Editor’s desk: What is it going to take?

          I wrote an optimistic and upbeat column for the Rosh HaShanah issue last year (September 2013), celebrating the achievements of the U.S. and Wisconsin Jewish communities. I am not in that kind of mood as we approach the (palindrome) Jewish year 5775.

          Instead, at this writing, there has occurred a seemingly worldwide outburst of hatred and contempt for Israel, Zionism, Jews and Judaism that has not appeared for a long time.

          We should not exaggerate this as a portent. We are far from experiencing a rash of events like Kristallnacht, the national pogrom the Nazis unleashed throughout Germany in 1938, whose 75th anniversary was this past autumn.

          Still, I have been reading and hearing about and seeing anti-Israel and anti-Semitic reactions to Operation Protective Edge — Israel’s recent campaign of self-defense in the Gaza Strip against the terrorist organization Hamas — until I’m ready to explode.

          In fact, I feel a need to apologize for this column to the majority of The Chronicle’s readers, and not only because it will constitute something of a barely controlled rant. Most of you are Jewish and pro-Israel; therefore much of what I want to say here you will already know and believe, and it may come across as condescending and patronizing.

          But not only Jews read The Chronicle. I have seen copies in local libraries and have received occasional email from non-Jewish readers, some of them in places distant from Wisconsin. I also know The Chronicle is at least sometimes monitored by some Israel despisers. So I address this column mostly to them.

          And I want to ask the Israel-despisers, Jewish and not: What is it going to take to make you open your eyes and minds?

          What will convince you to take seriously the contempt for Jews and Judaism expressed by large numbers, in many places the majority, of Arabs and Muslims — attitudes expressed by Arab and Muslim political leaders, religious leaders, journalists, authors and people in the “Arab street” the world over?

          What will make you understand that accusing Israel of “genocide” in its response to Hamas in Gaza and its other actions is a libel equal to “Jews are seeking to take over the world” and “Jews use children’s blood to make Passover matzah”?

          Do Hamas terrorists have to attack an Israeli school and murder Israeli children — as other Palestinian terrorists have done at a school in Ma’alot in May 1974 and countless other times and places?

          Does a small Palestinian or other Arab army or gang have to overrun a kibbutz or Israeli town; rape, torture and murder the inhabitants (as Syrians are doing to each other in the civil war there and ISIS is doing in Iraq); film the atrocities with their smartphones and post them on YouTube?

          Does Israel have to turn off the Iron Dome and wait until some Hamas rockets plow into a school or hospital or residential area and kill a few, or a few hundred, or a few thousand Israelis before you think Israel might have a justification for attacking Hamas in Gaza?

          According to the Jerusalem Post (May 1, 2014), about 2,500 Israelis have been murdered in hundreds of terrorist attacks since the state’s founding in 1948. Does Israel have to lose that many in just one attack before you will believe that Palestinian Arab groups like Hamas and Fatah plus their many other Arab allies are serious about wanting to murder all Israelis?

          Does Iran have to outright drop a nuclear weapon on Israel and murder thousands or millions of Israelis before you take seriously its leaders’ expressed hatred?

          If that’s the case, then not only are you contemptible, but you are going to remain stuck in your mental fog. Israel exists, and its wonderful military exists, precisely to try to prevent, or at least discourage, these kinds of things from happening.

          Examine a few facts, if you dare. If all seven billion people now living on earth were compressed into 1,000 people, about 330 of them (or about one-third) would be Christians, about 210 (or about one-fifth) would be Muslims and two — that’s TWO or one-500th — would be Jews.

          We are a tiny and an endangered minority of the human community. We are threatened by people who actively hate us, and who for 2,000 years tried to exterminate us or at least make our existence miserable.

          But we are perhaps even more threatened by that great majority of people who don’t care whether we exist or not and are willing to regard our safety as expendable for some other interest.

          And that remains the case no matter how prosperous Israel is, how good its military is or how prosperous are the Jews of the rest of the world.

          And Jews have endured conditions and events born of these attitudes not only in the Christian Europe that brought the business to a climax in the German Nazi Holocaust. They also endured it in an Arab and Muslim world whose history of violent and contemptuous treatment of Jews goes back to the founding of Islam 1,400 years ago, centuries before Zionism was born.

          And after 2,000 years of such experiences, some Jews decided enough was enough. They recaptured and reclaimed the land where Jews and Judaism originated and whose tie to the Jewish people has been part of the Jewish religion for centuries. And they set up a state that could mobilize resources and power for defense of Jews and Judaism, and would make their safety and survival priority number one.

          No, most of them were and are not arrogant “white man’s burden” imperialists and “colonists” seeking to push aside the “natives” to take their lands and resources in order to get rich. And most of them were not then and are not today racists seeking to lord it over “inferior races” and certainly were not seeking to commit genocide of anybody. Most of them sought to make a place where Jews could have life, freedom and dignity in a world where too many people wanted, and still want, to deny Jews all three.

          And no, they were not and are not seeking to expand throughout the entire Middle East and dominate or murder Arabs, as too many Arabs, Muslims and Western liberals seem to think. The threat that many Palestinians and their allies claim Israel and Jews pose to them and the world is bogus, delusional, fantasy.

          But the threat that they and much of the world poses to Jews is still very real. And that is not a post-modernist “narrative” in the sense of a made-up story used to justify crimes and exploitation, like “manifest destiny.” This constitutes an accurate map of the territory of reality.

          So from whence comes the neurotic eagerness to cast Israel and Jews as Nazis and to put the worst possible interpretations on the behavior of Israel and Israelis? And why exists the equally neurotic eagerness to portray Hamas and Fatah leaders and members as “resistance fighters” and always attribute to them the best possible motives?

          This is exactly backwards. The Jews of Israel are the ones fighting to maintain freedom and life against people who want to take them away.

          And the majority of Palestinians and of the rest of the Muslim world are not seeking equality and fair treatment, as were black Americans in the Jim Crow south. They want to restore Arab/Muslim dominance and to put Jews back to being a helpless and humiliated minority, and to exterminate Jews if they refuse.

          And in that situation, no wonder Israelis are divided and ambivalent about the idea of creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank/Judea-Samaria region. These lands are not a safe distance away; they are right in Israel’s backyard. They not only have important Jewish religious value — and whatever anybody thinks about the truth of that, the idea deserves a respect that Judaism too often hasn’t received — but they also are militarily strategic highlands overlooking Israel’s major population centers. It would be easy to shoot missiles and build terrorism tunnels there, turning those lands into a much larger Gaza.

          Of course, Israel is not going to agree to a Palestinian Arab state in those lands unless it has guarantees that doing so will result in real peace and the end of the whole conflict — things that up to now Palestinian Arab leaders have refused to grant out of their culture-born psychological inability to treat with Jews as equals and to make a “humiliating” compromise with them.

          Why are so many people, including some Jews, on the political left unable or unwilling to understand this? Why do so many of them think of ethnic chauvinists and religious fascists as noble victims and “freedom fighters,” and of the truly endangered minority as heartless and “racist” oppressors?

          It makes no sense to me. But maybe somebody might be able and willing to explain it. After all, this is only my opinion — not, by the way, necessarily the opinion of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation or any other of its employees or volunteers.

          I know Jews exist who believe in good faith that what I have written here is wrong. I think they are deluded and badly mistaken, but they are part of the community.

          And I invite them to reply, for the sake of openness and inclusivity and of having a Jewish newspaper that portrays the community as it really is, in all its wonderful and maddening diversity, rather than as I or anybody else would like it to be.