When Jews Can Only Trust Jews: Day 6

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.

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.

It's Beginning to Get to Me: Day 5

It comes at you in waves. You do your best to steel yourself and then the loneliness melts you like a white flame.

The moment it hit me was the moment I realized: as I should have known, my long distance friends have reached out from all across the country: from North Baltimore county to all across the Eastern seaboard to Chicago to Denver. My Baltimore friends?... Do I have Baltimore friends anymore? I've a few but...

I understand I've been forbidding on the issue of Israel: now as ever before, and nobody wants to say the wrong thing. Yet so many people elsewhere are heedless about the possibility and it's helpful to know that they'll chance a difficult interaction, even with this interpersonal grumpy bear. But this bear wants to write about Israel, he really doesn't want to talk about it. Sometimes you just want to talk about your new bike.

Maybe I'm person non grata in a hipsterland that issues social fatwas as easily as dispensing pez. If I'm suddenly on the social fritz with a couple dozen variouses, why am I outcast now after I've had the same uncontrollable emotions for eleven years with everybody seemingly OK with it? Why not ten years ago? Why did a social fatwa against me end six years ago as arbitrarily as it started the year before? How long am I in the penalty box this time? I had many more people in touch after I swore I was never going to socialize again on this page because of the way people went after Israel!

If you're Jewish, it's a very lonely period. It's thankfully made better by friends who reach out, and thankfully a number have, but even friends can't make it less lonely.

It's one thing to put doubts about Israel's future actions 'beneath the fold,' but what makes this most lonely is that so many people I know can't even stop voicing their doubts even now. Why can't this fucking wait until the casualties pile up? The families have just barely started to sit shiva, and already we have to endure the 'but' crowd. It's one thing to voice your misgivings with serious nuance below a fold so nobody has to read it who doesn't want to, it's another to do it with simple slogans, three sentence opinions, and other people's writing.

This is a time for the mourner's feelings, NOT YOURS. If nobody cares what I think or feel about Israel, they sure as shit don't care what you think. All it does is isolate Jews further, and for those who are particularly passionate on the Israeli side, all it does is provoke them to greater resentment.

I have already written serious misgivings about Israel's operations. In principle I don't regret it, and yet when I see other people do it I regret it instantly. It eats at my sense that Jews have their own space to occasionally feel like Jews first and every so often, not worry every minute about whether they'll be seen as having dual loyalties.

I have no idea where my ultimate loyalties lie any more than I know where yours are. I'd like to say that I'm a loyal citizen of this country long before I'm loyal to Israel, but what does that mean in a country where so many citizens currently think the country is not even worth being loyal to? I think my loyalty to this country is far above Americans who excuse the traitors on January 6th in the name of loyalty, or Americans who outright disavow their loyalty to a country they claim founded on genocide.

The world of being a Jew is lonely on the best of days. Life is different for Jews than for everybody else. In no way are we better or worse than other cultures, but we do have different concerns. Other cultures comment that we've lifehacked the universe: a portable culture of success, able to establish ourselves as movers and shakers ("machers") in whatever society we live.

Maybe that's superficially true, but what's the point? We lose our success every time we gain it, and a thousand times more quickly than it ever took Jews to become successful. In society after society, it's a generational process that takes a hundred years, and then it's all lost overnight: privilege, pride, titles materials, money (money more than anything), it's all worthless in the end; a mirage, a chimera, a farce from a god who wanders us from place to place, convinces us 'this is the time it'll be different,' only to dash our hopes for the sake of His glory.

So yes, these days I'm very lonely, we're very lonely, and we're only going to get lonelier when you pronounce your awful decree to disavow Israel or cease to be your friend. Even if you don't, we will always fear the moment you do. We deserve to live in this state no more than any other oppressed minority does, and however different or marginal it seems for the moment, oppression it certainly is.

Have No Illusions About Bibi: Day 4

Think about 9/11, that moment that should have united the world and renewed American administered peace for the 21st century. Instead of American peace, we had a neoconservative project of American power pursued as the sole arbitrating force of world administration. From the moment America refused the offer to activate NATO Article 5 that an attack on one member state is an attack on them all, we should have known, the Bush Presidency was a doomed project. People the world over never likde America's world administration, but they never had many suggestions for what could replace it. 

The Iraq War was a sufficiently predictable disaster that it basically absolves everyone who predicted its catastrophe, even if they had stupid beliefs themselves. Nevertheless, it was not quite the apocalypse many leftists projected, particularly in Europe, who contended the Iraq invasion to be a risk of World War III. Iraq was about as big a disaster as it was ever going to be, and still: no World War III.  

