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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 11/20/11

The Split: Differences over Israel tear apart a Jewish marriage

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From the Book

RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War


Stan and Hannah Cooper are friends of mine from college days. Both are Jewish, but they have diametrically opposed views about Israel, and their differences have become so bitter that they've decided to divorce. As the three of us talked about this, it became clear that their dispute is a microcosm of the conflict that is tearing the Jewish community apart and also destroying lives in an increasingly large part of the world.


William: Your differences must have become quite serious if you've decided to end your marriage after all these years.


Stan: Well, these are very serious issues. If you take the Holocaust seriously, you have to support Israel. And Hannah doesn't. If she has her way, if the people she supports come to power in Israel and the USA, they'll stop resisting the terrorists and become holier than thou pacifists while the Arabs push the Jews into the sea and blow up half the USA. Then the pacifists will cry about what a tragedy it all is.


Well, I'm not going through another tragedy. I'm not going to see America and Israel destroyed because we didn't have the courage to stand up to fanatics. I'm not going to have our generation go through something like our grandparent's went through. Once is enough, once was way too many, and now we finally have to defend ourselves.


Hannah: No way am I in favor of pushing the Jews into the sea. Whenever we talk about this, you exaggerate my position. You get very thin skinned and go into your attack mode.


Stan: Yeah, I admit, I and lots of other Jews are thin skinned about this issue. But when you think about how many Jewish skins got stretched over lampshades not so long ago, it's understandable that we might feel a tad oversensitive. My grandmother's brother, my great uncle, got gassed in Auschwitz. And her cousin got shot in the neck in Sachsenhausen.


Hannah: You know I lost family too. They didn't even make it to the concentration camps. They were murdered in the Kiev ghetto by the German SS. I'm not playing this down. I've got relatives in Israel just like you do, and I don't want them killed. But the Zionists have tunnel vision about this issue. They focus just on one part of it -- preventing another Holocaust, no matter what. But I'm convinced that what the Zionists are doing now is making another Shoah more likely. Their moral compass has got thrown off by the trauma they went through. It's making them do things that violate the basic principles of Jewish ethics. The moral sensitivity, the qualities that make me most proud to be a Jew are getting destroyed by these Israeli militarists.

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William T. Hathaway is an award-winning novelist and an emeritus Fulbright professor of creative writing. His peace novel, Summer Snow, is the story of an American warrior falling in love with a Sufi Muslim and learning from her that higher (more...)
 

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