We have never failed in gratitude to our, now-deceased immigrant parents who had braved the vicissitudes and emotional cost of leaving their respective countries of birth for lives of liberty and religious tolerance in America. The autocratic government and the established Church of their place of origin, Russia, engaged in religious prejudice, evincing itself, among other horrors, in sporadic, but predictable, “pogroms” and other evils. The insupportable context of such a life motivated many, like our parents, to bravely escape to this country, renowned for its liberty and economic opportunity.
As American-born, first-generation children, we, at an early age, learned of the horrific facts of programmatic antisemetism eternally characteristic of the European Christian World; the same, our later readings revealed, having its advent in the years preceding the (4th Century) Christianizing. reign of Emporer Constantine of the Holy Roman Empire (see:” Constantine’s Sword” by James Carroll, a former Catholic Priest). We grew up, admittedly, in an ambiance of insecure financial circumstances but, notably, as grateful beneficiaries of the blessings of acquired constitutionally privileged status, free of religious tyranny. We were thus imbued with a lifelong sense of gratitude and resultant patriotism for the Nation that afforded such freedom; a gratitude; empirically exacerbated by the oft-recited depiction of the tenuous state of life in the “Old Country,” in “Yinglish” by family and by immigrant neighbors. Understandably, we have been empathic supporters of the Nation’s program of immigration asylum,
Like others of our known Jewish-American citizens, in addition to our ardent feelings of pride in our American citizenship, we have additionally been supporters of the establishment in 1948 of the State of Isreal; the latter, significantly representing the singular permissible refuge for survivors of the Holocaust and other displaced and homeless European Jews. It was personally reaffirming to observe that our parents’ adopted Nation and Israel, have historically been partners and friendly allies.
The sudden barbaric attack on Isreal by the Gazan Hamas was intended, dually, to cause temporal damage to Israel and, as well, to besmirch its legitimate international standing, Following the atavistically sadistic assault upon Isreal, the terrorists, as planned, retreated with their kidnapped hostages to large tunnels, strategically constructed under Gazan hospitals and places of communal attendance. They did so with the strategic design and intention that the inevitable retaliation, of necessity, would be visited upon those humanistically heartless shields. Hamas, fully cognizant that it lacked the military capability to destroy Israel perniciously conspired to impair its legitimacy and international standing by imposed acts of cruelty such as bombing hospitals and thus be conceived as a pariah. Hamas, as planned, retreated with its seized hostages to its pre-planned, well-supplied tunnels, constructed under such Gazan hospitals and institutions.
Unfortunately. such a pathologically perverse tactic was successful, and unfortunately exacerbated by an overzealous response orchestrated upon Gaza by Isreal’s right-wing-religious government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, resulting in large numbers of innocent Palestinian mortalities and horrific suffering of innocent Palestinian civilians, which as evilly conceived., successfully aroused critical international opposition.
In the United States, the opposition was palpably expressed and publicly demonstrated by large protests on college campuses and various other places of assembly, most notably by young and idealistic college students and other young protestors.
We, in principle, have sided with the protesters to the extent of the Netanyahu government’s overaction wreaked on innocent Palestinians as being unjust and excessive, Yet, we were dismayed to observe that the evident overreaction of the Netanyahu Right-Wing government resulted in a perverse opportunity to justify and promote the chronic historical toxin of antisemetism. An opportunistic horde of reductionist bigots availed themselves of the opportunity to condemn the entirety of the Jewish population, for the overreaction by Israel’s contemporary right-wing government. It should be usefully observed that a substantial portion of Israelis vocally and demonstrably expressed their determinative opposition to the present government’s policies and actions and sought its resignation.
More to our contextual point, many of the protesters (students and non-scholastic antisemitic agitators) appear to reductively and critically conflate, the entire diverse population of Isreal, but, perforce, all ethnic Jewry..
The ancient serpent of antisemetism has again opportunistically emerged from its eternally insidious hole. In medieval days the Jews were blamed for plagues, poor crops, lack of rain, and other events, empirically and indeed, rationally unrelated to the lifestyle, tenets, and culture of the Jewish religion, Apparently for those whose persona systemically includes anti-Semitic, or other bigoted and reductive ideation, are eternally hungry for motivating ideations to assign to and rationalize their systemic inclination for hatred. Contemporaneously, it appears to be the Israeli-Hamas conflict.
Is it rationally necessary to remind the atavistic members of the world’s bigotted underbelly, that we, as illustrative and ubiquitously relevant examples, are American ( Jewish, not Israeli) citizens and that our inherited religious ethnos, are not notably exemplified by the perverse phenomenon of reductive “group think?”
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