By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO — One problem is that too many extraneous people, agencies, synagogue officials, evangelicals, ambitious US office-seekers, Israeli legislators, and—in some cases—our own parents and grandparents, are telling us what to think. The other problem is that a generally small element of “the Jews” (a famously fractious and contentious people that have been around for 4,000 years) are claiming, with no shame, that they speak inclusively for “the Jews.” Most of these individuals are wealthy, sometimes frantic, and increasingly filling Republican war chests.
The truth is that what a lot of Jews say out loud about the tragic labyrinth of the Middle East is not a faithful rendering of what we so often feel privately. We know that the Palestinians, like us, are not a monolithic people, uniformly terrorist or dripping with blood libels, and we covertly pray for a two-state solution (if it will work) even while we sometimes mimic the most extremist elements of the so-called “settler movement” and act as if the indigenous populations of the West Bank (wherever they originated—as if it matters) are barely even marginal figures in the real, dusty, rocky, calamitous, day-to-day manifestation of life in Ramallah, Hebron, Nablus, Qalqilya, and Jericho.
We know very well that the narrative of 1948, when the Jewish community of mandatory Palestine–yes–outnumbered, outgunned, and written off, heroically withstood the savage invasion of five sovereign Arab states (who really had nothing to do with the coexistence of Jews and Arabs within Palestine)—that the narrative was rewritten in tune with the miraculous scroll of Israeli resurrection while the Holocaust ashes still smoldered and the bones yet fouled the air of Europe.
In spite of gross Arab insensitivity to the plight of Arab refugees created by Israel’s genesis (and Arab flouting of the UN Partition Plan for two states), the millions of now-second generation Palestinian exiles—and their attendant resentments—were neither invented, resolved, nor acquitted reasonably and in fairness to a secure Israel and a viable Palestine.
Having lived in both Israel and the United States, as well as in Canada, I have heard and examined the full painful gamut of Jewish sensibilities on the Palestinian people, so much of it driven by understandable fears (the long, gory legacy of suicide bombings will never be erased from our consciousness), a degree of paranoia, and a regrettable strain of racism on our part.
Around kitchen tables in the Negev, I’ve heard Jews call for the murder of every Arab ensconced anywhere near the Jewish state. Yet, in a major US newsweekly years ago, I read the declaration of a prominent rabbi who opined, sympathetically, that the Palestinians “are the Jews of the Middle East.”
Neither of these grandiose declarations do much for the situation on the ground, where hunger, blight, illiteracy, hopelessness, and the fanning of the desert heat by Islamic hate groups remain the only collective truth that hurl the outcast souls of Palestinian youngsters into further frenzies of murder and self-destruction.
We Jews are a people of many centuries and too many opinions. We are also shaped by our own indescribable suffering. But we have to find our way to a practical and shady place in the desert—preferably from not atop a high hill—that is somewhere in between the genocidal manual known as the Book of Joshua and the more enlightened refrain of our Scripture to “remember the stranger amongst you, for you were a stranger in Egypt.”
Otherwise, we shall found ourselves a stranger in our own land.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com