; . _ 4 ~ Sunday, April-17, 1988 - North Shore News PVE NEVER been to Israel. I will probably never go. . It is a small country in the Mid- dle East. : Yet, of course, it occupies a gigantic territory in my mind, as if . some sort of psychological Mer- cator’s Projection was at work i in the internal landscape. It may have something to, do ; with being born in Canada in 1941 so that as I was growing up, vir- tually one of the first things I learned about the world was that there had been concentration camps. 1 doubt that any previous | i generation has had the perfidy of _ the human race spelled out so graphically for.them as in those black and whites of the living skel- - etons in their convict suits who * were the few survivors, For what it is worth, the knowl-, edge of what the Atomic Bomb meant came some years later, i in ; the ’50s. . What a pit of a werld to. have! , arrived int 3 “The fact that even tittle kids and mothers were not safe was,' I guess, > the most frightening part ofi it all. "Fathers could be off at war, okay, f -? .but Canada was a place where war / itself just didn’t happen. ' nightmare run amok! : Tk was as though the te actually landed. It had j been real: ~ 1 sawit on news reels on the ae i if never stop reading the thick book: ‘with the names of all the members , of family written /.. gone now: entire families wiped out! — ; ven though Hilived in what was : arguably the most secure place in the world, the horror of the Holocaust rolled over the final years of my childhood, giving me a terrific start into teenage existential nihilism. / AsI grew, into a young man, I had a few heroes, but one group loomed above the Test: the Israclis, . of course,” They deminated the develop- of ment of thy sense of morality and my terror about the world. God, if that had, happened to me and my family sind my entire nation, what ' would | feel like? How would | think? How strong . ; would I have to become? What rage/would boil inside me? What stark terror every time I looked at my/loved ones? Would [ ever dare ‘to have children? Al identified, passionately, with the Israclis/ dn fact/‘ am partial to Jews as a whole. me of the most entertain- ing, ecergetic and intelligent in- dividuals I have ever met have been Jewish, and I love their sense of humor. ‘At the time of the Six-Day War, I was ready to volunteer to go _down’and “fight, fight, fight for Isracl,"’ as the song went. -, . But of course it would have been © - facetious and a'waste of their time, a for an untrained, gangling goy | «who read Zen poetry to pester ‘* them, and of course it was all ger 80 fast... «Nothing has changed ft in n my. ai : if ttude,t toward israel except thar i It;has helped me succeed ecause you get in- dividual ‘attentio: tlt_tias:helped:in.my fractions and problem solving thy I really. enjoy“the program .&. the peop vat. * strictly personal © r could sce how with a few lucky military breaks over the millennia you could indeed Start to think of yourself as a ‘chosen pcople."’ Otherwise, what I loved — and still ove and admire — was the; . sheer guts of these survivors. | * Somchow the Bomb and the | Holocaust became interchangeable -and interlocked in my youthful postwar mind, and as desperate as I was to see the one not happen | again, neither could the other be : allowed. They were the same manifested evil, i What is going on today in the Gaza has been characterized as!be- . & ing Nazism practised by the | Israclis. {t is no such thing. It is as awful and stupid as bashing baby - seals in front of the world's TY cameras, but it is not the gas | chamber. The reality is that in any of Israeli’s neighboring countries, an uprising such as that of the Palestinians would have been cut: down instantly and everyone in- volved taken away and tortured. f mean, Let's not start making. dumb comparisons. The problem, of course, isthe _ classical imperial difficulty of an occupying army, which becomes corrupted by power. This is some- thing neither the Greeks nor the: ‘Brits or the French ever solved. . They ail simply got corrupted. is that { hoped and trusted they would do better. Breaking kids’ arms and stealing bread from” mothers i in front of a mass au- dience just ain't what Solomon: would have done eo The dif ference about the israclis. 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