My Take | Why I have stopped feeling so much outrage at Israel
After almost lifelong support for the cause of the Palestinians, I am, in middle age, becoming numbed to their endless sufferings
My first publication about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was actually in a student newspaper. The “editor-in-chief” and fellow student, who was probably as clueless as I was about running a real publication, somehow decided to put my piece in the centre pages.
That was my first taste and joy of media exposure, for all of one day. And then, nothing much happened.
Needless to say, the piece was considered pro-Palestinian but not antisemitic. Today, in the United States, of course, any public discourse that is critical of Israel may be denounced as anti-Jewish. The irony is that many critical American Jews are now potentially antisemitic.
I went to a tiny liberal arts college in the United States where everyone knew each other. After my piece, schoolmates tried to be polite and avoided the subject – very British! Some professors, a few of them Jewish, tried to have meaningful conversations with me.
But what really greatly embarrassed me at the time, was a very short letter to the student paper written by an older and wiser schoolmate who didn’t question the content of my piece – which I still believe in – but its appropriateness and relevance to our community’s very focused scholarly concerns.
We were expected to devote ourselves to our studies, at least during weekdays – that was the pathos on campus. Wild weekend parties were tolerated by school authorities, so much so they became legendary and the normally highly disciplined undergraduate midshipmen at the far more prestigious US Naval Academy next door were always trying to slip in to pick up our girls.