[THS] !!!!! Phil Rockstroh: One Jew’s Hard Awakening

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25753.htm


A Zionist State of Mind, A Dreamscape Of Ghosts:
One Jew’s Hard Awakening

By Phil Rockstroh
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may
be contacted at: phil at philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/


June 16, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Although my mother fled Nazi
Germany, as a child, on a Kindertransport, with a few family valuables sown into her
clothing, and I was brought up on the myths and hagiography of the Zionist state, I,
over time, came to recognize the folly of the whole colonialist enterprise — the folly of
ethnic exclusion and expulsion, the inherent tragedy of nationalism based on the
delusion of religious birthright. With much sorrow, I came to the sad realization that
the dream of the State of Israel was based on European chauvinism and
exceptionalism. This reckoning has been a difficult one for me to bear — the hardest
awakening of my adult life.

My father was born on a Reservation in the American mid-west. His people, like the
Palestinians, resisted invaders of European ancestry and were crushed. At present,
both peoples remain exiled and caged in their native land.

The Jewish side of myself understands the historical traumas that gave rise to the
yearning for a tribal Homeland. Atavistically, I suffer the Jewish state’s collective night
terrors and reel in its daylight rationalizations for its brutalities. But the Native
American in me knows the rage of those crushed by the heartless force of an
invading people.

Neither my father’s peoples’ bows and arrows nor the “threat” of metal rods,
clutched by a few activists aboard the illegally seized Gaza-bound Peace Flotilla, nor
Hamas’ small rockets will change the tragic trajectory wrought by a tribalist land
grab. History reveals a conquered and caged people will starve, in both body and
soul, as they watch their hopes wither to dust. But I will not condemn them for their
struggle, and even their “provocations” — dangerous and outrageous provocations 

such as the desire not to live out their lives behind ghetto walls, and the actions they
take accordingly. (Even though, a provocation will never soften the banal mind of a
bully to end his reign of brutality.)

To this day, within me, there are traits of cultural Judaism that have not been
washed away in the deluge of shame I experience when confronted by the actions of
the state of Israel and the casuistry of her apologists. Deep in my genetic structure, I
carry tribal memories of Diaspora and its concomitant feelings of alienation from
majoritarian culture. Most often, I still apprehend human existence from the
perspective of an alien and interloper, believing my survival is dependent upon
knowing where I stand in hostile terrain. By rote, I play the role of the outsider, wary
and savvy in my dealings with a hostile gentile world.

In this, I understand the paranoid nature of the Jewish state and the reasons
underlying her supporters’ rationalizations of her many crimes. Self-deception is at
the root of habitual deceit. Sadly, the true believers of the Zionist cause have become
case studies in that tragic trait.

The archetype of the eternal outsider and his involuntary wandering still resonates
within me. In this manner, I feel kinship with my urban Ashkenazi/Sephardim
ancestors 
 those who knew a just society, structured on social justice and civil
equity, was the Jewish minority’s best hope for living in safety among a gentile
majority — not this narrative of grandiosity and exceptionalism one hears muttered
by bearded boneheads (and other Bronze Age cultural throwbacks) at the Wailing
Wall and posited on the editorial pages of the Jerusalem Post.

By stealing those parcels of arid acreage in the Middle East, Zionists will match
generations of hostile Goyim in the harm they level upon future Jewry: By having
chosen mindless might over justice and fairness, they have bestowed a wasteland
upon the human hearts of their descendants.

Every human being is born, powerless and vulnerable, into a world they did not
create. Ergo, for the awakening heart of the young, it can be a barren land, a
dreamscape of ghosts, built by the bony hands of the dead 
 their mouldering
myths carrying the cold of the grave not the eros of the breathing moment. Ghosts
such as these curse at the present with the imprecatory psalms implicit in the
foundation of the Zionist state — and, as the nation’s history unfurled, became
explicit in her policies. Israel’s collective brutalities are the blind thrashings of
traumatized souls who, in their agonies, wound all near them.

Such forces of toxic, displaced vehemence can uncouple us from our humanity,
warping libido into murderous intent, reducing meaningful endeavor to selfish
striving, and twisting our exuberance into zealotry, thereby achieving a form of ass-
backward alchemy by transforming living human beings into resentful shades —
those seemingly no longer here 
 reacting rather than responding, reciting
propaganda as opposed to seeking meaning, squandering the golden, eternal
moment before us by transmuting it into leaden habituations of the mind. For all
appearances becoming a ghost, haunting the moments of one’s own life — non-
responsive, sans retrograde resentment, to the élan vital of the world — dead, but
for the redundancy of one’s breathing.

In this way, the spirit of a culture can become a mob of resentful, vicious ghosts.
With ghosts, the context of their suffering is misplaced. They cannot haunt those who
gave them injury. Their tormentors are long dead as well. The raging spirits of the
Zionist state can no longer locate the historical oppressors of the Jewish people, for
they have long since been conscripted to dust. Hence, the adherents of Zionism reap
vengeance against those living souls who misfortune has placed near them.

The Jewish state demands its neighbors make amends for crimes they did not
commit — to cower before the steel-toe might of its military and make perpetual
penitence for the sins of Europe.

Even if they did so: Such an act would not restore my mother’s childhood 
 would
not return to flesh the ashen remains of the millions who made their graves in the
winds of twentieth century Europe.

For the Jewish people, as is the case with all humanity, survival in the present age is
not dependent on military prowess nor the blessing of an imaginary father in the sky.
Awakening to new realities restores meaning and resonance to our lives. Felicity to
the putrid, Bronze Age admonitions of a savage sky spirit involving the ownership of
desert real-estate only entombs the heart and mummifies the mind.

Accordingly, the most putrefied and pernicious of these fallacies — the delusion that
there exists a “Chosen People” — must be the first to be toppled.

God’s Chosen People? Chosen for what reason: First, divinely bestowed entitlement to
a parcel of parched landscape, then exile, persecution, extermination? And now for
what purpose: Simply to join the brutal ranks of history’s bullies?

When the ashes of the Holocaust cleared, this is the world my mother’s tribe built: A
right-wing state that believes its godly mission is to lord over and oppress a militarily
weaker people. Moreover, if they resist — starve them, murder them in their homes,
drive them into exile. The Israelis seem to be demanding this of the Palestinian
people: Why don’t you simply accept your lot as being compliant lessors and stay
confined to your ghettos?

Furthermore, if you object, then leave — go into exile — wander the earth without a
home. It would seem, over the course of the lives of the last few generations of
Jewish believers, the ancient myth has morphed: The desert god has become more
of an earthly ironist than wrathful sky-daddy.

In fact, mirroring the ways of their invented father in heaven, some of my blood
relatives have become such inadvertent ironists, as they, at this moment, squat in
Palestine, bristling with misplaced rage, manic with delusional entitlement, and, on
the whole, casting a curse upon future generations that will poison their hearts and
cascade through the generations with a terrible symmetry.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may
be contacted at: phil at philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/