood. Some families wouldn’t let their children play with us. My parents sent us to Hebrew School, to get in touch with our roots – as we say now. My brothers and I attended for two hours after public school on Mondays and Wednesdays, and for four hours on Sunday mornings. We learned, or at least they tried to teach us, Biblical and modern Hebrew, the five books of Moses and historical commentary, and customs and ceremonies. What they also taught us, though we didn’t realize it until much later, was Zionism.
I was born three years after the Holocaust killed all our relatives who didn’t leave Poland in time. We learned that even though the world knew what the Nazis were doing to the Jews, few nations would accept Jewish refugees. Even the USA forced ships full of them to return to Germany. When anti-semites came for the Jews, we could not depend on anyone else to help us.
So, we were taught, Israel was the only safe place for Jews. It was the promised land of milk and honey. God had made a covenant with us: if we obeyed His laws, we would thrive in this land. We were taught nothing about the people who had been living there during the 2,000 years in which most Jews were elsewhere.
Jews in Israel were turning the desert green, they taught us. Jews were no longer helpless victims of anti-semites; in Israel, we were armed warriors, defending our new-built oases from the jealous tribes around us. Like the Sabra cactus that symbolized the settlers, we would be tough on the outside while we stayed soft on the inside.
At the Passover seder every year, my family repeated the ancient words: “Next year in Jerusalem.” Not that we intended to go ourselves. But Israel was the refuge of last resort. When we heard news reports about Arab attacks on Israel, our rabbis urged us to send money so that Israel could defend itself – for all our sakes.
The propaganda was thorough and relentless. Over time, support for Israel became as much an article of faith as the existence of God – and for many Jews, more worthy of our belief. Any Jew who dared to question Israel’s behavior was damned as a traitor to our people.
While we were learning about the Holocaust and Arab attacks on Jewish settlements, Palestinians were learning about the forced expulsion of 750,000 Arab residents from Israel after WWII – the Nakba – and the theft of Arab land and often violent repression of Arab residents ever since. Nobody taught American Jews about the Nakba. Nobody taught Palestinians about the Holocaust. The two peoples were deliberately blinded to each other’s suffering.
Now it should be no surprise to anyone that these two damaged, exploited, disrespected peoples, abandoned by the rest of the world after it trapped them together, have learned to identify themselves as bitter enemies, each willing to fight to the death to eliminate the other from their contested land.
One side shouts Holocaust. The other shouts Nakba. Both have long lists of atrocities to shout thereafter. Amid the shouting, who is listening? Who is able to see that everyone on both sides is the walking wounded?
It is heartening that today, in many demonstrations calling for a permanent ceasefire, progressive Jewish organizations are taking a leading role. At least some American Jews are finally waking up to our share of responsibility for the current disaster in Gaza. We have allowed ourselves to be silenced, while news of Israeli brutality sifted down to us past the censors. We have allowed too many of our so-called spiritual leaders to shame us out of fellow-feeling for Palestinians. We have continued to support an apartheid state that has segregated and oppressed Arabs just as Jews were segregated and oppressed in Eastern Europe long before the Nazis came to power. And we have sent untold millions of dollars, and urged the American government to send almost four billion dollars a year, to arm a country that always seems to meet violence with much greater violence.
Jews and Palestinians have all been brainwashed. Lost in the fog of partisan information is the sense of common ground – the awareness that we humans must share a finite and vulnerable planet. We have been taught to believe that Israel, or Palestine, has a right to exist. What we must come to understand is that no country has a right to exist. Only people have that right. Countries are products of our imagination. People are real. Until we can learn to acknowledge the harm we have all done to others, and determine to live together in peace, none of us will be safe.
Next year, may we share Jerusalem.