Driving to a Gaza event last night in Kingston, I listened to NPR and heard Arthur Frommer, the travel maven, defending his blogpost saying he was boycotting Arizona because of the state’s loose gun laws (and specifically, because a protester at an Obama event had carried an automatic weapon openly).
Frommer said he was afraid to go somewhere where people were carrying automatic weapons around.
I thought of Israel, of course. In Israel, you see people carrying weapons around openly, including automatic weapons. I don’t think Frommer’s telling Americans not to go there. Though it’s a militarized place.
I bet Frommer’s Jewish. And I believe he is applying a standard to his American neighbors that he would not apply to his Jewish cousins.
Then I thought, part of the problem in Israeli-diaspora relations is: Jews here think, Those Jews over there are at greater risk, those Jews serve in their army. While we Jews don’t tend to serve in the military, and we lead privileged lives.
Any society has respect for those who put their lives on the line to defend the society. People generally defer to military people. And American Jews are taught to think of ourselves as part of a community that includes Israel. So if those Jews are doing the fighting and dying– *for the community, supposedly*– that removes our ability to criticize them from our armchairs. Even after that paranoid, rightwing society has just slaughtered 300 Palestinian children in Gaza.
This primal extension of deference to the defenders explains why Jeffrey Goldberg and Robert Kaplan and Rahm Emanuel have enhanced status in American Jewish life. They all served Israel, in some capacity or another.
And again it’s a demonstration of PEP. Progressive Except Palestine. The exceptionalism that rots my community.
I wish Frommer’s wise standard was extended to Israel, too.
