I went to work today with a new worker. He’s a nice thirty-something middle class gentleman from Peru who came to Israel six months ago with a starry eyed Zionist dream that has been shattered by the reality of today’s Israel. Ever since his boyhood he has nurtured a naive vision of a caring Jewish State that is completely at odds with the militarist Israel of 2001. What a cosmic joke has been played on my friend by the emissary of the Jewish Agency in Lima. In Peru he was a respected manager of a major hardware store chain, an officer at his synagogue, and a solid member of the middle class with a nice home. In Israel he is staying at a slummy Absorption Center (immigrant’s hostel) with his wife and two kids, and has found his skills and experience irrelevant in a society that really doesn’t care why he came here, and even less about his welfare. So now he’s my painting helper working for wages that I’m ashamed to be paying. So where does that leave me?
Am I also a victim or a protagonist of this Zionist game that shuffles the Jews of this world out of their homes and into a matrix of beaurocracy and government control in order to provide more children to become Zionist cannon fodder. I hope not. But I do wonder most days about the reasons for my children becoming Israeli, and I hope the answers that come are the ones that will allow me to sleep at night when my children are grown. I took them from a secure home in the heartland of America and brought them to a land where the next day might be the last. But surely our Civil War will end and we will finally come to terms with our Palestinian cousins and learn to share this land with all who live here. Am I also naive?
Among my Israeli leftist friends I am the only one who actually goes out every day and builds calluses on my hands in order to put food on the table. But they are the ones with the rigid ideologies about the working class and the theories about the means of production and the political structures that will bring us all a final equality, brotherhood, sisterhood, and all that crap that died with the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. I would be happy for the killing to stop and the people to be able to go to the store for a loaf of bread without having to confront a conscript soldier from Russia or Brazil who has closed the road and makes our grandmothers climb over mud and rocks to get around the road that is closed but they let them go around it.?.?! Only some times they shoot at them because they are really not supposed to go around it. . . . for a loaf of bread, or going to school, or looking for work. . . they shoot at them.
Yet I live in a town not 7 kilometers from the aforementioned scenario. And here my eight-year-old daughter can walk herself home from school without a care in the world that some jerk with a gun will accost her and humiliate her. Why can my daughter have that freedom and her counterpart in Qalkylia cannot? Why can we be safe in our little bubble of security and they cannot? Why are Jewish human rights somehow more important than anyone else around here? It’s a little belated to keep pointing to the Holocaust as a reason for all our oppression of our neighbors. My dad was in a camp. I hate the Nazis too. But for G-d’s sake that was fifty years ago already. Let’s give it a rest! The world won’t forget. We’ve made sure of that. Maybe it’s time to show how magnanimous we can be, and open our doors, our arms, our hearts, to those who have unfairly borne the brunt of our redemption.
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