Here in Illinois, on April 5, 1918, a mob in Collinsville broke into the jail, and removed a man named Robert P. Prager from the jail, where he was held in protective custody after he was rescued from a mob that was bullying him. He was forced him to sing the “Star Spangled Banner” and to give three cheers for the red, white and blue. Later, the mob strung him up by his neck in a tree, and hanged him. Robert P. Prager was murdered because he was a German. The mob that murdered him believed he was a German spy, although there was no evidence that he was, and in fact, he seemed determined to become an American. At the time, Americans were aware of atrocities allegedly committed by German soldiers in Europe. The men who murdered Robert P. Prager were tried, but found not guilty. It was a “patriotic murder”.
In June of 1982, Vincent Chin was out with friends celebrating his upcoming wedding when two white men decided he was Japanese, and started a fight. The two men later found Vincent Chin in front of a fast-food restaurant, where they held him down and bashed him with a baseball bat until he was mortally wounded. The murderers took a plea bargain to accept three years of probation and a $3,000 fine. This took place in Michigan, and at the time, many jobs in Michigan were disappearing because American consumers were purchasing more Japanese cars. The Japanese, of course, had attacked the United States in Pearl Harbor not quite 41 years earlier, and had mistreated American prisoners of war in the ensuing conflict, and so violence targeting Japanese (even if the victims weren’t Japanese—Vincent Chin was a Chinese-American), was understandable.
On January 6, 2007, a man shot Cha Vang, a Hmong man from Green Bay, Wisconsin with a shotgun, and then stabbed him to death. The man who murdered Cha Vang was certainly aware of a murder spree committed a few years earlier by another Hmong man, and it came out in the trial of Cha Vang’s murderer that he had expressed a willingness to kill a Hmong man in an earlier incident, and had generally held hateful views of Hmong people.
On February 22 of 2017 Srinivas Kuchibhotia and Alok Madasani were out eating and watching a basketball game in a local bar-and-grill in Olathe, Kansas. A man who hated Middle Eastern men and especially despised Iranians yelled at Kuchibhotia and Madasani, telling them to “get out of my country” before he shot them. Srinivas Kuchibhotia died. In 1979, Iran kidnapped 52 employees of the American embassy in Tehran, and held them for 444 days. In Iran, chants of “death to America” are sometimes a ritualized way of posturing and expressing anti-American sentiments.
In October of 2023, Canaan Shahin had asked her landlord in Plainfield, Illinois to pray for peace. He later used a knife and attacked her and her son, Wadea Al-Fayoume, a six-year-old boy in their apartment. Young Wadea died from his wounds. About a week earlier, terrorists led by Hamas had poured out of the Gaza Strip into southern Israel, where they massacred 1,200 persons and kidnapped over 240.
In August of 2012, six Sikhs were massacred at their temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin; the man who murdered them was having a difficult life, and, in a strange ideological framework, he ascribed his problems to the idea that non-white people (such as Sikhs) and Jews are persecuting white people such as himself. On October 27, 2018, another man agreeing to the idea that Jewish people are bringing non-white people to America to destroy white Americans took his anger with him to the Tree of Life Congregation synagogue in Pittsburgh, where he killed eleven people during their celebration of Shabbat morning services. In August of 2019, yet another man who believed non-white people were coming to the United States and ruining our country decided to frighten away immigrants by going to a local Walmart in El Paso and killing as many people as he could—he killed 23 persons, and injured 22 more, all whose only guilt was that they were Hispanic, and thus part of a group that the killer thought was harming his “white race” and our nation by living here.
Robert P. Prager was not responsible for what the German army was doing in World War 1, and he was not a spy. Vincent Chin was not responsible for Japanese war crimes, or Japanese car manufacturers out-competing Michigan car manufacturers. Cha Vang was not responsible for murders committed years earlier by another Hmong hunter. Srinivas Kuchibhotia had nothing to do with Iran and no responsibility for any Iranian crimes against Americans. The six-year-old Wade Al-Fayoume had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks launched by Hamas. The Sikhs, Jews, and Mexican-Americans murdered in hate crime massacres were not guilty of any conspiracy to replace “the white race” or change “the nature of our country” in a way that would harm the men who killed them. In all these cases, people were angry, and they felt that they were victims of injustice, or they were in pain and felt harmed, and in their rage, they inflicted murder upon innocent people around them.
