Sympathy for a political group either lasts a generation, or it lasts three days. The poor intersectional left... I mean it... many of them think they've gotten permanent sympathy from history: take it from us, if your future is bright, all this sympathy will go away in 30 years as you accumulate gains and acceptance and become unfairly cast in the role of the villainous oppressor. If your future is dark?...
We Jews had our period of generational sympathy from Hitler's election until Henry Kissinger. Now we've had our three days of sympathy, and the sympathy will metamorphose until we're villains on a scale unprecedented in our lifetimes. This is how lifetimes of villainy start: it's never fair, it's never productive, but it is what it is. One century of Maccabee Jewish independence ended with the Roman occupation of Judea. All it took was seventy years under the Romans and somehow we became known as the people who killed Christ for 2000 years. (It was the Romans, by the way... Search my facebook page, two people over the years have accused the Jews of DEICIDE! ON MY PAGE!)
The world moves too fast now for 2000 years of villainy, but villainy for five years? Brace yourselves. Some of our most unassailable friends may wash their hands of us for a while when they can't get us to grovel sufficiently, then welcome us back when this all blows over in seven years as somebody else becomes the villainous flavor of the month, and then they'll treat us as though we always fit their perfect definition of woke.
Some of us fled into gentile friends' loving arms of white bread because many of the Jews in our life were difficult and hurtful. If we can stereotype a people, then we American Jews... well we're not the easiest to get along with, are we? And let's face it, compared to Israelis we're as easygoing as a retired WASP investment banker in an alligator shirt with a cocktail in his hand on a boat with khaki shorts.
This is already a terrible period for Jews, it'll only be made worse when we realize that most of our goyisher friends cannot be there for us when we'll need them most.
There will be atrocities committed by Israel. Period. They will be dreadful and malevolent. They will challenge everything we ever thought we knew about Israel. They will not be what Hamas just did, and yet everyone we know will tell us that they're worse.
Collateral damage of civilians is not the same as intent to murder, and who is responsible for collateral damage when Hamas put their munitions factories near schools and hospitals? Who's responsible for displacement when Hamas puts their tunnels and bunkers underneath the most populous regions of Gaza City? In moments of rage Israeli soldiers may commit massacres of a dozen civilians, even a few dozen, but there will not be a single night in which 1300 were butchered with complete intention as a public statement of barbarity: everyone from genocide survivors to babies. Israel has cut off all supplies and aid to Gaza. Thousands of wounded may die for lack of medical care and starve for lack of food, but what is Israel supposed to do when Hamas will hoard all the aid and distribute it as rewards for service and compliance? There will be cellphone captures of the murders most brutal, but can anything Israel do be as brutal as a kidnapping one-hundred-fifty people of all ages with intent to murder them on live television?
And yet friends the world over will push us to draw moral equivalence, and push, and push, until the yelling and the insults start, then the green lines in the sand that everyone crosses.
And, let's just presuppose, Israel does commit democide on a vaster scale with intent. Let's say that the unthinkable happens and the modern Israeli army proves itself truly as bad as Hamas. What are our Jewish friends supposed to do? OK, we'll say that Israel is an apartheid regime if it satisfies you, but were Israel truly as heinous as Hamas, it would commit far worse acts than Hamas, and no one would be satisfied by a mere designation of apartheid. Were Hamas the dictators of a more powerful country, they'd be as brutal as Hitler and Stalin. If Israel truly were as bad as Hamas, they would do still much worse things, and the world would demand precisely that designation as one of the worst regimes in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. There will never be a day when Israel plans a deliberate massacre of just 1300 civilians for which they'd planned over a period of years, because were Israel Hamas, they'd be powerful enough to kill over a million.
If Israel were truly as bad as Hamas, none of our friends would be satisfied except with the designation that Israel is an absolute mistake, a mixture of failed state and totalitarian regime, a religio-nationalist ethno-state should never have existed, can't exist a moment longer, and is the logical end result of founding a country on a religion .
Even on the .00001 percent chance Netanyahu's Israel turns out as bad as the Nazis themselves, we cannot agree. We will not agree. Other states go through periods of extreme nationalism and religious mania, and their existence is not questioned. When things get hairy for Jews, there's only one place guaranteed to take us. If that place ends and Israel turns into a binational state, the evidence is overwhelming that terrorists would come after Israeli Jews like butchers after kosher chickens. The very charters of Hamas and the old PLO say... you know what they say and if you can't figure out what they say about Jews, you need to read things more basic than what I have here.
A good friend of my 20s once assured me that he was an ally of Israel. "Founding Israel was a mistake, but it's there now so we can't let it go." This is what Israel gets from its friends.
Israel is not a mistake. Jews are not a mistake. How long, O Lord, until we're not treated like one? There are a bit over 15 million Jews in the world. I've read statistics that if Jews were allowed to grow naturally without genocide, we'd currently be 200 million. This is just the natural outgrowth of a religion that discourages converts and preaches only to other Jews - and unlike every major religious and secular power in world history, Jews haven't killed more than a couple thousand at a time since the biblical era.
Love your friends dearly, esteem and value them, but do not trust them to appreciate all our dangers any more than a group of color can trust white people, even after you explain it to them. Only other Jews can be trusted. However exasperated Jews are by each other, however much we'd like to retreat to our shabbesgoys, this is a period when only Jews can be there for each other with any real understanding of what we endure.
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