Freedom, Part 1: Sorry for Spoiling Your Fireworks

Sorry to spoil your fireworks.

I woke up today to the sound of the Ashland City Band warming up in the football stadium next door, getting ready for my little town’s annual July 4th parade. I live one street over from the start of the parade route, so there’s action nearby, including the band and also floats lining up, a few old cars rumbling and idling, people with painted faces drinking their morning coffee and herding their kids towards the main drag. It’s a weekday, and I’m up early these days, so it wasn’t the noise or the band itself that bothered me. In fact, as I was going about my normal morning routine – water my garden, wash the previous night’s dishes, throw in some laundry – and getting ready to head out to meet a good friend and his wife and two daughters, I found myself enjoying the soundtrack. And then, as I really started to pay attention to how I was feeling, my mood shifted.

I got to thinking, as I have more often these past years on this day: What are we really celebrating? The “united” states of America are dividing and regressing, on purpose. I’m not a political scientist, and I don’t read all the news because I value my mental health. I pay attention and know what I see, though, on the faces of my friends who belong to communities that are increasingly mortally endangered by laws and ideologies that fit right in with Jim Crow, Apartheid, Inquisition- and colonial-era policies. I know what I see in the eyes of the kids I work with as they grapple with the implications of mass shooting after mass shooting while the adults that are supposed to protect them offer meaningless platitudes while working to make it easier for them to be murdered in their classrooms, playgrounds, and birthday celebrations. I watch as corporations talk out the side of their mouths about diversity, equity, and inclusion with their fingers crossed behind their backs, then shrink and backtrack when they’re challenged by someone with a loud voice or a stock option.

We (some of us, anyway) are appalled that this country elected a president – using a ridiculous and outdated system like the Electoral College – who lost the popular vote and lied 30,000 times in office, but we continue to allow the system that put him there to stay in place. We claim to be deeply offended by disingenuous or anti-union or anti-LGBTQ+ corporations, but we still give our money to Amazon, Tesla, Hobby Lobby, Starbucks, and Home Depot. We decry the skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety, hopelessness, homelessness, loneliness, and suicide among young people, but we still check our Twitter feeds 10 times an hour and say “not in my backyard!” rather than teaching our kids once again to compassionately build connection with the people around them, rather than really doing the other-focused, ego-decentered hard work of caring for one another. Rather than sending our kids to play in Nature, with their friends, we keep them close and overscheduled and sedated and under our watchful eyes. In general, we’ve gotten very good at fear and selective outrage, and much worse at critical thinking, compassion, courage, and problem solving.

Something else happened this past week that hit particularly close to home for me. First, context: You may or may not know that I’m Jewish. Being Jewish is passed down through the maternal line; in my case, I get it from both parents. Being Jewish is somewhat unique because it is both a religious orientation and a racial and cultural heritage; a person who has a Jewish mother is Jewish in the racial and cultural sense, whether or not they practice Judaism, while someone can convert or practice Judaism and be religiously but not racially Jewish. I am the first one. Both my parents were raised in at least Jew-ish (from a practical standpoint) households, and my dad especially identifies strongly with his Jewish heritage (racial and cultural); normally a patient and magnanimous man, antisemitism is among the very few things that truly get him fired up.

Although my sister and I were not raised with any religious mandates, we both in our own ways also feel connected to our ancestral and cultural history. It’s one that is filled with displacement, brutality, lies, and oppression – from the outside, and internally, especially in its treatment of women – and also a lot of beauty, mysticism, and opportunity. Like other religions, Judaism originated from a simple set of spiritual teachings; in fact, the three most widespread monotheistic religions on Earth today originated from the same geographical place, and at their core teach many of the same ideals using much of the same source material. Compassion, acceptance, community, love, and faith are all fundamentally good things, I think most of us can agree.

Christians, Jews, and Muslims throughout history have all come to deal with the divergence of those initial spiritual seekers, and interpret those original teachings, in different ways. Wars have been fought, and there have been empires throughout history that have oppressed, imprisoned, displaced, and slaughtered based on their convenient (for them) interpretations of religious texts that are themselves convenient allegorical interpretations made by whoever happened to be in power – Roman, Persian, Ottoman, occasionally Jewish, and in our human history, most often by white European people who claim to be carrying the banner and carrying out the mandate of Jesus Christ. This is perhaps the most blatant example in human history of taking a line or comment or idea out of context and warping it for one’s own sinister purposes.

There is a private school in the next town over from me, a Catholic middle and high school called St. Mary’s. They are academically rigorous, which is one reason parents send their kids there, and the school has many of the same problems that private schools everywhere – schools, really, but there’s more money involved in private schools – struggle with, including bullying, cliques, burnout, and drug use. They also have lots of positive attributes, including clubs and good teachers and a safe campus and plenty of resources. I know people who work there, kids who go there, parents who pay handsomely to send their kids there. They are, one and all as far as I can tell, good people. Some of them are close friends of mine, colleagues, and people who I like and respect a lot. And yet, they send their kids to a school whose mascot is a Crusader. I haven’t asked, but I wonder whether they have any thoughts at all about that, whether that raises any kind of moral stickiness in them, any red flags or conflicts. As a person of Jewish heritage, it’s hard for me to get behind an organization, educational or otherwise, that in every moment and by their very identity, celebrates a campaign to wipe my ancestors off the face of the Earth.

