The Hardest Problem

I loved Lawrence of Arabia.  Not just the movie, but his whole story, right up to his fatal motorcycle accident.  Gertrude Bell, an archaeologist and Arabist and British diplomat, a woman who rode around Mesopotamia like it was Kansas, held my interest for quite a while.   

What no one told me was what those two were up to after WWI.  By the time the Western powers were finished divvying up the spoils, the groundwork was laid for disaster.

No one wanted the refugees created when Israel was formed.  

No one seems to want them now.

When I was in Hebrew school, twice a week from elementary through high school, I never heard anything about those displaced when Jews found a safe haven from the hate in the world.  The land was barren and empty until those hardworking Zionists came to town.  Suddenly, there was irrigation in the Negev and civilization from border to border.

Was there nothing there before?  It was certainly never mentioned.

And now all those displaced persons' descendants are once again unwanted.

And the Jews are unwanted, too, with antisemitism on the rise and now heightened by Bibi Netanyahu's absurd incursion into Gaza.  And yes, it is an absurd incursion.  If their special forces couldn't find the hostages then and can't find them now, then bombing the whole place to extinction is certainly not going to find them in the future.

It's possible to be Jewish and against all this, in Israel and in the US.  It's like loving America but despising what the Lying Liar did in our name.  It's loving America but despising LBJ's perpetuation of the Viet Nam War.  

The news of what's going on in Gaza has pierced the veil of TikTok videos and Instagram selfies on the phones of this generation of protesters.  That's a good thing.  People should be outraged.  Young people should sit in and march and share what they know and what they feel.

They should also be prepared to suffer the consequences.  Having an arrest record changed the course of a friend's life, and he was mad at the system.  But the system was what he was railing against; what did he expect?  

Having the courage of your convictions sometimes involves real courage.  As the police march onto campuses we will see just how deeply held those convictions are.  

I'm glad that the noise has been raised.  I'm glad that the issue made the front pages.  If I were paying for that education, I'd wonder what else they thought they'd accomplish.  Finish the degree.  Run for office.  Be the change.  It doesn't take much to get arrested, it seems.  The work of tikkun olam  - repairing the world through action - is much harder.