'Jews aren't the devil you make us out to be' - opinion

Had I been alive in 1968, I would have been out in the streets, protesting the nonsensical war in Vietnam. When I was at the tail-end of adolescence, I relished the opportunity of watching my comrades roll flaming trash cans down Seventh Avenue when the Republican National Convention was held in NYC. We needed something to rage against, we wanted to rebel, and president George W. Bush and his party of “oil and profits above all” made sense as targets (and still do in many ways).

But now I am flummoxed that the cause célèbre of the day is freeing Palestine of the Jews.

Israel was founded on values adored by today’s progressives (anti-colonialism, socialism, collectivism, communion with the land) by the most peripatetic and outcast of people (the “wandering Jews”) on the land which first defined them as perennial refugees. Shouldn’t we be raising this flag, rather than calling for true genocide and terror?

But I suppose truth and reality take more time to parse than a protest slogan on a sign.

The truth is ignored

It’s easy to cast the first stone when rockets aren’t being lobbed into your living room by your neighbors (who are a stone’s throw away); when it’s not practically all your neighbors who have made it their unflagging mission to annihilate you and your nation; when it’s not you who are there in that land because you finally came back to it after getting killed in or expelled from all the intermediate lands.

And to those throwing stones who are relative newcomers to “Turtle Island” (the Indigenous peoples’ name for North America), perhaps you’re interested in abdicating your home for the sake of redress here?

Ganging up on Jews

I just know all too well what can happen when the world gangs up on Jews, scapegoats them, and holds them to an entirely different standard than anyone else. Heck, we’re even going to be blamed for Trump 2024 when all those Democrats throwing stones don’t vote for Biden.

What can happen is what happened to my family: They were among the six million Jews murdered just two generations ago in Europe. My grandmother survived the concentration camps, but her parents, grandparents, and three of her siblings did not. My grandfather fled Germany as a youth just after Kristallnacht, sent alone to Belgium and then to the United States by his parents.

Until after October 7, when it seemed like much of the world turned against the Jews in the wake of yet another tragedy, I thought my grandparents’ stories were a relic of the past, and I didn’t understand how entire communities could be complicit in murdering two-thirds of their continent’s Jewish population: real genocide.

Sadly, today I do see how that can happen. And while I, too, find images of war horrifying, to accuse Israelis of following in the footsteps of the Nazis demonstrates a total lack of understanding of the history of the Jewish people, the history of Israel, and the tough situation it is in; the Palestinian resistance to a two-state solution over the decades; and moral equivalence.

To suddenly find yourself an activist out on the streets on behalf of one group and one group alone – not similarly roused by the plight of the Syrians, Sudanese, Yemenis, Burkinabè, or countless others – arouses my suspicions about your true motivations.

Not standing up for the Jews as perhaps the ultimate refugees also makes me question your motives. As does putting all of the onus for a ceasefire on Israel. 

Speaking of bias (implicit or otherwise), equating Zionism with racism totally ignores the tolerance, inclusion, and equitability that most Israelis strive for in their society (unparalleled in the region), not to mention the millennia of murderous persecution that gave birth to Zionism.

No one wants a ceasefire more than the Israelis. There was a ceasefire until Hamas broke it on October 7 and provoked exactly the reaction it wanted from much of the media and those seemingly reacting to that media alone. Let’s not confuse unwarranted aggression with what is ultimately self-defense. 

And let’s talk about a resolution in a way that doesn’t delegitimize Israel and doesn’t disregard the agency of Palestinians. 

To all the new radicals hurling incendiary trash cans down the street, just know that the Jews aren’t the devil you make us out to be. We just want the same kind of self-determination that you’ve supported for others fleeing and fighting persecution.

The writer, a grandson of Holocaust survivors, is a writer and editor in New York City.