Humans have a tendency to divide the world into "us" and "them", or in social science jargon we call this a division between "in-group" and "out-group". Sometimes this is called ethnocentrism, and it has special forms, such as racism. There are real advantages to having some groups to which one belongs and owes loyalty. We take greater responsibility for our family members and friends, because we exist in a close relationship to them, and they are part of "our group". We owe some degree of pride, concern, and patriotism to our city, state, and nation, and when we meet a person from our hometown while far from home, we naturally feel glad to see "someone from home". We tend to be favorably disposed to those who share our taste in music, art, or film, just as we may feel solidarity with people who favor the same sports teams we like, or vote for the same politicians we prefer. None of this is inherently bad, but people can fairly easily get a warped sense of loyalty to their in-group, and a darker and more dangerous dislike of the out-group, or enemy. Switching from the examples of Americans who focused their hatred of an out-group to individuals who were innocent and blameless, let's consider the situation in Israel and Gaza and the West Bank.
In 1929, Arabs massacred Jewish people in Hebron. Before that, in 1921, Jewish and Arabs killed each other in the Jaffa riots, and Arabs and Jews rioted in Jerusalem in 1920 during the Nebi Musa festival. During the end of the British Mandate in Palestine leading up to the 1948 Arab-Israeli war there were numerous acts of terror and assassination and massacres committed by violent elements of Jewish and Arab communities: particularly gruesome specimens of Jewish/Israeli attacks were the King David Hotel bombing in 1946, the Balad al-Shaykh massacre on January 1, 1948, the Rehovot Train bombing (the targets were British, not Arab), the Cairo-Haifa train bombing of March 31, 1948, the Deir Yassin massacre of April 9, 1948, the Tin al Zeitun massacre of May 3, 1948, and the massacres at Abu Shusha on May 14, 1948. Just as Israel has its dark history of shameful acts, the Arabs had no shortage of atrocities committed by some of their violent groups, including: the Haifa Oil Refinery massacre of December 30, 1947, the Ben Yehuda Street bombing of February 22, 1948, the Hadassah medical convoy massacre of April 13, 1948, and the Kfar Etzion massacre of May 13, 1948.
During the war in 1948, Israeli forces massacred people in places like Safsaf, Josh, Saliha, and Lod. Many Arabs intended to massacre Israelis in a similar style, and did so on a smaller scale when they had the chance. Abd Al-Rahman Azzam Pasha of Egypt (Secretary-General of the Arab League) warned that a war against Israel would involve “looting on a grand scale” and he claimed that the Israelis would not be able to stop the “volunteers who will come from all over the world to revenge the Palestinian martyrs because they know that the battle is an honor for all Muslims and Arabs in the world.” (see the Egyptian Akbar el-Yom newspaper of October 11, 1947 for the original quotation, which has been frequently misquoted in a distorted form by Israeli sources to make it falsely appear that Azzam Pasha was in favor of the massacre of Jewish Israelis). Israel had to defend itself against attacks launched (or in preparation of being launched) in 1967 and 1973, and responded to continuous attacks from across the Lebanese border by attacking into Lebanon in 1982 and 2006. Israel has responded to attacks from the Gaza Strip with attacks against Gaza in 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2023.
The state of Israel is actually threatened by some of its neighbors and some of the people residing in territories it occupies. Recently, some of its neighbors and former enemies (e.g., the Saudi government and the Jordanian government) helped defend Israel from attacks coming from Iran, so this shows that enemies can stop being enemies given sufficient time, but any student of history or human nature knows that. The rhetoric and activities of Hamas, however, show that enmity and hatred can wax as well as wane.
