“What the hell! Get that thing out of here!”
That was Rod’s morning grump reaction to finding the menorah on the coffee table in the living room. He thought I’d put it there just to piss him off, which was partly true, I suppose. But then I told him about how it was actually a family heirloom. When my mother went into the nursing home I’d gone home to sort out stuff in the family home with my brothers and sisters. I discovered the menorah in the cupboard above her wardrobe. A beautiful seven branched brass candelabrum. I asked Mum about it and got the story about how it was in her home in Rotterdam when she was a child because the family was Jewish – at least her father was a Jew.
Rod drained his morning coffee and became more civil. “So you didn’t know your grandfather was a Jew?”
“No. Mum had never said anything about it. And she converted to Catholicism when she married Dad.”
“Holland was a dangerous place for Jews during the war,” Rod said.
“Yeah. Hence the secrecy. She hid the menorah away and just kept it hidden all the time, even after the family emigrated to New Zealand.”
“So why have you ended up with it?”
“Nobody else wanted it. Anyway I did some research. I searched the Netherlands online genealogy records and I found my grandfather’s name in the archives of the Jewish population in Rotterdam. And I got my DNA tested and the results were I’m mostly west European – no surprise there, but also Iberian peninsula, the Levant, northern Israel, European Jewish.”
“I thought being Jewish was just about religion,” Rod said.
“No, it’s also an ethnicity going back thousands of years to the Hebrews in the Bible, in the Old Testament. Lots of Jews are Christian but most Jews these days are secular atheists. They say they’ve got no religion.”
“So now you’re a born again Jew,” said Rod, sardonically.
“Well, part Jewish. Don’t scoff. Lots of people are part Jewish.”
“No, I’m just surprised.”
“Even Hitler was part Jewish, so they say.”
“Really? Well, go figure,” said Rod. “Just keep the candlestick in your room, eh.”
Which is where I put it, on top of my chest of drawers. A few days later a Buddha sculpture appeared on the coffee table: the head of Buddha, covered in small curls of hair and a smooth face with closed meditative eyes.
“Have you become a Buddhist now? I asked Rod.
“No, I’m not a Buddhist,” he said. “I don’t subscribe to any religion. I just like the Buddha as a symbol of peace. We could do with more peace in the flat. Right? Actually we could do with more peace in the world. Less religion and more peace.”
“I’m definitely in favour of more peace,” I agreed, “but Buddhism isn’t really such a peaceful religion. I don’t know, maybe it was in the past but these days Buddhists are persecuting other religions. Buddhist monks in Myanmar are killing Moslems and Christians, helping the military with their genocide. And Buddhists are killing Christians in Sri Lanka.”
“That’s the problem with religion everywhere,” said Rod. “Intolerance, hatred, discrimination.”
“Yeah, that’s religion as the works of man,” I agreed. “Not the work of God.”
“History is full of atrocities committed in the name of God,” Rod persisted.
“By misguided people in the name of God,” I said. “Not by God.”
“You think Christianity is different?” Rod challenged.
“Yes, I do.”
“Didn’t God tell the Israelites to wipe out the Canaanites? Isn’t that what the Bible says? Isn’t that how the Jews got into the Promised Land?”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “It also says God saw the sin of the Canaanites was so complete they had to be wiped out. They were practising human sacrifice as part of their idolatry. They were burning their children alive in huge bronze statues of their god Molech.”
“Religion,” said Rod and rolled his eyes.
“False religion,” I said. “Anyway, you know that Buddha head would be offensive to an actual Buddhist.”
“What? Why?”
“It’s a severed head. It should be the whole body.”
“Well, I don’t care. Like I said, I’m not a Buddhist. Anyway, what about that cross you wear? Why isn’t the cross offensive to Christians? It was used to torture and kill Jesus.”
“We Christians see it as a symbol of the resurrection,” I said. “Christ crucified and risen from the dead.”
“Yeah but the image of Jesus hanging on the cross is pretty ghoulish.”
“Catholics have their image of the crucifixion,” I said. “I prefer the empty cross that shows the resurrection.”
“One man’s religion is another man’s superstition,” Rod quoted with finality, obviously wanting to end the discussion. He considered himself too rational for religion or superstition.
