Those loathsome jews...

Being jewish is not very popular these days. When Robbie Robertson wanted to reinvigorate his fading career, he adopted the "sexy" native american identity of his mother instead of his jewish bookkeeper father, whom you never seem to hear much about. Jewish men used to get all the plum roles in pornography but even that seems to have petered out. Israeli tourists are reckoned as the worst in the world, even supplanting the french. Not too many leading roles in television either, although occasionally we can still find a bit part as a comical, balding, gay, best friend. Cocky, superior, arrogant, deceitful, well - you know the drill.

Popular culture is replete with the stereotypes of the stingy, hook nosed shylock, a hallowed tradition in Britain that reaches from Shakespeare to Dickens to Eliot and forward. When Lawrence decided to roll around naked on the desert floor with the natives, he picked for his pashas our semitic cousins, leaving us lying around like so much chopped liver.

I have just been likened to a "sniveling weasel" for my words on the Israel/Palestinian situation by a reader from across the pond. The British have a proud history of anti semitism that has been getting uglier and uglier of late. Jews were banned from Britain in 1290 by Edward I and not allowed back until Cromwell in 1656. There were 609 anti semitic incidents in britain in the first six months of this year, over double the previous year. This includes 88 violent assaults. Of course, the jewish community in England is very small, around 350,000, a number that is dwarfed by the approximately 1.6 million muslims, many who have become radicalized by the slanted reporting of the BBC.

The Baroness Jennie Tonge, a member of British Parliament, who says that she stands with the suicide bombers, recently asked "How can we stop antisemitism if they keep treating the palestinians like this?" Sounds like a clear invitation for a pogrom to me.

We are not quite seventy years removed from World War II and the Holocaust. My tribe was hunted down for extinction and extermination throughout europe. Very successfully I might add. Countries vied with each other for carrying the crown of most despicable behavior. The austrians and germans are easy targets, but the venality of the Croation Ustasha and the Hungarian regime are legendary. The Hungarians, enraged by the past words of Bishop Prohaska, deported half a million jews in six weeks of spring in 1944. The French were no slouches, sending over 70,000 jews to the camps without even being asked to and rounding up 4000 jewish children in the spring of 1942. They kept them in the Veledrome d'hiver until the nazis could take them away. The Poles had pogroms after the war. The Baltic states were epicenter of some of the worst behavior as well, with over 40 pogroms extant in Lithuania  before the nazis even arrived. They were egged on by the catholic "thundercross" movement. Ditto Latvia and Estonia.



I could go on and on, but will spare you. Suffice it to say that Herzl and the late 19th century drive back to Israel did not exist in a vacuum. Violence and persecution were a daily fare for jews, egged on by virulent christians who accused them of killing christ and blood libel. My grandfather Israel Kaitz came from the town of Sierpc in Poland. He was conscripted into the Russian Army in the very early part of the century. That was a twenty year death sentence for a jew at the time. He could not take a brutal whipping from a cossack officer and ended up killing him with his bayonet, escaping to Antwerp and then Palestine in 1920. He didn't steal land, he bought land, and worked as a founder of the Histadrut and an electrical engineer. Much of the land was sold to jews by the Ottomans.

My mother's family, the Weinrobers, came from Yednitz, near Kishinev in Moldavia. My grandfather was constantly harrassed by the authorities and emigrated just before one of the most brutal massacres of jews in the century. If there was not a homeland for jews, I would not be alive today. Very few people survived the trip to Auschwitz from my grandmother's shtetl Wyzkow in Poland.

Yes, the jews had a diaspora, vanquished from the holy land by the crusaders. But their link to Israel is written on vellum and in blood. With the world against them, where were these people supposed to settle after World War II? Or those poor souls suffering more recent persecution and attacks in Russia?

The idea of Israeli brutality is so overplayed by a media that is so lazy and confused. Syria killed a reported 35,000 of its own people in one day on February 2, 1982 in Hama. Jordan killed a reported 10,000 Palestinians during the 10 days of Black September. Israel has never engaged in genocide. They have regrettably had to strike hard at a liberation force that shields itself amongst civilians. A people that have repeatedly rejected deals that would give them 95% of what they have ever asked for. But lazy intellectuals get almost giddy when they can liken Israelis to Nazis and attack zionism as a cover for their real intentions, going after, well, those people...

The fact is that the people of Gaza will never be satisfied until all the jews are gone from Israel. The anti zionist Israel haters, the David Byrne's of the world, casually neglect their history lessons. Jews are convenient when they are victims, and at no other time.  The rest of the world can feel a little better about themselves for the many times they stood by and did nothing.  They can embrace the message of Achmedinijad and his convenient target.

I have worked in Israel, I have lived in Israel, I had many Palestinian friends in Israel. I wonder how many signees of the Toronto Declaration can say the same? Palestinians belong to the Knesset. They have the highest education rates in the Arab world. Until the Islamic fundamentalists put down their swords and their dreams for a global caliphate, the idea of parleying with them is ridiculous. Their apologists have been completely co-opted. Blame the jews, by all means. We are going to do what we have to do to survive.