I'm Not Holding My Breath
May 2024
Kam Zarrabi

Having lived here for nearly seventy years, I never thought I’d ever see any open and direct criticism of the Jewish state, Israel, America’s Sacred Cow, no matter what it does. But, something seems to have changed; or has it, really? So, read on!

What’s going on with the anti-war and pro-Palestinian demonstrations by students in some of the most prestigious universities across the country? Don’t they know that the proper and approved way to express your protests is to assemble and demonstrate peacefully, state your opinions and demands, disperse when ordered, and then return to your classrooms like good boys and girls? But if you truly want change, that’s not how it works!

Let’s face some realities that are seldom if ever appreciated: Who are these college-age “kids” between the ages of 18 and 25, and what is their problem?

Below the age of 18, children are still going through mental/emotional maturation; they are still immature, ineligible to vote or to have certain social or legal privileges as do adults; or to have a clear interest in, or understanding of, politics or world affairs.

What about the adult populations post college age, who have entered the work force and are shouldering the responsibility of earning a living and struggling to make the ends meet? It’s safe to say that only very small numbers have the interest, the opportunity, and the free time to devote their energy to areas that do not have a direct bearing on their immediate livelihood. In other words, huge majorities of our working class populations are not truly and actively interested in analyzing and scrutinizing the news of the day beyond the bold headlines that interrupt their attention on mindless, entertaining diversions during their leisure hours.  

Those past the age of retirement have other things to be concerned about: and let’s not elaborate on how many! And those, such as myself, who do have the background, knowledge and a history of involvements in socio-political and global affairs, have to struggle hard to find equally interested colleagues to share and exchange our opinions, which, I must admit, have no effect in challenging the currents of affairs in any meaningful way.

That leaves us with our college-age fresh adult populations who have left the corny, self-centered adolescence behind, and are not as yet preoccupied with the duties and responsibilities of jobs and family affairs. Even with the addictive power of multimedia connections and smartphone diversions, college education does impart a significant degree of awareness and appreciation of currents in local and international developments. Granted, this generalization applies to a minority of students who are not totally focused on their relatively narrow specialized fields. But, nonetheless, this relatively small group of the more socio-politically aware students do influence their schoolmates in their casual debates and discussions.

What we have been witnessing in the past few weeks in university campuses, particularly those with the largest student bodies, cannot and should not be written off as a bunch of radicalized kids with nothing better to do, creating a cause to rally around, with no real idea of what they are talking about.

This all started soon after Israel’s brutal war against the Gaza Palestinians began seven months ago, when some of the biggest billionaire donors to the most prestigious universities decided to use their financial leverage to force these academic centers to kill any anti-Israel sentiment or expression on their campuses. Several of these university chancellors were forced to resign, accused of not doing enough to battle the alleged “anti-Semitism,” which is now going beyond, for example, any harassment of Jewish students, and includes any criticism of Israel and its genocidal massacre of the Palestinians.

Many faculty members, including several who are Jewish, have joined these student demonstrations voicing their opposition to the war, and in support of the Palestinians. But, here is the problem:

The United States has been the foster parent to the orphaned child, Israel, since its statehood in 1948. The Jewish people had paid a very high price during the Second World War and deserved ample retributions for their suffering. But rather than redistributing them back in their former homelands and providing them with ample compensations, something that President Roosevelt was actually contemplating, they were moved to a land called Palestine under the British Mandate: And problems were sure to ensue.  As a reminder, what the first Israeli Prime Minister and a Zionist founder, David Ben-Gurion, had said later in 1956 is quoted below:
"Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?"

The Europeans, especially the Soviets and the Poles, welcomed the chance to move their Jewish populations out of Europe, and actually encouraged the Zionist leaders to create a Jewish state in the Middle East, the Bible’s fictional Promised Land.

However, it was soon obvious that a transplanted organ, which the body naturally rejects, requires a constant flow of any-rejection medications to survive. Reparations from the post WWII Germany, and the nonstop financial, military and diplomatic support by the United States, ensured the safety and prosperity of Israel in the middle of the turbulent Arab/Islamic sea.

The European Jews, the Ashkenazim, the Jewish groups that had chosen not to assimilate within their Christian host nations and insisted on preserving their Jewish identity had managed to survive and prosper by adapting to a new traditional paradigm; excelling in arts and sciences that were of vital significance to the host populations. So, from the mid-19th century on, the likes of Marx, Freud, and Einstein dominated the various fields of philosophy and sciences; and that was no coincidence. The “old fashioned” Hebraic traditions were abandoned in favor of traits that ensured the competitive parity and indeed the superiority of the European Jews. Dominance, indeed control, in the fields of finance, law, medicine, and other vital social and scientific fields, did have its inevitable negative backlash; we could call it social resentment or even envy and jealousy. The cartoonish depiction of the Jews in Europe was typically someone running away from his patriotic obligation, carrying suitcases full of money. We know what it finally led to!

The post Holocaust European Jews who were moved to their new homeland in Palestine, carried with them, not just their European background and access to scientific and technological knowledge and financial support, but more importantly, a sense of entitlement. As their first political leader, David Ben Gurion, had said, they knew the truths, but they felt entitled to manifest their destiny after having paid the price to earn it. The initial Zionist motto of From the River to the Sea, meaning the manifestation of the dream of an Eretz Yisrael, stretching from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean, was later adopted in 1977 by the current Likud Party of Israel as “From the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea”, where only a Jewish nation shall exist. 