*
Rod and I had both come to New Zealand in our teens: Rod from the US, when his wealthy family decided to make New Zealand their home, and my far from wealthy family immigrated from the Netherlands. Different backgrounds but we both had a lot in common, like we’re both sporty, and that’s how we met. We shared a motel room when we played in the national under 20s soccer tournament in Auckland. He was a provincial rep for basketball as well. Anyway, we both ended up at Auckland University and thought: why not go flatting together, and that worked out pretty well to begin with, but who would have thought political differences could ruin a friendship?
I was studying History and Rod was studying Engineering. He’d made friends with some of the Arab Engineering students and I could see they were influencing his political views. Rod and I were friends on Facebook and I saw some of the posts his Arab mates were putting up, especially after the Hamas invasion of Israel and the Israeli retaliation, lots of pro-Palestinian anti-Israel propaganda.
I eventually challenged Rod on all the propaganda he’d been getting after he’d attended a protest rally with his Arab mates. They were protesting against what they claimed was the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, chanting From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.
A lot of them didn’t even know what river and what sea. Did they realise it meant the annihilation of Israel? Did they care? Was that really what they wanted? Some of the protestors were chanting Gas the Jews. Some carrying Israeli flags with swastikas painted over them.
“Do you really want to be part of that?” I challenged Rod.
“I’ve got nothing personal against Jews,” he said. “I’m not antisemitic. I’m anti-Zionist. Israel is an apartheid state and the Jews are behaving like Nazis.”
So I said, “Calling the Jews Nazis is really the ultimate insult considering what they went through in the war – what they suffered at the hands of the Nazis.”
“They’re still trading off sympathy for the Holocaust,” Rod said. “Now they’re just as bad as the Nazis. Look at the way they’re treating the Palestinians. Didn’t they learn anything from the war?”
“What should they have learned from being the victims of genocide?” I retorted. “You’ve been listening to too much Arab Palestinian propaganda.”
“I can’t believe you’re trying to justify what the Israelis are doing, slaughtering Palestinians in Gaza,” said Rod. “Are you really such a Jew lover?”
“A Jew lover?! Only a Jew hater would say that. That’s what this is really about – anti- Semitism.”
I think we were both a little shocked at how suddenly this had got acrimonious and personal.
Rod took a breath and adopted a calmer, more reasoned demeanour. “You have to admit the Israelis building settlements in the West Bank was setting back the negotiations for the two state solution and the whole peace process, or are you against the two state solution too?”
“More propaganda,” I said. “The real setbacks to the so called two state solution is the Palestinian refusal to recognise Israel as a nation. Their real agenda is the destruction of Israel.”
“Says who? What’s the evidence for that?” Rod demanded.
“Says Hamas. It’s in their charter: Kill every Jew, every last one. Says Abbas. Dr. Abbas, who did his PhD thesis on denying the Holocaust.”
“The Israelis won’t negotiate anyway,” Rod countered.
“More bullshit propaganda,” I said. “They’ve actually offered the Palestinians virtually all the territories they’ve been demanding and the PLO, Arafat, Abbas, they all walked away every time with no counterproposals.”
“What territories? When?” Rob challenged.
“East Jerusalem and the territory known as The West Bank and the Occupied Territories. To the Jews it’s Judea and Samaria, part of their ancestral homeland. When? 1948, 2000, 2008.”
Rod didn’t believe me but he didn’t challenge me on the dates because he knew I’d be able to give details. Maybe he would get his Arab mates to give him the counter arguments.
“Maybe you’re just biased because of your Jewish heritage,” he said, “but you’ve never even been to Israel.”
“I had the same views before I found out about my Jewish heritage. And you don’t have to go to Israel to know what’s going on in the Middle East. You didn’t have to go to Germany in the 1930s to know what was going on there. You just need to sort the facts from the propaganda.
“So you think the Jews are the good guys here and the Palestinian refugees is all just media spin. Arabs were there for hundreds of years before the Jews kicked them out and they’re treating the Palestinians like shit.”
I don’t think Rod even heard me say, “The Jews have been there for over three thousand years.” He just kept going.
“I can’t believe you’re justifying what the Jews are doing. Don’t you have any sympathy for the Palestinian civilians being killed?”
“Of course I do, but you can blame Hamas for that. They’re using their own people as human shields. I’m not idealising the Israelis. But let’s not demonise them either.”
