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U.S. Jews Cannot Acquiesce to Sharon's
Monstrous Behavior With commentary by Stefan Sharkansky What does it mean
to be Jewish? Is it belief in a set of religious values, identity with a
much-splintered ethnic tribe or automatic membership among God's chosen people
as certified by the lineage of one's mother? I, and I
suspect most others, simply want to see a Jewish nation-state that is strong
enough to defend itself. This latter
allusion to the Holocaust, a horror that occurred in the center of modern European
civilization and had little to do with the Arabs, nonetheless provides the
enduring rationale for Israeli brutality in the name of self-defense. Not exactly. The Holocaust provides some of the enduring rationale for some form of self-defense. The actions of the Arabs provide their own rationale. Self-defense, unfortunately, can sometimes be brutal What irony that
many Jews now comfortably vacation in Germany but insist that Arab
anti-Semitism is an immutable aspect of Muslim culture that can only be met
with the crushing power of tanks. It was precisely the “crushing power of tanks” that ended the horrific German regime of 60 years ago and now enables us to comfortably vacation in Germany Not that anyone
asked me, but those are not my tanks careening around the West Bank bringing
fear and havoc in their wake. Yet they are marked as Jewish tanks and
consequently they and I bear some familial resemblance on my mother's side. I
am thus obligated to consider what cruelty is being done in the name of defending
my people. You are correct. Nobody did ask you. Nobody asked me either. It’s very easy for those of us in the comfort and safety of California to pontificate about the moral choices made by people in a war zone on the other side of the planet. . Perhaps if you actually lived in Israel and had the experience of watching a friend getting her face blown off in a pizza parlor you might see things differently. In the meantime, your criticism is merely ignorant, shrill and supercilious Some of us make a
deliberate effort to disassociate from the mayhem of Ariel Sharon's carnage,
while others seem to wallow in it, as if displaying the awesome firepower of
the Israeli army is necessary to the survival of the Jewish state. I would like
to think that the peacemakers still outnumber the militarists among U.S. Jews,
but my own e-mail and street-corner conversations no longer bear that hope out. I, and I suspect most others, do not “wallow in Sharon’s
carnage”, but begrudgingly accept that military actions are an unpleasant but
necessary part of self-defense. I
happen to have siblings who live in Israel.
They were born there. It is the only home they have. My sister is currently serving her
compulsory military duty. My brother
will be drafted this fall. I can assure
you that nobody in our family wallows in the prospect of their going to
war. The other alternative would be to
live in a country where nobody leaves the house for fear of suicide
bombers. Unless you think the Israelis
should just give up and either be butchered or leave their country. Where would you have them go? While Jews are
hardly monolithic, even in their views of Israel, their large presence in the
media contrasts sharply with a near total exclusion of Palestinian Americans. This sounds like the old “the Jews control the media” complaint that is often made by all sorts of unsavory bigots. But by the same logic, I don’t know of very many Serbs in the media either. Am I to conclude that if the Serbs weren’t the victims of “near total exclusion” in the media, then Slobodan Milosevic would have been treated better by the press than he has been? Or that more Italians in the media in the 1930s would have given a kinder ear to Mussolini? But since you are Jewish (at least by virtue of X chromosome) why don’t you do something to fix this, and resign from the media so a Palestinian-American can take your place? I’m certain that you can find many professions for which you have no less talent than you do for journalism. Palestinian Americans
in particular, and Arabs in general, are the ghosts haunting U.S. newsrooms by
their embarrassing absence. As journalists, we do not know them as a people, we
have little connection with their slights and sorrows, and we can only, even
with the best of intentions, experience their suffering as an abstraction. The failure is entirely your own. Why don’t you go spend a few years in Gaza City, or Damascus, or Riyadh or Baghdad and really get to know those societies? I look forward to your weekly missives on universal tolerance and compassion in the Arab world. While the family
tales of Jewish oppression during the pogroms of czars, the Holocaust and
Soviet anti-Semitism have been merged into the dominant American culture,
horrific tales of Arab suffering are systematically ignored. It sounds like you are embarrassed by stories about Jewish suffering. Do they make you uncomfortable? But, as when
blacks and Latinos were absent from newsrooms and nightly death in the ghetto
was not thought to be news, it is difficult to escape the notion that many in
