America the Beautiful

Alan Zendell, November 18, 2023

I hate rattlesnakes, lima beans, heights, war, avarice, bigotry, lies, terrorism, and hypocrisy. The only thing that eclectic list has in common is that hating the things on it involves no moral dilemma and hurts no one. Hating people is an entirely different thing. For me to hate someone, there has to be a sense of genuine evil about them. The number of people I have truly hated (Adolf Hitler comes to mind) can be counted on one hand, and in no case did it have anything to do with race, color, or religion.

I grew up in a Jewish family in the aftermath of the Holocaust. If ever there was a reason to feel hatred and a desire for revenge…yet, even as a child, I understood that to hate blindly, to allow grief and rage to overwhelm our reason and screen out everything else is a profound and usually pointless exercise that hurts everyone. Too often, we find ourselves emulating the very thing that caused the hate in the first place.

I received my first lessons in anti-Semitism as an undergraduate at Columbia University. As a seventeen-year-old freshman in 1960, four years before the Civil Rights Act was passed, I worked at the Thomas J. Watson Laboratory, IBM’s main research facility applying solid state physics to computer development. On my first day, my boss, an otherwise pleasant, likable guy, informed me that since I was Jewish, IBM policy was that the only place I could be employed was the stockroom…unless, I had a PhD in Physics. Most of the senior researchers were Jewish.

Three years later, I worked at a NASA research institute located on campus as an assistant to a prominent German scientist who was in New York on a NATO contract. In his mid-thirties, he’d been a teenager when WW2 ended. His secretary, a young Jewish woman, was terrified of him. Poor Esther trembled every time she entered his office, and he, being a very decent and gentle man, was extremely troubled by her reaction to him. It was unproductive for everyone, but credit both Esther and the Professor; an hour of open communication was all it took to resolve the problem.

I have witnessed the entire existence of the nation of Israel. I’ve struggled to understand the hate and bigotry that has surrounded that country since it was born in 1948. The blind hatred of the Arab world, which caused every other country in the Mideast to declare war on Israel on its first day of existence, based solely on the fact that Israel became the homeland for Jews who survived the Holocaust, has confounded everyone who wishes to live in peace.

Even so, many of us who unconditionally supported Israel during that entire time also recognized the plight of the Palestinian people, which dates back long before Israel existed. The British, in the waning days of empire, had dominion over the Middle East between the two world wars. From that time until today, every governing authority, from the British protectors to every Arab nation in the region treated Palestinians as refugees with no inherent value, although there’s considerable evidence that Palestinians have in many ways surpassed their Arab neighbors in educating and caring for their people. The tension between Israelis and Palestinians is a legacy inherited from a time when Jews had no country of their own.

By 1990, a young generation of Israelis was tired of war and eager to reach an accommodation with their neighbors. But the influx of millions of Jews fleeing the defunct Soviet Union who had lived under Communist oppression all their lives, changed Israeli politics and gave birth to the extremist movement that brought current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to prominence. Many of us who support Israel recognize that Netanyahu has not been a positive force for peace. He is responsible for the ever-expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank that are a clear violation of international law, and he has not been shy about his intentions to annex large portions of Palestinian territory into Israel. He has done nothing to stop militant Israelis from attacking mosques and spreading the same kind of hate-based propaganda his enemies use.

That said, the actions of Hamas clearly fall into the category of genuine evil. After literally centuries of provocations on every side, the region has turned into an intercine brawl in which it no longer matters who cast the first stone. Responsible world leaders, even in Iran, know Hamas’ dream of a worldwide uprising against Jews must be ended. There are mountains of grievances on all sides, and Arab countries, who have survived on the world’s need for oil, are beginning to recognize that their future will benefit from cooperation with Israel. Even religious fervor takes a back seat to money and power.

As both anti-Semitism and anti-Arab hate rise in America, I’m struck by a personal reaction with a sixteen-year-old boy I was tutoring. Dark-skinned and Muslim, he was a big, strong kid with an even bigger heart. I was shocked to find him in tears one day, and after some probing, he revealed that there was a group of militant Jewish kids in his high school that targeted and persecuted him. An investigation by school authorities proved he was telling the truth. I took that very personally. Hate and hypocrisy have no place in my religion any more than any other.