A nation rose up from the ashes of the Holocaust, founded upon the ideal of freedom. Its people sought escape from centuries of oppression, to become a bastion of democracy, a forum for the exchange of ideas, and a place for multicultural expression.

Yet in its founding, there was a problem: there were others living on the same land before the new people returned to a land from which they’d been banished centuries before. The newcomers were actually ancient tribes who had lived upon these lands long ago. They had been enslaved, captured and removed. Then they returned, only to be expelled from their homeland once again. During their long sojourn, they kept their culture in their collective memory, defended their identity and their very existence against all comers.

And not only that, but they made contributions which advanced the progress of humanity in science, medicine, the arts, philosophy, mysticism, political philosophy, and all other areas of human achievement. They were truly a light unto the nations. Their brilliance – and their deep humanity – shone despite every effort to confine, to enslave, to exploit, and even to exterminate them.

A final, systematic attempt at their removal from the face of this earth, which succeeded in killing one third of their number, failed to diminish their light. After that, they’d had enough. They accelerated a plan to return to their ancient home once again.

This would be the test: What had they learned from the centuries of oppression, enslavement and abuse which had been visited upon them? How would they apply the lessons learned of the need to survive as a nation within other nations when yet still another nation lived inside the land to which they’d returned to establish their nation? How would they use the wisdom gained from the pogroms visited upon them? In what ways would their near imprisonment in the shtetls and the ghettos inform their coexistence with those who’d since come to live in their ancient homeland? They were persecuted and expelled by the Spaniards, punished in the Pale of Settlement, enslaved and gassed in the camps. They were persecuted by many of the other nations into which they were forced after their mass expulsion from their homeland.

Would they practice tolerance? We would know by how they treated their lowest, for it is based upon how a people treats its poor and disenfranchised, its homeless and its landless, by which the heart of that people would be known, perhaps by God, most assuredly by that people themselves. More than any other group, they had been a people oppressed. Through all those centuries of injustice, to what conclusions had their suffering led them?

Most of the world did not begrudge them their right to their own homeland. Most of the community of nations knew that these returning people were not going anywhere. Nor should they. Every people deserve a home. And even those nations who initially stood against the return of these people to their ancestral homeland eventually made peace with the reestablishment of this ancient nation.

The earth is a limited surface, yet there are more people than ever competing for its lands and what those lands produce. We have, perhaps, inherited a world of limits not so that we could learn to war over those limited treasures, but to learn how to cooperate and to share them. Maybe this is the next stage in our evolution as a species.

Yet it has been said that humans master, and pour their greatest ingenuity, into weapons and tactics of war. Those who returned to their ancient home were no different. Indeed, when their nation was founded, they needed to excel at fighting. Driven by the necessity of defending their newfound nation, these ancient people became warfighters. They became so good at war that many of their neighbors grew afraid to challenge them. Yet when applied against the people who’d come to live on these lands in the centuries while the sojourners were largely absent from them, the weapons became crude, overpowering instruments of destruction. These hammers were ill-suited to policing those who also claimed the same land.

Those who were already in these same lands were often expelled from their homes and cordoned off into camps in the manner that indigenous tribes on other continents had been separated from their homes in centuries past. And so they fought back, fought for their lands and their rights, a natural instinct of any living thing. In a horrible tit for tat of terror and counter-terror, the ancient ones who had returned sought to claim more land, to exercise more control. In this long and bitter struggle for territory and political rights, slowly, the ancient ones began to prevail.

Perhaps their greatest triumph was in convincing the world that what occurred in their ancestral homeland was a fair fight. They became a nuclear power. Despite overwhelming numerical inferiority vis a vis their neighbors and a marginally-thin territory, the ones who returned are now the military envy of the world. Their vaunted technological and intelligence-gathering prowess allowed them to prevail against their enemies. Of this mastery, they were proud. Their greatest, most revered institution was their combined armed forces. Able to call up a million soldiers on a day’s notice, no one dared these men and women in a direct fight. They possessed the world’s most advanced fighter jets, fueled and perpetually running on the tarmacs, a triad of nuclear capability, antimissile systems more advanced than any other nation’s, and internal and external security apparatuses of which books lauded truly daring exploits. And yet, their teenage adversaries, like cavemen, could often only fight against the bullets with hurled stones. Is this something of which to be proud?

They convinced the world that the fight between their nation and the people who occupied these same lands before their return was an issue of security. By virtue of their genius, the returners had defeated neighboring armies and suppressed terrorism through the building of walls and fences and isolated highways which only their people could travel. There were checkpoints for those who happened to be of another blood. True, these precautions were about security. Yet they were made necessary because of the confiscation of land and the curtailment of freedom. Can we expect a people to lose their land and their freedom and not fight?

We shouldn’t judge those who have returned too harshly. In the United States, European settlers expropriated land from Native tribes through force of arms, oppression, coerced confiscations, treaties upon which Washington reneged, and the forced movement of Indigenous peoples to less desirable tracts called reservations. To this day, Aboriginal peoples all over the world suffer the effects of their internal exiles into enclaves set aside because newcomers wanted their lands. Some call this ethnic cleansing. In other nations, it was termed apartheid. By what name do you call it?

