Israel

I’m feel­ing my way to responses on this. I don’t have intel­lec­tual ones yet, not coher­ently, anyway.

I saw a guy at the Picasso exhibit today wear­ing a kippah and, having just read about Sonia Mosse (was that her name?), the artist who stayed with Picasso and Maar in the summer of 1938 and was killed in a con­cen­tra­tion camp, I thought about what sorts of things would have to happen in the world for people to want to target Jews again, to bomb syn­agogues, to make our lives unsafe again, wherever we lived, even if we didn’t live in Israel, and I real­ised that Israel is car­ry­ing out exactly those kinds of actions now. What do you expect to get when you bomb chil­dren? So my life just got a little bit less safe. I’m not a believer, but I’m not about to lie either. That’s always been one of those ques­tions you ask your­self as someone from Jewish her­it­age who isn’t a believer: what does it matter what you say you are? If Hitler returned tomor­row, he’d say you were a Jew. And if I want to be the brave person who joins the res­ist­ance, if I want to be the person who helps the under­ground rail­road, if I want to make sure there’s someone there when they come for me, I’d better bloody be there when they come for others. I wrote a poem about this when I was in Latvia. There are many, many reas­ons I would be a target. I’m scared and I’m dis­gus­ted that Israel has come to this. And even more dis­gus­ted that there was a rally in Mel­bourne today of Jews sup­port­ing Israel’s actions. 

Last night, I spoke with someone very close to me whose opin­ions I respect a great deal. He men­tioned, cas­u­ally, that it’s hard not to wonder if the Middle East would­n’t be better off if Israel were just washed away. He said it in such a quiet way, it was almost more shock­ing. Polit­ic­ally, I think I almost agree with him; after all, I don’t believe in nation-states at the best of times and wrote a thesis about the danger of basing com­munit­ies on iden­tity. But all my life, I’ve been told that the State of Israel is essen­tial to ensure that the Jews have a home­land so “we” can never again exper­i­ence another Holo­caust. So it was a chal­len­ging thing to hear. And if this guy is think­ing that, how clear is it that the people Israel are attack­ing would be think­ing that same thought?

I’m almost cer­tain there are enorm­ous logical and intel­lec­tual flaws in what I’ve just writ­ten here; massive con­tra­dic­tions. As I said, this is writ­ing from emo­tion. Please help me under­stand this. [That said, flamers on this issue will just have their responses deleted and they’ll be banned. This is a very sens­it­ive issue for me and I’m will­ing to dis­cuss but not be insul­ted or have zealots wage war on my journal. Last time I stood up at a Jewish con­fer­ence and said I was pro-Palestinian state­hood, I was called a traitor to my people. This is much more complicated.]