Bacon, Revisited

December 22, 2021

Cathedral City, California

     Reading the previous posting again, and making a few minor changes, as I often do, it struck me that I might have been a little hard on Judaism, and by implication, the Jewish people.  After all, for the last couple of thousand years, they've been mostly victims.  There's the diaspora (an incredibly complicated series of occupations and migrations), the expulsions from various countries, the Inquisition, the pogroms of the Cossacks, the Nazi Holocaust, the Soviets, and of course, God, who we have to assume, based on the very beliefs of the Jewish people, put all that in motion.  Then, when the State of Israel came into existence in 1948, the Israelis had to fight against all the neighboring Arab countries that were arrayed against them, which they did several times, with great alacrity and well-armed efficiency, like Popeye devouring can after can of spinach.  But as things stand now, they finally have someone weaker than themselves to pick on within their own borders, and in the semi-autonomous ghettos of Gaza and the West Bank, namely, the Palestinians.  

     The Palestinians, as we know, are the Arabs who were sort of pushed aside to make way for the Jews who got the area we now call Israel in 1948. The Zionist Jews had begun to go back there in earnest at least fifty years before that, while it was part of yet another couple of empires, those of the Turks and then of the British.  Today, to fast forward a bit, the Palestinians have, by dint of a relentless guerilla war that has killed many people and gotten many of them killed (rather akin to the same kind of stuff the IRA was doing in Northern Ireland), finally obtained, on a semi-autonomous basis, a couple of little pieces of land at the outskirts of Israel, from which they are sometimes allowed to come and go in order to function as the permanent underclass that serves the more affluent Europeanized citizenry of Israel.  (I'm leaving out the Palestinians who live in Israel proper, and are citizens of that country.)  Not that the Palestinians really own their little bits of land, or owned pre-Israeli Palestine, for that matter.  That's the thing.  The Palestinians were living there, but they were no more owners of the land than the Jews ever were, except for a few thousand years ago, off and on, and also of course on and after 1948.  The history of the region is so complicated and so replete with occupations by foreign powers going back millennia, that it would take (and indeed has taken) volumes to discourse over it.  The bottom line is that right now, for a comparatively tiny sliver of time--just over 70 years--the Israeli Jews have been in charge of the area, for the umpteenth time, and the Palestinians are not in charge, also for the umpteenth time.  

     The saying goes that possession is nine-tenths of the law.  Actually, the saying originally was that possession is nine points of the law, which I'm pretty sure means about the same thing.  And what it means is that if you possess land now, and haven't blatantly stolen it, and even if you have stolen it you've exercised control and care over it for some period of time, that reality gives you a bit of a leg up on anyone who claims the land should belong to them.  I think it comes from the English common law, which I'll admit doesn't cut much ice with displaced populations, especially those that don't adhere to the English common law.  (But even those that do, including for example the Welsh and the Scots and the Irish, don't care much for the idea that coming in and taking over a place confers certain proprietary rights, even though the Celtic ancestors of the Welsh, Scots, and Irish did pretty much the same to the Neolithic inhabitants of Britain way back when.)  But what's indisputable is that the Palestinians and the Israelis each are utterly and unalterably convinced that they, and not the other ones, are the rightful owners and possessors of what we call Israel.  There's very little wiggle room on that issue on either side.  God gave each of them the land, they believe, and God is mighty and always right, and that's the end of it.  So Fuck You.

     I won't say much more about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict here, though.  I don't think it's an easy issue on which to take sides, unless you're one of the interested parties.  And I am not.  I can afford to be more or less neutral.  I don't want to see either side have to leave, but I would like to see the Palestinians treated with more compassion by the Israelis, considering especially that the Israelis should know better than to act like such dicks, considering how shabbily the Israelis were treated throughout European history.  In exchange for being compassionate and accepting of the Palestinians, the Palestinians should accept that Israel is pretty much fully in charge, on the basis of that possession thing I mentioned in the previous paragraph, and also on the basis of another saying, namely, that Might Makes Right.  It's sort of the way of the world, and unless you have your head pretty far up your ass, you shouldn't be thinking that Israel will suddenly pull up stakes, or that the Palestinians are going elsewhere either.

     As I said at the beginning, I gave Judaism as a religion a bit of an unfair shake when I tarred it with the same brush as I did Islam and Christianity.  Judaism doesn't want to try to make you convert.  In fact, Judaism doesn't really want you at all, unless you're a Jew by birth.  They'll take you, if you sincerely want to join them, but all in all they'd just as soon you didn't want to.  Judaism, as far as I know, has never put anyone to the sword or the gun simply for refusing to join the Jewish religion.  You can't say the same of Christianity or Islam.  So there's that.  

     The Israelis who run the country of Israel, on the other hand, can be real pricks, and treat their Palestinian co-inhabitants like shit.  Much of this goes back to the Jews' own bad treatment at the hands of practically everybody for a long time, which, bless their hearts, they migrated to Israel to get away from.  But now they somehow can't avoid internalizing all that mistreatment.  So they're as ruthlessly efficient and exclusionary as their own tormentors, and as disdainful of the Arabs as the Europeans were (and pretty much still are) of them.  And it also dovetails neatly with the religious principles of Judaism, which seem to hold both past and future generations responsible for each others' actions.  It's like there's no real passage of time within Judaism.  They live in an eddy of repeated history--a constant state of travail, punishments, momentary victories, long-term losses, and above all, lots and lots of rules, with very little qualitative progress.  It's as if they're caught in an episode of the Twilight Zone, where they wake up to the same thing every day, perpetually under threat from outside, bound by their own neurotic obsession for order, and lorded over by a nasty Father-God who won't give them a break.

     And on top of all that, they can't eat bacon.