I'm behind on several writing projects already (sorry, Caitlin!) but I've gotten into four separate online discussions about the Mavi Marmara in as many days, and I might as well post my thinking here as anywhere else. My head-meat refuses to lie still until I do. Damned head-meat.
I'm not even going to bother to try to explain my point of view in some manner of clear-headed analysis, because this is more visceral than that. Some things are just plain wrong, not because it's written in stone, or because my parents would disapprove, but because they offend my conscience.
In the interest of disclosure, I'm Jewish. It's not what I am, so much as who
That said, I believe in the Torah. Not as a historical text or anything even vaguely divine but as a road map. It has some good ideas. (It has some crappy ideas, too, but for the moment I'm thinking about the good ideas.) Those ideas were generally meant to be pragmatic--a way to explain to readers around 625 BCE why the southern kingdom of Judah had survived the test of time and the northern kingdom of Israel had not. It's not modern pragmatism by any means but good ideas remain within the front and back covers, many assembled from writings and teaching from all over the region. That stuff about helping out the poor? That was ours. Those bits about a day of rest? Ours. The wacky points about avoiding idolatry and not screwing with your neighbors? You guessed it, us. You know who values those ideas today? Everyone, at least in principle.
From what I can tell, the situation that we've been seeing is what a lethal combination of bad ideas looks like in real time. Israel's blockade of Gaza was a bad idea. The decision by the Free Gaza types not to include any Jewish peaceniks on board the Mavi Marmara was a bad idea. The decision to provoke the Israelis into an armed confrontation was a bad idea. The decision by the Israelis to assault the ship in international water was a bad idea, and their decision to send armed commandos when a more subtle resolution was almost certainly available was a bad idea.* Finally, the decision by some of those passengers to beat the crap out of the troops as they descended onto the deck was definitely a bad idea.
My point: there were no shortage of bad ideas to go around in this instance. And with another such incident growing more possible every day, this shit will not fly twice.
Surely we as Jews can do better.
I don't write that because I think that Jews are demonstrably better (or worse) people than any other race on the planet. (Apparently we are a race--who knew?) I don't subscribe to any particular theory of Jewish exceptionalism. I say it because at least one of those good ideas within the Torah--specifically the one about Justice, truth, and peace--tell us that we are supposed to be better. When we refer to ourselves--or are referred to by the goyim--as God's Chosen People, that doesn't mean that some imaginary man in the sky reached down and tweaked our DNA in a certain way and made us different, even if that's what it may look like genetically. What it means is that yes, we are different--we're different because we have learned to be better. As Douglas Rushkoff wrote in Nothing Sacred, "We, God help us, are the adults here."
When they were old enough to understand, I explained the Ten Commandments to my godchildren as simply as I could: "Try your best not to be an asshole, today." That's it. That's all those rules say when taken together: "Try not to be an asshole. Today." The emphasis is on the fact that you should try every day--as every day is today in its turn--to be a mensch. Occasionally, or ideally, more often than that, you should succeed. Without that constant attention to the larger goal, the effort means nothing.
Back to that naive crap about Justice, truth and peace. Peace . . . all right, peace is elusive. Perhaps eternally so. With nearly seven billion people breathing the air down here, things happen, and people fight. There were wars before there were nations. Truth is similarly difficult to pin down, and the idea that there is a grand, unifying truth that binds the universe together is probably not the sort of thing we'll be finding any time soon.
Justice, however, is different. Even if you and I have different ideas about what constitutes it, we probably both agree that is is a worthwhile ideal. It's measurable. It's observable. It's empiric. It can be verified. And it's ours. Judaism has a lock on Justice in a way that no other major religion has. Think about it: Jesus was all about love--see how far that got him--and is Christendom a particularly happy place? I think not. Muhammad was about how God is One and submission to him was everything. That worked for about 1100 years but hasn't done so well just lately. The Buddha believed that desire caused suffering and we haven't done much with that, either. Face it, folks, fighting for justice is almost easy compared to pushing love, submission, or doing away with desire for longer than a few minutes at a time. It's what we mean when we stand up in a crowd of people and declare that we are Jews--we believe in justice, not just for ourselves, but for everyone. That's what we were chosen for, if we were chosen for anything. To push justice above all other considerations. It's our job to convince everyone around us that it's worth achieving. (You think it's an accident that so many American Jews become lawyers? Think again.)
In this respect, and only in this respect, I identify as as a Jew. (That, having created a kick-ass recipe for chicken soup, and a huge collection of Marx brothers movies on my laptop's hard drive. And yes, my bar mitzvah and extremely Jewish wedding.)
And that, friends, and neighbors, brings us back to the events of May 31, 2010, which I think can be summed up (again) as "bad ideas all around." I've already identified the bits that I think were bad ideas, and you've followed this drek long enough. Simply put, starving the Gazans into submission will not work and gives them the political upper hand. I don't think the Israeli government gets the long-term implications of the situation. Maybe they've decided that if it kills just one more terrorist, it's worth it. Maybe they think that since the world already hates Israel, a few more bad news bulletins won't hurt. Strangely, I can see the validity of both points of view, but I don't share them. The tighter Bibi closes his fist, the faster real criminals will slip through his fingers. That's a fact. If it weren't, we'd be living in a very different world.
We are supposed to be the Good Guys. The least we should do is try not to be assholes today.
-----
*Seriously, how difficult is it to imagine sending a small submarine--Israel has several--to move into the Mavi Marmara's six o'clock (that's directly behind it for you without pretensions to military knowledge), plug it with a torpedo to the engine room, and then be on hand to offer assistance when the ship radios a mayday? Alternately, why not just let the damn ship make port, surround it with armed guards and physically search any and every person who debarked? It was good enough for Olmert to allow them to do that in 2008.
Recent Comments