I Ain’t Your Fellow Nothin’

Fight the power, kiddies! That’s today’s message.

I just got some email in from the Jewish Students’ Association (sent before sundown on the Sabbath, I notice, but who am I to judge?). I signed up for their mailing list, not because I enjoy their company, but because I wanted to get notices of any lectures or movie nights that might be going around. Plus, I might need an ethnography base some day, so it never hurts.

Usually they just send out invites to wine and cheese shindigs, sweaty Jewish-undergrad proms, and other things that sound as appealing as a weenie roast at a hospital for the criminally insane. Usually I delete these. However, I am not deleting this new one just yet. I have not yet decided what I shall do with it. If I reply, I think I should wait and decide how exactly to phrase it.

This newest email is addressed, “Dear Fellow Zionist…”

“Fellow Zionist”?

That made me jump. I have been called many things in my life (beatnik, fellow traveler, reactionary, democrat, tree-hugger, pinko, etc), but never that. And never so damn smugly and presumptuously.

I have yet to frame a response that doesn’t involve cussing.

You see, in a perfect world in which Israelis didn’t have to shoot, imprison or round-up Palestinians, maybe I would be a Zionist. Maybe not. Since I don’t live in Israel, I don’t feel pressured to decide. I sure as hell don’t think people around here should be putting in our two cents worth and making the crap-flinging over there worse.

I don’t know about these little suburban-born brats, but I have no plans to leave my comfy and safe Canadian home to get gunned down at an ATM in Jerusalem. I think this fact, alone, disqualifies me from the title. I’m fine with that.

And I certainly don’t enjoy people, any people, making assumptions about my political leanings without knowing me, simply by my email address being on a largely unrelated mailing list. I didn’t sign-up for a “Zionist Mailing List.” I signed up for the “Jewish Students’ Association” list. I see the difference. These people, it seems, do not.

The point is not whether I am a Zionist. The point is their impudence at assuming I am.

Assuming that everyone who cares about Jews is a Zionist is something akin to assuming that anyone who is proud of being German is a Nazi. Both are wrong and grossly insulting to the individuality of the human spirit.

These organizations dissolve the independence of thought that I see as inherent to Judaism. Ever since Abraham walked into his dad’s icon shop and busted up the joint Jews have walked their own path.

So I have not decided how I will respond. I’ve thought of deleting it like the others, but it burns me to let them get away with such a whitewashing of political complexities within the Jewish community. Yet, if I complain they’ll just go into their “self-hatred” or “Anti-Zionism = Anti-Semitism” dance and circle the wagons against the infidel.

Maybe I’ll just show up at the No Palestine Apartheid rally wearing my Star of David, and hope they can at least get that message.