The Jews & The Israelis & Me

The Jews & The Israelis & Me When I was a kid—barely a teenager—there were two reasons for me to cross over the Williamsburgh Bridge into Manhattan from my Woodhaven, Queens home: one, to pick up and take home my grandfather, Gramps, from his small grocery store on the Lower East Side’s Rivington Street; or, to look for my father at his workplace in Greenwich Village, the Department of Justice’s Federal Detention Headquarters which all in my family referred to as “FDH.” The Lower East Side and Greenwich Village were two colourful locales in the early 1950s. Their ambiences aroused in me dominant emotional effects and appeals that remain with me today. I could sense a fervour for life among the people populating these places although I was too youthful to know why I was living or what even for. These areas also suggested an exciting disparity to the rows and rows of Archie Bunker Queens suburban dwellings, victims of urban planning, which populated my neighbourhood. The Hasidic Jews on the Lower East Side and the “crazies” in the village were reasons alone worth making the jaunt into Manhattan. I did not know it at the time, but the mania of McCarthyism was an important concern of my parents, older family members, and other grown-ups in my circle of acquaintances who were adamant about politics. When I went into Manhattan to dawdle about these places furtively, I did not realize that a lunatic fringe of Northamerican politics was affecting all of us very profoundly, and was, on each trip, tainting my own innocent spirit with hatred, and was impressing on my subconsciousness, by frequent repetition, the painful emotions of humiliating disgrace and disrepute. Those about me did not understand what they detested, and so they feared what they scorned. There is no glory or pride when one loathes. (Damnant quod non intelligunt.) McCarthyism’s distortions fettered freedom so proficiently, my family members were burdened with strong regret, censure and reproach—effects they could not understand were playing havoc with their blind adherence to conservatism and their desire to be happy, productive citizens. 1

One evening I was with my uncle going over the Williamsburgh Bridge on our way to pick up Gramps. On my lap was The Daily News. I knew very well that the headlines, proclaiming the execution of two Jews (one of whom was a woman) who had been convicted of providing atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets, did not sit very well with my uncle. There was some small connection between my grandfather and these sacrificed Jews. I do not know if Gramps was familiar with them in the neighbourhood, or that he was friendly with some of their relatives, but there was a precise reference to a building across the street and around the corner where people, linked to the event, lived. I was excluded from knowing the exact details of this relationship, but I did surmise that no one was very satisfied about what had happened to these two people at Sing Sing, and my kinship were all silent, afraid concerning the matter. The look on my uncle’s face as we crossed the bridge had been one of resoluteness—not typical of the blustering, swaggering conduct displayed by a 1950s’ surefire conservative. I think he was ashamed. My grandfather was distressed. In the 1950s and 1960s I enjoyed in New York City the fruits of a location which was truly tolerant—at least the most forbearing of any other city I have known since. The Jews, in particular, for all the narrow-mindedness that has been heaped upon them during their history, could profess their “Jewishness” in the open without fear of being attacked for doing so. Jews mingled freely with the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, Puerto Ricans, Afroamericans and all other ethnic groups (cryptic New Yorkers!) living in The Big Apple. Intermarriages were common. Most of us would not be ashamed to bring a Jewish friend home. The “spy” story was a blow to many who had Jewish friends, and the horror of McCarthyism was blamed for stirring up the basest of feelings of those who were less charitable than others. Some years later my Jewish girlfriend, who I loved very much, sobbed to me about this tragedy. She was terribly despondent about what had happened to Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and she proclaimed vociferously their innocence to me. I have often felt comfortable with the movement, on the part of Jews worldwide and Israelis in their home, to “rub the human race’s nose” in the accursed acts perpetrated on Jews, the ROM, gay persons and other factions singled out for destruction during the incomparably atrocious Second World War. While perhaps film footage does not authenticate the “6,000,000” number, it does, nonetheless, confirm acts of violence that demand universal condemnation. The Jewish and Israeli communities do well to harp 2

