Keeping the Gate

Though my father, my mentor above all and hero and role model wasn't at all religious, he WAS a committed Zionist. I learned from an early age that our family supported Israel, no matter what. Throughout my early years in college, I learned a strange thing -- especially strange for a kid who grew up in a liberal household: some of Israel's staunchest critics were from the left. I guess some of it was the Left's love of the underdog, which, somehow, Israel's enemies, sworn to its destruction, had become. Of course, much of it is also anti semitism... My dad died young, and afterwards I met Wifey, before she was Wifey, of course. She was born in Israel, and her father had fought in the Independence War, and somehow her mother, despite emigrating to Israel after the concentration camps and meeting her husband and having Wifey and starting a new life -- couldn't stand Israel. Her self hatred of her former country reaches comical heights: she warns the Ds against marrying Israeli men with the zeal many mothers or grandmothers have in warning their daughters against marrying drunks... Complex psychopathology there, with my mother in law. Somehow she feels more affinity towards her native Poland, the country whose people betrayed her family to death, than she does towards Israel, the land she helped found. So last night Wifey and I saw "The Gatekeepers," an Israeli documentary. It was a series of interviews of the former leaders of Shin Bet, Israel's FBI. To the man, they questioned Israel's treatment of Palestinians, and the whole war on terror. These were men who ordered the killing of true bad guys -- those who blew up busses carrying children, and yet they wondered, in retirement, where their beloved country was headed, so long as they continued to occupy Arab territories. The film left me very uneasy. I'm comfortable in my standard belief since childhood: tiny Israel is the miracle survivor in a land of those who would destroy her. Why can't the vast surrounding nations take in the "Palestinians?" These former Hawks have their doubts -- clearly. As one said, when he sees a new Israeli Army member, months out of high school, holding an Uzi on an Arab family and deciding their fate -- he is sickened. I have to read more about the movie, and learn the other side of its interviewees... What a world we live in...it's truly so comforting when things are black and white, and they almost never are.