the media, Jews and non-Jews alike, lean to the view that Arab life is cheap. I don’t believe that Arab life is cheap. But it’s not the Americans who read the “Jewish-controlled media” who go around encouraging Arab children to stuff explosives in their pants and blow up themselves up in Israeli supermarkets. If you really want to expose people who view Arab life as cheap, and you’re not simply on a crusade to trash Israel, you might also look here: http://hrw.org/press/2002/03/saudischool.htm Despite all the
attention accorded affirmative action by news organizations on the grounds that
diversity is necessary to better news reporting, the exclusion of Arabs has
been ignored. By the same logic do you think that the media coverage of World War II would have been better if there were more Nazis working for the New York Times? Or that today we should encourage more pedophile priests to cover the scandals in the Catholic church. It is not
appropriate, particularly given the past decades in which Arab-Israeli strife
has never left the news and has frequently been a front-page headline--a story
covered far differently by the European media, where Arab voices are much more
integrated. Sadly, it was the collective action/inaction/failure of the Europeans, who instigated and/or failed to prevent the Holocaust. Now many in Europe are insisting that Israel act unilaterally to stop the violence and are boycotting Israel, without demanding any ceasefire from the Arabs. Returning to your earlier issue, perhaps you can see why so many in Israel feel that the “world community” simply doesn’t give a shit about them, and that they must act in their own defense. One can recognize
this enormous imbalance without endorsing the anti-Semitic slanders of the late
Richard M. Nixon and the Rev. Billy Graham, who asserted in tapes made 30 years
ago, which were recently released, that Jews control the media. They don't own
the media. Nor do Jewish journalists toe a common Israeli party line. Indeed,
they are less inclined to apologize for Israel than Graham, who has lined up
consistently behind Israeli militarism as somehow godly. For Nixon there
were good Jews, such as his speech writer William Safire, who was hawkish back
then and whose current columns in the New York Times provide the most reliable
outlet for Sharon's propaganda. I don’t see the connection between Nixon and Sharon except
that you despise them both. Richard
Nixon is so far removed from the current situation in Israel that I’m beginning
to wonder if you know what you’re trying to say, other than to complain about
something. What’s your point again? Sharon himself is
a man of barbaric impulse, demonstrated all too clearly in his terrorizing of
civilians two decades ago in Lebanon and now on the West Bank. He has been a
consistent provocateur, undermining peace efforts no matter their content, and
now he is using his tanks to poison the ground for future generations. Sharon wasn’t in power when the peace process “broke down”. Sharon was elected to office only after Arafat refused to make peace with Sharon’s more dovish predecessor and launched the current wave of violence. Both are killers
of the innocent. Any head of government during a time of war can be derided as a killer of the innocent. Perhaps you’d prefer to live in a country that refuses to defend itself when attacked? Both are to be
roundly condemned by all, and the failure of prominent moderate Arabs to do
their part to restrain Arafat is all too obvious. No less a moral offense is
the acquiescence of too many Jews, in Israel and abroad, to the comparable
crimes of Sharon. It’s easy to look at a foreign conflict and to claim that both sides are morally comparable. That is not “unbiased reporting” it’s ordinary laziness. I think there is an enormous difference between Israel, which wishes to live in peace on a small patch of land, and the Palestinians and other Arabs who have an inalterable objection to the existence of any Jewish state in their midst and who indiscriminately murder civilians in the pursuit of their political goals. Just between you and me, I would probably also prefer to see Israel under different leadership. But I waived my legal and moral right to select the Israeli Prime Minister when I chose to remain in the United States, where I was born. Accordingly, I must respect the voice of those who make their homes in Israel and need to figure out the best way out of their crisis for themselves. If I ever felt strongly enough to campaign against an Israeli government I would move there first and work from within, rather than simply claim special privileges as a Jew and then throw stones from the outside and agitate for changes that I don’t have to live with. You have already told us that you view your Jewish identity as a simple matter of “familial resemblance on your mother’s side”. In my view you are morally similar to the Nazis who saw fit to murder anybody who had a Jewish grandmother. In your case, you seem to feel that having a Jewish grandmother gives you a special license to libel and incite hatred against a nation full of people who live under circumstances you obviously don’t understand in a country you repudiated long ago. Copyright © 2002
Robert Scheer commentary
by Stefan Sharkansky |