What about the blame for Palestinians for electing Hamas in 2006—the same Hamas that uses genocidal anti-Semitic rhetoric and actions against Israelis? When Hamas won legislative elections in 2006 with 44.45% of the vote, their intolerance and hatred against Israel was not a prominent aspect of their campaign, although they did launch rocket attacks on Israeli cities in 2006 (a war crime). Candidates in the legislative elections of 2006 in the West Bank and Gaza that favored humanitarian government, respect for human rights, an end to corruption, and acceptance of the Israeli state (such as The Third Way headed by Salam Fayad and Hanan Asharawi, and Independent Palestine headed by Mustapha Barguti) received only 5.1% of the vote, while leftist and Marxist and independent parties received 2.9%. This 8% of Palestinian voters who rejected both Fatah and Hamas have been unable to gain power in the dictatorship Hamas has been running in Gaza since the 2006 elections. Hamas has become more vitriolic and unhinged in its rhetoric against Israel. But then again, a similar transformation has occurred in Israel. In 1997, polls showed that about 60% of Palestinians supported the Oslo Agreement and Palestinian-Israeli security cooperation. Throughout the mid-to-late 1990s, public opinion polling in Israel showed support for the peace process varied between 45% and 55%. More recently, about 29% of Israelis supported a two-state peace solution in late 2023. And in polls from November of 2023, only about 2% of Israelis thought the Israeli Defense Force was using too much force in Gaza. Support among Israeli adults for an independent Palestine was at about 61% in 2012, but is now around 25%. Among Arab Israelis, support for a two-state solution with an independent Palestine is about 72% (as of November 2023). These poll and election results show that significant numbers of Arabs in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank accept the reality of Israel as a state and expect it to continue as part of a two-state solution, and they do not agree with the Hamas position of destroying Israel and killing all the Jewish Israelis who fail to flee the destruction of Israel.
For those who want to feel anger and hostility toward groups of people based on what some violent members of those groups have done, there is no shortage of “justification” for being angry at the Arabs, because some of them have sought to kill Jews and eliminate the state of Israel, and some of them glorify those who did kill Jewish Israelis as heroes. There is also no shortage of “justifications” for being angry at the Jewish Israelis for their many atrocities and war crimes against Arabs and the residents of occupied territories such as the West Bank. If you happen to be a resident of Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, or the Arab countries around Israel, and you yearn for peace and wish that people would put aside animosities and stop de-humanizing others, you still will probably belong to either the “Jewish side” or the “Arab side”, and people of your side will point to the atrocities committed by the other, and ask how you can sympathize with that group; and people of the other side, with whom you desire peace and friendship, will frequently distrust and despise you because of what “your side” has done to them and “their people”.
The Jewish Americans who live among us as friends and neighbors are generally not involved in the atrocities recently (or currently) being committed by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza. I do not believe that the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu listens very much to what typical Jewish Americans tell him, and the bloodthirsty members of his cabinet such as Israeli Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu really don’t care about concerns of American Jews. Likewise, Arab-Americans and Palestinian-Americans are not generally fond of Hamas, or its death-cult leadership such as Ismail Haniyeh and Yaha al-Sinwar, and those bloodthirsty monsters aren’t obviously concerned with the attitudes of Arab-Americans toward them. It is however natural that many Americans, and especially Arab-Americans, feel moved by the atrocities committed by Israeli forces against the people of Gaza. And, likewise, Jewish-Americans are joined by most Americans in being horrified by the sadistic massacres committed by Hamas terrorists in Israel back on October 7th.
The point of remembering what Americans did to Robert P. Prager, Vincent Chin, Cha Vang, Srinivas Kuchibhotia, and Wadea Al-Fayoume, is to realize that some Americans are apt to boil and seethe in a stew of hatred and animosity against innocent people because of what some members of groups to which those people belong have (allegedly, and perhaps long ago) done. Sometimes actual evils have been perpetuated, but often the injustices used to justify the hatred are false, as in the case of the deaths in the El Paso Wallmart, the Tree of Life Synagogue, or the Sikh Temple. In those cases the hatred was based on fantasies and delusions of conspiracy with as much substance as a gnat's shadow at midnight. When we oppose injustices and atrocities, we must be careful and mindful about how we target outrage, and it should only be directed against persons who have actually done evil. If no evil has been done, or the person(s) committing evil were not the person(s) towards whom we feel angry, then we we shouldn't be angry and hateful.
