From Calvary to Gaza
For better or worse, my life has been a lesson in antisemitism. I became a stateless Jew when I was four years old. In Mumbai, India.
My mother left Baghdad for Bombay after living through the terror of the Farhud, the Nazi inspired massacre of 1941.
My father said goodbye to his beloved Egypt in 1939 and headed for the Far East and Near East, after seeing Hitler’s Mein Kampf celebrated in Cairo’s bookstores.
They met in India.
Both my mother and my father’s native lands, Iraq and Egypt, were “waiting for Germany” to come and clear their countries of Jews. Germany isn’t Jew-free today, but my parents’ countries and most Arab lands once home to ancient Jewish communities predating Islam, have been ethnically cleansed of all their Jews today.
I grew up without a passport or a country. My only “nationality” was Jew. It was my identity, and I clung to it despite it being less than popular among my peers.
Today the struggle is not the old Christian hatred of Jews I fought against in school, it is anti-Zionism, repackaged Jew hatred with a new blood libel.
It is no longer the “Jews killed our God” and “used Christian children’s blood in our matza;” it is the increasingly biased “news” and photos splashed across the front page of the New York Times.
More sophisticated than the outdated Jews killed Jesus doctrine, we are fed a new ideology, Palestinianism, the latest blood libel.
Today it is Israel the Jew killing innocent Palestinian children and all its people. Hamas and Co. know exactly what they are doing. The more Palestinians they deliberately put in harm’s way in a bloody war it forced Israel into, the better. They repeat it openly.
We have graduated from bloody matza that never existed and Roman (not Jewish) Crucifixion, to Palestinianism with its one goal, to eliminate Israel.
Where I grew up, in Catholic school, as in today’s Tik Tok NYT world, fiction is fact and it doesn’t have to be proven. The truth is always inverted when it comes to scapegoating. Unfortunately Jews have been the number one candidate, we are the recipients of not only the most Nobel Prizes but also of the “longest hatred.”
I suffered humiliating comments, open resentment of Jews, the scapegoating, the normalized libels of how we killed Christ, throughout elementary school.
In seventh grade I was given what I imagined was the opportunity to curb this Jew hatred I lived with daily. It should have.
The oral book report was for History class, on a historical event. A paperback with a Star of David and bold red letters; “Eichman and the Jews,” jumped out of its place on a crowded shelf. I stared at it.
I had heard about the Holocaust, we had a few Survivor families from Germany and Poland in our Jewish community in Kobe. But I didn’t know.
My heart broke with every page. I felt passionate about sharing this information. This would change the culture of antisemitism in my classroom. How could it not?
I delivered my report in front of my class – On Auschwitz, the “selections,” the children the mothers, the girls, the boys the photo we have all seen of the skeletal men in bunks staring out with eyes hollowed out by torture.
I believed my classmates would “get it”, this would make a difference. They would begin to understand where prejudice leads.
It didn’t end well, my teacher agreed with the girl who raised her hand before I even got to my seat, quoting her father, “Hitler built good roads for Germany.”
The discussion was short and swift. The Holocaust was a result of not only what we did to Jesus (the Vatican had not retracted the lie and put the blame on the Romans yet). Most of all, the Holocaust was a lesson in how Jews will be persecuted until we repent and “accept Jesus Christ as (our) Lord and Savior.”
It was a devastating experience, but it made me an even stronger Jew who never takes off her Magen David.
I cannot help but make the parallel with those of us who thought October 7th would work to make the world understand Islamic Jew hatred.
We thought the world would understand Radical Islam, see this need to eliminate Israel Hamas concretized on October 7th.
We certainly thought our Progressive and Feminist communities would get it. The barbaric rapes of young women at the Nova Music Festival, the children, the parents, watching their beloved slaughtered, the kidnapped starved and tortured in Gaza tunnels. It’s all recorded on the bodycams of Hamas terrorists.
The Gaza border communities where the worst crimes against Jews since the Holocaust took place were filled with idealistic peace-makers. They didn’t understand what many Jews from Arab lands understand – that being good neighbors is not enough. It isn’t personal – It’s just Islamic ideology.
The individual Jew living under Islam were Dhimmi, never equal. To have Israel the Jew be sovereign in that part of the world is haram, an abomination.
With radicalized Islam, we have Hamas and the not so innocent Palestinian Authority, with its bloody history of Intifadas and grooming jihadis.
October 8th was not the awakening we hoped it could be. Groups I once marched with for Civil Rights, Feminism, LGBTQ rights, have colluded with Islamist ideology that hang Queers from rooftops,and force the hijab, chador, burka over its girls and women. And worse.
We have the information. My classmates had the information.
When mainstream media goes wrong and courage fails, moral compasses break. It’s easier to collude and dance into the latest form of antisemitism, of Jew hatred, than face the worst scourge hitting us all today.
Turning October 7th into Israel’s fault is disgusting, haram, sickening to witness.
