Tonight we all had some enlightening conversations. We had the privilege of sharing out Bavarian dinner in Berlin with a number of students from a local classics-oriented high school (called a Gymnasia). While the teens got to spend two hours getting to know a wonderful group of German teens, we adults had the chance to speak with a friend who is one of the school’s department heads. I have a tendency to regularly violate the rule of not bringing up politics at the dinner table, and tonight I asked him in what way the rise of extreme right-wing nationalism in Europe and America was present among his students and in their school-oriented lives. Surprisingly to me, he said that this issue is rather minor to them. There are indeed rising hateful groups, but they’re finding even greater problems among the Arab refugees coming in. This statement, for him and for us, felt problematic. We certainly do not want to generalize about racial and religious groups, and want to give everyone a fair chance. And indeed to counter, he told us of a non-refugee Arab student of his who was involved in an exchange program, who he defended when a family said they wanted nothing to do with him because he shared a last name with a well-known terrorist family. And yet, he knew this kid, and he was the sweetest most wonderful teenager he knew. But, when it comes to the Arab refugees and their attitudes towards Jews, his words were “even the neo-Nazis know the lines that they cannot cross.” He shared that he had one student who insisted, day after day, that he came from Palestine. He finally got fed up, brought in a world map, and asked the student to point at the place from which he came. He pointed at Israel and said Palestine. My friend then asked him to point at the place he was born. He pointed at Lebanon. He said his parents were from that same place. His grandparents came from the land of Israel. This student had been indoctrinated in the Palestinian belief that anyone descended from a Palestinian refugee is a Palestinian refugee, and there can be no other nationality by which he identifies. Let’s be clear. Palestinians are the only group for which this definition of refugee applies. Though Jews have always yearned to go back to the land of Israel, this never meant that we would not settle in the lands where we were living. Jeremiah told us upon our arrival to Babylon in ancient days that instead of sitting and wailing, we were to build houses and plant our vineyards. Anyway, my friend made clear to this student that referring to Israel as Palestine in Germany is quite illegal (it is recognized as hate speech) and that when one chooses to come to a country, one must accept its history and laws with it (this student and his family had deliberately chosen Germany as the EU country in which they would settle).
There’s so much cognitive dissonance here for us. We wish we didn’t have to generalize, about an entire group of people, as we have faith in humanity and want to live without such prejudices. Europe is being flooded, however, by a wave of people indoctrinated in serious hatred towards the Jewish state. This leaves us on the left in a really precarious place, and neither of us is really sure of what to do with this.
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The other exhibit, perhaps even more evocative, was one set up in one of the museum’s narrow and angular atria, where piled on the floor in layers and filling up every inch of space were metal faces. Each was heavy to lift, and one could not take a step without feeling and hearing the impact of that which was beneath. The dead are piled beneath us. Infinite light far above, but no way of going from A to B without stepping on death. Berlin is a city of art, of culture, of fantastic stores and restaurants, of lovely and open-minded people. And we cannot take a single step without the voices of the dead calling out.
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