By Stan Goodenough
Courtesy of The Jerusalem Post

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on September 22, 1995.

A woman I know well passed me in the street the other day. She was weeping in great gulps as she hurried home. From where she came, I could hear the sound of pots and pans being banged; it was the sound of demonstrating women calling for a change in the direction their nation is heading.

The woman was Christian, not Jewish. But her outpourings of grief as she left the scene unfolding behind her were cries for Israel.

Later that night I lay sleepless, listening to the shouts of police and the echoing cries of protesters. For my friend, for myself, and for a number of other Christians in the land, it has become increasingly difficult to understand what we see taking place around us. We listen to Israeli politicians on TV, watch policemen filling up city streets, see children being dragged along and women beaten, and the questions boil up inside us.

It’s not that scenes of citizens challenging authorities are unusual, shocking or new. Korea, South Africa, Beijing, Tahiti – such confrontations are commonplace in our world. And the methods used by security forces to put them down are pretty well universal.

But somehow we expect it to be different here. We expect to find more compassion, more sympathy, between the people of this nation.

You Jews are, after all, fellow victims. One would expect a nation as despised and rejected as yours has been – and is – to stand together against its foes.

I ask myself whether your leaders – those acting against the protesters, and those demanding that Jews leave Hebron and other Jewish settlements – have ever cried out in their hearts, questioning the worldwide antagonism their people have experienced through the ages. Have they ever agonized with their fellow Jews, including those with differing politics, over the waves of hatred and murder that have taken the lives of so many of their people down the years?

Something seems to be missing in the heart of the land of Israel; there is so much animosity in the air. Where is the gentle response, the caring heart? Where is the tenderness human beings naturally show towards those who have suffered as they have?

We hear you talking about “the putrid fruit of the settlements,” or vowing one day to hold “peace crimes trials,” and you’re talking about one another, Jew about Jew.

It seems as if some of you are so averse to – or ashamed of – the religious beliefs of your countrymen that you will side with the enemy to destroy the very things your fellow-Jews believe in. It is very hard to understand how some Israelis can applaud the embracing of men who have personally delighted in acts of anti-Jewish terror, while denigrating religious Jews in Gaza, Judea and Samaria.

You are not hated because of some of you are “fundamentalist” in your beliefs, you know, but because you are Jews. All of history attests to this. Are you now blaming one another for the prejudice directed against you all?

It has only been 50 years since the liberation of the Nazi camps; just five short decades. Surely you cannot really believe that you are living in a brave new world?

OH ISRAEL, Having stood together, and thus remained distinctly Jewish, in the face of antisemitism from “Christians” – Catholic, Spanish, British, German and Soviet – and from Muslims, I fear you may now fall divided among yourselves within the boundaries of your finally-restored homeland. I fear that the Gentiles, who strove, and failed, to absorb you into themselves, may have their victory after all.

Surely this is a betrayal of all those who stood firm, all those who fought against assimilation, all those who refused to be baptized or converted by force, all those who went to the gas chambers with the Shema on their lips. The nations stand at your borders and laugh as they watch you turning on yourselves. They feel sue that their centuries-old goal will finally be achieved.

How many more bus bombings and kidnappings will it take, I wonder, before you acknowledge that perhaps those calls for jihad really mean what they say? It’s exactly what so many of Europe’s Jews said. They said that Hitler’s spelled out designs for them were just empty rhetoric.

It’s not doing any good. After all the sacrifices you have made for peace, all the compromises, all the risks you have been willing to take with your safety and your security, there has been no lessening of the animus directed towards you by western leaders. No pro-Israel element, or any softening of attitude, has surfaced in the coverage Israel receives in the international press.

And witness the refusal of the vast majority of the world’s nations, led by the so-called Christian ones, to attend your celebrations heralding Jerusalem 3000.

The truth is that there has been no change at all. Expectations of you and demands on you are increasing. The only time you win any sign of acceptance is when you indicate a willingness to relinquish you -millennia-old Jewish beliefs, claims and traditions, and become a more homogenous part of the human race.

Is this really the price you are willing to pay?

© The Jerusalem Post