A cheese sandwich for the children

Today’s advertiser is AG1. Although Beehiiv rules forbid me from asking or encouraging you to click the ad, if you do so, of your own free will and according to your own moral principles, each click will earn me $2.40.

Children are awful, on this we can all agree. They are smelly, cloying, and disagreeable. They make noises when you want them to be quiet, but when you do want them to talk, they have difficulty carrying on a meaningful conversation. Then there’s the way they keep changing: Their manners and emotions, their likes and dislikes, their very size shifts from month to month, sometimes minute to minute, requiring us constantly to adapt to their inconstant needs and desires. Worst of all, we are responsible for them—for feeding, clothing, educating, and both protecting them from and preparing them for the world they will encounter as adults.

Still, children are, one must admit, often rather cute. Their helplessness, their innocence, and their weirdly out-of-proportion limbs and features all combine to make kids adorable — or at least to activate that forlorn chunk of the human brain, known as Sanrio’s Area, that controls our feelings of love and nurturing. We see kids and, irrationally, we melt.

Which is why, after not giving a shit about Palestinians for many months, a decent chunk of the world decided to start throwing around the word “genocide” to describe what’s happening in Gaza. A number of media outlets published pictures of starving Palestinians, and because the starving people were kids, everyone felt bad. Really bad. Like bad enough to say maybe this shouldn’t be happening? Bad enough that even some Republicans said maybe this shouldn’t be happening?

And it shouldn’t be happening. The past 22 months of Israeli action in Gaza have been chock-full of war crimes, from the targeting of civilians, journalists, aid workers, and hospitals to the starvation-through-blockade of much of the population. Is that a genocide or not? I don’t care, because “genocide genocide genocide, cheese sandwich cheese sandwich cheese sandwich.” But war crimes? War crimes are specific, identifiable events, with perpetrators and victims and enabling policies and politicians, and those can and should be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court. I care about war crimes. War crimes bad¹!

And you should care about war crimes, too — but not just when the victims are children. It boggles my mind that there are people who were until recently okay with the deaths of “military-age” Gazan men and (I guess) childbearing-age women, not to mention elderly Gazans of all sexes, but who drew the line at pre-teens. What does it matter whether someone has 50 years under their belt or 5 years? The former can be killed as a necessity of war, but the latter’s a tragedy? As a newly minted 51-year-old, I find this troubling! My life is just as important as any child’s — not more, not less, but equally important. (Okay, maybe a little tiny bit more important.) How about not killing or starving either of us?

And if you’re one of those people kvetching that that one skeletal kid also had muscular dystrophy, or that we can’t trust stats coming out of the Gaza Health Ministry, or that the refusal of the Palestinians to take what was on the table during negotiations the past few decades means they can’t ever be dealt with, or that you honestly just don’t care what happens to Palestinians, well, you should probably click unsubscribe right now, cuz you won’t like where this is going.

More after the ad…

Thirteen years ago, I took my first — and likely only — trip to Israel, for my New York Times series “Getting Lost.” From the start, I announced my ambivalence about visiting what I’d always been told was in some way my homeland:

When the story was published, it quickly caught the attention of David Harris, CEO of the American Jewish Committee, who, uh, did not like it. “By the second paragraph,” he wrote, “I was shaking my head in disbelief.”

Now it was my turn to shake my head in disbelief. Had Harris really never encountered Jews who were ambivalent about Israel’s history, especially its recent history, not to mention troubled by what visiting it for vacation might mean? I figured I was just one of tens of thousands of anxious nebbishes, but had I actually broken new ground in Jewish self-hatred? If so, I would have been proud! I’m an innovator!

Sadly, I’m not very original. Jewish political-religious ambivalence about the meaning of going to Israel is older than the state of Israel itself. And yet today, as outrage about Gaza spreads (yea, even unto corners of the GOP), it’s treated like some brand-new rupture in American Jewry. Here’s my neighbor Ezra Klein a few weeks ago, writing in the Times after Zohran Mamdani’s primary victory in NYC:

I am 51 years old, and I can’t remember a time in the last four decades when that consensus held true for me. For me there has always been a disjunction between Israel and Judaism writ large. And I’ve always liked it that way. Because I believe in criticism, because I believe in real discourse, I wanted that gap to exist, so that criticism of Israel, whether or not it amounted to “anti-Zionism” (whatever that means any more), would not extend to criticism of Jews like me, who were either opposed to Israel’s policies or just not particularly interested in the place.

(I can pinpoint the moment my feelings about Israel really shifted: It was in 1997, when 17-year-old Samuel Sheinbaum strangled and dismembered a Maryland teen then fled to Israel to escape the U.S. justice system. That was when I went from “Oh, Israel is the place of refuge for Jews” to “Oh, Israel is the place of refuge for murderers.” Sheinbaum was eventually convicted by an Israeli court, but still, there was no guarantee he would even be arrested there.)

Sadly, it has been the policy of the Netanyahu regime to conflate Israel, Zionism, and Judaism, so that any criticism of Israeli policy, anywhere in the world, is condemned — erroneously — as antisemitism. And now, thanks to the homegrown fascists who’ve seized power in the United States, we can see it here now, as the Trump administration extorts universities for hundreds of millions of dollars while pretending that Jewish students are being treated unfairly (and that students who protest American policy toward Israel are national security threats).

