Make sense of the news fast with Opinions' daily newsletterArrowRight
Another sign carrier’s poster read “You want Holocaust, turn on your TV.” I got the message. The scenes of death and destruction coming out of Gaza were horrific. Those photos appeared on the heels of Hamas’s 21st-century-style “pogrom” — the word for the organized massacres of Jews that took place during the 19th and early 20th centuries in the Russian Empire, Germany and Eastern Europe.
But this is no time for whataboutisms. Each hell is sufficient unto itself.
Advertisement
In the days since the Hamas’s Oct. 7 onslaught, I have felt shock, anger and revulsion over what’s taking place on the ground in Israel and the Palestinian territories. So have many others.
Follow this authorColbert I. King's opinionsFollow
But today I’m filled with something else: a sadness that won’t let go. Because I know that even after the guns fall silent in Gaza and Israel — and they eventually will, if only for a spell — the post-Oct.7 open and global display of antisemitism will not abate. Neither will the ugly scourge of Islamophobia. Conflicts and difficult times lie ahead.
I have lived too long, and seen much too much, to think otherwise.
During my tour of duty with the State Department in then-West Germany, I visited Dachau. It was the first Nazi concentration camp, where thousands of prisoners died between 1933 and 1945. Untold numbers of Jews spent their last excruciating, horror-filled days in that damnable place.
Advertisement
A few years later, however, I saw another and — for its place and time in history — more banal face of antisemitism when I went to Prague’s Jewish Quarter. I didn’t encounter, as in Dachau, tales of forced labor, medical experiments, firing squads or gas chambers. But I learned about the gated walls that were locked at night to keep Jews separate from Christians who didn’t want those they viewed as murderers of Christ around after dark. I saw, in that ghetto, evidence that the ruling class wanted Jews out of their lives, only they couldn’t do that; Jews, it was said, engaged in the money trade and supplied raw materials, and thus were needed for the economy.
I saw the cramped ghetto where Jews lived with their cemetery. On display were broken tombstones where a Czech guide told me the graves were stacked 10 deep because there was no other place for Jewish bodies to go. It is said Hitler spared the Jewish monuments in Prague because he wanted to turn a site in the Jewish Quarter into an “exotic museum of an extinct race.”
As part of my informal education in Europe, I learned about other places where Jews were forcibly kept separate from everybody else. There was, of course, the Nazis’ Warsaw Ghetto. But there was also Rome’s 16th-century Jewish ghetto surrounded by high walls. And Venice in the 14th century, where no Jew could live anywhere in the city for more than 15 days.
Advertisement
In Europe, I saw antisemitism of centuries past. Just as I learned here about centuries of American slavery, taught in school as part of our history, but equally important around the table from family and church folk.
I know about enduring the ugliness and brutality of slave ships, auction blocks, plantations, Jim Crow and segregation. I’ve seen records in the Culpeper County, Va., courthouse attesting to an enslaver’s belief in my ancestors’ inferiority by prices assigned to their heads.
That hurt and anger will never go away — no matter how much Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin wants to protect White children from learning about their forebearers’ obscene past.
Racial and religious bigotry have gone nowhere. Perhaps underground from time to time. But never permanently. Blacks and Jews of centuries departed knew that all too well.
Advertisement
But there’s something else I know. Palestinians also know what unrelieved suffering is like. They also have been libeled. They, too, know what it’s like to be scapegoated and cast down by powerful, pious people.
America — racism notwithstanding — is mine. Israel exists. And Palestinians must have a homeland, too. It doesn’t matter who got there first. They have a right to a safe place of their own, without any semblance of neocolonial governance. Land that they and their children can call all their own.
And the distance to getting them there, as I look on in the autumn of my years, makes me sad.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said to the crowd that marched with him from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.
“I know you are asking today, ‘How long will it take?’ … How long will justice be crucified, and truth bear it? I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because ‘truth crushed to earth will rise again.’ … How long? Not long, because ‘no lie can live forever.’ … How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
I should live so long.
Share Comments
Popular opinions articles
HAND CURATED
- Opinion|Could this man bring down Putin?November 7, 2023Opinion|Could this man bring down Putin?November 7, 2023
- Opinion|Readers respond to a Hamas cartoonNovember 8, 2023Opinion|Readers respond to a Hamas cartoonNovember 8, 2023
- Opinion|I’m tired of disability activists pretending my son doesn’t existNovember 8, 2023Opinion|I’m tired of disability activists pretending my son doesn’t existNovember 8, 2023
View 3 more stories
Loading...