on these massacres for the benefit of humanity. It is disgusting for political organizations to make reference to this calamity as some sort of Zionist plot to increase Jewish and Israeli economic and political hegemony. And it does not surprise me, as repulsive as it might be, that there are Roman Catholic organizations and even prelates, members of a religious body that offered succour to the Nazi regime during the Second World War, who are willing to make biased hay for the “Holy” Mother Church at the expense of another spiritual entity. How low can they go? Nevertheless, it can be argued that the Jews and Israelis exaggerated in their efforts to condemn and, out of feelings of intense grief and justified bawlings for rectitude, compromised their own position in light of the political and economic realities of today. Instead of aligning themselves with the protests of other victims of historically-neglected exterminations, the Jews and Israelis went along alone. History itself has not been kind to the victims (200,000,000) of not only the First and Second World Wars, no one ever thinks about the millions and millions of natives purged by the Europeans in the Americas, the Vietnamese bombed to death by the Northamericans, the African slave trade...an ad infinitum inventory of the revulsions committed by men and women throughout the world’s olden times. The Jews and the Israelis gave the world the impression that their reversal was something more special than the staggering blows executed upon others. They possessed the savvy and means, something maybe the Northamerican Indians did not, to put their case before the world and seek its pity. Many of us offered them compassion. It is a terrible shame that History consigned the efforts of the Jews and Israelis to the heap of so many other human-made catastrophes, and permitted the Jewish holocaust to pale and take its ordinary place among them. “The death of one person is a tragedy, the death of millions is History.” Stalin said that. Our mea culpas for the Jews and Israelis can be grasped still further by analyzing in a more revisionist political sense, not a particularly historically religious one, the post-Second World War dividing up of the spoils of that calamity. Shocked beyond belief, military and political leaders attempted to deal with the catastrophic loss of life and the rubble of bombed-out cities which they surveyed had befallen the European continent. Death and destruction horrified all of us, and still today we carry in our psyches the enormously scarred memories of the deathly twentieth century and the two world wars forever blotting its history. What was to be done? Where was one to begin to reconstruct? Who would have what? 3

How would a continent be rebuilt on the shambles it had twice made of itself? How could it? One would have to distend his or her imagination quite a long stretch to believe that the United States and the United Kingdom had purely sentimental and honourable objectives in their minds when they guaranteed European Jews not only a safe exodus to their promised land, but even the assurance that they would be protected from any hostility that they might encounter during their settlement activities, attempts to fulfil their religious dreams, and then those expectations of establishing the State of Israel. The Jews had come to stay, and they would be sustained militarily, politically, economically and morally by the victors of the Second World War who enjoyed tremendously to wield their newly-discovered global powers. As immediately as the Jews and the soon-to-be Israelis comprehended that their religious and chauvinistic stakes in a sliver of terra firma, more or less half the size of Switzerland, was not appreciated by their Mashreq (Middle East) neighbours, those inhabitants similarly, hastily revolted at the notion that several newly invigorated Western nations were to be the determiners, not them, of the Jews and the not yet Israelis in the centuries-old homelands of an awesome amount of Arab-speaking peoples. This was an intolerable state of affairs. Blood was shed. It continues to be. Having wedged a handful of Hebrews between the Christian world and the Islamic sphere, the exponents of Judeo-Christian “Democratic” Capitalism, shown the way by the soon to be DisUnited Kingdom and the DisUnited States of Northamerica, had put their foot in the entryway of Mashreq, had fortified their turf with a strategy of long duration in mind, and had started in on looking forward to counting on the petroleum reserves in that area which would be needed to fuel their expansionist aspirations brandishing, in one hand, the vicious, dog-eat-dog MBA dogmas of Harvard University and the University of Chicago, and, in the other, the St. James bible. Psychoanalysts describe this as the “double bind” syndrome. Others simply refer to it with the more mundane appellation— two-facedness.

4

It is often commented—frequently by Jews spread out throughout the world and Israelis and Jews suffering markedly in Israel—that the Jews and Israelis are remarkably bright people. That they have been the victors of a fifth of the Nobel prizes, and that this worldwide group of approximately 13,000,000 people, chosen by God (their god!), individuals very often atheistic, is therefore some kind of “untouchable” ethnic group. Not being necessarily arrogant about their knacks, the Jews and Israelis are quick to explain that their gifts have been forged throughout the ages not on account of any particular pre-eminence, but because their minority complexion has compelled them to be sharp in order to survive. So be it. I doubt that Jews and Israelis are outstandingly quick as a group. We all have known some of them who are not clever—are far from being astute. History is replete with races which were astonishingly sophisticated but are no longer with us. Likewise, the Jews and Israelis look as if they, too, might be in grave difficulty attempting to prolong their lineage. They are not a super people. They are not out to get us. They do not control the world’s financial and media institutions. No one does. We are obligated to be of assistance to the Jews and Israelis. We must help them to continue to exist not because of their religion or nationality, but for the reason that they are human beings as all of us are. If the Jews and Israelis have won a fifth of the Nobel prizes, this is not evidence of intellectual dominance. The Nobel is not an IQ test. The award is often influenced by political rationales. Jean-Paul Sartre refused it. Henry “The Carpet Bomber” Kissinger and Mother Teresa are Nobel laureates. One Nobel winner (1921), born into a Jewish family, Albert Einstein, regretted very much his part in the invention of the nuclear energy that would eventually massacre tens of thousands at Nagasaki and Hiroshima and terrorize millions in a protracted Cold War. Still another Jew crowned with a Nobel laurel wreath (1976), Milton Friedman, intimidated hundreds of millions of people, bringing too many of them to the brink of destitution—an E=mc² for them—when he concocted a fruitless economic ideology based on the exploitation of individuals’ toil, an absolute, autocratic aversion to government intervention to assist those in need, one that vied for the “perfection” of the marketplace, hinted that eventually some kind of concentration of economic controls and planning in the hands of a highly intelligent group of people is the best of all economic possibilities available, an economic mafia that did what it could to benefit multinational companies, cultivated a creed which encouraged the use of 5