*
Justice for the underdog Palestinians had long been a great cause celebre for the well-meaning liberals of the university and a good many anti-Semites who did not mean well. There was some anti-Semitic graffiti around the campus and social media was full of politically correct ‘anti-Zionism’. Tolerance for anti-Semitism was quite high. I’d heard the Israeli Sodastream factory in the West Bank, which employed a lot of Palestinians, touted as an example of Israelis treating Palestinians decently. But a professor on the staff of Auckland University, who was “an acclaimed hate crime specialist”, wrote a letter to the Waikato Times comparing an Israeli company employing Palestinians to a German company employing Jews. There was a bit of a fuss and the university asked him to write a second letter, clarifying he was not intending to make anti-Semitic remarks, which he refused to do, and he was never censured.
*
I began to see Rod less and less. He spent a lot of time hanging out with his Saudi friends and his American friends, and even when he was at home he spent most of the time in his room. He eventually moved into another flat with a couple of his American basketball team mates. I saw him recently on the campus, wearing his Che Guevara T-shirt and a black beret, and I thought, there goes a privileged middle class American armchair revolutionary, who idolises Guevara. To Guevara and his cronies America was the evil empire and after the revolution in Cuba, the destruction of America was right up there on his to do list, which is why the CIA had him killed.
Hamas and the other Islamic Jihadists are of the same mind. They detest the West and want to establish Islam by conquest and subjugate America. And I know Rod joined the protest when Trump declared his support for making Jerusalem the capital of Israel. You might just as well protest against making Washington the capital of the US and building American settlements, I thought. Jerusalem has always been the real capital as the centre of Judaism. The Ottomans had it by conquest but it’s never been the capital of anything Moslem. The Moslems have got Mecca. The Jews have Jerusalem. There’s no evidence Mohammed even went to Jerusalem. I continued to express such views in history classes and found a few allies, like Chaim, but I was mostly opposed for being a bigot and politically incorrect and I began to feel increasingly isolated.
One of my classmates admitted quite openly he didn’t like Jews. I asked him why and he said, “The Jews killed Christ.”
So I said, “Actually the Romans killed Christ on a trumped up charge of treason. But yeah, a group of Jewish theocrats were responsible for getting Jesus executed. So you hate all Jews for all time? How about the Germans and all their historical war crimes? How do you feel about Germans today?”
He said he didn’t like Germans either, so the point was lost.
“The Jews were Christ killers,” he insisted.
So I said, “Who is Jesus to you?”
“Oh,” he said, “he was a wise man, a good man, a great teacher, a sort of a guru.”
“So if that’s all he was, what do you care? It was just another homicide. The Jewish leaders charged him with blasphemy for saying he was the son of God and demanded the death penalty. Just like Sharia law today. Blasphemy’s a capital crime. Rough justice, but according to your thinking Jesus was guilty as charged.”
*
Chaim moved into the flat not long after Rod moved out and the menorah went back onto the coffee table, just in time for Purim, the feast of celebration of the defeat of Haman and his plot to exterminate all the Jews in the Persian Empire; the first recorded attempt at genocide of the Jews. I’d bought seven candles for the occasion. Seven – the number of completion. Chaim said it wasn’t necessary to light the menorah for Purim but it was a nice gesture and a sort of proclamation.
“What is it?” Chaim asked, “Why do all these highly educated, otherwise very rational academics say such absurd things about us Jews? All the conspiracies. And the old Blood Libel about jews killing babies. And they say the Jews control world finance and control the media. If the Jews control the media why are we always getting such bad press? What’s behind all the anti-Semitism? The persecution of Jews has been going on for centuries, for millennia. Why does the world hate us?”
“I don’t know,” I sighed, “but you know what the Evangelical Christians say? It’s all caused by a satanic spiritual dynamic. Yeah, Satan is behind it all. He’s got it in for the Jews because he was defeated by Jesus and Jesus was a Jew. Most people don’t believe in Satan or the Devil or if they do they think he’s in hell, but in the Bible he’s called ‘the Prince of this World,’ so he’s in this world wreaking havoc but he knows his time is coming to an end. At the end of the Age, hell and Satan will be cast into the lake of fire. That’s what the prophecies say.”
“Whoa, heavy stuff!” said Chaim. “What do you think about all that?”
“Well, if you believe in God, the God of the Bible, or of the Torah, why wouldn’t you believe in Satan too? But you Jews don’t believe in Jesus, the messiah. But still the Bible says salvation is from the Jews. So it makes sense to me.”
“It doesn’t make any sense at all to me,” said Chaim. “I don’t know. Let’s just fire up this menorah, eh.”