I went to the VOPJ meeting in Brookline to hear a professor from the University of Tel Aviv speak about what she sees in Gaza.
First of all, I want to say that this woman was singing-to-the-choir. As concerned Jews at this meeting, we all want the battles in Israel to end. What Israel has been doing to the Palestinians has been variously compared with what Germany did to the Jews in1933, and worse. There are some survivors of that outrage who will weep and say that nothing could possibly be as bad as what happened to them during the Holocaust. And it is true-when such atrocities happen to oneself, nothing that happens to anyone else ever seems so wretched.
However, this writer, this very concerned Jewess, gets the same bad feelings in her chest when she listens to a Palestinian from Gaza or the West Bank describe what he is experiencing, as she does when she listens to a Holocaust survivor recount what he lost in the last war.
We have officially gone from being victims to being victimizers. The professor at this meeting recounted in monotone the statistics of the losses on both sides. She spoke of people being separated from their families, because Israel decides who will live in Palestine and who will not. She cited the numbers of people living in Palestine who cannot get medical treatment.
She cited the deaths, and she cited the Israeli abuse of Palestinian children, all in the same monotone, matter-of-fact numbers. It is only as I go back through my notes that I can grieve over the enormity of the situation there.
And she went on to say that we cannot publicly label what is happening there as another holocaust, because many Jews will claim that we are anti-Semitic. The word to use now is apartheid. And so, we struggle over semantics while people are dying.
I wish I did not have to be ashamed of Israel. I read the news coming out of that country, devout Jew that I am, I wish the Balfour Treaty had never been signed. It has been said that there was a time when the surviving Jews could have been permitted to settle in Israel without the battles that have been fought over that land ever since. Some form of agreement had been laid out that would have given most people there what they wanted-without the bloodshed. But the decision was made to do it the way it is now.
And I am ashamed.
