URBANNA —
What a year 2023 was. I don’t have space today to list the many worrisome events that took place around the world.
The savage massacre by Hamas on Israeli citizens on Oct. 7, 2023 was especially alarming. The cruel barbarity and number of deaths to innocent Israelis attending a music festival when attacked left the world speechless.
Too soon after such shocking human behavior American college students, apparently totally naïve or ignorant of the Oct. 7 massacre or even the brutal history of the Jews began protesting “Jews” with zeal that I never dreamed I would ever witness in America.
The protests became much more than a simple act in support of Palestinians. Some of the protests were downright ugly… filled with hatred, some even calling out the ominous phrase “from the river to the sea” (the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea), which is part of a Hamas slogan that translates to Israelis as literally wiping Israel off the map.
The protesters attacked not only Jews in Israel, but American Jews along with Jews across the globe. Jewish students on American campuses stated they no longer felt safe and some even claimed they feared for their lives.
The protests demonstrated many college students no longer study world history. Their knowledge of geography is also weak. When asked, many students using the phrase “from the river to the sea,” could not identify either the river or the sea. One college student even named the sea as the Caribbean!
I’m not sure when I was first aware of antisemitism in the world. Perhaps it was my undergraduate history major program that introduced me to the painful history of the Jews who have been (until the middle of the last century) long denied their own mother land.
After World War 11, the West decided the Jewish people should have their own country and drew the boundaries of Israel, later changed somewhat after the Six Day War waged in 1967.
Jewish people deserve their own country as they were historically the original inhabitants of Palestine. Eventually they lost their homeland and they began their long history of moving into other countries and experiencing cruel antisemitism wherever they went. The last century saw tens of millions of Russian, German and European Jews murdered by totalitarian governments.
The great Irish novelist, James Joyce, published his famous novel, “Ulysses,” in 1922. It was about Leopold Bloom, a Jew living in Ireland. The book, among other things, challenged readers to create a world where a Jew was safe wherever he went in the world.
My generation was ultra-sensitive to attacks against anyone for religion, gender, age, racial, or ethnic differences. I grew up at a time when few women had broken through the male exclusion rules that kept women out of most professions. Anyone who has had to fight for equal rights in the past still remembers what it was like to be excluded from opportunities.
Since the battle for equal opportunity was so intense for women (as it was with other minorities in America) it mystifies me how any college student today could be so oblivious, ignorant, and darn right heartless in their protests against any “other people.”
Perhaps the reason for this is simply that they didn’t experience the past struggles for equality. Their equal rights were handed to them.
Palestinians feel that Israel is really “their country,” and thus many feel oppressed. Hamas, a terrorist group operating in Palestine, is determined to rid the land of Israelis and apparently by any means.
But Israel must have its own country. The U.S. supports a two-state solution to serve both Palestinians and Israelis. This seems the only sane and just solution.
Here are some suggestions that might help bring peace. Stop the practice of rearing children in racial or ethnic hatred. Teaching “hate” to anyone is evil. Hate comes easily enough later in life without having to be installed in the brains of our youth. (For example, understand how Ukrainians might feel about Russia and for the next several generations.)
Rather we should teach our young the “Golden Rule” — love of others, compassion, tolerance and compromise. Without such behaviors we will never see world peace.
And let’s return to requiring world history to all students in high schools and college. There can be no wisdom or hope for peace with people who do not know history and its two major lessons: All people of the world have suffered terribly at the hands of others and history repeats itself for those who do not know it.
Then, with knowledge, perhaps no citizen of the world will ever repeat the tragedies of the past.
© 2024.