Every year Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh gives out the Martin Luther King, Jr. Writing Awards. The contest "encourages Pittsburgh-area high school students and CMU students to explore their personal experiences with race and discrimination through poetry and prose."
I've read the winning pieces, and they're all powerful. I'd like to focus, though, on the piece by Jesse Lieberfeld, who took first prize in the category for high school students. A junior at Winchester Thurston High, he has penned an essay entitled, "Fighting a Forbidden Battle: How I Stopped Covering Up for a Hidden Wrong."
Jesse's piece is about his precocious political and spiritual journey. Growing up Jewish (observantly so, apparently), he was constantly hearing about the "perfect society" in Israel. That image didn't jibe with what he was coming to learn. Government propaganda is one thing; but what if it's coming from the people who are supposed to teach you about the world?
Although I was fortunate enough to have parents who did not try to force me into any one set of beliefs, being Jewish was in no way possible to escape growing up. It was constantly reinforced at every holiday, every service and every encounter with the rest of my relatives. I was forever reminded how intelligent my family was, how important it was to remember where we had come from, and to be proud of all the suffering our people had overcome in order to finally achieve their dream in the perfect society of Israel.
This last mandatory belief was one which I never fully understood, but I always kept the doubts I had about Israel's spotless reputation to the back of my mind. "Our people" were fighting a war, one I did not fully comprehend, but I naturally assumed that it must be justified. We would never be so amoral as to fight an unjust war.
Yet as I came to learn more about our so-called "conflict" with the Palestinians, I grew more concerned. I routinely heard about unexplained mass killings, attacks on medical bases and other alarmingly violent actions for which I could see no possible reason.
Jesse began to discuss his concerns with other Jews, who used distressingly neutral language to describe the IP conflict (itself a description that Jesse came to understand is a euphemism.) They said it was "a difficult situation" or some such. He learned that for some, behind the euphemism and evasion lay the ugliest of emotions.
It was not until eighth grade that I fully understood what I was on the side of. One afternoon, after a fresh round of killings was announced on our bus ride home, I asked two of my friends who actively supported Israel what they thought. "We need to defend our race," they told me. "It's our right."
"We need to defend our race."
Where had I heard that before? Wasn't it the same excuse our own country had used to justify its abuses of African-Americans 60 years ago?
To be clear, he's not comparing the plight of American blacks in the 50s to that of Palestinians today. He's referring to the lies dominant groups tell themselves to rationalize their oppression of others. (I would argue that racism is more result than cause of the occupation, because as Chomsky says, "If you're sitting with your boot on somebody's neck, you're going to hate him, because that's the only way that you can justify what you're doing, so subjugation automatically yields racism.")
I can obviously never know what it must have been like to be an African-American in the 1950s. I do feel, however, as though I know exactly what it must have been like to be white during that time, to live under an aura of moral invincibility, to hold unchallengeable beliefs, and to contrive illusions of superiority to avoid having to face simple everyday truths. That illusion was nice while it lasted, but I decided to pass it up. I have never been happier.
Jesse seems to have abandoned not just the lies but also his religion. I hope (and assume) he understands it's possible to be both a religious Jew and an opponent of Israel's oppression of Palestinians. Support for brutality is not a tenet of any kind of Judaism.
Many Jews have gone on journeys similar to Jesse's. I grew up in a liberal, secular household, yet my "liberal" mother and my "liberal" grandmother (as I learned once I got to college) gave me a one-sided (untrue) take on the IP conflict. Their distortions were more subtle than the ones inflicted on Jesse, but they nonetheless led me to value the lives of Arabs less than the lives of Jews. It was deeply liberating to begin to think for myself.
I hope Jesse's courageous essay inspires other young Jewish Americans to reject the chauvinistic lies they've been fed. In fact, there's evidence that this is already happening on a broad scale. It's a promising development for the prospect of peace. A truth-seeing American-Jewish population, one that empathizes en masse with the Palestinians, would be good for the Middle East, good for Palestinians, and good for the Jews.