Thursday night, my dear sister Rose called me to chat – and drop hints. She observed, for example, that there was a significant cold front moving in on Washington that should arrive by the weekend, meaning that the weather on Sunday promised to be remarkably comfortable for August. Then she went on about the kids – her brood and Arthur’s, their cousins – and how they are all growing like weeds and so forth, and dropped a few strategic complaints about her husband Hank running off to West Virginia with Arthur’s wife Shannon to become survivalists awaiting the Apocalypse that they have convinced themselves Obama the Antichrist will surely bring any day now; and, of course, how difficult it is to make ends meet with only Arthur and her incomes; followed, naturally, with the observation that with school out for the summer the house in Fairfax where they all live is a real zoo lately, and finally capped off with a wistful wish that everybody could get out of there, if only for a day.
I knew where all that was leading, just as I knew, when we were children ourselves, when she wanted me to get out of the living room so she could watch soap operas. So I invited her and Arthur to bring the kids to my place in Great Falls for a cookout today. And as frequent readers of this Web log know, when I invite my sister over for a cookout, it’s customary that I invite my brother Rob Roy, along with this wife Katje and their son Jason, and that I would never leave out Cerise if she’s in town, which this weekend she was, or deny Veronica or any of my many neighbors their God-given right to invite themselves to my barbeques any time the scent of grilled prime beef, deep ocean fish, artisanal pork, free range chicken, organic sausages and various exotic game animals wafts from my back yard. And somebody has to drink those ninety-five international varieties of beer, ale, porter and stout, each bottle precisely chilled to forty-two degrees Fahrenheit, in the professional bar sized cooler in my lavishly furnished basement – Lord knows those lovely creations would get stale if I didn’t have some help rotating the stock out periodically.
Not that everyone goes for the brewskis, or the contents of my well provisioned liquor and wine collections, either. Hamdoon, my neighbor who owns a carpet cleaning business, for example, doesn’t drink – he’s a Moslem. And it was he who waited patiently while I finished serving bison burgers and hand made Smithfield bratwursts to a hungry line of my nieces, nephews and their cousins, before taking me aside, no sooner than I had removed the barbeque apron and handed it to Rob Roy, for a bit of important conversation. After the usual pleasantries and compliments on my hospitality, he got down to brass tacks.
“Tom,” he earnestly entreated, “You know the situation in my home country…”
“You mean, Israel?” I interjected.
“No,” he replied with a slight air of indignation, “I mean Palestine.”
“Well,” I reminded him, “strictly speaking, Palestine isn’t actually a country.”
“It is,” he insisted, “if you happen to be a Palestinian!”
“Point taken,” I conceded.
“Tom,” he continued, “the situation in Gaza is extremely dire at the moment. And just look around here – see how fortunate everyone in this neighborhood is! I’ve sent over a hundred thousand dollars to Palestinian relief agencies since 2008, and I’ve forgotten how much before that. Couldn’t you see your way clear to contribute a thousand, maybe two or three, to help the Palestinian people in Gaza?”
“I do give money to various international relief efforts,” I told him, “but I would be concerned that if I gave you a contribution, it might fall into the hands of an organization more oriented toward ordnance than beans, bandages and blankets. I mean, how do I know that, say, Hamas militants might not get the money?”
“You wouldn’t,” challenged Steinberg, who owns a chain of local jewelry emporiums, approaching us possessed of a self-righteous air, confronting Hamdoon with a steadfast glare. “Excuse me, Tom, but I couldn’t help overhearing this guy hitting you up for money he says he’s going to send to some so-called ‘charity!’ I think you and I both know that anything you give him is going straight to terrorists, who are going to buy rockets and explosives for suicide belts with it!”
“As if,” Hamdoon huffed, “the Israeli Lobby didn’t squeeze billions out of the United States treasury every year – those are your tax dollars, Tom – to buy tanks, fighter planes, bombers, drones and Iron Dome missiles for his people to oppress mine and keep us off land that is rightfully ours!”
“Wrong! It belongs to us!” Steinberg shot back.
“Says who?” Hamdoon barked.
“Said… said… um,” Steinberg stammered, “said He Whose Name Shall Not be Spoken, Who promised the Land of Canaan to Abraham and later gave it to the Israelites.”
“See? See?” Hamdoon exhorted. “Bronze Age fairy tales, that’s what he’s talking about! But in my safe deposit box, down at the Well Fargo Bank on Walker Road, I have the deed to my family’s land, ‘with a house, a stable, two wells, a spring, three fields, two vineyards and an olive grove,’ made out to my great-great-great-grandfather under the seal of Mehmet Pasha of the Sanjak of Jerusalem in the Ottoman Empire. And do you know what it is now? A Zionist settlement with an apartment building full of Russian Jews on it!”
