OP-ED: Please forgive me for what I think on Yom Kippur
By ALAN SMASON
When I was a little boy, I read the propaganda distributed in the classroom. I watched the films and TV shows the teachers showed us and, like most of my classmates, I believed what they said.
A young Palestinian girl holds a knife as she glorifies matyrdom and the killing of Jews. (Screenshot courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch)
Both the looming threat of communism and the previous political mania known as fascism – over which we fought the Second World War – were drummed into our dear little ears and projected into our pupils until we had little doubt that attention must be paid.
In what was my most horrific discovery, I learned of mankind’s efficient and most destructive inhumanity towards itself: the Holocaust. When I saw with my own eyes and read accounts of the Nazis’ “Final Solution,” I was shaken to my core. I could not fathom such vile and senseless hatred had only been defeated a decade prior to my birth. Indeed, had they not been defeated, I might never have been born.
In doing my own research on Nazism and antisemitism, I borrowed two very descriptive library books on the Holocaust from the local public library. The photos and interviews took me to a very dark place. I did not want anyone else to ever see such atrocities and in my own way of coping with the trauma, I refused to return those books and hid them for at least two years under my bed so as to “protect” others from expeeriencing my own agony. (While I did eventually return the books, I dodged those library fines for years.)
The fact is children are born receptacles for propaganda. Like sponges, we eagerly absorb indoctrination from our teachers and, with reinforcement from our parents, cling to those principles as we grow. As teenagers, we sometimes rebel against what our parents teach us, but we largely recognize the wisdom of our elders once we begin to marry and raise our own families.
Just released last month in advance of the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks, a new feature length documentary – “Shadows of October: Israel Under Siege” – more fully examines the ramifications of this shaping of impressionable minds in one section of the nearly two-hour long film.
It all hits home when the narrator and host, Levi Hazen, interviews Palestine Media Watch executive director Itamar Marcus. Marcus explains the purpose of his organization, founded in 1996, is to learn from official and unofficial Palestinian sources what they were telling their own people in Arabic during the peace process between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
Marcus claims that the words and actions of the Palestinians differed greatly from what had been proposed in the Oslo Accords. Using funds provided by the United States and European allies, the Palestinian Authority and its supporting Fatah Party were responsible for setting the curricula for learning in the West Bank and in Gaza. Instead of trumpeting the prospects for peace with their Israeli neighbors, their textbooks and films vilified Israelis and Jews and actually glorified the killing of Jews and the prospect for their children to achieve martyrdom. Math textbooks would set up problem solving in which students were told two out of six Jews were killed and then asked to come up with the difference.
“We found that there’s nothing that they’re learning that’s compatible with the peace process with Israel or even compatible with the peace process with Jews,” Marcus continued. “There is intense demonization of Israel. Israel has no right to exist and And as a further example, we see Assoud the Rabbit, a jovial, pink bunny rabbit wearing a large wooden key about its neck. The voice of the rabbit proclaims it is the “key of return” and the children are encouraged to take back Jerusalem (and other lands) from the “evil Zionists.”
Videos showed very young elementary school pupils wielding plastic knives and capturing Jews inside cages. According to Marcus, it was no accident that an entire generation of Palestinians saw becoming part of Hamas or Islamic Jihad as a logical extension of their early childhood learning.
Given this kind of continuing propaganda and forced indoctrination by their own teachers with reinforcement from their beloved parents, the willingness to take part in the attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023 and to become martyrs thus makes much more sense.
Most disturbingly, we must ask: how do we fight children who are weaponized by hate to become the radicals of tomorrow?
All of which leads me again to a very dark place.
At this time during this very young year, we are encouraged to take measure of ourselves and to beg forgiveness from those against who we have transgressed. But I see no similar measures coming from the Palestinians and their supporters. In fact, Israel has become so demonized within the liberal world and similarly taken to task by right-wingers as forcing Americans into a war they are not willing to wage. Jews are losing support across the board in their attachment to their ancestral home.
Meanwhile, as Israel continues to act in self-defense in Gaza and in Lebanon, it also loses ground internationally. The United States is embroiled in the same war in the MIddle East, centered around the all-important and strategic Strait of Hormuz through which 30% of the world’s oil is typically shipped. By means of its strategic air advantage and its naval forces, the United States seeks to cut off the head of the snake – the Iranian Islamic Republic – which sponsors terror through its proxies of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and the Muslim Brotherhood elsewhere around the Islamic world.
There is no counterpart for forgiveness or atonement within those groups – most of whom espouse a form of Islam that denies Israeli identity or the right for Jews to exist peacefully as neighbors.
When I was born, the nascent nation of Israel – emerging out of the ashes of the Holocaust – was just five years old. I’ve always known of a modern State of Israel, occupying the same land once ruled over by the ancient kingdom of Judea in the Bible. Israel accepted a United Nations plan in 1948 to divide the land between Arabs and Jews and to split the governance of Jerusalem as a condition of the plan. Israel announced its independence and the Arab nations attacked. After more than a year of bloody conflict between Israel and five of its Arab neighbors, a ceasefire was achieved in 1949.
Threatened again in 1967, Israel took the initiative and captured lands formerly held by Jordan including East Jerusalem and the strategic Golan Heights as well as the Sinai and the Gaza Strip from Egypt. These lands were captured during war and were the spoils of the victor. The Yom Kippur War, which we will remember in just a couple more days, was another instance where Israel was attacked but came out on top of the conflict.
In the interest of peace, Israel gave back the Sinai to Egypt in 1982 after having signing the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty in 1979. Looking to similarly solidify peace with the Palestinians in 2005, Israel forcibly removed their own people living in Gaza to give the Palestinians the very land over which the fighting is being currently being waged to claim back from Hamas and others.
I am thankful and grateful that the 251 hostages taken on October 7 have all been returned either alive to their families or in body bags. The scars of what happened on that date – the most atrocious attack on Jews since the Holocaust – and all the previous wars Israel has had to wage for survival makes me sad.
Bu then my mind turns back to the children of the Palestinian Authority living under the leadership of Yassir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas as well as those in Gaza from 2005 onwards. While I seek shuva (“return”) and atonement this Yom Kippur, the images of these indoctrinated children stares at me in my mind.`
A friend of mine, now deceased, once lived in Israel with her son. She became friendly with an Arab woman around her age, who also had a son of the same age. They conversed over the phone constantly and were supportive of one another in their parenting and helping their sons succeed in school. But they could never meet in public. I asked my friend and she replied that her friend had told her if anyone saw the two of them together, her throat would be slit by the next morning.
“If what you’re telling me is true,” I said to my friend, “there will never be peace in the Middle East.”
And without blinking an eye my friend said: “Alan, there will never be peace in the Middle East.”
The realization that my dear, dead friend is pounding this into my head again in the same manner as my teachers did back in elementary school and the Palestinian instructors and parents are doing for their own children makes me recall a direct quote from Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir that was first published in 1973 as part of an oral autobiography. Despite the fact it is more than 53 years old now, it rings as true today as it was when it was first recorded.
“When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons,” the prime minister said, “but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”
G’mar chatimah tovah.
