My Israeli Army Shirts

I love my Israeli army t-shirts nearly as much as Iove my violin. I have no idea where I got them, but they are without a doubt my favorite shirts, and I can never wear them outside the house again.

It don't love these shirts out of patriotism. I love them because they are the most comfortable shirts I own: no polyester, 100% cotton, pleasing against the skin, flattering to the physique, its breath perfect for humidity and exercise. Clearly Israeli higher ups knew that if their soldiers participate in the most controversial battles on earth, they ought to be wearing a comfortable shirt.

I haven't worn them for a social event in ten years, because whenever I did it became a conversation piece. And whenever the Middle East becomes a conversation, it either becomes a monologue or a fight. Ever since then, if I absentmindedly wear them in public, I drop everything and go home to change. I don't even wear them to check if my car is locked in the middle of the night. If, god forbid, a mugger picks on me, I can't have him knowing that I have any connection to the State of Israel.

We are at the point that those of us connected with Israel are being pressured to feel shame at it. What's worse is that some part of us does feel shame, and still worse, we feel shame at our shame.

Peer pressure is a hell of a drug. Jews are pressured to love Israel every day of our lives. And not just Israel but the Israeli army too. Even when I was a kid, I was never totally comfortable with pressure to love the army. Dealing with Jewish jocks was hard enough. Honoring an organization full of them? Something about it made me feel it deeply queasy.

Even if they're too honored, jocks need a place in this world too. As I'm older I see the dire need for national defense, and short of the most naive leftist, I think most liberals do too. But national defense is not there attack, it's there to deter. And if armed foces are used for offense, they are there to weaken opponents, not decimate them. God always punishes hubris, and there are few groups of people today more hubristic than the people who advocate war with Iran.

But now we're getting pressure from the other side. We always got some pressure to hate Israel, but now? It's everywhere. It's dozens of friends on social media. It's every time you pass by a college. You never know which street corner you turn on where a person will have a sign accusing your people of genocide.

To those who don't believe in either, the world seems like chaos. You can't go anywhere anymore and simply say 'I don't know' without people suspecting that you're the problem. Even a correct militant is a militant who can take what's right and make it deeply wrong.

And all of this is made more complicated by the extremity of your own beliefs. Even after all this, I maintain, Israel is worth dying for, it is worth killing for. Equality and freedom for the world means nothing if Jews dont have the same. And we've given the world 2000 years of chances to let us have it elsewhere. Jews suffered from white people 1500 years before most of the globe knew what a white person was, and even after they learned, our suffering didn't get any less.

But when you fight to that extent, you better be damn well sure you're fighting for the right thing.

Is this the right thing? We have no idea. We have inklings, surely I lean to the belief that this is a willful and deliberate mistake, but anybody who thinks they know beyond certainty is lying to you. There are known knowns, the things we know, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. No matter what our predictions, success or failure will make itself manifest over the next while. Even the people who predict correctly what happens don't deserve credit for it. The only option left to us is to wait, and watch, and recall our experiences of whatever comes for those who come after us.

There are so many unstable factors in the world today, so many faultlines that divide the world into halves, any one of them could flare up into conflict that engulfs us all: Gaza, Ukraine, Taiwan, the demilitarized zone, even Capitol Hill.

But if the gunpowder that starts it all is Israel's, then the old antisemitism will flame up like an inquisition pyre because we will be seen as the murderer of millions, perhaps more. Like antisemites since John Chrysostom, the new old antisemites will point their fingers at us and spout: 'THIS is what happens when you give Jews power. This is what happens when you give Jews independence, autonomy, equality. This is what happens when you treat Jews like human beings!'

It won't occur to them that 2000 years of hatred against us may be what provoked war. Must untold masses die so that Jews may live? Well, if billions didn't already hate us, nobody need have died.

But if Israel ever proves the flash point that engulfs global war, then who would be able to deny the State of Israel was a mistake? Who even knows if Israel would survive such a melee? Did we really found this country just to deliver ourselves to another Shoah?

We did the best we could in the wake of the most evil tragedy of the 20th century, and it was the most evil, no matter what progressives say about imperialism today. Millions of European Jews thought Zionism an irritating embarrassment, and they were all gassed and burnt because they had nowhere to go. But just as we didn't want another holocaust from doing nothing about Iran, we want to avoid another holocaust from doing something about Iran.

Being Jewish has meant impossible choices from age to age. Israel literally means 'he who wrestles with God,' and God has placed before us the most impossible choice in our whole history: potentially destroy the world or potentially destroy ourselves. We just made the choice.

Jews have always been punished for being conspicuously Jewish. Having a state of our own will never change that. Being Jewish means sleeping with one eye open as it does for any minority. We can be proud to be Jewish, but we pay for eberyfeeling of pride ih blood. The state of Israel may have been doomed no matter what the choice we made.

It's increasingly clear that Israel's existence depends upon US protection, but long after the US breaks apart, the Jews will still be here, absorbing the abuse of country after country. We can be proud that we've survived, but whenever we are proud in public, God sets a terrible price.