repression to put into operation the Chicago Boys’ economic policies in at least Chile and Indonesia, and viewed a human being as some sort of homo economicus. He was a mentor to Ronald Reagan and the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher. Ironically, he also helped develop a new proximity fuse for anti-aircraft projectiles! A veritable hard-nosed skinflint who set the tone for bankers, financial advisers and stockbrokers to bring the DisUnited States of Northamerica to its knees after an unprecedented spectacle of graft and corruption never recorded in world history previous to nowadays. All Jews and Israelis must consider the following: Judeo-Christian “Democratic” Capitalism is a lethal fusion of repugnant inanity and unrepentant malfeasance. It has been that now for more than four-hundred years, and will continue to be so until its last gasping breath. Already this more or less spent system of elitism has become the laughingstock of many throughout the world, and it is especially ridiculed by the three billion human beings who live on two dollars a day. A new DUS president, skimming over the top of this reality with a stiff upper lip and repetitive supplications for rectitude, is not going to alter, substantially, the course this economic shipwreck is pursuing. The ship has been brought to a standstill. Still afloat, it is taking on water. It risks sinking into the nethermost depths of the sea. With the loss of the world’s dominant economic power to cover for it, Israel is also treading in an ever more treacherous territory. Contrary to many buoyant prognostications, the DUS will not stay put at the center of the international economy. There are said to be seven hundred DUS military bases scattered throughout the world. While many of these installations seek to cultivate “friendly” rapports within the territories they occupy, the schizoid implication is that, in return, backing for the DUS and its principles is insisted upon. Might is Right! Is it possible that this wide-reaching martial exposure, with military conduits strategically arranged, gives the DUS some tactical gain, or are the DUS’ military forces so spread thin they might be considered by their opponents to be impotent and eventual easy targets? What would happen if Southamerican leaders bonded and again challenged the DisUnited Kingdom over its possession of the Malvinas? Would 6

inebriated Chelsea and Manchester United fans fill up military cruise ships singing “Rule, Britannia!” and sail off towards Southamerica to conquer it? Or, what would happen if hundreds of thousands of Italian left-wingers surrounded Camp Darby in Tuscany, the DUS’s most sizeable deposit of arms outside continental DUS, and chained themselves to railroad tracks to prohibit the delivery of other arms from northern European DUS caches? Would chubby, under the influence “Americans” march off to get the better of Italy again? Or, what would happen if China opted to take back Taiwan? Would pot-smoking “Americans” set off to fight against China’s million plus army? Or, what if all three of these hypothetical incidents occurred at the same time? Or, what about another 9/11? And, will the DUS be able to depend on France, Germany and Italy—hedonistic, arteriosclerotic, marinating in their vulgar hypocrisy, and still shell-shocked from the bloodbaths they participated in during the twentieth century—to rally round the Stars & Stripes’ flagpole? Let’s face it, DUS militarists are mightier bluffers than are DUS capitalists. To my Jewish and Israeli friends I suggest an exit stratagem. A word to the wise should be sufficient. I implore you all to come to your senses and renounce your lost cause that horrifies each day the global community with blood-letting in Israel and Palestine giving mankind the nightmare that there can be no hope for peace on this planet. Your nation is a focal point of hatred for a billion people, and that detestation has been incubating for at least two-hundred years. In Israel, you are a mere seven million constituting one half of the total worldwide Jewish population. What madness makes you think you can continue to exist with such odds clearly against you? What ethical justification do you possess that justifies your continued confrontation which, in turn, causes so much anguish for individuals who are not even your neighbours? What principled concept entitles you to risk the lives of half your people? If you depart from the “promised land,” (the promise of what?), you will relieve a tremendous tension that threatens the world’s security. Further, this act will cause us to respect you. Your choice to relinquish your homeland for the benefit of humanity will not be regarded as a surrender on your part, but a wise move made considering your own restricted options. Such a feat might just save the Jewish and Israel race in Israel from still another mass butchery this time caused by your recalcitrance and conceit. It is impossible for you to count any longer on the DisUnited Kingdom 7

and the DisUnited States of Northamerica. It is time to cease being their pawn. A posse ad esse.

Authored by Anthony St. John The Ides of March, MMIX Calenzano, Italia

8