Like many Jews born in the post-World War II years, I grew up in the dark shadow of the Holocaust. However, I did not become a Zionist or an Israel right-or-wrong defender.
My parents, proud temple-going Conservative Jews, did not hide the horrors of Nazi death camps from me. Born in Belarus in 1903, my father had his baby feet in the land of pogroms and his immigrant youth and adult feet firmly planted in America. Jewishness and pride in Israel were central to both of my parents’ identity. They spoke Yiddish to my grandparents and one another when they didn't want my sister and me to know what they were saying. My father was president of the Jewish Community Center. My mother was a local leader in Hadassah. We kept a kosher home with separate sets of milchig and Fleishig (milk and meat) dishes. Pork spareribs were the only exception when we went out for Chinese food!
For the most part in the overwhelmingly Christian community of my youth, we all got along. However, overt and passive antisemitism always hung there like an ever-present specter in the mist. When my father led a group to purchase a piece of land in Bridgewater, New Jersey to build a pool for the Jewish Community Center, a neighbor tried to block it and declared, "This is a Christian nation." The pool became my summer refuge with other Jewish youth. School was different. During the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann after his capture, a kid behind me on the school bus said, “He should have killed six million more.” That memory is indelible. Before the Supreme Court found school prayer unconstitutional, my second-grade teacher made everyone recite the Lord’s Prayer aloud. Afraid to speak up, I mouthed the words silently. “Cheap Jew” and “Jewed me down,” comments were ubiquitous. Multiculturalism wasn’t a thing then, so I dreaded the enforced isolation of the annual singing every Christmas about our lord Jesus.
I went to Hebrew school and recited my Haftorah for my Bar Mitzvah, reading the words but did not know their meaning. For me, religion was hollow. Surely, I thought if God existed, he would not have allowed the Holocaust. As I learned about the role religion played historically to promote or excuse unjust wars, I turned my back on religion but not my Jewishness as central to my identity. I came of age during the Civil Rights Movement and militant struggles against colonial oppression and occupation. I became deeply involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement as a teenager and young adult. I earned my undergraduate and graduate degrees in history focused on struggles for freedom. I engaged in the social justice movement of my era. My parents’ narrow empathy for Jews but not Palestinians came into sharp contrast to my developing understanding that there is never safety in exclusive nationalism.
It wasn’t exclusive engagement just with other leftist Jews that cemented my identity as a secular Jew committed to racial, economic, and social justice. Instead, it was intense engagement and eventually leadership in an interracial community center and summer camp in the East New York section of Brooklyn that was deeply committed to an integrated struggle for common goals. There, standing up for oneself was inconceivable without doing so for others.
The lesson some Jews took from the Holocaust was, "No one will ever care about us. So, we need to protect our own by any means necessary.” Others, like me, concluded, "No one is safe unless we are all protected." Like today, that made our wider family Passover Seders fraught events, trying to avoid anything that would prompt my aunt’s usual anti-Arab remarks.
The latest explosion of hatred, violence, and revenge in Israel and Gaza and the exponential growth of antisemitism and Islamophobia show the hopelessness and profound danger of empathy-blind ethnic or religious self-protection. As a Jew and human with the images of Nazi death camps seared in my memory, I can't be a pacifist. I recognize that struggles for freedom, democracy, and self-determination must sometimes turn militant in the face of persistent brutality. However, reciprocal inhumanity and killing innocent civilians are never righteous. Any group's freedom that is contingent on others' subjugation is unjust, immoral, and inevitably fleeting.
The lesson of history is that acceptance of a narrow self-righteous mindset– most often a mask for the protection of the power-hungry–is what brought us the murderous regimes of Stalin and Pol Pot, to name a few. Alarmingly, that mindset is what fuels the acceptance of today’s authoritarians such as Netanyahu, Trump, Putin, Modi, Orbán, Erdoğan, and now Wilders in the Netherlands.
The conflict between Jews and Muslims living in Palestine before the partition follows a pattern. To protect their power, occupying European colonial powers purposefully pit resident oppressed people against one another. When new independent statehood followed, sometimes after armed resistance, it did not mediate that legacy. In post-colonial India Mohandas Gandhi invoked, “An eye for an eye will leave everyone blind,” to plea with Hindus and Muslims to eschew slaughtering one another. They didn’t listen. Too many people refused to recognize their common humanity. They are still killing one another.
The internecine conflict that accompanied partition and statehood in Palestine was exacerbated by an influx of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, Zionist ideological claims to an inherent right to the land, and subsequent displacement of non-Jewish Palestinians. The result of the end of colonial rule by Great Britain was colonial rule and oppression by the new colonial power, the state of Israel. Inevitably the partition continued without a mutual commitment to human rights and democracy for all. They are still killing one another.
I know that perpetrators of injustice are impervious to accusations of hypocrisy. Nonetheless, it is stunning that defenders of Netanyahu's war on Gaza can object so vociferously to the slogan, "Palestinians will be free from the river to the sea," when his explicit plan is Israeli ethnocentric domination across the very same geography.
The fact that other Jews are unable or unwilling to empathize, identify, and forge common cause with oppressed people is unbearably painful to me. That is a blindingly shortsighted and immoral repudiation of what it means to be Jewish.
When will we ever learn?
Arthur taught and led science professional learning and curriculum and assessment development projects for 50 years. He writes about education and social justice. He loves spending time with friends and family, hiking, and gardening.
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Thank you for an open and honest discussion on the roots of Zionism and the inevitable consequences of a small-minded, narrowly focused, “self-preservation” attitude while still recognizing the realities of anti-Semitism. We cannot turn a blind eye and must fight all hatred to preserve our history and culture, but if we do so at the expense of others, we are doomed to fail.