I saw an old friend last night. We had drinks in Grand Central. He's Jewish too, and he and I completely disagree about Israel but we've learned to tiptoe around all that. He's a very fair minded, intelligent man. But I'd had two scotches. I said, "I want to tell you something: the ideas that I had that were so radioactive three years ago, they’re not radioactive any more."
He nodded and gave me an affectionate look. “I know that! And you know who you have to thank?”
There was a copy of Time Magazine on the bar and I picked it up. “Barack Obama.”
“No. Ehud Barak.”
We both laughed really hard. (Apologies to all who think at once about the bloodshed.)
I brought up a mutual friend who's an ardent Zionist (this is one of my big themes on this site by the way: All Jews no matter how fairminded, from Matt Cooper to Daniel Schorr, are tied in by social connections to feverish Zionists). I challenged my friend: “Do you ever think, because of what’s happened in the last month, that Bill is wrong, and I am right.”
He said, “No. Because I fundamentally believe in the strength and importance of the Jewish state. And against Hamas?? But let's not have an argument."
"We're not going to have an argument," I said, “I just want to ask you something. Let’s get ideology and religion and all of that out of the picture for a second. You’ve never been there, I’ve only been there 10 days. We have no idea what it's like over there. There’s a great thing an old friend of mine says about Alfred Hitchcock movies, there's that moment in the movie when there’s a reveal that explains everything. When you say what you said about Ehud Barak– do you think that it is possible that it has revealed something essential about that society that you didn’t know?”
He said, “Maybe”
and jammed popcorn in his mouth from the bar. I felt that I’d upset him, but we changed the conversation and parted on a convivial note. We talked about all the people losing jobs, including my wife, and he said, "In the movie Dinner at Eight, a guy comes home after losing his job and tells his wife and she gets a big smile and says, 'It's happening to all the best people.' Look it's happening to all the best people."
I had to get my train. Later I reflected that I'd had two meetings in New York yesterday with Jewish friends, and the earlier meeting was with a Zionist too, a far more knowledgeable one. And he had said, with a blankly realistic expression, when we were talking about Gaza, that it might just be “the end of Israel.”
That seems to me the greatest damage of the Gaza assault, apart from the destruction of 460 children and families, the beginning of the destruction of the myth in the United Sates. The destruction of belief in inherent Jewish goodness. It seems to me I went through this process a long time ago. Now my friends are at risk for the same process.
(Phil Weiss)
