My family went to Venice, Italy, this summer. We stood in the world’s first ghetto, where guards locked in Jews each night.
There was a man sitting at a table with pamphlets in support of Israel. He asked me, “Are you Jewish by chance?” I am.
Right now, Palestinian children are starving in Gaza. Starving, because Israel is starving them. But still, right now, there are people who say that speaking against Israel is harm against Jews.
It isn’t. Defending this is.
I understand the urge for nuance. I am not jejune or radical. I am an elementary school principal. A dad. My younger son is preparing for his bar mitzvah even now.
But I have eyes. So do our children. And so does the world.
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, has written: “Throwing around the term genocide in relation to Gaza is deeply offensive to many Jewish people who have suffered actual genocides.”
On the highway, a billboard says: “Protesting Israel but silent about Congo? Makes you wonder why.”
Profoundly, they miss the moment.
Yes, Jew hatred is real. It’s easy to remember in the ghetto of Venice: Jews seen as strange, suspicious people. Jews as a people apart. These are old ideas, still with us. Wrong then. Wrong now.
Sure, I can understand the fear — that the fervor in the movement against Israel comes from latent hate of Jews.
My own son asks, earnestly: “Why does everyone talk about Israel when so many things are wrong?”
Even Brin’s words — crass, impolitic and from the mouth of a billionaire — express something I have heard others say. The word “genocide” was invented in 1944, responding to the Holocaust. The Holocaust led to the extermination of 6 million Jews — so recent that some who lived it are still living. Why such eagerness to apply that word today?
But it is not antisemitism that causes people to say “genocide.” It is not hatred of Jews that gives the movement its fervor. It’s Israel. It’s what Israel is doing.
And because Israel claims itself a Jewish nation, what Israel does, does harm to us.
Watching Israel’s war in Gaza is like watching a fight that isn’t one. Like watching a person landing blows against a person on the ground. Anyone in their right mind would call out, “No.”
But the people who lead and support this war are not in their right minds.
In Israel, too many have radicalized themselves through fear, or want of vengeance, into believing their neighbors are not human.