Israel has a duty to defend itself, and Hamas attacked it. Hamas wanted, and continues to desire, a war against Israel. The current war in Gaza was sparked by atrocities intentionally committed by people doing the bidding of Hamas and its leadership. The people of Gaza, however, are not all guilty of supporting Hamas or participating in the massacre. Most of the people in Gaza are too young or too old to have been involved, and large percentages of Gaza residents don't like Hamas much anyway.
The Arab Barometer survey project conducted a survey of 1,189 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in early October of 2023, concluding their data collection the day before the massacre in Israel. They found that 51% of their respondents favored a 2-state solution (with the 1967 borders), and were thus not favoring the elimination of the state of Israel. Another 7% thought there should be a confederation of Israel and Arab Palestine. In Gaza the support for a two-state solution was 54%, whereas it was 49% in the West Bank. The survey showed that only 23% of Palestinians had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in Hamas, but 52% had “no trust at all” in Hamas. In Gaza, where Hamas was the government, 46% of respondents said the government was not very responsive, and 28% said the government was not responsive at all; and 44% said they had “no trust at all” in their government. (Full report on the survey results is available on Youtube if you search for “Public Opinion in Palestine Before the Conflict”). According to Statista, half of the people in Gaza were younger than 20 years old, and some sources had about half the population as under 18 years old. The children would not be responsible for the actions of their adult older siblings or parents.
The way the Israeli Defense Forces have been attacking Gaza and killing people in Gaza, they are clearly violating the norms and laws of war. That is, they are committing atrocities. As Robert Jay Lifton said about war when summing up his research on American veterans of combat returning from Vietnam, war is an “atrocity-producing situation” and we should generally expect some atrocities from all sides, even the “righteous side” in any war. However, the atrocities the Israeli Defense Force has been committing in their war against the people of Gaza and Hamas seems especially egregious, similar in effect to what the Russian imperialist war of attempted conquest against Ukraine has accomplished (mass bloodshed and the slaughter of innocents). Hamas continues to intentionally commit war crimes as well, and it counts for something that their inhuman attacks on Israel sparked this bloodbath. But the Israeli government, in the means by which is has prosecuted this war against Gaza, has lost global sympathy, and in my opinion, rightly so.
But we who are at some distance from the conflict need to remember that our Jewish neighbors are not responsible for the behavior of the Israeli Defense Force. In fact, they may be even more horrified and aware of the monstrosities than we are. Likewise, our Arab and Palestinian neighbors may be even more intensely disgusted and appalled by Hamas and its behavior. Blaming a fellow American citizen for things done by people who share a religion or ethnic heritage on the other side of the world is a specimen of insanity. Most Americans felt no need to demand of their European-American friends that they give special condemnation of what racist madmen had done in El Paso, or Pittsburgh, or Oak Creek. Likewise, people with clear understanding don’t expect their Jewish friends to have any special responsibility to speak out against Israeli behavior in Gaza. And likewise, they have no expectation that their Arab and Palestinian friends have duties to condemn the behavior of Hamas or the so-called self-proclaimed “Hezbollah” of Lebanon. After all, Jewish and Muslim Americans are no less American than any other American, and have no more involvement in the decisions to commit atrocities made by distant forces than any other American. Thinking of them differently because of their group identities in a way that makes us demand special behavior from them (like condemning what some of their co-religionists are doing far away in a land twisted by torments of hatred and injustice) is a sign that they are not accepted as being fully American or fully human—they are instead special creatures who must express their loyalty to our ideals and condemnation of far-off monstrosities to prove that they are worthy of escaping our condemnation.
