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"native" to Poland or Germany any more than us white folks are native to the U.S. Hell, the U.S. isn't even "native" to the U.S.
The ethnic "Jews" are native to the Middle East, just as the "Arabs" are. Judaism being an older religion and well established as a culture in the region long before Muhammad was born, and most of the Jews being systematically expelled from the region over a period of several hundred years (beginning about 600 BCE), 20th century Jews who endured persecution, discrimination, and routine attempts at extermination utilized world sympathy (such as it was) after the Holocaust to lobby the fledgling UN for a "Jewish Homeland." Because Zionism had established some settlements in what was then "Palestine" prior to the 1947 UN vote, because most of the European and American powers saw the Middle East as largely "vacant" land, and because most of Europe and the U.S. didn't want all the displaced Jews of Europe in their own midst, they were given a "homeland" in Palestine.
They didn't always do an honorable job of defending their new "homeland" in the ensuring war of 47-48, or again in '67 or again and again and again and again.
But the Palestinian and other Middle Eastern groups -- some political, some ethnic, some a bit of both -- didn't make matters any better. They vowed repeatedly to shove the Jews into the sea, a reference to the fact that most of the Jews in Israel had come via the ports from other places around the world. Prior to the late 20th century, there weren't a whole lot of "native" Jews in Israel. Some, but not many.
That is no longer the case. 1947 is over 60 years ago. A couple generations of native-born Israelis have come to maturity, and the animosity continues. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which was supposedly the "Palestinian" half of the partition, was "westernised" enough that its king, Hussein, married an American woman, Lisa Halaby who became Queen Noor.
But the conflict between the Israeli state and the Palestinian people is hardly black and white. It's complicated by intransigence on both sides, a refusal to cooperate and compromise. It's a politically internalized irrational fear on the part of Israel and it's a politically internalized sense of oppression on the part of the Palestinians. BOTH FEARS are grounded in historical reality. I'm not minimizing that. Nor am I letting either side off the hook.
Helen Thomas is of Lebanese extraction. Lebanon has had its own religous wars, usually pitting Christians against Muslims. This kind of sectarian violence breeds distrust and internalized antagonism. I'm not saying Helen Thomas has always been a bigot, but if at 90 years of age she is revealing both an ignorance and a hatred that appear to be of long standing, then maybe it's indeed time she remove herself from the public stage.
I am, under Hebraic law, a Jew. No, "Tansy Gold" is not my real name; my real name is archetypically Anglo-Saxon. But my mother's mother was a Jew, and I grew up knowing about the Holocaust, about the pogroms, about the ghettos and the discrimination when very few of my almost exclusively Christian schoolmates had any clue. I was 12 years old when the film "Exodus" was released, and I often had to explain it to friends, even friends who were older than I, because they had no context for it. Years later, in the 1970s, I was still explaining. For that matter, it's 2010 and I sometimes STILL have to explain it. (Come to think of it, that's what I'm doing right now, isn't it.)
So yes, I have a connection to this subject. A slender connection, but a connection nonetheless.
I also live in Arizona, where people who were brought to this country as children, even as infants, now live in fear of being forced back to a country and culture they have no connection to. They are "illegals," and they are at risk of deportation. And there are "anchor" children who have been born here of "illegal" parents. Do we send them back to Mexico or Honduras or Nicaragua, strip them of their property, because they lack papers? Is that what Helen Thomas would have "us" do to the second- and third- and fourth-generation Israelis, simply because their government is acting like a terrorist organization? What would she have us do about the hordes of Iraqi refugees -- including "Riverbend" -- who managed to escape Iraq to settle, welcome or not, in Syria and Jordan and Lebanon and Egypt?
Hatred and exclusion accomplish nothing constructive. Violence accomplishes nothing productive. Helen Thomas ought to, if she has a shred of decency, abjectly apologize for her awful words and then spend the rest of her days working to get the Israeli occupiers PEACEFULLY out of Gaza, AND get the Muslims and the Christians and the Jews to sit down and reconcile the stupid stupid stupid "differences" in their respective religions that have kept them at each other's throats all these centuries.
Jimmy Carter, who truly tried to end this insanity, said "War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children." The continuing series of wars in the Middle East are undoubtedly evil. But they are also undoubtedly unnecessary. What the Israeli government is doing, in the name of something akin to "national security" is beyond disgusting. Beyond revolting. It is evil, pure and simple. But responding to that evil with more evil accomplishes nothing.
I would have expected better of Helen Thomas.
Tansy Gold
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