Time is not on our side

It’s August 2024 and lots of things are happening here on the streets of Philadelphia and along the Philadelphi Corridor in Rafah. Our world seems to have taken a turn for the worse, with wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and Monkey Pox metastasizing across the African continent and beyond.

Even the weather has demonstrated what too many chemicals will do to our little planet.

I’m afraid we find ourselves consumed by problems with no easy solution. Somehow the crisis on our Southern border has lasted for more than a generation, and even when Republicans and Democrats finally came together on a bipartisan border bill, it was overturned by a right wing candidate who determined that the issue was more important for November than a solution.

He may be right since he’s losing anyway to the new Democratic candidate for President and her even newer VP.

A little closer to the ground, people are scared. Not everyone. Just the Jewish population of America who has witnessed a marked rise in antisemitism since Israel declared war on Hamas after the October 7th massacre in the Negev. Things quieted down a bit after school let out for the summer. But the problem at Columbia University that some say began with a pro-Palestinian encampment, spread across the country the moment police were called to remove the demonstrators, who challenged Jewish students on campus day and night.

The issue was larger and far more diverse as teachers and principals in high schools, middle schools, and even elementary schools found out. Students showed up wearing Palestinian and Israeli attire, and creating conflict over the War in Gaza, and calling not only for a ceasefire or return of hostages, but holding signs that said, ‘Genocide Joe.’ That’s our 81 year old President who happens to be working his ass off for a ceasefire, with the return of the hostages, and a commitment by all sides to a real and lasting path to peace.

That’s another one of those long term goals that politicians and poets speak of, even as it disappears repeatedly over the horizon. But something has to give in the Middle East or we will find our way into a war that is larger and more costly than anyone can imagine. Looking down the barrel of rocket and missile launchers in Lebanon and Iran is not a pleasing idea. We are walking on a dead end path that has already cost over 40,000 lives in Israel-Palestine.

Somehow truth is always a victim of war, and the ten thousand skirmishes that add up to the last 75 years of battle between Jews and Muslims and Christians in the land they all consider Holy. There are truths specific to each religion, and truths specific to each people, and truths for Labor and truths for Likud, and truths for Fatah, and truths for Hamas, and all the millions of individual truths that lay inside the hearts of families and friends and neighbors and schoolmates and others. And there are more truths for those of us living here in the Jewish and Palestinian diaspora of America. And one truth subsumes another, even as one people subsume another.

In 2024 Palestinians became a cause celeb for countless liberals with many who don’t know the name of the River or the Sea, and many who do. But in 2024 the cause was to stop the “Genocide.” The Genocide was the War in Gaza that Hamas planned and programmed in the Negev with a brutal killing spree that ended with over a thousand Israelis, from babies to old women, murdered in their homes and at a music festival, with some abused, butchered or burned alive. Another 250 were taken hostage including some that were already dead. Hamas has in fact been holding some two million Palestinian hostages, human shields in Gaza, to protect their empire of tunnels and the roughly 30,000 terrorists that inhabit them.

In 2024 the ongoing decimation of one people by another finally caught up with the Israelis, and subtly at first the media announced the daily death toll from Hamas. They didn’t count terrorist-militant soldiers, just children and women, and as the War in Gaza proceeded so did the body count. Today it may be 40,000, and that number may include 17,000 or so members of Hamas who were the primary target of the Israeli military.

There are fundamental problems with UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East. They have existed since 1948, but continue to represent the Palestinian Diaspora because solutions remain too costly aka unavailable. The world is pieced together in an odd puzzle that no one has all the pieces to. So it’s time for Students for Justice in Palestine to demonstrate on the Columbia University campus, and a couple miles from here, every Saturday on the corner of Haddon Avenue and Cuthbert Road in the megalopolis known as Haddon Township, New Jersey.

It is the generalization of discontent that has scared the heck out of Jewish parents ready to send their best and brightest to Penn and Harvard, Michigan and Berkeley, and even Rutgers right here in the Garden State. Things have grown tense in Cherry Hill East High, and too many middle and even elementary schools in New Jersey, New York, California and points in between. And they tell me it’s not a day in the park for Islamic students and those who are too often mistaken for Islamic students. But the pressure is on Israel and its Jewish constituency across the Atlantic. By the time anyone reads this, I fear some 20,000+ pro-Palestinian sympathizers will be demonstrating and worse at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It doesn’t seem to matter that the other party’s position on Israel aligns with its far right Prime Minister. The pressure is squarely on our President and our Democratic ally in the Middle East. It now includes the new Democratic ticket!

So Kamala Harris will say more things to recognize the other side. It’s hard to believe that Israel and all its Hasbara; resources to explain, have been overrun by a bunch of Palestinian students. Of course, if one looks closer, they see long term investments in American universities by Qatar and other Arab states. The SJP is part of a National SJP that has chapters on over 275 campuses and is funded by an agency that funds both pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas revolutionary activities and no doubt answers to Iran.

So what continues on Monday in Chicago will follow the fall calendar back to school, and threaten religious and other community sites throughout America. A number of university Presidents were caught with their pants down by a hungry Republican House Investigating Committee and forced to resign rather than work together to confront a difficult problem on campus, growing with the new semester into a battle between free speech and the utterance of anti-Semitism and worse. We have to think big enough to see a better future on the horizon, and find a means to listen to each other and bend enough to seek and find a bit of common ground. The World seems to be headed off its axis and we need to do a great deal more than watch it spin away…