Kenrick (comment #34) writes : “If a man wishes his humanity to be recognized and respected, he had best extend that same recognition and respect to the neighbor.” Kenrick, you won’t get any argument from me, or, I’d wager, many other Jews. After all, Jews are the folks who introduced the concept of “equal treatment for the stranger” to the rest of the world — and a most radical doctrine it was at the time. (In fact, in most parts of the world, it’s still considered a radical doctrine.) The admonition against oppressing strangers appears 36 times in the Hebrew Bible. So, if you’re directing your comment to Jews in general or Israelis in particular, you’re preaching to the choir.
But you shouldn’t be directing your comment to Jews of any stripe. You should be directing it to Muslims, and particularly those Muslims who call themselves Palestinians. They’re the people who have, since at least the very early years of the last century, refused to extend either recognition or respect to Jews. The record on this matter is absolutely clear — and hideously bloody. Again and again and again, the Arabs have disdained peace overtures from the Jews of Israel; again and again, Israeli offers of honest negotiation and respectful discussion have been spurned, denounced, and treated with the most abject disrespect by their Arab interlocutors.
I don’t know how much more plainly I can say this: If you’re implying the Jews are the bad guys in this century-long tragedy, you’re committing an outrageous act of role reversal. There are bad guys aplenty, but they’re all Palestinians and their Muslim cohort. The newly-founded State of Israel, seeking nothing more than peaceful coexistence with its Arab neighbors, was immediately invaded by Arab countries, not the other way around; Yasir Arafat was, the last time I checked, a Muslim, not a Jew; the perpetrators of the ghastly pogrom in Hebron in 1929 were Arabs, not Jews. And so it goes, on and on. I wish I were exaggerating when I write that the Arabs dream of dead Jews, but the historical record clearly demonstrates that I am not.
You have a wonderful message to convey, Kenrick, but the people who need to hear it are not listening, and they never have been. For at least a century now, the entire world has been grappling with the problem of how to get the message of mutual recognition and respect across to people who refuse to hear. I wish you good luck with that.
