Us And Them: Breeding Racism In The Jewish Establishment
By Roi Bachmutsky
Demonstrations in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah have come alive again as of this past Friday, aiming to show solidarity with the Shamasneh family who have appealed the impending eviction from their home. Unbeknownst to many, the struggle in Sheikh Jarrah reaches far beyond the borders of Jerusalem. In fact, it affects ethnic tensions half a world away by influencing how American Jewish youth internalize the separation between “us” and “them.”
“I was just having a really hard time,” one Jewish student at UC Berkeley told me, speaking of her experience at a Sheikh Jarrah protest she was invited to attend while traveling through Israel. “It was the first time I’d ever talked to a real Palestinian,” she explained, “… [he] doesn’t want to kill me, he tells me he likes some Israelis, it was just crazy.” She would later explain to me that upon reflection, she was “raised, not explicitly but at least very implicitly, with racism towards Arabs, and Palestinians in particular.” I asked whether she meant that she had never explicitly said the words: “I hate Arabs.” “Frankly,” she admitted to my surprise, “I probably did say that.” The Palestinian man she encountered at Sheikh Jarrah was evidently not at all whom she was expecting, but the question remains – how did she imagine her first encounter with a Palestinian and where did this conception come from?
I found my answer in the summer of 2011, when I attended a Taglit-Birthright Israel trip with 39 other Jewish young adults – the vast majority of whom were receiving their first glimpse of the Middle East. Before we even boarded the plane, our Birthright staff were quick to explain that “Israel is a safe place but there are people that want to hurt Jews there so we have to be very careful.” The notion that we were endangered tacitly followed us throughout the trip, from the daily reminder of our security guard’s loaded rifle to the staff’s insistence that participants refrain from venturing into Jerusalem’s Muslim Quarter. “It is very dangerous,” we were told.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emphasized similar perils to thousands of Jewish youth at the Taglit-Birthright mega event in January of this year. “It’s our job to wake up the world,” he proclaimed, “… the great danger to the world is not from Jews building in our ancestral capital in Jerusalem. It’s from nuclear weapons in Iran… It’s chemical weapons in Syria falling into the wrong hands.” The message is straightforward – the enemy of our enemy is our friend. There are powerful antagonists seeking to do us harm – Bibi wants us to remember – and therefore Jews the world over must ignore divisive politics, such as the Judaization of East Jerusalem in Sheikh Jarrah, and instead unite against our common enemy.
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