“Western press, Do your f---ing job!” read the sign carried by a young man walking toward last Saturday’s pro-Palestinian rights rally in downtown D.C. I held up my Post ID and asked whether he had anything to say to me. He smirked and continued toward the White House. It wasn’t a festive gathering on that beautiful autumn afternoon. The crowd was focused on the Palestinian cause and a cease-fire in Gaza.
Another sign carrier’s poster read “You want Holocaust, turn on your TV.” I got the message. The scenes of death and destruction coming out of Gaza were horrific. Those photos appeared on the heels of Hamas’s 21st-century-style “pogrom” — the word for the organized massacres of Jews that took place during the 19th and early 20th centuries in the Russian Empire, Germany and Eastern Europe.
But this is no time for whataboutisms. Each hell is sufficient unto itself.
In the days since the Hamas’s Oct. 7 onslaught, I have felt shock, anger and revulsion over what’s taking place on the ground in Israel and the Palestinian territories. So have many others.
But today I’m filled with something else: a sadness that won’t let go. Because I know that even after the guns fall silent in Gaza and Israel — and they eventually will, if only for a spell — the post-Oct.7 open and global display of antisemitism will not abate. Neither will the ugly scourge of Islamophobia. Conflicts and difficult times lie ahead.
I have lived too long, and seen much too much, to think otherwise.
During my tour of duty with the State Department in then-West Germany, I visited Dachau. It was the first Nazi concentration camp, where thousands of prisoners died between 1933 and 1945. Untold numbers of Jews spent their last excruciating, horror-filled days in that damnable place.
A few years later, however, I saw another and — for its place and time in history — more banal face of antisemitism when I went to Prague’s Jewish Quarter. I didn’t encounter, as in Dachau, tales of forced labor, medical experiments, firing squads or gas chambers. But I learned about the gated walls that were locked at night to keep Jews separate from Christians who didn’t want those they viewed as murderers of Christ around after dark. I saw, in that ghetto, evidence that the ruling class wanted Jews out of their lives, only they couldn’t do that; Jews, it was said, engaged in the money trade and supplied raw materials, and thus were needed for the economy.
I saw the cramped ghetto where Jews lived with their cemetery. On display were broken tombstones where a Czech guide told me the graves were stacked 10 deep because there was no other place for Jewish bodies to go. It is said Hitler spared the Jewish monuments in Prague because he wanted to turn a site in the Jewish Quarter into an “exotic museum of an extinct race.”
As part of my informal education in Europe, I learned about other places where Jews were forcibly kept separate from everybody else. There was, of course, the Nazis’ Warsaw Ghetto. But there was also Rome’s 16th-century Jewish ghetto surrounded by high walls. And Venice in the 14th century, where no Jew could live anywhere in the city for more than 15 days.
In Europe, I saw antisemitism of centuries past. Just as I learned here about centuries of American slavery, taught in school as part of our history, but equally important around the table from family and church folk.
I know about enduring the ugliness and brutality of slave ships, auction blocks, plantations, Jim Crow and segregation. I’ve seen records in the Culpeper County, Va., courthouse attesting to an enslaver’s belief in my ancestors’ inferiority by prices assigned to their heads.
That hurt and anger will never go away — no matter how much Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin wants to protect White children from learning about their forebearers’ obscene past.
Racial and religious bigotry have gone nowhere. Perhaps underground from time to time. But never permanently. Blacks and Jews of centuries departed knew that all too well.
But there’s something else I know. Palestinians also know what unrelieved suffering is like. They also have been libeled. They, too, know what it’s like to be scapegoated and cast down by powerful, pious people.
America — racism notwithstanding — is mine. Israel exists. And Palestinians must have a homeland, too. It doesn’t matter who got there first. They have a right to a safe place of their own, without any semblance of neocolonial governance. Land that they and their children can call all their own.
And the distance to getting them there, as I look on in the autumn of my years, makes me sad.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said to the crowd that marched with him from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.
“I know you are asking today, ‘How long will it take?’ … How long will justice be crucified, and truth bear it? I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because ‘truth crushed to earth will rise again.’ … How long? Not long, because ‘no lie can live forever.’ … How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
I should live so long.
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
visit website
