The Crime in Gaza

I was, as they say, raised Jewish. Fractiously, secularly, often indifferently, but nonetheless. At very least I got to learn another alphabet and familiarize myself with some pleasantly poetic mythologizing. And somewhere there is a poorly-monitored Roth IRA with a couple-ah-grand languishing untaxed and untapped, the last memento of a very ordinary Bar Mitzvah made amusing only by the post-service reception at our country club, an institution unused—to say the least!—to finding itself festooned with blue-and-white decorative evidence of Jewry.

My already nonreligious family drifted even further from faith after my younger brother and I completed our requisite transitions into pre-to-mid-pubescent manhood, and we’re now the sort of atheistic clan that could never stand for office in these United States. My father’s side of the family was nominally Catholic, and when my grandfather died, a priest long known to us offered my grandmother the odd condolence that Fritz was surely waiting for her in heaven. “What am I supposed to do about that?” my grandmother deadpanned with a speed and wit I only wish I had, “Hurry up and pack him lunch while I’m at it?”

Yet despite the knowledge among my friends, peers, and colleagues that I am heathen-born, heathen-raised, and heathen-set, there’s an awkward pause each time I speak negatively of Israel; then, inevitably: “But aren’t you Jewish?”

Others have written long and well about the fatuous commingling of the State of Israel and the People Formerly Known as Jews—the notion that because there are Jews, and because they have suffered historic wrongs, and because there is now a nation-state run, if not populated, principally by Jews, ergo to critique Israel, however mildly, is to take up the Death’s-Head mantle and advocate the wholesale destruction of God’s Chosen, which pogrom, by the way, probably never occurred in the first place. In other words, to become a crypto-Nazi holocaust denier, a position that makes about as much sense as calling oneself an inventor and devotee of Thomas Edison, all the while denying that he invented the light bulb or the phonograph. Unless you count the erection of a lot of gaudy architecture or the resume of Leni Reifenstahl, there’s precious little for yer av’rage crypto-Nazi to praise in his forebears. What else did they do but transpose Napoleon’s follies northward by degrees and infuse it with a lot of dollar-store Wagnerian hocus-pocus?

Whatever you call it, though, it’s nearly universally granted that to Critique Israel is to Hate Jews. That isn’t even casuistry. The entire proposition is absurd on its face. Zionism bumped around Europe even before Daniel Deronda got all googly-eyed at whatshername in Monte Carlo, or wherever, and thence went forth on a vacation later popularized by Madeline Albright: discovering the inner-outer genealogical Jew within himself. Some Jews even went to eke out a living in the Palestinian desert. Then, after the Second World War, the Moral Imperative reared its ugly head, and the British and the Americans and a lot of other hopped-up Western victors carved Israel back out of the map as if the Old Testament were a geography text. I know, I know. That’s reductivist and dismissive. But capering over the history doesn’t make the conclusion less true.

At this point in the conversation, someone usually rears back and does the ol’ j’accuse number: “Are you saying Israel has no right to exist?!” Eyes widen and roll like a bad cut from a Dario Argento film. Screams are heard. God weeps. Madeline Albright says the Kaddish. Elijah farts in his flaming chariot.

There’s no answer to that question. Israel does exist. The United States has no right to exist either, seeing as how Europeans small-poxed the continent, killed the buffalo, and herded the rest of the indigenous inhabitants into reserves on the worst land this side of the Gobi, but it does, and here we are. Time machines have not yet been invented. The notion of nation-states possessing “rights” is transparent bullshit in any event. A smarter man than I wrote, and I concur, that states possess powers; only men (excuse me: persons) possess rights.

So the point to make is that Israel does not have the right to keep killing Palestinians, toppling their government, undermining their society, arresting and emasculating their men, destroying what modicum of normalcy they’ve scraped up for their lives. It does, unfortunately, have the power to do so, and it exercises it indiscriminately. Israel has killed more Palestinians than vice versa, in large part because its US-funded and US-built military far outstrips the capacity of rock-hurling and aging Kalishnikovs and yes, even that horror of horrors, the suicide bomber. You can’t put people in a cage, whip them into a frenzy, and then start shooting at them when they try to bite your hand. That’s called asking for trouble.

Now, there’s plenty of madness on the other side as well. I do not deny that Hamas spouts distasteful rhetoric; it will never recognize Israel, it says. I ask you: has not Israel spouted precisely the same thing, only inverted? Doesn’t the United States itself yak in precisely the same manner about any number of “rogue states” and “defiant regimes” and axes of evil? Western nations make it a point of pride to confer or de-confer legitimacy on elected and unelected governments everywhere on Earth. Even the notorious, traitorous, perfidious French occasionally emerge from their accommodationist cafés, reeking of Gauloises and vin ordinaire and socialism, to bluster about Iran and Kim Jong-Il and Dick Cheney.

And all of this is a very long-winded way of saying that Israel’s long-planned reinvasion of Gaza is a brutal, absurd, unconscionable enterprise that will prolong the misery of both peoples in that tiny little sliver of the world. It is a criminal enterprise. Were it up to me, I’d push them all back into the sea and find some extant genetic Phoenecians, decent traders who established some lovely cities and managed to figure out the basic concept of an alphabet.