And yet, we are seeing growing anti-Semitism in America. Many journalists and their editors are highlighting particular voices in protest against American support for Israel at a time when Israel is daily committing blatant war crimes. The voices they are highlighting are those of racist and anti-Semitic protestors. Examples of anti-Semitic activities include students in the University of California at Berkeley who posted Anti-Semitic posters of Erwin Chemerinsky (Dean of the law school in Berkeley) and the many people who sent threats against him and his wife, or tried to get him fired from his university after he tried to force trespassers out of his backyard dinner party when they disrupted it with a bullhorn and a plea for the University of California to divest from Israel. Actual survey evidence (provided, for example, by the Anti-Defamation League) suggests that strong Anti-semitism has had a trend of slight decline over the past couple decades (11-13% of respondents were strongly anti-Semitic in in 2013-2019, whereas about 15% were so in 2002-2007). However, we still have about 7% of Americans holding American Jews responsible for the behavior of Israel, and the 2022 FBI Hate Crime Statistics report showed of 2,042 religion-based hate crimes in 2022, 1,122 were driven by anti-Jewish bias (158 were driven by anti-Muslim sentiments).
Mixed in with the clear and alarming signs that anti-Semitism is rising, and Jewish Americans are suffering from an increase in hatred directed their way, we also must contend with some false accusations of anti-Semitism. Some people wish to portray any criticism of Israel that describes the current Israeli state as operating with an apartheid system as anti-Semitic, and any opinions that hold what Israel is doing in Gaza qualifies as genocide are also identified as anti-Semitic. This dilutes the power of the accusation of anti-Semitism. It’s clear from Israeli policies in the West Bank and Israel proper that Israeli citizens with Arab nationality do not enjoy equal treatment in society compared to Israeli citizen with Jewish nationality. And, when you compare the treatment of squatter-settlers who steal land and attack West Bank Arabs to how Palestinians of the West Bank are treated, the accusation of creating an apartheid system become less easy to dismiss as “anti-Semitism”. When you compare the definitions of Apartheid found in the Apartheid Convention or the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, it’s pretty easy to make a case against the government of Israel for what has been going on in the West Bank in the past decades as Apartheid. As for what is going on in Gaza, and whether it should be identified as ethnic-cleansing or genocide, that’s another matter where reasonable people can disagree, and it’s not clear that accusations of genocidal intent are unfounded. Do anti-Zionists who desire a solution where Israel ceases to exist as a Jewish state and becomes a democracy where neither Jews nor Arabs can claim special rights or privileges exhibit anti-Semitism? Or, are all expressions for an end to Israel the equivalent of hoping for the mass extermination or exile of Jewish citizens of Israel? Does any claim that justice requires the end of the state of Israel imply anti-Semitism? One can disagree with such claims, dismissing them as impractical or unfeasible given the state of hostility among the two local tribes of Jews and Arabs, but it’s certainly not the case that all those who want to end the existence of Israel also want all the Jewish citizens of Israeli to be pushed out and ethnically cleansed or genocided away. Some certainly do: Hamas, for example. But others claim they desire justice in which Israel is replaced with a new state where Arabs and Jews and everyone else can live together with their human rights equally respected in a free and democratic society. You may think such people are hopelessly naive, but that’s different from being anti-Semitic, and does not make it fair to equate them with Hamas and other groups that desire the end of Israel in bloodshed and massacre.
In all sorts of long-term conflicts, you’ll find the same rotten and evil structure underlying animosities: this is the pattern of dehumanizing “the other” so that any sort of violent and unjust act against an enemy can be justified. The doctors in the Nazi concentration camps and others who participated in the Holocaust sometimes explained that they didn’t like the work (of exterminating other humans), and felt bad about murdering so many people, but they felt they were doing the right thing, because the targets of their genocidal massacres had to be removed. Their victims deserved destruction because they were a type of vermin that poisoned and stained the human race, and only their excision (brutal deaths) could purify and preserve humanity. It's the same thinking that informed the Serbian nationalists trying to exterminate Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s, or the Hutus that massacred Tutsis in Rwanda around the same time. Americans (or Soviets) who justified building the means to massacre and exterminate millions of citizens of the Soviet Union (or the USA and Western Europe) said that doing so—and being willing and intending to use such an evil power—was actually a good thing, because it prevented the actual worldwide atomic war. Again, this is the same dehumanizing madness, the idea that some greater good would be secured by the destruction (or threat of destruction) of others because they were the enemy (and thus, less than human). People generally don’t want to murder each other, but if you can convince them that the people they must kill are not really human, and are instead some sort of vermin or enemy that deserves death, then you can motivate real massacres and atrocities. To a small degree, I see this dehumanization directed against the protestors who demand their universities divest from Israel, and I see it in some of the slogans and desires expressed by some of the people among those protestors. Clearly, the dehumanization resides in the hearts of people who are actually saying and doing anti-Semitic things, or anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian things. There is probably some of that dehumanization in your heart if you start getting angry at Jewish-Americans or Arab-Americans because of the deeds of people far away who happen to be Jewish or Arab.
