I’m seldom shy about speaking out, but I’ve held back on commenting about what has happened in Gaza. My reasoning is simple. I have numerous Jewish friends that I don’t want to lose. In high school, many of the friends I hung out with were Jewish; when I worked in radio several of my favorite people there were Jewish; I was partners with a Jewish man at the first talent agency I worked at; the first band we signed to that talent agency was Jewish; if it weren’t for that Jewish band I would have never met my wife; the best man at my wedding was Jewish . . . and on and on.
So, naturally, my positive experiences with Jews in the United States have made me want to support Israel. But now, as much as I would like to, I can’t do that.
I follow the Facebook and Substack posts of a Jewish friend/celebrity I have known for many years. The majority of his posts deal in some way with the horrors of the October 7th Hamas attack. Reading his posts, one would think the entire Palestinian conflict began on that day. But October 7th didn’t happen in a vacuum. Israel has never treated the Palestinians well. Every human has a breaking point, and at the time of the attack, Gaza was essentially a large open-air prison.
Imagine being fenced in for your entire life. Or, if you were one of the lucky ones who were allowed to leave, you’d have to pass through checkpoints where you could be strip-searched and subjected to other inhumane treatments.
My Jewish friend/celebrity also writes about the bigotry he and others face solely because they are Jews. I’m totally with him on those posts. Bigotry toward Jews is wrong. But then he takes shots at Muslim Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, Muslim Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Muslim U.S. Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed. Obviously, the bigotry goes both ways.
When I was in high school, I took an excellent class on the Middle East, which was taught by a Jewish teacher. Other than changes in the individual Jewish and Muslim leaders, very little has changed since I took that class. Back then, my opinion was that the United States needed to extract itself from involvement in the Middle East and let the parties fight among themselves. After all, Muslims and Jews have been fighting each other practically since their inception.
I have just finished writing my next book, God’s B-Sides: Bible Passages Preachers Pray You’ll Never Read. That book required me to do hundreds of hours of biblical research. Since the Tanakh and the Old Testament share nearly the same core text, I read many stories about Israelites going into battle against other tribes. Often there was no justification for the fighting other than “God said so,” and when the Israelites won, God gave them permission to take virgin women as sex slaves. How is that any different than the October 7th Hamas attack?
The bottom line is that both Jews and Palestinians each have convincing arguments as to why their side is right and the other side is wrong. As someone who is a mutt (Bohemian, Swedish, Norwegian, and who the fuck knows what else), I do my best to look at what is happening in the Middle East with an open mind.
And I keep coming back to the opinion I had when I completed the class on the Middle East back in high school: Both sides are wrong—only at certain times in history one side is more wrong than the other.
Last week, I viewed Google Earth satellite images of Gaza. I also viewed Gaza images before Isreal flattened it. If you haven’t done the same, I encourage you to do so. It’s horrible. I also read a summary of the documentary NAZA, which I plan to watch when it becomes available for all next month.
It’s one thing when soldiers of one side battle the soldiers of another side. It’s quite another when innocent women and children become casualties of men fighting each other just as they did back in the Tanakh and the Old Testament.
I simply can’t support generational fighting by people who are born into hate for each other, can’t toss away their pretend gods, and can’t grow the fuck up.
And I object to even one penny of my tax dollars supporting such violence.