I would guess that followers of Islam, people of color, and people with eclectic or pagan belief systems have their version of this, since Crusades and Inquisitions were equal-opportunity murder for any non-white non-Christians. This brings me to what happened this past week: Israel’s largest-scale rocket attack on Palestinian land in the last 20 years, an attack that was accompanied by the cutting of access to water, electricity, and emergency services. This attack targeted the refugee camp in Jenin, and is not remotely an outlier; according to the UN there has been an attack on Palestinians by Israeli forces every three days on average since the beginning of the year. The attack was preceded by a few days by the approval of a plan to build 5,000 new homes - for Israelis - in the West Bank; this is a tactic that Israel uses regularly, dispossessing Palestinians of their homes and replacing those homes with new structures that only Israeli citizens - which Palestinians are barred from becoming - are eligible to inhabit. The Palestinians then land in refugee camps, which the Israelis bomb, which prompts a response from Hamas, which is then used as an excuse for more violence, and the cycle continues.

First of all, when I say “Israel” here, what I mean is the political entity, a nation-state and military-industrial institution that was formed with the aid of the West, led by France and Britain (who were essentially dividing up the Middle East at the time) in 1948 to serve as a “Jewish homeland.” In my view, Israel was also created to serve as a Western ally/nuclear power/barrier between West and Middle East, between Christianity and Islam. One of the ramifications of the not-at-all-arbitrary creation of a new nation squarely on the border between West and “not West” was that tens of thousands of Palestinians were displaced from their homes, and more than 20,000 of their descendants live in Jenin, where Israel’s rockets landed last week.

I’m not arguing about Jews deserving a homeland; that part of the world is indeed where both the Jewish people and the religion Judaism were born before spreading outwards, sometimes through the use of force and more often because we were forced. However, this is an instance of Christian- and white-majority nations using another ethnic group - in this case, Jewish people - as a shield between them and something they feared under the auspices of advancing democracy.

It’s worth pointing out that Jerusalem is not just a Jewish but also a Muslim and Christian holy city; that area is the birthplace of all three religions, and before those was the home to any number of other belief systems and spiritual paths. In the first half of the 1900s, before we went in there with our Western wisdom, “democracy,” and our white supremacist foreign policy, that area was called Palestine by some, and there are many people of many faiths that can claim that land as their ancestral home.

I’m also not here to debate the merits of Israel’s existence. What I want to point out is something that I struggle mightily with, which is the fact that Israel – the homeland and supposed safe haven for people like me – is, in practice and according to international law as outlined by a 2022 Amnesty International report, an Apartheid state similar to what existed in South Africa and Namibia from 1948 - the same year Israel was created - to the early 1990s. That era is one of the most shameful examples of humans degrading other humans in our history, and there are a LOT of them; Israel will not be looked upon kindly by history (unless you count whatever books they’re calling “history” in Florida these days).

On the radio the other morning, some high-ranking American government official was quoted as saying that we will “continue to support Israel unconditionally and will defend all of our allies” from terrorists. With the recent exception of Barack Obama, who did stand up to Israel’s increasingly nationalistic right wing government, this has been the position of the United States for the past 7 decades. And yes, Hamas – a government entity representing the Palestinian people and maintaining control of the Gaza Strip – is a militant and oppressive regime in their own right, but that doesn’t excuse Israel’s actions or our government's blind eye turned to their campaign of terror.

Israel has more power, more weapons, more soldiers, and that unconditional Western backing, and is therefore the oppressor. It should be a source of, at the very least, serious self-reflection for people in the Jewish diaspora that our supposed representatives, our “people,” have taken that power, filtered it through what we’ve learned and won by surviving though 5,000 years of oppression and slaughter, and decided that the best thing to do is perpetrate the same crimes against others. And, fortunately, among younger Jews at least, the conversation is finally changing and those red flags are being raised.

Look, I believe that most of us in the U.S. are by and large fundamentally good people; in point of fact, I imagine that most Israeli people are, too. I think that most people want to live their lives, have opportunity, feel safe, find love and beauty whatever that means to them, and do the mundane things that comprise life on Earth. Even on hot-button topics like abortion and gun control, a large majority of people here agree that women should have autonomy and people should have to follow simple, clear laws based on common sense and safety.

The problem is that our systems, in this country and in places around the world – like Israel – where we have imposed our influence, from their inception were designed based on the premise that only certain people deserve those things. This is what we have come to call capitalism and democracy. In their “evolved” modern iterations, those systems now exist mostly to bar many people from that safety, that mundanity, and those choices and opportunities in order to keep the few in power. In 2023, our political and economic and social systems have become so cynical that what the mostly-good people of the United States – and Israel, and Brazil, and Russia – want, no longer feels very relevant.

Originally published on July 4, 2023