JLM-Jewish Lives Matter Even More To Me
As I sit in my summer home in Whistler BC, halfway through my quarantine, and having taken my third Covid PCR test in 10 days, I have a lot of time to follow the news and the events in Israel and Gaza.
Today, Sunday May 16, erev Shavuot I watched on CNN an analysis of the fighting which sounded like a box score being reported on ESPN. 10 Israelis had died and almost 20 times more Palestinians in Gaza had died. This in itself was seen as a source of criticism of Israel. In a media world that is smothered in false equivalencies, there seems to be a criticism of Israel for being good at trying to defend itself from the ultimate example of terrorism and war crimes i.e., the indiscriminate killing of civilians.
Does Israel kill civilians? Of course they do, but their deaths are the direct result of Hamas embedding their weapons and infrastructure directly into densely populated civilian areas.
The recent building destroyed by Israel that housed some foreign journalists’ headquarters was also a major center for Hamas intelligence and R&D. Did that make it a legitimate war target? Of course, nevertheless to Israel’s strategic detriment they called all the residents and workers in the building and gave them one hour’s notice of the bombing. Did that allow Hamas to remove many documents and other strategic papers? Of course it did, but Israel takes great care to avoid or at least minimize civilian collateral damage. Yet, the disparity of numbers was implicitly seen as a criticism of Israel for somehow “over-reacting” in its response. After all, all lives matter and if you take more than you lose you are immoral. Therefore, I want to say something that you rarely hear anyone say out loud for fear of being criticized or cancelled, but I don’t care. ( retirement has its privileges) To me all lives matter, but Jewish lives matter more, because if we can be honest, all people are tribal.
All families matter, but my family matters more to me.
When bombs and rockets are flying all over Gaza and Israel I am concerned, but when my daughter her husband and my three grandchildren in Beersheba run multiple times a night into their safe room it bothers me much more.
Family is my primary tribe, but it is followed by other tribes like my fellow countrymen. During the war in Afghanistan, deaths of American soldiers to IED’s bothered me a great deal more than Taliban terrorists killed in an artillery barrage or a guided missile.
If I were alive in WW2, the blitz on London would have concerned me much more that the firebombing of Dresden. Both were atrocious bombings of civilians and by today’s standards, war crimes, but I would still have been much more concerned with Londoners than Germans.
We Jews are one of the oldest surviving tribes in the world and when some of our tribe try to seek moral equivalency between the IDF and Hamas they are not only wrong, but they are also defectors to their own tribe.
It is only fair to ask why would a significant minority of our tribe act this way? Why would they in the midst of the battle, when my 13 year old granddaughter is scared when the siren goes off, criticize the country that is trying to save her from a terrorist entity that wants to kill her and all the Jews around her?
If she was not Jewish and not white living in any developing country, those same members of my tribe would be speaking out on her behalf, but because she is Jewish and white and dare I say it, “privileged” for those reasons her own tribe has jettisoned her for the very others who are exploited and abused by the very leadership that they are now advocating for.
In what democratic country in the world when 2 litigants are in a multi decade legal dispute over property rights, that is being adjudicated by the country’s supreme court, would a US Senator opine even before the verdict that one side of the dispute is unjustly being evicted from their land? Yet Senator Bernie Sanders, (a marginal member of the clan) has done just that. AOC and others in her growing squad have stated how this is just another example of a white elite exploiting the downtrodden people of color, as if Israel can be understood through the glasses of America’s race struggle. Flash news to them and my tribe who follow them. Israel is a majority black and brown country. White Ashkenazim are not the majority, Mizrachi Jews are, and given the mixed marriages those who are half Mizrachi coupled with those who are full Mizrachi, make up the majority of the population. While we are at it, Israel also has nonwhite Yemenites and of course black Ethiopians. Only through the eyes of American race theory is Israel seen as a white colonial power that stole the land from brown people, conveniently forgetting that darker colored Jews were on this land for 2000 years before there were any Arabs in the world.
Finally, there is one other major selfish reason that Jewish lives matter more to me, and especially Israeli Jewish lives. The world does not like us Jews. Anti-Semitism may go dormant, but it is never gone. We may have thought after the holocaust that the collective shame of the world and the unprecedented scope of the holocaust would have inoculated the world from the virus of anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, this virus too is in a pandemic mode. Countries with little or no Jews spread anti-Semitic statements. Even in the US, white supremacists and their anti-Semitism is spreading, but observe the irony that as the extreme left condemns Jews as members of white privilege, the extreme right does not consider Jews to be white at all. We haven’t seen this deviation of logic since the 1930’s when Communist Russia accused the Jews of being capitalists and Nazi Germany accused Jews of being communists.
In such a world I need all the solidarity of my tribe that I can get and mostly I need the strength and military superiority of Israel to save me and my tribe in times of danger. Some thought America was the one country that Jews would always be safe in. Some also thought our American democracy was immutable. A country that has almost half its people believing that the last election was stolen and one of the two major parties, strips from leadership a member of the house that challenges the big lie is no longer the absolute guarantor of our safety. A president that ferments an insurrection attended by a protestor wearing a camp Auschwitz shirt reminds me why I need a strong Israel.
Everything in Israel is not perfect. Relationships with the Arab Israeli citizens needs to be dramatically improved. Radical right wing racism in Israel against Arab citizens is intolerable. But Israel’s right to protect itself is absolute, and absolutely necessary for me, my tribe, and maybe even for the peace of the world.
Hag Sameach
After Shavuot please forward to friends and family.What I say may be considered controversial by some so be prepared for blow back.