This is not going to be World War III, not for a while at least... but unless Netanyahu goes, it will be as big a catastrophe for Israel as the world knows. Watchers suddenly call Israel united now as though it were 'the old Israel' - 'the old Israel' hasn't existed since Menachem Begin took over in 1977, it's never coming back and nobody sane wanted 'the old Israel' at the time which dealt with apocalyptic threats to its citizen's lives every day for thirty years. Even if Netanyahu stays Prime Minister for years hence, we owe Israel our support just as we owe the support of 100 dictatorships the world over who keep the forces of world chaos at bay; nevertheless, have no illusions what it is. This is 'the new new Israel', nearly as radicalized as Yassir Arafat, and similarly chaotic. Netanyahu's project to eliminate Hamas is as doomed to failure as any project to remake Iraq. 

And now we get reports that Netanyahu ignored Egyptian intelligence that an attack was imminent three days before it happened. At best, this is rank incompetence and the same arrogant trust in his own judgement for which Bibi's been notorious for 30 years. At worst, Bibi 'wagged the dog' and willfully used this attack to save his power and prevent himself from going to jail for corruption. 

Is Netanyahu capable of such evil?

Come on. Of course he is. We've known the evil of Bibi ever since he refused to disavow all those rabbis who called for Rabin's assassination. He lusts for power and will do anything to get more. But if the latter is true, and let's call it a 1% chance, I doubt Netanyahu thought the attack would be nearly as awful as it was. Either way, this is the incompetence of dictatorship, a paranoid authoritarian locked in his own mind with no advisors he trusts. States have to make alliances with dictators all the time, but we owe them no respect. This is the work of a third rate tin pot leader, determined to preserve his own power even if he drags one of the world's most successful countries into mediocrity. 

There is a chance to save Israel, but there is only one solution. Bibi. Must. Go. Forever, disgraced, distrusted, ignored. In a just world, Netanyahu's incompetence would be investigated for treason. This is no just world, this is the world we have and for the moment it's the best we're going to do. This is 'the big one', an Israeli quagmire that ends with demoralization and isolation on a level even the new Israel never experienced. The tragedy is that, for the moment, it's the option we're stuck with. Netanyahu must go, and Netanyahu will go whenever Israel realizes his plans are delusions. Let's just hope it takes four months rather than two years. 

Make Yourself of Steel: Day 3

I remember an interview with a famous historian (Jewish, of course) whose family got him out of Germany in time. The famous interviewer asked him "What happened to the rest of your family." The reply: "They were all killed." What happened next was ten seconds of the coldest silence I've ever experienced. The historian stared the interviewer straight in the eye. No morsel of rue or regret for the lost. Just the brutal fact that people were once people. Now they're all gone.

When history happens, you don't get to sentimentalize it. With any luck, the savage details (what Stalin apparently called 'the wet stuff') disappear beyond the record and you get to awaken from reality's nightmares, but when it doesn't, you either stare it straight in the eye or you make bad decisions that just make more wet stuff.

My advice is to leave the sadness for the future, leave the anger for the future. The post traumatic stress will come however you feel now. For the moment, you're in the thick of it, and the most important thing is to keep your head clear, achieve the objective, and get out. When you hear what happened in Kfar Azza, don't get angry, don't get sad, just acclimate yourself. It's going to happen again, and again, whichever side does it, and eventually you'll be numb to it until it's over and the real work begins of coming to terms with the horror you repressed. But that is for down the road.

Political sympathy is cheap and fickle. Nobody should know that better than Jews. It's personal friendship that's deep and lasting, and if your gentile friends are your real friends, then whatever they think about Israel, they will listen to your grief and horror and all of it else. Political gains are never won by causeheads baiting people into argument (believe me, I know..) but our friends are there for us to work through our grief and horror in private, and if your friends are truly your friends, then they will either see your logic and come to agree in time, or you will see their logic and come to agree with them, and if you never agree, you will respect the disagreement and not bring up what only causes ugliness.

New generations are always becoming acquainted with tragedy. Thinking we've evolved is an occupational hazard of being. Humans are not more generous or tolerant than they used to be. It's not because humans have always been this brutal, it's because humans have always been generous and tolerant. Life is a series of moments, and in terrible moments it's the same people who help those in need who do terrible things. People are not inherently good, they're not inherently bad, they're inherently people, and the circumstances of any moment add to the completeness of who we are.

