I was born in the middle of the Second World War, and by the
time it ended, I was too small to remember any of it. Later I began to realize
there was a far away place in which something bad was happening. All I could
tell was that the place was associated with words that sounded like Jewish and Palestine and British and
United Nations and things like that.
Eventually I grew old enough to go to school and hear
grownups talk in French about a big war that resulted in people called “Juifs”
going to a place called Palestine ,
killing the locals and taking their homes and farmlands. And for the first time
I learned there are numbers so big I could not count them even on the fingers
of both hands. These were 250, and 1000, and something called 250,000. That's
how many Jews, they said, were killed by a people called Hitler, or maybe Nazi
– I could not make out the difference at the time. Then gradually, that number
got even bigger, becoming a million and then two … eventually reaching six
million dead Jews.
In school, I made friends who looked different from each
other and spoke with different accents. I also came to know their parents and
their siblings as the school/church compound often became the center of social
life. In my tween years by now, I noticed that one of my friends never attended
church, and for a long time did not realize he was Jewish. Eventually, I
learned who he was, but because 4 or 5 years (half my life then) had passed
since I heard of the bad things they did in Palestine , those things did not affect my
relationship with him.
This set-up lasted another 4 or 5 years before we said
goodbye because my parents had decided it was time for our family to return to Egypt where I
was born. I was a teenager by now, and met good friends in school whom I knew
were Jews. That's when I detected both similarities and differences in the
behavior of the European Jews I met previously compared to the Egyptian Jews
with whom I was now associating.
They were similar in that both were inquisitive about
everything pertaining to the people with whom they associated, including me.
And yet, they revealed very little about themselves. As to their differences,
those in Egypt
did not seize every opportunity to show how unique they were, contrary to the
European Jews who never ceased to show how apart they were from everyone else.
After a seven year stint in Egypt ,
our family came to Canada
where I met Jews that behaved like an exaggerated caricature of the European
braggarts I met elsewhere. That's when I learned to link this Jewish character
with what happened to the Jews during the Great War – the event that took the
name Holocaust. I detected that linkage in almost every Jew I met in Canada , and I
continue to see it in their writings wherever they are.
The one piece of writing that highlights that linkage more
than anything I've seen before, came under the title “Shouldn't Israel Care
About Anti-Semitism?” It was written by Shmuel Rosner who lives in Israel , and was
published on February 9, 2017 in the New York Times.
Rosner establishes in the first paragraph that Jews
everywhere are the same, and that the Holocaust figures prominently in their
thinking and their behavior. He put it this way: “Jews across the States were
troubled when a White House statement failed to mention the Holocaust's
principal victims: Jews.” He then used the blog that was posted by the ADL to
establish the uniqueness of Jews: “haters who seek to dismiss the notion that
Jews suffered disproportionately during World War II”.
That's a loaded statement in that it does more than say the
Jews are different. It accuses those who do not acknowledge the notion of being
haters i.e. anti-Semites. Right after that, Rosner complains: “The government
of Israel
was silent.” But why is he complaining? He is because individual Jews and Israel benefit
from being “hated.” They learned to monetize the sentiment, also use it as a
weapon to gain power. The difference, however, is that Israel has
alternatives whereas individual Jews have none, hence Rosner's complaint.
Here is how he explained that part: “Israel 's
silence tells a few disturbing things about the Jewish state. There is a limit
to what Israel is willing to
sacrifice in its denunciations of anti-Semitism … There is even a temptation
for Israel
to benefit from anti-Semitism.” This leaves individual Jews, especially those
in America ,
out in the cold.