Letter to a Daughter

Dad, 11-20-2023

This is a letter from Dad to his daughter. She had received a racist message about Gaza from an elderly cousin, Cousin S.

Dear daughter,

Cousin S is about 95 years old.  He lived through the Holocaust in the USA and is old enough to remember when Jewish kids might get harassed or even beat up in the USA. It happened to me but not very much. He very likely has relatives, perhaps some that he knew face to face, who were killed during the Holocaust.

His closest friends belong to the Jewish temple. For that generation, Israel was seen as a safe haven from the Holocaust and the anti-Semitism that still plagued Europe after the war.

The grotesque slaughter by Hamas of hundreds of civilians including 200 kids at a concert sent him and many others over the edge.  

They see this conflict as “WE versus THEM” rather than what it is: “THEM versus THEM.” Nationalists only want power for their political group whether Zionist or Hamas, neither of whom care about the common people and see Israel’s pretty much genocidal attack on tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians as equivalent to US bombing Berlin in 1945.

It isn’t of course. 

Israel truly is an apartheid state which has discriminated against Arabs for decades and, even as we speak, encourages right wing Jewish settlers far away from Gaza to physically drive Arabs out of their homes.

And this. I have a good friend, an anti-fascist Jewish man who spent 7 years in an Israeli jail including being beaten after being falsely charged with espionage.

Israel supported Hamas because they saw that as opposition to the Palestinian Authority, another Palestinian nationalist group.

The following quote is from The Times of Israel (10-8-2023), an Israeli, pro-Jewish, newspaper:

“For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.

The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state (https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/)”.

 But in moments like this, people’s somewhat suppressed racism comes bursting to the surface, a much much more intense similarity to the USA Summer of 2020, only by analogy and not nearly as severe, of course. How many white folks said “Just start shooting at the black protesters?” Although even then almost nobody proposed bombing the neighborhoods and killing 4,000 kids.

Nationalism and racism go hand in hand. Muslims are mistreated in China and driven out of Myanmar by the hundreds of thousands. The current government of India is making life miserable for many Muslims as well as lower caste Hindus. There’s mass expulsion of people from Congo right now. Hundreds of thousands are trying to flee Syria and often are attacked when they attempt to find safe haven in Europe. Sudan is experiencing another mass slaughter of innocent people. (Yugoslavia in the 1990s saw some similar aspects.) And all these have been recent without even going back into the past very far.

There are hundreds of thousands of Jews and people who have Jewish ancestry, strongly opposed to horrors the Zionist government is bringing to innocent Arabs.

Kindly, insightful caring Cousin S has let his fear and his anger and lack of knowledge, or unwillingness to see reality, control his otherwise kindly self.

That’s what fear, and group solidarity based on ethnicity, race, or religion or even same-state citizenship push people to support the horrific oppression of others and divide us from sisters and brothers all over the world. Blind fear and anger combined with usually dormant racism lead to the kind of racist rage that some Jewish people are expressing.

I use the term “racism” even though it’s not adequate. None of the intense, severe massive problems that humans face from war to climate change to poverty to pollution to pandemics will be solved until there is a massive movement to reject and actively oppose all these different kinds of racism and nationalism.

My friend from Malaysia once told me “There are no unrealistic goals, only unrealistic timelines.”   That helps keep me grounded.

In some ways it feels like, as an analogy, that we are trauma nurses at the scene of a massive train wreck and we have to do two things at once. Do our best to make a better world for those in the present, and building a movement to find out who is causing these goddam train wrecks and force them to stop.

Love,

Dad