We live in an era that doesn't like traditional readings of history. Leave aside whether there was ever such a thing as 'traditional history', the one truth about history that never changes is that certain events have monumental, overwhelming consequences remembered forever, discussed by normal people for a hundred years and debated by historians for thousands. Certain events are so traumatic that they feel like a bomb went off inside you. Once every twenty years or so, an event insists on itself and their consequences reach out forever.

We don't know whether the Hamas attack is one of those moments, but it certainly feels like one right now. The world may never be the same after this: not just the Jewish world but the world entire. For eight years, the tensions of an already tense world steadily ramped up without a break: more division, more ideology, more mutual hatred, more disagreement. Whenever a clear world majority decides their disagreements are too important to compromise on, there will be war, and it may be war unlike any the world has ever known.

Is this that moment? I don't know, but history is not for the feint of heart, and we all live in it. For the moment, I categorically refuse to make any demonstration of my Israeli patriotism, even as every chamber of my heart beats blue and white. Yet again, Jews find themselves at history's epicenter, and what's at stake is so much larger than two peoples. What the heart wants at the moment is so much less important than figuring out how to minimize life lost in an impossible situation that, if it's one of those historical nodes, could claim billions.

Pour Out Thy Wrath: Day 2

Usually, when Israel trouble happens, I get so angry that I have to talk myself out of mailing dogshit to people who piss me off.

This time, I'm beyond anger. I feel numb, I feel cold. I worry that if I check my feelings I'll realize I'm devastated, shattered, wrecked, utterly run over.

My reaction now is more narcissistic than selfish (the two are different). My brain seems to know that the world is ruined, but my heart hasn't caught up yet. My brain knows that no rage can save the world of everything I love. My brain recognizes it's the death of the two state solution, it's the death of liberal zionism, the death of 20th century American liberalism, the idea that one can be wholly liberal and wholly Jewish, of liberal democracy itself and who knows how much else or how many? My not quite reliable brain tells me this is the death of the idea that all the various sides of my life will ever live in accord. The conflicting parts of me feel stretched out as though on a cross and if my heart bleeds any more it will stop. I have no room for rage left because my rage is with the world itself and the god who made it.

Half-remembered lines occur to me like those in Psalm 79, excerpts of which we're supposed to chant in the Amidah three times a day (at least I think this is the passage...): "Pour out thy wrath upon the heathen that have not known thee, and upon the kingdoms that have not called upon thy name... And render unto our neighbours sevenfold into their bosom their reproach, wherewith they have reproached thee, O Lord."

By biblical standards, those lines don't seem all that shocking until you realize that the Hebrew word for 'heathens' is 'goyim.' We've used the word 'goy' to make fun of gentiles for centuries, and so long as we're powerless, it's a great punchline. But this passage is literally an incitement to g*nocide at the whole world, and whether or not such incitement is offensive, that wrath is present in the heart of every Jew right now. If the progressives among us deny it, then they're as repressed as any Catholic nun.

Goyim can make all the well-wishes they want, but it's for you, not us. At this moment, Jews are literally staring down the potential that we either k*ll hundreds of thousands or be k*lled ourselves by the millions, do you really think we care whether or not you feel a moment's sympathy for our plight?

In fact, we don't want your sympathy. We want you to be terrified of us. We want you to gape in horror at what we're capable of. The State of Israel is pretty good circumstantial evidence that the world stops k*lling Jews when the price of k*lling us is as high as the price of Jews for living. When it's all over, we'll be horrified at what we've done and we'll cry convenient crocodile tears; we'll swear we were only following orders because a leader bewitched us, but we'll be alive, relieved that some other group died by the millions this time.

I know that I should let that statement sink in without qualifier, but I guess I have to add that of course, I'm not advocating for anything 1% as lethal, but if you've never felt the urge to d*mocide, you've never been part of a group on which one was perpetrated, and the temptation toward d*mocidal options is why idealism never works.

We'll get further into this at a later date, but even if I'm a liberal, I'm no idealist. I'm a liberal because if you don't spend money taking care of the poor, the poor revolt. I'm a liberal because if you don't build alliances with other countries that guide one another to better behavior, those countries make war on you. The stability of the state comes before everything else: equality, liberty, human dignity, whatever... if you don't have a stable government, the anarchy will kill you.

