Lebanon Leaflets for America

The Israelis are on to me. They know I'm using my backyard tool shed as a launch pad for homecrafted missiles so primitive they are lucky to get, let alone stay, airborne. Yesterday I aimed these firecrackers at an AIPAC lawn party and barbeque across the street that serves as a two-lane border line between Narberth and Wynnewood. When my cherrybombs struck, they spread black smoke, followed by the thick haze of impotent defiance.

Nevertheless, the Israelis dropped leaflets on Narberth this afternoon, warning me and my neighbors to get out within 24 hours, although they have already bombed Philadelphia International Airport, all four bridges to New Jersey and left craters up and down the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I'm told they will also take out bridges across the Chesapeake to stop rebels from escaping south. So I'm not exactly sure where to flee. Maybe I can take refuge at Valley Forge or Gettysburg, if they've not already become tent cities for refugees.

I'll be honest. I'm scared. I dare not accuse Israel of overreacting to my feeble gestures of outrage lest I bring charges of anti-Semitism on myself, even though I am Jewish. Besides, doesn't Lower Merion's status as one of the epicenters of U.S. fundraising and propaganda for AIPAC and other pro-Zionist lobbying groups outweigh the sputtering use of one of two smoke bombs? Apparently not.

The leaflets say that no act--whether real, symbolic or imaginary--against the state of Israel and/or the Jewish People will be tolerated. If they don't set an example here in Narberth, anti-Jewish sentiment will spread throughout the Main Line in "a thick contagion of hatred." And so while they grieve for every innocent life that will be lost when they bomb and strafe this suburban molehill of antiwar activity, the cessation of all hostility against Jews will bring a lasting peace well worth dying for. What's more, my neighbors shouldn't have harbored a known pro-Palestinian sympathizer in their midst. As the leaflet so eloquently put it, "His toolshed is your tool shed." Ah, the joys of collective guilt.

You know, reading the leaflet with its faint State Department watermark, I'm tempted to quote the words of that famous patriot, Giorgio Bushamente, "Bring it on." But instead I'll quote Yves Montand from some 1960s French noir film in which he plays a police inspector outwitted by a pair of anarchist psycopaths. Down to one witness against this demonic duo, and trying to help her escape to safety, he mutters, "Jesus, they're going to kill them all." That's been the mantra in my head for a week. And today a friend who lives in an Arab section of Brooklyn told me that shop keepers have soap-scrawled, "Give peace a chance," on their windows.

I fear there is no placation of Jewish post-Holocaust traumatic stress. There is no safety in a world in which a Jewish garrison state feels threatened by its neighbors. There is no idea of a citzenry with rights in the closed-fist Israeli psyche. The idea of the citizen and a polity in which people are defines as such no longer exists in the Israeli mind. All are enemies of their state.

Who cares if they've got atomic weapons and $3 billion worth of free bombs and airplanes to drop them from America every year for at least two decades? Who cares if a man can be sent to Guantanimo for sending sling shots to the Palestinians? I'm a devout believer in non-violence, but if I can't have that, at least make it a fair fight. As Gandhi--yes, Gandhi--put it when he was explaining non-violence as non-reistance, "I never meant it to mean, run away. I'd rather see a man fight than flee."

In my opinion, Hezbollah intervened to prevent Israel from reoccupying Gaza, which has been Sharon's and now Olmert's plan ever since Hamas won free and fair democratic elections. Hezbollah is trying to force Syria and Iran to come to Palestine's defense with weapons not just wrods. They are trying to provoke a showdown with the West. Yeah, it's a stupid idea. Yeah, it'll probably backfire. But except in America, Israel has lost most of its moral legitimacy and has begun to resemble its persecutors of the past.

In the mean time, I've done my own pathetic best to take the heat(-synching missiles) off Beirut and Gaza by further forcing Israel to stretch itself thin in a three-front war that now includes Narberth and other parts of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. I apologize to my neighbors for the coming Israeli blitzkrieg, but now they'll know firsthand what it's like to live under the heavy heel of Israeli rule. I can't wait for the Israeli check points every block or two. I can't wait to be issued my very own identity card. I can't wait to see the bulldozers sweeping across front lawns and pulverizing houses that harbor suspected anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers. I can't wait to see Israeli troops demand that my NRA-member neighbors surrender their arms and, finally, someone answers fire with fire--since America's leaders have such a pronounced dislike for diplomacy.

In the mean time, I just wish the government of Israel had waited until the borough of Narberth, or the township of Lower Merion, or the governor in Harrisburg had asked for their intervention in our domestic affairs. Oh, that's right, Lebanon didn't ask for Israel to come to its aid. Nor did the UN. Only America stood back and let Israel settle scores that can never be settled.

Here, some lines of poetry written by Ed Dorn 40 years ago, when he was caught in outrage against America so much more articulate than mine:

. . . they form
the message of men stooping down
in my native land, and father an entire conglomerate
of need and wasted vision. All the children
were taught the pledge of Allegiance, and the land was pledged
to private use, the walnut dropped in the autumn on the ground
gree, and lay black in the dead grass in the spring.

What he means is that we have become a collective of greed, paying no mind to the true motives for our continual wars. We fight for the full employment that only a war economy brings, or as much of it as can be sustained at home in a global economy. Maybe some day the Chinese will make the bombs we drop on them and we will have to finally teeth on that gritty irony of a war economy.

Maybe that is why Israel has such appeal to us: they don't invade for oil or fight to defend any extensions of corporate greed (although, God knows, those Palestinian wells are pure gold). They fight for a clearly defined, glaringly bright right to exist. But that right is no longer an affiliate of justice or compassion. It is fertilized in nitrite and nitrate--fire and fear. But like the smoke from my uncles' cigars when I was a kid, it is still an aromatic ideal, not like the odorless bug spray I aimed at some wasps a few minutes ago.

What Dorn means is that there are no bodhisattvas left, no gnostic eyes to open and encompass the unquenchable light behind the front-and-center glare of bomb burst and gun fire.

There's a Friends of Israel today noon in downtown Philadelphia. Maybe I should represent the non-brainwashed Jews of America and duck the outstretched fists of Jewish rednecks from the JDL. Pray the light of reason and the voice of conscience have not been utterly extinguished. But don't blame God if they have. His Creation is designed to be a conduit of wisdom. Just ask the Prophets, most of whom were sent to Israel to condemn bullying, brutal conduct unbecoming believers in Providence.