The ancient people who returned to the land of their historical birth, with long experience in being oppressed and excluded, fought wars of liberation and engaged in movements for their own freedom and the freedom of other peoples on foreign soils. Military cemeteries are filled with their religious symbols, as well as with crosses. They gave their lives for people who would later try to exterminate them. Yet once they returned to their ancestral home, after the glow of a well-earned independence wore off, many of the new citizens became strangely apathetic to the devolvement of their nation from a democracy into something which gloried the force of arms, and which practiced a collective punishment upon those for whom the right to vote and the ability to display even a flag were often denied. In Greece, where democracy was born, a vast slave class supported the Athenian citizenry who could vote. While those who lived in this land before the establishment of the new nation are not enslaved, a fair reading of history shows that they are oppressed.

It seems mostly though, that economic success, combined with disillusionment with the slowly rolling violence that still molders in the territories, has desensitized the newcomers so that they can justify what they think they must do to others for their own safety and comfort. The war for true survival long since passed, perhaps living partly in their own past and still traumatized by it, they feel they must yet fight an enemy in order to maintain their unity. The mistake made of old, in all times of antiquity save for when their monarchy in the biblical era was united, was the very human error of fighting amongst themselves. The way to combat infighting is to fight others, and to organize around an external threat. No Roman, no Babylonian or Persian or Pharoah or Nazi shall enslave or exile, shall rule over or exterminate us ever again. Never again is an understandable vow. But what does it mean when it comes at the expense of others? Is it so important to deter others – a far enemy like Iran – that those who’ve slaughtered 1,200 innocents must themselves be starved and burned alive and slaughtered, the innocent along with the guilty, at a ratio of over 18 to 1? And what of the innocents in Lebanon? In the West Bank?

Politics in these lands holy to all of the world’s Abrahamic traditions, like that in America and much of the world, has become balkanized. The weakness of the parliamentary system in this new nation is that it allows small parties with swing votes to exert inordinate leverage on the political system and impose draconian policies. The majority of the polity may not hold the views espoused by these minority parties with radical agendas, but it can lead to the nation as a whole becoming apathetic to radical acts committed by the few. Or it can lead to splitting apart. What better way to unify than to fight a war.

In any two-tiered society, apathy is the enemy of the oppressor as well as the oppressed. And in an advanced society riven by political disagreement bordering on paralysis, altruism unites citizens against a common enemy which strikes out in horrific, unspeakable acts of terror. Why has that adversary committed such evil? Was it unprovoked? Was it to let the world know that the people it purports to represent are still there? Perhaps. Maybe every once in a while, the inmates will escape the prison and run amok. But why? Why were they in jail to begin with? In this case, we often ask what and who and how and where and when, but we seldom question why. On October 7th, 2023, why did they do what they did? Underneath, it may have been apathy toward the oppressed which allowed the terrorists to commit their horrors. Can we expect those locked in a vast prison because of their ethnicity not, in some way, to seek their revenge? Not much was being done to improve their lot. Not really. They lived crammed together, imprisoned, impoverished.

Apathy was never an excuse for those who turned their eyes away from the railcars that filled with people as if they were cattle, or maybe even watch as they were carted off to slaughter in the death camps. The ones who survived to speak of it, they wouldn’t stand for apathy as an excuse when others said that they didn’t know, or that they were powerless to stop it, or worse, that they were just following orders. Nor should they have tolerated these excuses. As the world lurches toward a devastating war, will we now allow apathy as an excuse for ourselves?

It may be said that as goyim, as a gentile living in a foreign land, I have no right to utter a word about what happens there. Yet was it not said by Reverend Niemöller in Germany after the Holocaust that he had not just a right but a duty to speak out against the oppression and slaughter of others, even though he was not of the same blood as the victims? And what may happen in this ‘contained’ war if it draws in other nations? In this, I do have a say, as my nation will certainly be one of those called to sacrifice its blood and treasure.

I acknowledge the right of all people to live in peace in the land of their own choosing. There are many among the people who have returned to the Holy Land and among those of their own ethnicity who support them from abroad, who also call upon a surcease of hostilities there and for equal treatment of all who live there. All people are my brothers and sisters. Yet especially, do I call those on both sides of this unimaginably bloody conflict my sisters and my brothers when they seek peace, when they call out injustice committed by their own ‘side,’ and when they seek to forgive. And there are many. The Turkish-Persian mystic known as Rumi wrote that love was his religion. Forgiveness is mine. And though some of you may see mortal enemies at your doorstep, the truth is that, as the bell chimes midnight and one-by-one we take off our masks at the end of the ball, we see that we are each just reflections of one another, as described in the metaphor of Indra’s Net. We project everything – our hopes, our hates, our loves, our fears – onto one another. Freud believed that.

They have been called a light unto the nations. Whether this was through the bringing of monotheism to the Abrahamic world, or through science, through literature, medicine, music, political innovation, psychology, philosophy, law, and in every field of human achievement, they indeed have brought the light, in partnership with the gentiles, to the entire world.

I have no doubt their light will always shine as a beacon, whether we believe in a God or follow secular ways, to improve our common condition. These people have established themselves in the world for as long as the world lasts. The past is over. Maybe it’s finally time for all of us to evolve beyond our atavism, to stop fighting, and to extend even to our enemies the freedom and basic rights and opportunities we’ve all fought so hard to achieve for ourselves. True magnanimity, true generosity, true power gives of itself when it does not have to, when it chooses to rather than because it must. This, perhaps, is the meaning of mercy, of compassion, of love itself. It’s what it really means to be human.

We know what we are, Shakespeare wrote, but not what we may be. As we look into the eyes of our children or of our lover, we gaze far past what they are into all that they could be. Love sees each of us, and all peoples, in the same blameless light. Perhaps it’s time in our evolution that we see each other – enemy and friend alike – the same way.

© 2024 by Michael C. Just