There are all sorts of transformative projects which assert without evidence that humans are capable of better things: libertarians promise that with enough freedom there can be greater prosperity for all, socialists promise that with enough state intervention inequality can be a thing of the past. Neoconservatives swear that a powerful military can change regimes of small countries anywhere to any kind of government, woke intersectionalists swear that by redistributing the privileges of white men oppression between demographics can end. Political coalitions require the interpolation of all these ideas into party platforms, but the moment rank-and-file liberals or conservatives start actually believing in ideals over results, the battle is lost.

I'm not a Zionist because I believe that God promised His land to the Jews. I'm a Zionist because I believe that without the land of Israel, Jews will die by the millions again.

What that actually means is for another day.

To Life: Day 1

I deliberately haven't read anything. I have deliberately not watched the news. I absolutely don't want to know what's going on until I can't ignore it. This war will be here in two weeks, this war will be here in two months, this war may be here in two years, and I want to live my life as normally as I can for as long as I can. There is so much to say about this even before learning anything about the new situation.

I'm lucky my family didn't move to Israel. I'm lucky I didn't move to Israel when I was tempted. Most of my close family lives in the US, and I currently have no close family in the Israeli army. Nevertheless, Israel wars are my special version of hell, where everybody insists on talking about what Israelis call ha-matzav 'the situation,' and they talk, and they talk, and scream and yell, and everybody makes hurtful statements they can't take back, and life becomes a series of reminders that you're a Jew among Jews, a Palestinian among progressives.

All I can do is make a list of those dozens of people I have to go out of my way to watch myself around so as not to ignite my ever-so-short fuse they seem eager to burn. When I'm around my half-neocon Pikesville family, I'm inevitably accused of being an unforgiveable defender of Palestinians. When I'm around progressive friends, I'm inevitably accused of being a reprehensible defender of Israelis. And so often has it happened in the past that if it's not them who do it, it's me hurling accusations back. I really don't like the person I become in this situation, and it astonishes me that they seem perfectly alright with whom they become. How were they so protected from consequence that they don't realize the shameful state which transfigures them?

The fact is that when it came to Israel, I grew up in something not unlike a cult. Jews get understandably touchy when people accuse us of dual loyalties, but when every grade school event began with both the Star-Spangled Banner and Hatikvah, something was wrong. Not a month went by without appeals to the parents to send their money to Israel. Not a week went by when Jewish day schools wouldn't remind their students that we owed Israel our love, but the ultimate injustice was that they were right.

Because whenever it really matters, nobody gives a shit about Jews. Nobody came to the aid of Jews in Germany because so many were convinced that Jews were the most privileged people on earth, then every Jew in Europe vanished into smoke. What can we do but have a homeland we loyally reverence as the only reason we're not living impoverished in the same ditch where live so many other minorities? Whether or not you think that's true, we KNOW that's true. The shtetl is still within living memory. So are tenement houses and the postwar refugee camps. Minorities are only treated well when they have the option to leave. Would it really help our cause if we volunteered to live like them again?

What it comes down to is that I'm a person without a spiritual home. I feel like a second class citizen among both Jews and gentiles. My home is culture, my home is history, and it's not much more comfortable a house to live in than it was for those 2000 years of Jews who could only find themselves in sacred texts. Torah is not my home, but Jewish history is my home, because the history of Jews is the history of the world, and as history and culture now expands to include the whole world, so too will the study of Jewish history. One day, be it next year or in two hundred, the State of Israel will cease to be, and the Hebrew nation will find themselves scattered to the Global East just as they've been for two thousand years among the Global West.

The most important part of reading history, the part even historians have trouble with, is having no illusions about it. In history, there's only one real question: life and death. There is no such thing as justice. There is no such thing as freedom. There is no such thing as victory. There is no such thing as progress.

All things of this earth are subject to a life cycle, and it is in our interests to prolong that cycle of life as long as we can. Humans can bear any burden so long as they live, and the more burdens we bear, the greater heroes we are to those who understand us. The only important question is whether life is allowed to progress to a long delayed end. All governments and companies rob us of freedoms and justice, but what matters is whether their inhumanities are symptoms of plans to rob us of survival. More oppressed groups seem to live shorter lives, less developed nations certainly live shorter lives. Nations with less substance abuse live longer. Slaves and wage slaves are deliberately exploited for their bodies until their bodies give out.

A long life is, generally speaking, the metric which indicates a healthy life with many seasons of joy and suffering. The proliferation of life is why we live, everything more than that is either commentary or sentimentality.

Hopefully I'll be more articulate on Day 2