Steps were taken very methodically at every opportunity to expand their allotted territory and marginalize the ill-equipped and downtrodden Palestinian populations. America’s blind and unconditional support for the newly adopted orphaned child emboldened the increasingly aggressive Israel to violate any and all international norms in the pursuit of its agendas with total impunity and accountability. What has long become officially known as the Occupied Territories, was gained by staging a pre-planned faked preemptive war aimed purely as territorial expansion to accommodate an increasing population. Even if such gains were the result of a legitimate defensive war, retaining their possession and building settlements there are against the international law. Yet, even though the label of Occupied Territories has stayed, no effort has ever been made to remove the illegal settlements and to return the territories to the Palestinians.

Today the process of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians seems to be approaching its final stages. The October 7th Hamas military attack on an Israeli settlement near Gaza has given the Likud government of Israel another excuse to wipe out any remaining Palestinian resistance against Israel’s Final Solution to create a purely Jewish Greater Israel.

There are some legitimate suspicions that, just like the very creation of the Hamas resistance group, which the Israeli regime supported to water down and counter the influence of the PLO; perhaps the attack of October 7 was also facilitated by the Israeli regime to create the necessary pretext to annihilate the Gaza Strip. That might well be a somewhat believable conspiracy theory, but considering Israel’s long-patented behavior pattern, you cannot put anything past it!

With over 35,000 Gazans, mostly women and children and innocent Palestinians, dead, and perhaps another at least 10,000 bodies under the rubble, plus over a million injured, starving and homeless, the massacre is far more than disproportional retribution relative to the carnage done by the Hamas militants seven month ago; it is a clear and undeniable case of a genocide and war crimes. What’s now even more tragic, and possibly more ultimately consequential, is America’s clear, bold and blatant complicity in all that, already showing its effects throughout the world.

The current university campuses’ student and faculty outcries for an end to the Israeli carnage have already spread internationally. Many of the historical and ongoing issues regarding Israel’s misbehavior and America’s wrong-headed ironclad bond with the Jewish state are becoming better known in the public domain. I have to admit that I was actually surprised to see the depth of understanding by the younger generation university students of so many cleverly concealed realities regarding these matters. But then I recalled my own participation as a student at the age of 18 in even more violent demonstrations in Iran’s Capital, Tehran, when I was chased by a soldier who managed to hit me with the bayonet on his loaded rifle, the scars of which I have carried to this day. In 1953, after a military coup masterminded by the British and carried out with help by the CIA, many thousands lost their lives, the Shah was reinstated in power, and any hope of a democratic reform in the country was dashed.

We younger generation “kids” did know what was going on, while our parents and other working class populations were mostly too busy making a living to show serious concern over politics or world affairs. And, just as it is here, those who were concerned were only interested in joining the mainstream establishment for their own personal agendas and ambitions, and not to serve the best interests of their nation!

So what do today’s “unruly rioters” at university campuses want and demand, over 2,300 of whom have already been arrested by the law enforcement authorities? Among their demands are:

• The US Administration must press Israel to stop military assaults in Gaza.
• Israel should be forced to allow humanitarian aid to reach Gaza.
• The US should stop all shipments of arms to Israel.
• Universities must divest from companies, organizations and businesses that have any involvements in Israel. This includes military industries that manufacture machineries of war, which the United States buys with taxpayers’ money and donates to Israel.

The following is the US Administration’s position in that regard:

As the President and practically all the members of Congress have stated, the support for Israel is ironclad and unbreakable. As the new bill just passed by the House broadly states, any criticism of Israel in any form or way constitutes an anti-Semitic act, a hate crime, and illegal. So, forget about the First Amendment rights to free speech!
Israel has the right to defend itself, for which the US is obligated to provide all the assistance necessary.

In response to the University campuses pro-Palestinian rights demonstrations, President Biden, who has often declared himself as a staunch Zionist, gave a speech at the Holocaust Museum two days ago to emphasize his support for Israel. That says it all!

Thanks to what I referred to above as the modern Jewish traditions that had replaced the old, archaic teachings and rabbinical teaching and traditions, the American Jews are now visibly and dynamically present in most influential positions in our society. Despite their tiny population percentage, roughly 2.4%, they dominate quite massively and disproportionately in the fields of banking, money management and finance, law, medicine, journalism and broadcasting, sciences, entrepreneurial ventures, authorship, etc.

In their book, The Bell Curve; Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, 1994, psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray demonstrate that the most successful groups in socio-economic achievements have been the American Jews of Ashkenazi or the European origins. Even though the book became somewhat controversial for racially segregating and listing the Blacks and Native Americans on the opposite side of the bell curve as the lowest achievers, it would be difficult to argue against their research findings.  

I would rather call this socio-economically elite group as the social influencers, who despite their tiny population percentage have had immense influence on every aspect of American life and culture. Just look up the list of, for example, CNN’s Jewish journalists and presenters to get the picture.

Finally, what do you think will be the outcome of all the ongoing pro-ceasefire or pro-Palestinian student demonstrations? Perhaps another futile and phony push for a Two State Solution, which we all know has not been, and will never be, acceptable to either the Palestinians or the Israelis, anyway!