I Wonder If What Went Around Will Come Around.

I grew up Jewish.  I gave it up for a number of reasons.  The glaring one was that I always knew there was no such thing as "god," or never believed there was.  So I didn't think I had the entry criterion to be part of any religion, if I wanted to, which I didn't.  (And if anyone thinks there is such a thing as "god," and considers him- or herself Jewish, why doesn't he or she accept the idea of the son of "god," or the Messiah -- there's a scripture for that, too -- and be Christian?  And if anyone thinks there's such a thing as "god," and further believes there's a son of "god," or a Messiah, why doesn't that person also accept that there's a prophet of "god" -- yup, a scripture for that, too -- and be Muslim?  And if they go that far, and accept that was a son of "god," but it didn't work out as promised, so they're waiting for a "second coming," why don't they agree to Haile Selassie, as the Rastafarians do?  How much picking and choosing do you get to do if you think you're dealing with an almighty creator and ruler of the universe?  It seems to me that once people make these decisions as to what exists, in what ways, and has to be followed how, and what doesn't exist, then it's people who are "god."

But another reason which had insidious importance was that it always seemed that the prominent topic in Hebrew school and Saturday school was the Holocaust.  It seemed that being victims of the Holocaust was not only the main thing Jews could talk about, but in effect, what defined them.  And for the purpose of perspective, my family were reform Jews.  So we didn't have all the rituals to distract us from the fundamental meaning of being Jewish (unless anyone thinks the rituals are the fundamental meaning of being Jewish).  But if anyone thinks that, then they have to account for the rituals that people like Orthodox Jews choose not to follow.  (The famous "Letter to Dr Laura" is funny, provocative, and instructive.)

And it wasn't just the Holocaust.  Many Jewish holidays are about the retellings and replayings of stories of having been victims of one group or another.  You quickly get the idea that being Jewish is all about being a victim.  In fact, if anyone reads the OT, it becomes clear that one of the victimizers is "god."  It's a helluva lot of unexplained and meaningless nonsense to put people through.  And "god" doesn't content him/her/itself with victimizing Jews (can you imagine telling a true believer to kill his own son, just to see if he'd take the bait, then telling him he doesn't have to once he's agreed to do it?  Maybe "god" was just working himself up to setting up his own son to be killed, which the son didn't even understand: "father, why have you forsaken me?")

And in the OT, "god" tells the Jews to conquer neighboring villages, kill the men, and take the women and children as slaves.  "God" turns out to be a pretty pervasively sadistic character.

So, back to the title of this post.  I don't disagree for an instant that Jews, and very many others, were horribly mistreated by the Nazis.  The Jews will say six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.  They don't talk about the six million victims who were not Jews.  But in any event, the world community decided Jews needed a safe homeland, and under heavy lobbying from Theodor Herztl, Palestine/Israel was chosen.  The Jews considered it their original homeland, and they wanted it back, even though they'd been run out of it and attacked and conquered there several times.  (Hence, those holidays.)

What Hertzl didn't take into account, or didn't care about, was that Palestine/Israel was not barren and lifeless land.  A million non-Jewish Palestinians were displaced to make room for the Jews.  The non-Jewish Palestinians were given the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a homeland of their own, since no one else wanted to absorb them.  The land for the Jews was thus just called Israel.  And to complicate matters, the Israelis won the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in a war with the Egyptians, but the settlement of that war included that they had to give it back to the Palestinians.  Except...

The Israelis/Jews began a relentless pattern of incursion into the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where they erected illegal settlements, and from those settlements, began attacking Palestinians.

It should be said that Palestinians don't particularly care about, or have anything against, Israelis/Jews.  The Israelis/Jews had Israel, the Palestinians had the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and absent Israeli incursion, and an unsatisfied ambition to control all of that part of the Middle East, "from the river to the sea," there was no problem.  But Israel did have that ambition, and they used as foundation for it the fact that some Arab countries, a number of which had been invented after WWII, did not accept Israel.  There were wars and treaties about that tension.

Part of the problem, though, was that the Israelis, having surrendered the West Bank and Gaza Strip, even though they did surrender them, and still having to deal with some Arabs who didn't accept them, hung onto their land grab ambition.  And they didn't treat common, civilian, innocent Palestinians well.  The word "apartheid" has been used.  Some of these Palestinians even worked in Israel.  (You can think, for a similarity, about Caucasian Americans and African Americans.)

Perhaps bizarrely, it was Benjamin Netanyahu who helped set up Hamas, in the interest, he thought, of splitting groups of Arabs who were, or were thought to be, hostile to Israel.  But neither he nor any other Israeli government ever stopped the illegal settlements or the attacks on Palestinians.  I don't know what was the final straw, but somehow, we got to October 7, 2023.

Back again to the title of this post, there was post-WWII German resistance to admitting how viciously and violently wrong they were to have decided to blame Jews and others for the condition of Germany after it lost WWI.  Blaming Jews and others, and victimizing 12M people with the Holocaust, was their way of reconstructing self-respect.  It worked until it didn't, they lost WWII, and not only did many of them get tried, convicted, and punished (including executed), but despite a certain amount of kicking and screaming, they paid reparations, at least to Jews, too.

Netanyahu is not a popular figure in Israeli politics, and he has some criminal issues, too.  He's doing a version of what George W Bush did, trying to distract the public by engaging in a war.  It's true that Hamas could not possibly have done him a greater favor than it did for him on 10/7, but important parts of this war are invented.  Netanyahu claims that Hamas are using Palestinian civilians as "human shields."  It's an assertion, and it's hard or impossible to disprove, unless you concede that newborn babies are not Hamas fighters in disguise.  Netanyahu and the Israeli military have claimed repeatedly that they are working carefully and strategically to spare innocent Palestinian lives.  About 2/3 of Palestinian casualties are what anyone would call innocent, and the Israelis have also assassinated aid workers and journalists.  They have also chosen to use bombs that result in lots of shrapnel (human injury), not destruction of the kinds of buildings where they claim to believe Hamas fighters are hiding.

The question, then, is if and when the Israelis will admit that Israel was wrong to conduct this extended war as they have, and if they will do some form of paying reparations, at the very least including rebuilding the many buildings, apartment complexes, schools, hospitals, etc, they have destroyed while they're still trying to annihilate the Palestinian people.  Somehow, I doubt it.  Although if they get rid of Netayahu, and install a decent human being, who knows?

Biden hasn't done the simple thing he could do -- cut the Israelis off -- and Netanyahu has bizarrely and unspeakably been invited to speak to the US Congress.  Any US Congressperson who shows up for that speech should be deeply and irretrievably ashamed of him- or herself.