Brownian Emotion

For the record, I don’t care that Mel Gibson is an anti-semitic jerk when he’s drunk, blaming Jews for all war (literally). He’s apologized for his outburst. And that’s fine by me. Forgive and forget.

It’s his Passion of the Christ that I have a problem with. It’s still out there, and it still portrays the biblical Jews as bloodthirsty killers. And that has a real effect on people who had nothing to do with the reality or fantasy of those events.

I remember as a kid in my mostly Irish/Italian neighborhood in New York, being told by kids down the block that I’d killed Christ. Yes, they said that I personally killed Christ (or might as well have) and they were going to kick my ass. I didn’t even know who Christ was at that age. But some kid’s dad told him Jews had done it and I was a Jew. So I was attacked. And I suppose it’s stuck with me all these years. I don’t see Mr. Gibson’s movie as much different than that kid’s father. Words are cheap, but ideas have power.

But consider this. If Christ had not been killed, there would be no Christianity. There is evidence that Christ knew what was going to happen and accepted it as his holy path, dying for our sins, going so far as to confide his plan to Judas (who somehow is the only apostle that sounds Jewish, perhaps because of the name). However, to people who don’t appreciate the origin and original teachings of Christianity, it’s certainly understandable to blame the Jews. And to people who don’t understand the situation in the middle east, it is also understandable to blame Israel. The two go hand in hand, except for those fanatics who encourage Israel towards war to hasten the return of Jesus for their own selfish ends.

Consider also that the term ’scapegoat’ comes from the Jewish biblical traditions around Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. A goat was loaded with all our sins and driven off into the woods and possibly pushed off a cliff, the idea being that the sinners would be thus cleansed. Compare that to the idea that Jesus died for our sins. And compare that to the idea that the Jews are the cause of anything bad in the world and let’s kill them or exile them or leave them to fight a circle of enemies on their own. The fundamental misconception in all cases is that our sins can be paid for by anyone but us. They can’t. And scapegoating only makes it worse.

Now, to be clear, I’m extremely critical of Israel and their tactics in the cycle of violence. But in a cycle of violence, it is impossible to say who causes what, unless you’re willing to unwind the circle a million times to Genesis or any alternate history you desire. We can really only criticize the current tactics, their brutality and ineffectiveness, and talk about possible solutions.

Israel and the US are mistaken for not waitng for international support to take out Hezbollah (though the International Community has been loathe to do anything but watch and condemn). Hezbollah is tacitly evil for using innocents as shields with the intention of getting Israel to hit them and make the news. That’s the case with the 4 UN observers killed last week. One of them had written to CTV (Canada) to give a heads-up about a week before he died. The last part of his letter was the key:

What I can tell you is this: we have on a daily basis had numerous occasions where our position has come under direct or indirect fire from both artillery and aerial bombing. The closest artillery has landed within 2 meters of our position and the closest 1000 lb aerial bomb has landed 100 meters from our patrol base. This has not been deliberate targeting, but has rather been due to tactical necessity.

“Tactical necessity” means Hezbollah was fighting from nearby, using the UN post as a shield, which is much the same clue to the horrible bombing of the village of Qana in southern Lebanon yesterday. We have only the Israeli’s word for it, plus the fact that Hezbollah has done the same thing a hundred times before, going so far as to shelter and launch attacks from schools and hospitals to get them blown up too. It’s pretty hard to blame either side in isolation. Israel dropped the bombs. Hezbollah picked the target. Both are wrong.

But coming back to anti-semitism directly, the UN and British partitioned Palestine and Israel was born. The next day, all her neighbors declared war, with the aim of driving the Jews into the sea. They could have accepted peace and a Palestinian state right then. But they couldn’t tolerate Jews sharing any of the disputed land. If that’s not anti-Jewish, I don’t know what is (I know of some Palestinians who say they’re Semites too, so they claim they can’t be anti-semitic–right—we’ll be more specific). But why was Israel created in the first place?

Europe has a long history of religious persecution, not just of Jews, but of any group that isn’t the cultural majority in their area, Gypsies, Moors, you name it. Religious and nationalistic hatred exists to this day. But if there’s anything the various nationalities and religious groups have ever agreed on, it’s that the Jews are the worst of it. There were laws against Jews owning property, or working in any business but money lending and tax collection, which is the origin of the “Jews are Greedy” myth. There were ghettos and shtetls, which make the opposite point. And there was the holocaust, which made it clear that Jews needed their own country as much as any group ever did.

But it’s fair to say that the creation of Israel was seen in Europe as a way to ease some of that guilt, but also get the Jews to move away. In other words, the Jews became the goat carrying the European guilt. The reality is that this guilt never left, just as we Americans pretend we’ve solved Racism in this country despite the economic realities (the goats-du-jour in America are the illegal immigrants). There is no doubt that Europe, on the whole, has been a pretty ugly place for Jews, and fairly anti-semitic (in all senses, but mainly Jewish) over the centuries. What then, I would ask, has changed since 1939 to cause that latent anti-semitism to go away?

Now it seems to me that the slant in coverage coming out of Europe isn’t outright racist, but there is a clear undertone of disgust at Israel, a lack of understanding for how European countries (check the UN resolutions and vetos by various countries) help perpetuate the situation rather than bring resolution, as America has repeatedly tried to do. Curiously, the information about Hezbollah using Qana buildings and the UN post as shields is not present in some BBC stories, though Australian news has no such problem. And the American papers clearly slant the other way. But the undertone I’m picking up from too many sources and blogs and conversations is that this would all just be easier if Israel didn’t exist. Nuke them all. Kill the goat.

By the way, Jews today take a more reasonable approach for Yom Kippur: we are told to apologize directly to anyone we’ve wronged before that day and make things right. But the world seems stuck on the concept of the scapegoat. And once that scapegoat is loaded up with our sins, the only thing we can do is drive it off a cliff to cleanse ourselves, at least for another year, if at all. That is where Israel is heading right now. And the rest of the world focusing on outrage after outrage instead of on root causes and solutions, we are driving them there more and more with each whack of the stick.

The solution to the mid-east conflict has been and will be the total disarmament of terrorist groups, the return of occupied lands (or some compromise that does the most good for all sides), and the enforcement of peace by armed international forces, at least until this generation passes on. There’s a reason that Moses and the Israelites spent 40 years in the desert. Some people never change. And some traditions never die. As in modern Jewish atonement, the change must come from all of us.