Gaza aftermath: dinner with friends in dark times

It’s not often you read a column that encapsulizes everything you’ve been thinking, but Marching for Hamas – by Denis MacEoin in the Jerusalem Post – did that for me. Here is just one excerpt, but the whole thing merits your attention.  (From Wikipedia, Mr. MacEoin, born in Northern Ireland, is “a novelist and a former lecturer in Islamic studies and is, at present, chief editor of the Middle East Quarterly.”)

Israel guarantees civil liberties to all its citizens, Jew or Arab alike, but it is dubbed “an apartheid state”; Hamas, ever the bully, kills its opponents and denies the rest the most basic rights, but we march on behalf of Hamas. The Left prefers the bully because the bully represents a finger in the face of the establishment? Almost no one on the Left has any understanding of militant Islam. Their politics is a politics of gesture, where wearing a keffiyeh is cool but understanding its symbolism is too much effort even for intellectuals.

So we live in a world upside down and sometimes it seems as if there is no way out of it.

That was the subject of the conversation over dinner last night at the rented home (in the Los Angeles area) of my friend the Dutch novelist and filmmaker Leon de Winter and his wife Jessica Durlacher, also a writer. Another couple was there – two Dutch women now also living in Los Angeles and working for a major American corporation. All of us were Jewish and talk centered on recent events – the Gaza War, the “anti-Zionist” demonstrations in Europe, the coming Geert Wilders trial in Holland. The atmosphere over dinner was friendly and relaxed, the food and wine good, but I think all of us felt disturbing overtones of earlier, even darker times.  There I was the lone American (my wife wasn’t feeling well) having dinner with four intellectual, very liberal people (in the classical and real sense) from ultra-liberal Holland who had opted to live, for now,  in the United States.  That the women were lesbians who had chosen the US over the Netherlands quadrupled the irony. (America Alone indeed!)

One of the women had just returned from Amsterdam where she found herself in the middle of one of those militant pro-Palestinian demonstrations with masked demonstrators (some native European) shouting “Hamas! Hamas! Jews to the gas!” To say she was upset was an understatement, but both she and de Winter expressed some optimism about the situation in Holland. Well, maybe it was more Leon. The public and politicians, he said, unlike the ritually-leftist media, increasingly understood what was really going on and were beginning to react accordingly.

Of course no one knew where that would lead – Europe being Europe – and at other times Leon sounded bleaker than I do at my bleakest.  He thought that Israel was doomed and would not live to see her one hundredth anniversary.  Though the Israelis had vast military superiority over their Arab adversaries, they would never use it to the degree necessary for survival because of moral constraints built into their own culture.  After all, this was the only country in history repeatedly to telephone its targets to get out of the house before bombing them. Of course that seems to be lost on the media and with world opprobrium (the UN, that same media, etc.) building against them, Jews would, eventually, over time, simply leave the country and the lights would extinguish.

We had some delicious lemon meringue pie for dessert.