So, stop it. Jews of the United States are not responsible for the moral transgressions and appalling atrocities committed against Gazans and West Bank Arabs by the Israeli Defense Force or West Bank Jewish settlers. The Palestinians and Arabs of the United States are not responsible for whatever Hamas or the so-called self-proclaimed "Hezbollah" does. Recognize that people who condemn one side and excuse the other are not generally interested in achieving peace: they are defending their feelings from the cognitive dissonance they would feel if they had to admit that "their side" and their in-group was partly to blame and partly guilty of the disaster. It does appear to me, looking over the whole history since the 1920s, that the Palestinian Arabs have missed many opportunities to achieve peace, and it seems to me the Palestinians have been cursed with especially rotten leadership (and polls of Palestinians shows that I'm in agreement with most Palestinians on this assessment of their political leadership). Israel has had more of a mixed record, with some leaders in culture and politics sincerely trying to achieve peace and a settlement that—as they deemed it—would be fair to Palestinians. However, Israel has had other leaders who have evidently felt almost no empathy or responsibility for the plight of Palestinians, and have use hateful rhetoric (to match the rhetoric coming from many Arab leaders) urging continued policies of injustice and brutality. Any outsider equally sympathetic to Jews and Arabs, or equally disinterested in the welfare of either group, can plainly see how both sides lie and distort, and perpetuate a blindness to the wounds their side inflicts on the other. Yes, we may feel one side is more blameworthy, and we may agree that there is no equivalence between murder done intentionally and murder done through careless and callous lack of attention to the rules of war, but both murder and manslaughter are crimes, and it's not a matter of feeling more sympathy for the person who commits manslaughter over the person who commits murder. In the case of Gaza, most of the people suffering are not guilty of the murder. At the moment, it is the Gaza residents who are being murdered, and the people murdering them are American allies who benefit from generous gifts of military aid from our elected representatives. It makes perfect sense—and I'm glad to see it—that most Americans now oppose further assistance to Israel, and want no part in helping to perpetuate the atrocities and war crimes Israel is committing. Most Americans also do not want to see the destruction of Israel, or the triumph of Hamas, or people who would vote for Hamas, or people who celebrate murderous atrocities committed by Hamas.
The important thing is to preserve in your heart a love and an openness to your Jewish and Arab neighbors and friends. They deserve your positive regard and sympathy, and whatever goes on in foreign lands shouldn't change your opinion of them. They may have very one-sided narratives about the situation in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, but that is understandable. One side is consistently lying about the other side, and people will tend to side with "their group" when their group is unfairly attacked, seeing all lies against "their side" and blindly failing to notice the lies against the "other side". So, do not judge your Arab or Jewish friends harshly if they seem blind to the evils of one side or the other over in the Middle East. Cognitive bias is a human trait, and we all suffer from it. Keep in mind that as your neighbors, as fellow citizens, your task is to feel solidarity and fraternity with both the Arab Americans and the Jewish Americans. Whether you want the USA to continue supporting Israel or cease all support for Israel, this opinion about foreign policy should be kept separate from your feelings for Americans who advocate for either of those positions. And, if you can put efforts into peace, do that in your home communities by supporting both your Jewish and Arab/Palestinian neighbors and friends, who may all feel entirely misunderstood and hated now. The deaths of so many people since October 7th and the continuing deaths of many innocents is driving many people to despondency and worries that America is not a safe home for them. Try to demonstrate through your own friendliness and kindness that our nation is still one where the murderous impulses that I highlighted at the start of this essay are only felt in a few twisted and dead hearts, and that most of us Americans are a welcoming and gentle people, aspiring to become an unprejudiced people.
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