To the People I've Talked With About Israel

 I have conflicting feelings towards this war that don’t quite add up to the anger to protest. While I admire the protesters and agree with what they are demading, I am having having an upsetting struggle with my Jewish American identity that takes me out of the mood.

I contrast these protests with the BLM protests after the deaths of Michael Brown and, later, George Floyd. Seeing those instances of racialized police brutality made me, and millions of my fellow citizens, angry. Protesting was a natural and constructive way to express that anger and communicate it towards the police, who were present in force at every protest. Thanks to the organizers, the protests were generally inspiring, uplifting communal experiences. In hindsight, I feel that they had a positive effect on the culture, even if much less so than I and others hoped at the time. Attending them was morally easy, fitting squarely with my sense of identity.

This time, I also fully understand the motivation to protest the actions of the US government as a citizen. While it would be hard for most people to spend the time and energy to protest every time our government did something sinister and destructive in the world, this case is definitely upsetting. Our country is providing the weapons and standing guard as our ally indiscriminately bombs civilians, as our leaders weakly ask them to stop.

But unlike last time, mixed with anger, I have some strange feelings that amount to a hesitancy to protest. I find myself wondering, why protest this particular atrocity? It would be one thing if I went out and protested every time the US government contributed to death and destruction, or if I became involved in trying to stop genocide and war crimes around the world, and God bless those engaged citizens, but let’s face it, most of the time I am just living my normal, privileged life as the powerful forces of the world clash around me. So why this time? In other words, why is Israel my problem? Is it because Israel is the “Jewish state” with a mostly Jewish population? Because some American Jews feel the need to support Israel? Why does my Jewishness involve me?

The idea of a moral obligation towards Israel due to my Jewishness seems to fly in the face of my very American right or privilege to choose my own identity based on my personal convictions and live according to it. I have been content to fully participate in US society, live proudly and mostly at ease with my Jewish identity, practice the religion in the manner and to the extent I want to, and try to be a decent member of my local community, while breezily rejecting Zionism and distancing myself from Israel. I have been able to say, with conviction, that Israel has had little bearing one way or another on my Jewishness. When I have crossed paths with Palestinians in my professional and social life, I have described myself as a non-Zionist Jew and that simple effort seems to diffuse any tension. Except for a few awkward conversations with relatives and friends, my approach seemed to work well, until now.

The pressure that I feel to take some sort of political action right now seems to suggest that I should definitively feel a certain way about the war as a Jew. What should that feeling be? Searching myself, I find stewing sadness, helplessness, pessimism about human nature, and some fear because of the war. I’m not sure what to make of those feelings or how I might constructively express them. It doesn’t feel like protest.

Like it or not, and whether I understand why or not, I see now how linked I am in peoples’ minds with Israel and all of the tragedy and danger there right now. Little well-meaning comments and conversations among friends and family remind me of this connection, which is a form of Jewishness that is unwanted and unwelcome. It upsets my lifelong easy blend of Americanness - white Americanness no less - and Jewishness that has seen me live as an ordinary citizen with my right to independent religious views, my cute and nostalgic ethnic heritage, my family, and my normal life, while dark powerful forces mostly outside my control clash in the world. It makes me afraid of the precarity of the status of Jews in this country, as it relates to those dark forces. This fear is irrational but it ushers in some intense and dark thoughts.

There is antisemitism in this country. I don’t see it in the Gaza protests, but rather popping up from dark corners sometimes, like in that Pittsburgh mass shooting. What if the ease of living Jewish life in this country were to end, and we went back to persecution, poverty and the fear of gratuitous violent death? What if one day the rifles from the gun racks of all those pickup trucks are pointed at us? Again I know this fear is irrational but I know I’m not alone in it, and it’s deeply, deeply ingrained. That day, I would be saying to my fellow Jews, “I’m sorry I disagreed with you about Israel.” I don’t mean that I would ever change my mind and support the Israeli government in escalating endless cycles of violence, but I know that the drive for collective survival among Jews, if pressed, will transcend those political differences.

These fantasies are fueled by overwrought fear, I know, but even as I struggle against it, it feels like a very Jewish fear! The struggle is between the Jewish identity I want to have and the one that the conditions of the world seem to impose on me. Some of the implications are: do the treasured moral convictions that support my sense of identity come from the hollow innocence of my privileged life? Facing my undignified, untimely end, would I finally see that the Jewish people do in fact have a special destiny? Would I come to understand why we were commanded to stick together and remain apart from other peoples? These disturbing thoughts are lightyears away from where I’d like my mind to be at.

The state of Israel looms large in the externally imposed Jewish identity. The Jewish American that I want to be - proud and privileged, but trying to be a good person and act from a coherent moral understanding of the world - demands freedom from Israel’s special influence over me. I don’t want to feel anything more about it than as a concerned citizen reading the news. But the unwanted Jewishness coming in from around me is telling me that like it or not, this is my issue, and I have to act. I’m not sure that I want to accept the reasons why.