Siege to the city on the hill

In the first week of September, I sent a quick e-mail to a former teacher from my time in Israel. He is a smart man who is deeply dedicated to his country, and our sporadic correspondence has brought much insight into my questions about the Middle East. So I was disappointed when he finally responded, a few weeks and one world-changing event later, without a single word of personal greeting--only a long, 20-page series of post-Sept. 11 articles of various pro-Israel and anti-Palestine sentiments.

My teacher, who had always tempered his own politics with close personal relationships and encouragement to pursue their education independently, was giving me the straight propaganda shaft. I was disappointed but not really surprised. A Jew is expected to believe unconditionally in Israel, and any concerns should be about forces that oppose it. This is my experience with politics when mixed with religion: They don't reflect a real desire for peace progress so much as a self-perpetuating hunger only for justification.

The Jewish community--my community--has both the hot pride of a champion underdog boxer and the snarling defensiveness of a dog kicked into a corner--a result of thousands of years of communal triumph in the face of overwhelming adversity. Jews have successfully, decadently assimilated into American society, but conflicts are still seen in terms of us against the world--especially when it comes to Israel and that city on that hill.

Now, my generation was not alive when the struggle for our homeland was an uphill battle, rather than the last 30 years' messy ordeal of holding on to it. So we were indoctrinated as religious school toddlers into an ideology that equates the land of milk and honey from our Torah stories directly with its modern incarnation--as if they were the same state, interrupted only for a millennium or so. When time came to learn about its historical context, it was made to appear as if the whole world was pretty cool with letting our cousins just tramp over there and set up camp. The only problem was the neighboring Arabs; they must have had some sort of jealous grudge. Then, in 1967, they tried to kill us. We won. The winner gets more land, fair and square. Fair and square--impeccable logic for a kid raised as one of the Chosen People.

It couldn't hold water for long, though. The first leak sprung on me in Israel, when I realized that our class lecture on Sabra and Shantila--sites in Lebanon of the 1982 massacre committed under the watch of current Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon--was almost shorter than the time it took us to speed through the decrepit Palestinian town of Hebron on our way to the sparkling beaches of Eilat. All of the beauty of the land was shown to us, but I saw for myself just enough of the dark underbelly to know that there was much more to it. The bubble burst early in college when I realized that imperialism does not just entail the New World and Heart of Darkness but is inextricably tied up with a movement about which I once sang songs on the promenade looking over Jerusalem.

I wasn't able to attend Norman Finkelstein's discussion on this topic at Duke last week, but I'm sure that the Jewish community at Duke must have had a tense moment in the face of pro-Palestinian arguments from "one of our own."EUnfortunately such challenges are often met with the easy way out: Critics like Finkelstein--and probably myself, at this very moment--are tasked into the label of self-hating Jew. This willful exclusion of dissenting voices is anathema, the antithesis of healthy discourse. As it stands, dialogue within the community is stale at best, and outright biased at worst. To give an idea, an e-mail I received some time ago called for the boycott of McDonald's because the corporation gave aid to injured Palestinian refugees--just about the worst cause for organized protest that I have ever heard.

I only criticize the Jewish community because I know it well; this propaganda and intolerance exists on every side of the conflict. I do love Israel, a land of great hope and beauty where I may someday live--and yet that does not blind me to the fact that it is, with tensions escalating daily, arguably the most dangerous country in the world. There are no right answers, but surely claims such as "we were here first" or "they started it" are wrong ones. And yet they are used daily by each side.

The Middle East is a bloody morass, a mess of primitive political quicksand where the more you know, the less you really understand; indeed, anyone who can provide you with straightforward and simple answers to its problems probably knows very little. That's why public discourse, like on these very pages of The Chronicle, goes in such meandering circles, with manipulated, meaningless statistics and death counts aimlessly fired off like blank shells. Before we confront the intolerance of others, we have to recognize those same fundamentalEaspects of ourselves. Otherwise the harder we struggle to stay on that hill, the farther into the pit we'll all sink.