When making small talk with family and friends, I always enjoy bringing up my Wednesday night poker game. There’s no better affirmation of old-guy bona fides than hunching over a card table with other old guys from all walks of life, “busting each other’s balls” like a bar scene from some bad Mafia movie.
Farts are good for 10 minutes of conversation. Of course we played through the pandemic. But the best part by far is that on any given night, half or more of the players were Jews, most of whom grew up together in the gritty mill town of Haverhill, MA.
Some of these guys went to Hebrew school together and now attend the same Temple. You hear all kinds of Jewish stuff at the table along with all the holiday well-wishes and the latest synagogue gossip. For a goy, it’s like being accepted into some secret society.
So, what could possibly have me thinking of quitting the table, after playing for 20 years? Gaza. I suspect many at the table are sympathetic to, if not supportive of Israel’s latest violence in Gaza and I’m not sure I can continue feigning fraternity with any endorsement of the murderous ethnic cleansing of a hapless population whose only sin was fighting for their homes and electing the wrong leaders to help them.
I don’t fault the fidelity of my poker buddies, and I don’t envy American Jews in general who are struggling to choose sides in this reckless slaughter. To them, Israel must represent not just their faith but their solidarity with one of the world’s oldest, most accomplished, and similarly persecuted minorities—a 4,000-year-old culture that was chased from its ancestral lands 2,000 years ago.
The problem is, the country of Israel’s entire 80-year history has involved brutally taking back those lands from Palestinians with equally established roots in a land grab that has infuriated its neighbors and relentlessly inflames global tensions. It’s a land grab present-day Israeli leaders now appear bent on finishing by leveraging a particularly gruesome attack on Israel into a scorched earth bombardment killing 50 Palestinians for every Israeli and threatening millions more with starvation.
As a human being, I have to condemn that. At the same time, I tend to like Jews. I find them to be self-effacing, yet strident. Remarkably open-minded and just as obstinate. Irreverent yet respectful. Generous and quick with a favor, Jews have made for a lifetime of great friendships which I’m reluctant to jeopardize.
More important, I like the culture of Judaism. Not all the silly rituals that seem increasingly prerequisite to faith in all of the world’s religions these days. Judaism is a culture that should be precious to the entire world, largely for reasons I believe most people, including Jews, poorly understand.
Judaism was one of the first truly monotheistic religions in the cradle of civilization. While all their neighbors were deifying trees, planets, and lesser contrivances, Jews were blazing the ethereal path that half the world eventually followed.
Judaism elevated mankind above its means. It put us on a whole new footing with The Almighty. While other religions focus on recruiting nonbelievers, Judaism has always seemed more interested in living and loving l’chaim. What a concept for a religion—pursuing personal fulfillment instead of followers.
That is all being threatened by Israel’s current leadership which is plundering dwindling political capitol that carried the nation since its creation 80 years ago. Say what you want about the ruthless tactics of Israel’s founders—they’d just survived an existential threat to their 4,000-year-old beliefs whose adherents, not to mention their friends and family, were slaughtered by the millions as an indifferent world looked the other way.
That holocaust translated into world sympathy sufficient to grant a fledgling Zionist movement a country of it’s own. It was also a great opportunity for post-war global interests in Middle East oil. I went down enough AI rabbit holes to come up convinced that the concomitant rise of Israel as a country and the Middle East oil industry as a global source of immense wealth is much more convenience than coincidence.
Corporate energy interests have prompted a lot of Western meddling in Middle East politics, and Israel almost always comes out ahead. Yet continued support of Israel’s current campaign of violence increasingly comes at a price far too great for any country calling itself a democracy. So why is Israel making Gaza its Waterloo, particularly as the world weans itself from oil.
It turns out Jews are just as susceptible to greed and immoral persuasion as any other people and it’s present leaders are exercising both at increasing expense to the country, its sponsors and 3.7 million Palestinians standing standing in its way. Even as opposing global interests in the area leave little doubt it’s inviting global catastrophe.
Undaunted, Israel is pursuing its own final solution to its Palestinian problem that, more than any other time in its contentious history, is threatening the global credibility of an ancient faith. For what? A homeland in the middle of a desert whose greatest value is symbolic. A better question is: why is The West still supporting an Israel that is looking more murderous and menacing by the day?
Reasons abound, some nefarious and others less-so, for this continued fidelity by Western nations toward their long-standing Middle East proxy, but it’s clear the Netanyahu government is going to milk it for all it’s worth. Early Israel would never have survived without that support, but its nuclear bombs now mean it can, but only at unacceptable costs to the rest of the world.
Faced with these ugly prospects, why not, at some point, quit winners and start making a few friends? The hundreds of billions in unconditional financial aid to Israel from the U.S. and Britain alone could have gone a long way toward compelling the country to seek peace with the Palestinians. But those outside interests refuse to compel the country to capitulate for reasons today that are even more nefarious than noble.
The answer can only come from within and without that entity most threatened buy the Israeli government’s present path: Judaism. Of all the peoples in the world, I most admire Jews now opposed to the campaign in Gaza. They understand that the purpose of Judaism is personal and not some prideful nonsense pushed for reasons completely opposite to the culture’s founding and so much of its heritage.
I don’t envy these more sober-minded Jews the task of convincing others less so to seek a lasting peace with the Palestinians but that’s another reason I like Jews. Practicality has been key to Judaism’s surviving endless persecution for thousands of years. Pride in that heritage now appears to be its undoing—as it is in so many lands where unscrupulous leaders leverage such fidelity to further their material and vainglorious interests.
Hopefully, the global disaster Netanyahu’s government is making might remind more practical Jews that their faith has always been their home, before the price paid far exceeds any unstable sovereignty it annexes from Palestinians lands. Maybe then the culture can once again lead the world into a future that focuses on l’Chaim.