I am sick at heart this morning watching the days old massacres in Israel. The appalling retaliations of Israel with its U.S. made and paid for rockets showering down on people who have only rocks to throw, is horrible. Yes, it’s the house that Trump and Kushner and Netanyahu built, but it isn’t only them. Its all of us. Its me. This terrible imbalance of power and land and justice is an international shame. I am a Jew and this doesn’t speak for me, doesn’t speak for us.
I remember the white supremacist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 and how angry and defensive I got watching the signs that said: “Jews will not replace us.” So stupid and hate-filled. Why would Jews replace them? It was already far more likely that robots would and that they would be more compassionate than the people holding the signs.
After the riots some of the rioters got their genes done, to prove how white they were. Some got predictable results. Most, however, did not. They found out that they weren’t as white as they had thought. They had to countenance the possibility that inside their ancestral genome were people who were possibly less hate-filled and paranoia-filled than they were. Assuming that not all the miscegenation that occurred was due to rape of a less-dominant culture by a more dominant culture, and that is a BIG assumption, they may have had to think what most of us already know, which is that the heart wants what it wants. Sometimes it wants it so badly that it cannot wait to be talked, shamed, transported out of it. Sometimes humans just need to get close, very close to someone they desire regardless of the either the pigment in their skin or the language of their religious practice.
Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs share a great deal of common DNA, some going back to roots in the bronze age. And yet here we are, in 2021, battling over a scrap of desert in the name of power and money and not at all, of the human heart.