This is not to say there isn’t antisemitism, because there is. Oh boy, is there a lot of it! As Tom Lehrer (RIP) once sang, “Everybody hates the Jews!” Even I hate them from time to time, and I’m one of them.

But what’s changed is that you used to be an antisemite first. You hated the Jews for whatever reason — blood libel, conspiracy theory, penis envy — therefore you also hated Israel, because it was the Jewish nation. Those were the days! Back then, a white hood really meant something.

Now, because of Netanyahu and Trump’s conflationary tactics, the antisemitism is a corollary — you’re upset with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, so you unleash your anger on all Jews. You become an antisemite. And that means anyone can be an antisemite now. Once again, white people are being replaced.

To be sure, there are a lot of paleo-antisemites masquerading as neo-antisemites, couching their generations-old resentment of us heebs as heartfelt political differences with Israel. (Some of them are in the Middle East, some in Washington, D.C.) But the fact that they are able to play that game at all shows how much the tide has turned: Because of Netanyahu and Trump, random Jews in America are under threat.

Yes, I blame them. First, for all the war criming. (Biden and his administration bear some guilt as well.) And then for all the antisemitism: They intentionally, strategically blurred the lines; by trying to keep Jews safe in Israel, they made Jews less safe everywhere else.

And so I’ll come back to the questions David Harris “asked” me back in 2012:

Yes! And yes!

Now, I’m not saying I want Israel to close up shop. I have friends who live there, I greatly enjoyed my one visit, and a goodly portion of Israel’s Jewish population (if not, it seems, the majority) is opposed to Netanyahu and the war in Gaza. The food is wonderful, and Mem brand shaving cream is the best I’ve ever applied to my face. What’s more — and I know this is going out on a crazy limb — geopolitical stability is good. No one really wants new nations popping up or older ones blinking out all the time. Too messy. The rich can’t get richer when there’s a new border or national currency every week².

That said, we humans tend to forget that things — from small things like children to big things like countries — change. For some people alive today, Israel did not exist when they were born. When I was a kid, the Soviet Union loomed over the world, and Germany was split in two. I was here for the breakup of Yugoslavia and the independence of East Timor. Whether those were good changes or bad changes, I can’t truly say — I can say only that things changed because sometimes things change, and that the status quo is only the status quo until it isn’t.

And so it’s not inconceivable that Israel as we know it could at some point in our lifetimes cease to exist. Gaza and the West Bank, too. There could be a wholesale rearrangement of borders and powers throughout the Holy Land. Maybe new nations, new identities will arise, and maybe those too will be in conflict with one another. I can’t predict how it will go, but I do know the current situation looks intractable: Israel wants to “keep itself safe” from hostile neighbors, and it also wants to maintain its Jewish identity, which means to some degree dispossessing its own Palestinian citizens of their rights, and then Israel itself is split between a dwindling left-wing movement and a growing and outspoken and nakedly bloodthirsty right wing. Everyone wants to fight, and no one wants to give anything up, ever. They’re all a bunch of heavily armed babies. This is going to go on for a long, long while.

You want it to end? Here’s what you do: One day, all 7.2 million Jews of Israel just up and leave. “You think you can do better? Fine! Good luck! See you!” And then they disperse—to Europe, to Russia, throughout the Middle East (from which about 40% of their forebears hail), and to the Americas and Asia and Australia. There they will face resentment, because they will once again be refugees and (literal) outcasts, and they’ll face paleo-antisemitism, because everybody’s gonna keep hating the Jews. But in this case, the antisemitism is the point: The way to get people over it is to make them live with us.

This is one of the things I truly love about New York City: There are so many of us — “us” being people of all different types and backgrounds — and we’re all packed in so close together that we have no choice but to try to get along. Do we all like one another? Hell no. But are we about to murder one another? Probably not. Sure, we may complain loudly and frequently about “those people,” whoever those people happen to be, but we complain so that we don’t have to kill. It’s an outlet. It makes life amid the throng bearable, in part because we know everyone is complaining about us instead of murdering us. (Thank you, everyone, for not killing me.) Frankly, we’re doing pretty well here. I haven’t assaulted anyone in at least a decade!

What I want from this proposed new Exodus is for everywhere else to become a lot more like New York: not just full of Jews but full of tolerance for everyone. That’s the way to deal with antisemitism in both its old-school and newfangled varieties — if they don’t like it, it’s their problem, not ours. In a post-Israel world, antisemites need to grow the fuck up.

I don’t want you to think that I’m naive. I don’t expect this to work smoothly, or really at all. But I do want this to be in the realm of our imaginations, as it was for early 20th-century anti-Zionists, and not some crazy, off-the-table proposal. Besides, it’s just land! Holy land, okay, sure, but land just the same. Let it go. Abandon your attachment to an outdated idea of “home.” Save the people — save the children! Save the culture. (Save me a bagel.) Those things endured for thousands of years far from Jerusalem, and they will continue to endure and evolve and speak to the hearts of those who value them. If you don’t have faith in that, if you can’t be Jewish without the soil and the blood the soil requires you to spill, then maybe you’re the one conflicted about your Jewish identity, not me.

Finally: Because Trying! is contractually bound to include at least one Star Wars reference per essay, I’m going to let Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) have the final word:

If only the screenwriters on The Rise of Skywalker had listened to him… 🪨🪨🪨