Jews were always the scrappy underdogs in my drama, heroes who refused to die out despite the best efforts of the Nazis and similar monsters.
As a half-breed born in 1943, everything I ever learned about their struggles was Holocaust infused. The wrenching history of the first industrial-scale attempt to exterminate an entire race of people was unnerving to Jewish youngsters of the 1950s and ’60s.
During my family’s life in West Babylon, I preferred missing school religious holidays for fear of standing out.
Those feelings were made indelible as cousins and in-laws began trickling to the United States to begin life anew after surviving the slaughter in Europe.
Like my Uncle Phil, the butcher with his concentration camp tattoo still scarring his bicep. He was the husband of my mother’s brother’s wife’s brother-in-law, but that was close enough.
In the meat department of our Long Island neighborhood market, we listened wide-eyed to his stories of resistance and struggle. Mila 18, Exodus, the Ten Commandments, the tales of my youth always featured Jews as the good guys fighting against impossible odds to create and defend a homeland.
As a journalist covering the Yom Kippur War and many post-war intifadas and terrorist attacks, those feelings survived the reality of Palestinian civilian suffering during the decades of unholy war.
Yes, it was terrible that Palestinians were refugees, but what else could the Jewish people do to guarantee their own survival than to defend Israel?
At one point in the half-century of violence that has marked the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, worried that my support for Israel was beginning to soften, Benjamin Netanyahu came to visit me at the King David Hotel.
On a mission, the once and future prime minister of Israel patiently explained that Israeli tactics that might seem harsh, like roadblocks and roundups, were unavoidable if the Jewish State was to be sustained.
Nothing has tested my support for Israel like the War in Gaza.
“Young, Old and Sick Starve to Death in Gaza: ‘There Is Nothing,’ reads the front page of last Friday’s New York Times. A four-column photo shows a Palestinian mother holding her 18-month-old, born healthy, but recently diagnosed with severe malnutrition.
The child’s ribs protrude alarmingly from his bloated belly. “New and astonishing levels of desperation, with a third of the population not eating for multiple days in a row,” says Dr. Ahmed al-Farra, a pediatrician.
I know the bastards from Hamas started this chapter of the continuing saga by invading Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. 1,200 Israelis were killed in the attacks. Hamas then wrapped itself in its own civilian population to avoid Israel’s wrath.
Tens of thousands of Gazan women and children have died as a result of the relentless Israeli counterattack and siege that continues. Of course, Hamas created this wave of violence. Still, how can any of us stay silent watching Palestinian babies die of malnutrition?
It doesn’t help that far-right Israeli government ministers claim no desire or necessity to feed Gaza.
“There is no nation that feeds its enemies,” Amichay Eliyahu said in an Israeli radio interview. Netanyahu is under tremendous pressure to escalate the fighting and end wobbly peace talks. More babies will die. Hostages will die. The international community will further isolate Israel as more nations follow France in recognizing the existence of a Palestinian state. The international community no longer believes anti-zionism is always antisemitism.
For now, pro-Israel forces in Washington and in the media will frighten away or diminish voices calling on Israel to end the fighting or at least hugely increase food and other aid to Gaza.
Unless Israel does that, there will be fewer Jewish youngsters dreaming of Israel as the good guys.
