My good friend Tarek Sami’s Wespeak in the last issue of the Argus addresses a very serious topic with the characteristic brilliance of his caustic tongue-in-cheek levity. I do not possess Tarek’s verbal gifts and as such my response will seem unnecessarily dour. Yet I write it because I feel misrepresented by his swipe, as though I’ve been lumped together with a different sort of phantom.
Tarek, you will have a difficult time convincing Jews that anti-Semitism does not go part and parcel with anti-Zionism. There is no exact correlation. You, for example, are no anti-Semite and neither are the great number of Americans – Muslim, Jewish, and Christian – who find the brutal Israeli devastations of Gaza and Lebanon atrocious. But just as in the past members of my family have been verbally assaulted (picture little girls running home to Mama, asking, “Mama, what does kike mean?), spit at, and had pennies thrown at them because they are Jewish, I have been screamed at for being an ”Israeli Nazi“ with ”two thousand years of treachery in my blood,“ even though I’m a Jewish American, never brought up Israel, and didn’t feel especially treacherous that day.
In Europe the link is barely concealed. American Jews are transfixed by increasing reports arsons, fire-bombings, graveyard or temple desecrations, and individual attacks against Jews. The Spanish prime minister, leftist José Zapatero is reported to have said, ”At times one can even understand that there might be people who could justify the Holocaust“ while wearing the Arafat keffiyeh. Iran has become a center for the exportation of virulent anti-Semitism through the cloak of its ”The World without Zionism“ campaign. And on our shores, many will remember the shooting in a Seattle Jewish community center by a man who was upset about ”what was going on in Israel.“ Alison Weir, the speaker who sparked this debate, is in my opinion simply a liar, but her willful distortions and untruths provide semantic cover for a larger anti-Semitic presence that distorts and undermines legitimate protest on the left.
And yet for all that I have watched this phenomenon both in America and around the world with growing trepidation, I cannot begin to imagine what it must be like to have been an Arab-American for the last six years. I cannot imagine how hard it must be to listen to the talking heads, lionized bigots all, decrying with impunity the barbaric, evil nature of Arabs next to news reports of American and Israeli bombs falling on Arab villages. I can only imagine through the most horrific cultural memories of my people what it must be like to be Muslim in a country in which, according to Gallup polls, 39 percent of Americans believe that Muslims should carry special identification. I have trouble simply imagining how it must feel walking towards airport security with the name Tarek Sami.
I must also recognize, divulge, and denounce the dirty little secret of the American Jewish community – the intense anti-Arab racism that thrives behind closed temple doors. Within insular Jewish settings I have heard words that are, without a doubt, despicable slurs and epithets bandied about thoughtlessly. I have seen young liberal people smile to the faces of pro-Palestinian Jews and behind their backs deride them as ”brown dick-lickers“ and worse. I have heard words like these even here at Wesleyan. And even my own grandfather, whom I loved dearly, spent his later years scribbling away at a tract that he said would expose the vast Arab conspiracy against the Jews. Although these views have always repulsed me, for the most part I’ve let them slip by without thought or comment, chalking them up to the haunted memories of old Jewish steadfasts or the tempers of young hotheads, and as such I have not recognized the prevalence of these sentiments. The Jewish community has turned blind to its own hate.
There are many things, I know, about which Tarek and I disagree, but I have spent enough time with him to know that we share the same zeal for justice and humanism. If we allow these principles to be devoured by the us-versus-them mentality, we will be unable to repair the sinking moral foundations that plague both our houses. Those who struggle for the freedom of Palestine should not deny anti-Semitism among their ranks, but reject it. Those who support Israeli causes must struggle against anti-Arab racism amongst our own.
Our peoples need us to be just more than they need a rhetorical victory.
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