Create a Palestinian State in Long Island, New York
By
David Gottfried
I have such sharply ambivalent emotions about my Jewish faith that the facets of my feelings face off against each other like sterling silver knives. I don’t want to cut myself. So I think I’ll have to cut someone else.
When I was 6 years old, I learned about the Holocaust. When I was 8, I learned about the State of Israel and saw my redemption; I saw God made corporeal in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Eilat and in every last scrap of the dusty and arid Negev desert, increasingly marred by American Jewish tourists who littered the land with coca cola cans and candy wrappers.
When I was nine years old, and Israel won the Six Day War, I was ineffably jubilant. On the last day of the war, when I saw a headline of the New York Daily News of just three stark words, “Israel Invades Syria,” I bought the paper, stormed into the nearby Syrian bakery, held the paper aloft as it were a battle standard, and Shouted, triumphantly, “We beat you, We beat you. We bear you.”
For I lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, perhaps the most anti-Semitic part of New York, a cloistered, cantankerous conglomeration of Archie Bunkers, Catholics who still revered Father Coughlin, and bigots for whom the murder of six million was an afterthought. There was only one murder that moved their arctic blood: The murder of sweet Jesus by the abominable Jews. I hated Christian Europe. I hated the towering Churches, their steeples poised to pierce the heavens like hypodermic needs.
At the age of nine, I lacked the political savvy to differentiate among the different bands of goyim (non Jews) that cursed G-d’s green earth. And so I didn’t realize that Islam was not aligned with the Pope, stood in opposition to murderous, European Christendom, and that when the Inquisition thrust Jews into the fire, the Jews fled to the Muslim Ottomans. And so I simply hated the whole goddamn goyische (non Jewish) world.
However, as I got older. the clear convictions of childhood were muddied. I learned that there actually was a people living in Israel before modern Israel was born.
(I will not call the terrain Palestine for numerous political reasons that would complicate this essay. Suffice it to say, 1) the word “Palestinia” was a Roman linguistic concoction designed to erase the memory of Judea, 2) although there is an Arab nation, and a Muslim nation, there never was a Palestinian nation as A) there is no Palestinian language, B) no Palestinian Religion, and C) there never was an independent Palestinian state, 3) When Jordan controlled the West bank and Egypt controlled Gaza, before 1967, no one said that those two Arab states were treading on Palestinian land and nationalism, and 4) Palestinian nationalism is a contrivance designed to de-legitimize and ultimately extinguish Israel. I could cite much more history to buttress my points, but then my critics would say I am just another ponderous, pedantic Jew. This is not an era for intellectual inquiry. This is a godforsaken telegenic era in which morons of the right – the Trumpers – and morons of the left make their case with good looks, good teeth and malignant intentions.)
As I grew older, I became increasingly divorced from my American Jewish moorings. First and foremost, I felt too poor to be Jewish. Although Jews have a long history of grinding poverty, even in this country (When the poet Dylan Thomas visited America, he was anxious and curious to go to the Lower East Side to see, as he put it, “the starving Jews.”), most Jewish Americans, in the 1960’s, were living the good life. They sprawled out over suburbs, such as New York’s Long Island, and every third word they uttered and garment they wore attested to their smug and catty affluence.
In my childhood and youth, my family frequently made pilgrimages to the wealthier folks on Long Island, and my most vivid recollections pertain to the radiant beauty of their suburban retreats, shining with brightness and pride.
Even the air conditioners smelled cleaner in long island. The Channukah menorahs sparkled like a diva’s eyes flashing with rage. And they were so sure of themselves and their majesty that they could even eat trafe (non kosher food) and by some form of Jewish transubstantiation make it as Kosher as a very unctuous version of “Fiddler on the Roof.” (Leah Rabin, wife of the assassinated Prime Minister of Israel, wrote that when she went to a fundraising dinner for Israel in Philadelphia, she was sickened by hordes of very rich Jews feasting on Lobster, a patently unkosher food.)
I’d rather eat stuffed cabbage. While imbibing the scent of stuffed cabbage and other Central and Eastern European Jewish foodstuffs, the chemical esters of the foods perfumed my mind like Queen Esther seducing the King Of Persia. Some Jews opine that the story of Purim is one part history and one part witty satire, and the Purim spirit bequeathed this political satire:
The Arabs are complaining about the wrong sort of Jews. The Jews of Israel, who rejected the miserable, mercantile spirit of cold and caustic Europe, deserve their repose and Eretz Yisroel.
The so-called Palestinians should be given the riches and flourishes of Long Island, New York, one of the most sumptuous Suburbs of the Great Satan of their febrile imagination.
Long Island, in a way, looks a lot like Israel. Geographically, it is long and thin just as Israel is. Topographically, it is a lot like Israel. I often went to Long Island to swim in the Atlantic Ocean and I can attest to the presence of lots and lots of beautiful beaches. When it gets hot, in the summertime, the sandy beaches can make our Arab immigrants recall the greatest deserts of the middle east. (Also, our sandy beaches have walking oases in the form of venders peddling ice cream, soda and beer all day long.)
Let us give the Arabs the beauty of Long Island, the sandy beaches more resplendent than the Negev, the haughty Mc Mansions glowering with gold and shopping malls glittering like the most opulent bazaars.
And what shall we do with the current residents of Long Island? So many of them seem to be versions of Amy Fishcr and Joey Buttafuocco, a Jewish tramp and an Italian thug implicated in the murder of Joey’s wife, who enlivened our local news in 1992.
They are bursting with pride for their histories and their people, but the Italians know Italy and Catholicism only the way Anthony Soprano wannabes know Italy and Catholicism, and the Jews, the people of the book, increasingly know less and less as they become just another corrupt part of the mélange of American decadence.
The Italians and Jews of Long Island, so fully Americanized that many of them have supported Il Duce, Fascist Trump, are entitled to live their Americanism to the hilt. Let them be uprooted from Long Island and resettled in Georgia, where they can pick cotton.
And some of the Jews, those Jews who supported Israel by sitting on comfortable sofas and enjoying the fireworks on their TV screens, courtesy of the American invasions of Iraq, can get up off their fat and ugly asses and defend Eretz Yisroel.