“Pasha?” Steinberg snorted. “Sanjak of Jerusalem? Ottoman Empire? What is this, One Thousand and One Arabian Nights? Sinbad and Ali Baba? How about throwing in some genies and wizards on flying carpets to back up your claim? Talk about fairy tales! Look Tom, the United Nations legally established Israel in 1948 and…”
“That was not a legal act!” Hamdoon protested. “The UN had no authority to expropriate Palestinian land!”
“Oh, yeah?” Steinberg shot back, “what about the Balfour Declaration, huh?”
“Who cares what the British Foreign Minister said about the King of England’s opinions in a letter to Baron Rothschild written in 1917?” Hamdoon spat. “What if the Foreign Minister of Japan had written a letter to Henry Ford in 1917 saying it is the opinion of the Emperor that the British should get out of Ireland? You think the English would have said, ‘Oh, well, in that case, yes, let’s pull out tomorrow,’ I suppose?”
“That’s absurd,” Steinberg scoffed. “What possible interest would a sane Japanese ruler have in the Irish?”
“What possible interest,” Hamdoon needled, “could a sane British leader have in the Jews? And what about that wall you built? Tell me, how is that wall different from the wall the Soviets and East Germans erected through the middle of Berlin?”
“The difference?” Steinberg sneered. “The difference, Hamdoon, is that the Berlin Wall was designed to keep East Germans in, and the wall in Israel is designed to keep terrorists out.”
“Ha!” Hamdoon parried. “The communists always claimed the Berlin Wall was intended to keep capitalist spies, saboteurs and criminals out of East Germany. And it’s obvious to everybody but the Zionists that your wall is intended to imprison the Palestinian people in their own land!”
“It’s not their land, it’s ours!” Steinberg shouted.
“So said Theodor Herzl in 1897,” Hamdoon responded with a sarcastic roll of his eyes. “Big deal. Suppose Bozo the Clown says the Tamils have a right to an ancestral homeland in Sri Lanka – does that make it true?”
“For your information,” Steinberg condescended, “the Hovevei Zion established Jewish settlements in Eretz Israel in 1870, and the Zionist movement was founded by Judah Touro in 1854!”
“And it’s all blasphemy!” Hamdoon declared. “According to your own holy scriptures, your Messiah is supposed to lead you back to the Promised Land – that’s what it means when you say ‘next year in Jerusalem’ at your Passover seders. It means that you pray that next year your Messiah will come and lead you back to Israel. So tell me, if Zionism, a nineteenth century political movement that says the Jews should take back the Levant by any means necessary, isn’t pure religious heresy and total blaspheme of the Jewish faith, then which one of those guys was the Messiah – Judah Touro or Theodor Herzl?”
“I certainly hope you know more about your own religion,” Steinberg taunted, “than you think you know about mine! Israel needs that wall! On the other side of it, the Palestinians are breeding like rabbits!”
“Right,” Hamdoon agreed, “and if you don’t want the Arabs outnumbering you at the ballot box and voting an Arab majority government, you’d better start working on a two-state solution right now.”
“There is one, single Eretz Israel!” Steinberg thundered. “And that’s how it’s going to stay!”
“And that attitude,” Hamdoon volleyed in return, “is why Israel has never, ever negotiated in good faith with the Palestinian people!”
“Us?” Steinberg’s hands shot skyward in a gesture of absolute astonishment as he shrugged in complete disbelief. “Us? You’re the ones who shoot rockets at Israeli settlements without provocation!”
“You’re the ones,” Hamdoon objected, “who locked down Gaza with an economic blockade!”
“What were we supposed to do,” Steinberg shouted, “let you continue importing more rockets and explosives?”
“We’ll stop shooting rockets at you if you lift the Gaza blockade!” Hamdoon proclaimed.
“We’ll stop the blockade after you quit with the rockets!” Steinberg yelled as the pair drew closer, clenching their fists.
“How about this,” I interrupted. “Both sides claim they want to negotiate in good faith. So to prove that, whenever the shooting starts, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ismail Haniya each voluntarily place themselves in solitary confinement under house arrest until a cease fire arranged by their designated representatives takes effect. Then they come out and negotiate in good faith. If the cease fire breaks down again – then boom – back in solitary confinement for both of them until the shooting stops. Do you think an approach along those lines might possibly break up the nasty political log jam you folks have constructed for yourselves over there in the Holy Land?”
A eerie silence ensued as Steinberg and Hamdoon quit confronting one another in favor of staring at me, dumbfounded.
“Forget, it, dear,” advised Cerise as she took me by the arm and lead me to the grill, where Rob Roy had at last finished handing out burgers and brats to Rose and Arthur’s teeming throngs of progeny, “a plan like that makes way too much sense. Let’s cook you a nice antelope steak.”